The Smallbone family has a story tailor-made for the big screen. Scratch that. It’s almost too remarkable to fit on any screen. The Australian clan came to America with little more than a dream to buck music industry odds. Instead, the family produced multiple chart-topping artists, including For King + Country and Rebecca St. James. The children’s talents expand beyond musical successes, too, something “Unsung Hero” shares in the moving post-film credits. The film itself, told in deep collaboration with several Smallbone family members, is either too close to the source material or unwilling ..read more

If this is the end of “Peak TV” it was hard to tell. We’ve already had a Q1 that blasted out amazing shows into our yearning eye holes. Seriously, this is a “Ten Best” list, and it’s not even May. We’ve got three more quarters of TV to look forward to with shows like “Squid Game,” “House of Dragons” and “The Boys” still to come. The best shows of 2024 (so far) in descending order… (Minor Spoilers Ahead) ‘Tokyo Vice’ (MAX) The second season of the Michael Mann-produced series, based on an American journalist working as a crime reporter for a Tokyo newspaper in the 1990s, has been stellar ..read more

Spiders are the new sharks. Genre directors can’t get enough of the creepy crawlers. Can you blame them? We’ve all been grossed out by larger-than-expected spiders sneaking into our bedrooms. They drop in like Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible,” dangling overhead on invisible strands. “Infested” is never that demure. It delivers softball-sized spiders and the most intriguing hero we’ve seen in some time. Too bad the story’s third act doubles down on commentary, not scares. Young, entrepreneurial Kaleb (Theo Christine) is hustling his way through life in his hardscrabble community. He’s calc ..read more

Stephen Colbert is a master at compartmentalization. CBS’s “Late Show” host has spent three-plus years looking the other way as President Joe Biden bumbled through his first term. Colbert ignores the endless gaffes, senior moments and shocking inflation rates. Not to mention crazed tales of uncles eaten by cannibals. BIDEN: "I made it clear to the Israelis — don't move on Haifa!" Haifa is a major city *IN* Israel. pic.twitter.com/BdNgoDlGkM — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 18, 2024 And, when a Special Counsel dubbed Biden “an elderly man with poor memory,” Colbert spun the awful news to B ..read more

There’s a growing list of stories that Hollywood would never tell again. “Blazing Saddles” shoots to mind, but so do “The Producers,” “Soul Man,” “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” and “The Toy.” (The last entry, to be fair, makes sense) Add “Beautiful Girls” to that growing list. The 1996 ensemble tells uncomfortable truths about the male mind from start to finish. A key subplot involving a precocious 13-year-old girl wouldn’t make it past the first draft in 2024. Even the actress who played her agrees. Yet “Beautiful Girls” remains wise, elegant and quietly hilarious. That a movie with so ..read more

Bill Maher simultaneously loathes Donald Trump and finds common ground with the former president’s party. The “Real Time with Bill Maher” host sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy. Yet he simultaneously chats up conservatives on his “Club Random” podcast. That’s not all. Maher often sides with the Right on key culture war issues like trans women in sports. This week, the comedian skewered Hollywood following the release of the troubling, five-part docu-series “Quiet on Set.” The production recalls the disturbing revelations behind the scenes at Nickelodeon involving child sexual ab ..read more

Alex Garland wasn’t kidding. The writer/director of “Civil War” said his dystopian thriller didn’t take political sides. The film bears that out, focusing entirely on journalists scrambling to cover a country at war with itself. The problem? “Civil War” isn’t action-packed in a traditional, rah-rah sense. Nor does it shed new light on what it means to be a war correspondent. What’s left? Visceral moments and the sense that almost anything can happen on screen. Like Garland’s previous film “Men,” that sense of storytelling chaos papers over plenty of flaws. And “Civil War’s” flaws could fill an ..read more

This is the perfect time for a documentary honoring Dan Rather. Really. We’re watching the collapse of NPR as a trusted news source in real time thanks to Uri Berliner’s withering expose on the far-Left platform. Most mainstream journalists are covering up the fact that the U.S. President is in obvious mental decline. Media outlets have yet to account for promoting the Russian Collusion hoax, one of many Fake News stories that eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. Reporters now all but cheer on free speech repression, burying scandals like The Twitter Files. What better moment to honor an anchor ..read more

Horror and dumb go together like peas and cah-rots, to paraphrase Forrest Gump. Think: There’s a serial killer on the loose … let’s split up! The monster sure looks like it’s dead. Let’s drop our weapons! You know the drill. “Abigal” is a different kind of dumb. The film’s screenplay insults us at every turn. You can’t help but question what’s happening instead of letting go and having fun. Young, talented Abigail (Alisha Weir, very good despite the story around her) gets kidnapped as the story opens. The fledgling ballerina is the daughter of a powerful mob boss, and a gaggle of goons hopes ..read more

Andrew Schulz says he didn’t believe the media’s portrayal of San Francisco. Surely a major American city can’t be as filthy and out of control as the updates he sees on his smart phone and elsewhere. Exaggerations often camouflage the truth, and this could be yet another example, the “Flagrant” podcaster figured. Call it Fake News on Steroids. And then he visited the California city for himself last month as part of his “The Life” stand-up tour. Schulz posted a clip from that performance this week via his Instagram account. Suffice it to say the media reports were not exaggerations.   ..read more