Kansas City Star: Entertainment

Who knew that a musical would be the talk of the town going into the 2025 Oscars? No, not Wicked (though that movie has received its fair share of recognition at the box office and from the Academy) or the still puzzled-upon Robbie Williams monkey biopic Better Man, but Emilia Pérez. The film, a French-made, Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug cartel leader, starring Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Karla Sofía Gascón, is a somewhat off-kilter awards chatter favorite.

Sometimes what’s absent from a film defines it as much as what’s present. Negative space is the great underused resource in filmmaking. It demands that you trust your audience to follow along, to fill in every intentional gap, to pick up the meaning of every invisible whisper. Steven Soderbergh was the brash young kid on the block when he made Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), in which then-new technology cracks the world open for a married couple on the skids.

Two weeks after disastrous fires first erupted across Los Angeles county, communities across the region are coming together to aid its recovery. Sid The Cat, Mike Viola and Tyler Chester on Friday announced the “I Love LA” Eaton Fire Relief benefit concert with Andrew Bird, Bright Eyes, David Longstreth (of Dirty Projectors), Delicate Steve, Ethan Tasch and […]

I love all things horror, but I’ve never been someone to seek out hauntings in real life. Precisely because I’ve seen so many scary movies and know not to mess with that stuff — I’m not going to be the person shouting about how not scared I am right before some creature/demon/ghost slaughters/possesses/terrifies me.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Night Agent Season 2. When The Night Agent premiered on Netflix in 2023, it didn’t take long to find an audience. The undercover spy thriller, based on the eponymous Matthew Quirk novel, became the most viewed series on the streamer for the first half of the year.

Dan Fogelman loves a bait-and-switch. In its premiere, his signature show This Is Us—the smash-hit NBC tearjerker that revived the family-drama format amid a broadcast landscape dominated by procedurals—introduced four characters all turning 36 on the same day. By the end of the episode, viewers learned that three of them were siblings (two fraternal twins and one adoptee).