Kaitlyn Dever
George Clooney and Julia Roberts Reunite in Seaweed-Thin Romcom Ticket to Paradise: Review
The Pitch: David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Julia Roberts) are two hugely successful, extremely divorced people, with 19 years of bitter animus between them. In fact, the only times they even see each other are for the major milestones in the life of their daughter, Lily (Kaitlin Dever), and even then they can’t help but snipe at each other through forced smiles. But they’re forced back into each other’s orbits when Lily shacks up with a handsome seaweed farmer (model Maxime Bouttier) on her post-graduation trip to Bali, and invites them to her whirlwind wedding on the Indonesian island paradise. Recognizing that throwing her career away for idle island living and a guy she’s just met is a Bad Idea, the two plot to sabotage the wedding from the inside. Along the way, though, t...
HBO’s Coastal Elites Feels Like a Carefully Curated Twitter Feed: Review
The Pitch: Amidst the backdrop of 2020 — the heady and often unpleasant mix of an impending presidential election and a worldwide pandemic that’s hitting the United States especially hard — five people deliver five different monologues (or, as they’re briefly dubbed, “unhinged rants”) about the Way We Live Now in the satirical HBO “special presentation” Coastal Elites. Look at the Camera: Because of the very nature of the coronavirus pandemic, Coastal Elites is a decidedly un-flashy glimpse into the lives of a quintet of Americans. From sly writer Paul Rudnick, the 90-minute special presentation (that’s what HBO is calling Coastal Elites, and although it’s movie-length, frankly, the descriptor fits) is meant as a mix of earnest sincerity and dry wit. How is this disparate handful strugglin...
The 25 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2020
“New year, new decade, new films, right?” That was January, back when we were still looking ahead at 2020 with blind optimism and ill-fated excitement. Sigh, hindsight is 20/20 they say, right? Who knew. At the time, we had 50 exciting new titles we were anticipating, most of which have since been either postponed, dumped to VOD, or relegated to a limbo state. It’s been an unnerving year for the film industry, to say the least. A year fraught with shutdowns, furloughs, layoffs, bankruptcies, and re-evaluations. All of that change has prompted a seismic shift in how everything’s run across the media landscape, and no one truly has a grip on things just yet. Odds are they won’t for quite some time. Because of this, anticipating anything right now — let alone anything in pop culture — seems l...
HBO Shares First Trailer for Coastal Elites with Issa Rae, Dan Levy, Bette Midler: Watch
HBO has shared the first trailer for its new satirical film Coastal Elites. The socially-distanced comedy will light up your screens on September 12th with stars Issa Rae, Dan Levy, Bette Midler, Sarah Paulson, and Kaitlyn Dever. Coastal Elites solves the practical problem of filming in quarantine by borrowing an idea from the theater. It’s a cinematic approach to the monologue play, as each of the five characters take turns speaking into the camera. Here, the camera is apparently supposed to be a laptop fixture, and each of the monologues represents a remote video call. In the trailer, for example, we see Levy’s Mark Hesterman greeting an unseen therapist named Dr. Morton, before launching into a joke-filled rant about identity. It’s unclear if everyone is in therapy, but f...
