Michael Nordine: Last News

Michael Nordine author Some straight-to-streaming offerings inspire viewers to bemoan the movie’s fate, wishing it had received a proper theatrical release — to be seen the way movies are meant to be seen, and by the widest audience possible. “Crater” isn’t one of those, but neither is this Disney+ original mere algorithm-created dross. Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s lunar adventure follows five young friends as they hijack a rover to visit an enigmatic crater for one last hurrah before one of them leaves the moon forever. It’s sci-fi informed by a Gen-Z sensibility, with a particular focus on those Zoomers who can’t imagine a bright future on the planet they actually inhabit — an ever-expanding demographic, one imagines.

Michael Nordine author Few events loom larger in the minds of movie teenagers than prom. Dreams are realized, bullies are put in their place, girls are declared “all that.” Real life is rarely as dramatic, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean we should expect studios (and streamers) to stop trying to make the next “Pretty in Pink” or “10 Things I Hate About You” anytime soon. Disney offer a fresh take on teendom’s big night with “Prom Pact,” in which two platonic best friends who are more comfortable on the outside looking in decide to finally step into the fray of high school life. Mandy Yang (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) first appears in a Ruth Bader Ginsburg T-shirt, obsessively refreshing her Harvard application in the hopes that it’s gone from “pending” to “accepted” while trying to avoid the pep rally where North Seattle High will officially announce its prom theme: the ‘80s. “Real life starts once we get out of here and go to college,” she says to bestie Ben Plunkett (Milo Manheim), who’s slightly more enthused about the prospect of having a traditional high-school experience than she is. She asks him to prom as a gesture of goodwill despite the fact that “the only thing I hate more than slow dancing is the gender wage gap,” setting the stage for what so far feels like yet another familiar teen movie.

Michael Nordine author Is there an animal better suited to the big screen than the elephant? From Topsy (RIP) to Dumbo, these magnificent creatures have been especially prominent in documentaries and animation. (Understandable, given the logistical difficulties of making the soulful pachyderms into live-action protagonists.) Continuing this long tradition is “The Magician’s Elephant,” in which a boy (voiced by Noah Jupe) must complete three seemingly impossible tasks to find the younger sister he thought died at birth. Netflix Animation’s latest offering uses the concept of magic to express the idea that nothing is impossible if your heart is in the right place and you believe in yourself. While the movie itself is more whimsical than magical, it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.

Michael Nordine author News of a fresh horror comedy from Christopher Landon, director of the joyously silly “Happy Death Day” and its sequel, should be greeted with cautious optimism at the very least. He’s been working in the space for some time now, having also co-written and directed “Freaky,” “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” and the more straightforward “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones,” and understands how to thread that particular needle better than most. His latest feels like both a natural next step and also something of a departure: a family-friendly haunted-house story releasing on Netflix. Unlike his previous efforts, however, “We Have a Ghost” fails to capture what makes this particular genre hybrid so much fun.

Michael Nordine author If, like your humble correspondent, you immediately assumed that The Stranger who fell from a star all the way back in the series premiere of “The Rings of Power” was Sauron, “Alloyed” is here to prove you right — or is it? The season finale drops that bombshell just moments after it’s begun, but just as not all who wander are lost, not all major plot reveals are to be trusted. We learn of The Stranger’s true identity via those three otherworldly women who’ve been tracking him for several episodes now — two of whom seem to be called the Ascetic and the Nomad— and who offer such grand pronouncements as, “You fell from the stars, yet you are greater than they” upon finally encountering him. But he isn’t immediately won over by them, especially when they attack Nori as she and her fellow Harfoots try to rescue him — including their leader, Sadoc Burrows, who’s mortally wounded by a well-placed throwing knife. It’s a mournful loss, not least because the hobbitses have always represented Middle-earth at its most wholesome, but in his final moments the elder is nothing if not content. “The missus will be waiting,” after all. 

Michael Nordine author “The Rings of Power” has been visually arresting since its first moments, but never has that beauty been as haunting as it is in “The Eye.” Beginning just moments after last week’s cliffhanger, the first season’s penultimate episode opens on the immediate aftermath of Mount Doom’s inaugural eruption: Everything that isn’t on fire is covered in ash, Isildur’s friend Ontamo (Anthony Crum) has perished in the blast and the sky itself has turned a volcanic shade of orange. Though we can be sure most of the principal characters have survived, Isildur is missing and the body count is devastating. Good always triumphs over evil in “Lord of the Rings,” but the obvious fact that “Rings of Power” is a television series carries with it a not-so-obvious implication that’s becoming clearer each episode: With the end much further away than it would be in a movie, evil is sure to log a number of brutal victories along the way.

Michael Nordine author Anyone who’s been waiting for “The Rings of Power” to pick up the pace will have their wish granted by “Udûn,” an hour-long battle sequence with a few brief interludes thrown in for viewers to collect their thoughts. It’s the most focused episode to date, as two of the main narrative threads are conspicuous in their absence: Elrond and Durin’s odd-couple bromance and the hobbitses’ migration. It’s also the most consequential. It would appear that having a stronger, larger army matters little when attacking a fortress in Middle-earth. Just as Saruman learned this the hard way in “The Two Towers,” Adar does in the opening moments of “Udûn.” He and his battalion of orcs and human conscripts march on Ostirith, the watchtower where Bronwyn, Arondir, and their people have taken shelter; the battle promises to be a short one, with little hope of survival for the good guys, except there’s no battle at all. The tower is abandoned, and yet Adar is sure that Arondir remains — “I can smell him,” he tells one of his officers. He’s right, of course, but he failed to anticipate the trap he’s just walked into: With a few arrows and graceful movements, Arondir brings the whole place down via a booby-trapped tower as he makes his nimble escape, presumably wiping out Adar’s forces in one fell swoop. Though yet to show as much personality as some of the show’s other characters, Arondir can always be counted on for a balletic action sequence.

Michael Nordine author “There is no meaning to life apart from the movie story,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in the opening pages of “Blonde,” “and there is no movie story apart from the darkened movie theater.” If it was inevitable that Oates’ novel about Marilyn Monroe would be made into a movie, it’s also a little ironic that that movie was made by Netflix — suffice to say that few who see “Blonde” will do so in a darkened movie theater. How many potential viewers are scared off by its runtime of 167 minutes is impossible to say, but there is a good reason for its protracted length: The book is similarly imposing at 738 pages. A finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Blonde was released in 2000 and adapted once before — not that the CBS miniseries starring Poppy Montgomery garnered nearly as much attention as this new version has.

Michael Nordine author There’s no meet cute in “Meet Cute,” which is kind of the point. The film, which takes its name from the romantic comedy trope wherein two people meet in an unusual, makes-for-a-good-story kind of way that rarely happens in real life, owes as much if not more to “Groundhog Day” as it does to “When Harry Met Sally…” Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson are the would-be couple in Alex Lehmann’s time-loop rom-com, which could have just as easily been named “500 First Dates” for its portrayal of a lovesick woman on a monomaniacal quest to get things just right. The movie itself is more freewheeling than its heroine, deriving much of its charm from a performance that’s well rehearsed on several levels.

Michael Nordine author With just three episodes remaining, the show’s narrative threads are beginning to converge. What we want to do and what we must do are rarely the same thing, including in Middle-earth. Just ask the ever-honorable Elrond, who finds himself stuck between a mythical ore and a hard place on “Partings,” the latest episode of “The Rings of Power.” It turns out that there was indeed an ulterior motive behind High King Gil-galad sending him to Khazad-dûm, as mithril — which the dwarves, led by Elrond’s close friend Prince Durin IV, have been mining in secret — could be the only thing preventing the elves from slowly diminishing into nothingness. Asked by Gil-galad whether the dwarves have in fact found the precious ore, Elrond refuses to answer on the grounds that he swore an oath to Durin not to reveal what he saw in those mines. He’s then asked a much more loaded question, one that speaks to a number of overlapping conflicts on “The Rings of Power” right now: “And what if keeping your promise to his people meant ensuring the doom of your own?”

Michael Nordine author All is not well in Númenor, dear reader. Queen Regent Míriel is plagued by dreams (or are they prophecies?) of the island’s destruction via “The Great Wave” that gives this episode its title, and rabble-rousers are gathering in the town square to accuse her of being an “elf-lover” — a serious charge indeed. Her waking hours are no less stressful, as Galadriel is putting that theory to the test by once again bothering Míriel about Sauron. She also takes it upon herself to reveal that Halbrand may in fact be the exiled heir to the Southlands’ throne, a theory Míriel neither believes nor cares about; what concern is it of hers whether a far-away would-be kingdom is without its rightful king?

Michael Nordine author Few remakes feel necessary, but English-language versions of international horror films have an especially difficult time justifying their existence. We certainly didn’t need George Sluizer or Michael Haneke to remake their own “The Vanishing” and “Funny Games” for the benefit of subtitle-averse audiences, nor was anyone asking for a “Let the Right One In” remake when it was first released. “Need” and “want” are two different things, of course, and it’s hardly unheard of for one of these remakes to be quite good — just ask Naomi Watts, who followed her star-making turn in “Mulholland Drive” with “The Ring.” The two-time Oscar nominee now finds herself as the face of Matt Sobel’s remake of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s “Goodnight Mommy.” Well, maybe not the face exactly — as in the original, her head is obscured by surgical bandages for reasons that aren’t immediately made clear.

Michael Nordine author SPOILER ALERT: Do not read unless you have watched the first two episodes of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. That sound you just heard is neither drums, drums in the deep nor the roar of a Balrog. It was actually a collective sigh of relief emanating from countless “Lord of the Rings” fans who just watched the first two episodes of “The Rings of Power” and realized that it is, in fact, a compelling expansion of the Middle-earth mythos. The episodes, titled “Shadows of the Past” and “Adrift,” both premiered tonight, while the remaining six will air weekly. The Second Age of Middle-earth is fairly technologically advanced, all things considered, but it would seem they haven’t yet developed the means to drop an entire season of prestige television at once. 

J. Kim Murphy Just as it looked like the summer movie season was winding down without any well-loved franchises in sight, “Dragon Ball” has come to town.“Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” looks to top domestic box office charts for the weekend after scoring $10.7 million on its opening day.

Michael Nordine author If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. It isn’t just prestige television series that want to be thought of as “like a 10-hour movie.” For years now, video games have sought to become more cinematic by focusing as much on narrative as they do on interactivity.

Michael Nordine author“You’re not gonna like the way this story ends,” announces the teenage narrator of “Don’t Make Me Go” as the film opens, “but I think you’re gonna like the story.” The first half of that sentence is so accurate it complicates the second. The movie’s ending is misguided to the point of being perplexing rather than upsetting, recasting everything that came before it in a less favorable light.