Mark Rylance
The Undeclared War Is a Prescient But Ponderous Cyberthriller: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2024, and a post-Brexit Great Britain faces a general election beset on all sides with misinformation, anti-government grievance, and stark division on all sides. What’s more, a foreign cyberattack hits the country’s Internet access, hitting everything except social media. Luckily, it hits the same day 21-year-old student Saara Parvan (newcomer Hannah Khalique-Brown) starts her work placement stint at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s first defense against cyberterrorism. She quickly figures out how to disable it, and even finds a second exploit that would have further crippled England’s infrastructure. It’s a hollow victory, though, as the young Muslim woman struggles to fit into the “tediously male, stale, and pale” organization even after her im...
Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 Gives Aaron Sorkin a Timely Bully Pulpit: Review
The Pitch: In 1968, a coalition of anti-Vietnam War and counterculture protestors took to the streets in Chicago to protest outside the Democratic National Convention, rallying to end the Vietnam War and bring our boys back home. Predictably, the police retaliated with overwhelming force, greeting them with beatings, tear gas, and scores of arrests. Five scant months later, one of the most infamous trials in American history took place, charging seven of the organizers with conspiracy and incitement to riot — YIPpies Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), Mobe leaders Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), John Froines (Danie Flaherty) and Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins). Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya A...
Aaron Sorkin’s Star-Studded The Trial of the Chicago 7 Gets First Trailer: Watch
The Oscar hype is on for writer and director Aaron Sorkin’s star-studded historical drama The Trial of the Chicago 7. On Sunday night, Netflix dropped the film’s first teaser trailer ahead of its October 16th premiere on the network. The film captures the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which saw a peaceful protest dissolve into a violent clash between the police and the National Guard. This led to seven organizers — which included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale — being charged with conspiracy. Given the current political landscape — and the fact that this lands a few weeks before the 2020 Election — one might say The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a tad prescient, no? Whatever the case, it features the most incredible cast in recent memory, s...
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...
