Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again Review: ABBA-Fab Sequel Suffers From Streepless Throats

The first Mamma Mia was a huge hit (close to $610 million worldwide box-office) a decade ago, despite critics making every effort to drive a stake into its ABBA-singing heart. And now the global stage smash-turned-hit film rises again in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Dont bother to get your stakes ready. Like Trump voters, fans of this jukebox-musical franchise see only the good in it, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Even Abba apostles will have to admit it hurts that Meryl Streep is barely in the film, for reasons were honor-bound not to spoil which is silly, since you can find out the reason in tweets and blogs from here to the remote Croatian island of Vis,where the film was shot. Still, her absence is deeply felt since the three-time Oscar winner sang and danced her heart out as Donna Sheridan, the single mom who ran a hotel on a gorgeous Greek island where she planned the wedding of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Its Sophie who sent out invites to three men Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgrd) believing one of them is her father.

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Jump ahead 10 years, and Sophie now pregnant is working hard to reopen her mothers hotel. Her husband, Sky (Dominic Cooper), is busy working in Manhattan; Sam is the only one of the fathers able to break away. The young woman is glum. And so is the movie, whose spirit is (hint) funereal, until the arrival of Donnas irrepressible best friends Rosie (a perfect Julie Walters) and Tanya (the ever-priceless Christine Baranski) who once rocked out together as part of Donna and the Dynamos. Everyone sings nonstop, even the actors who shouldnt (looking at you, Brosnan) and the score by Bjrn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (the male half of Swedens pop quartet) is strictly from their B-side, leftovers collection.

Things perk up with the appearance of the smashing Lily James so good in Baby Driver who plays the young Donna in flashbacks. Shes a knockout. Filmmaker Ol Parker, standing in for the originals director Phyllida Lloyd, gives the actor time to to stretch out and show her talents. He also seems fully committed to rampant silliness he sprinkles on the screen, and his script boasts welcome story contributions from the tartly funny Richard Curtis. But nothing can save the herky-jerky, prequel-sequel setup of the plot, as Donna meets one-by-one with the younger, studlier versions of Sam (Jeremy Irvine), Harry (Hugh Skinner) and Bill (Josh Dylan). The dudes are pretty but shallow, which leaves James, dropping her sugary Cinderella image, to add the spark the film needs. Her Waterloo number, set in Paris caf and partially sung live, is an exuberant kick. But the shadow of Streep, who shows up late, looms large. Donnas big song, The Day Before You Came (one of the last ever written by Abba), lets Streep sing and act with a genuine emotional clarity the rest of the film sorely lacks.

Nothing stops the Abba tunes from their relentless march into your ear canals. James is sweet-sexy on I Have a Dream and puts real zip into The Name of the Game. But When I Kissed the Teacherand Kisses of Fire typify the kind of Abba songs no one needs to hear again. The sequel works best when its high on the fumes of its proudly cheeseball concept. Feeble attempts at character development just bog it down. You wait forever for the movie to find its animating spark.

And finally it comes, in the ab-fab person of Cher, basically playing herself in the role of Ruby, Donnas livewire mom. The Dancing Queen enters the movie as if on a magic carpet, wearing a platinum wig and attitude for days, aghast about becoming a great-grandmother. Im not putting that part in the bio, says Ruby, and Cher who at 72 is only three years older than her movie daughter brings out every ounce of sass in the line. With the singer/icon on screen, the audience enters kitsch nirvana. She imbues the essence of Cher into Fernando, making the Abba song soar and flirting outrageously in a duet with a moonstruck Andy Garcia, who plays Rudys great love from the past. Naturally, his name is Fernando.

The last part of the movie, which brings the whole cast together on Super Trouper, is almost worth the price of admission. Millions will happily get drunk on the films infectious high spirits. For the rest of us, who cant get with the program, Here We Go Again will go down as more of a threat than a promise.

Watch Jermaine Dupri Trace So So Defs Southern Hip-Hop Revolution in New Doc Trailer

The trailer for the new documentary,Power, Influence and Hip-Hop, highlights the hip-hop and R&B revolution fostered by Jermaine Dupri and his record label So So Def. The film arrivesJuly 18th on We TV.

Founded in Atlanta in the early Nineties, So So Def provided a crucial southern counterpoint to what was happening in the hip-hop power centers of Los Angeles and New York. At the helm was Dupri, whose production talents allowed him to work with a cross section of rappers and singers, including Mariah Carey, Usher, Kris Kross and Da Brat. The trailer captures the eclectic, genre-blending nature of So So Def in an amazing moment where Dupri and Mariah Carey share a glass of red wine and the former quips, Shes a rapper, and latter responds, Hes a diva.

The trailer for Power, Influence and Hip-Hop also teases interviews with Usher, Snoop Dogg, Will.i.am, Da Brat, Bow Wow and Nelly. The film will also include a mix of video from liver performances, and never-before-seen archival footage.

Power, Influence and Hip-Hop will premiere June 23rd at SeriesFest in Denver, Colorado before arriving on We TV in July.

Scarface Reunion Planned for Tribeca Film Festival

Anniversary screenings featuring the cast and crew of Scarface and Schindlers List will highlight this years slate at the Tribeca Film Festival, which returns to New York for the 17th time next month.

To mark the 35th anniversary of Scarface, Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer and director Brian De Palma will reunite at the Beacon Theatre on April 19th to screen the 1983 gangster epic and talk about the film and its lasting impact. Pacino previously took part in The Godfather reunion at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.

On April 26th at the same venue, Steven Spielberg will lead a panel that will include actors Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Embeth Davidtz honoring the 25th anniversary of the directors classic Schindlers List. New York Times critic Janet Maslin will moderate the post-screen conversation.

Additionally, the film festival will once again hold Tribeca Talks, with filmmakers like Alexander Payne (Election), Jason Reitman (Tully), Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and Nancy Meyers taking part in the Tribeca Talks: The Directors Series.

Tribeca Talks: Storytellers will feature Bradley Cooper with Tribeca founder Robert De Niro, Spike Lee with Alec Baldwin and John Legend with Jamie Foxx, while the Tribeca Talks: The Journey conversation will focus on the career of Sarah Jessica Parker.

Tickets for Tribeca Film Festival events go on sale March 20th; check out the festivals site for more information.

Hold the Dark Review: Blood, Snow and Wolves Are Just the Tip of Thrillers Iceberg

Some filmmakers excel in telling stories; Jeremy Saulnier is better at setting moods. Oh, his movies have narratives: man wants revenge recently-released-from-prison killer of his family (Blue Ruin); punk rock band must get out of neo-Nazi stronghold or die tryin (Green Room). But what you tend to remember more than the A-to-B particulars of this 42-year-old Virginia natives thrillers are the vibes that he marinates his tales of murder and mayhem and vengeance in all variations of a sort of sickened, curdled sense of dread. Hes also remarkably good at staging moments, and Hold the Dark, his adaptation of William Giraldis blood-snow-and-wolves novel, has a handful of indelible ones. Weeks from now, you may end up racking your brain regarding specific plot points, hard-left pivots and some seriously twisted turns. But youll find yourself unable to shake the sight of what a well-shot arrow does to a jugular vein, or the image of a backlit man perched on a ledge and wearing a primitive lupine mask, or the sensation of watching a nightmare unfold before your eyes as things go from bad to underbelly-of-the-beast worse.

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We dont want to damn Dark with faint praise its still an extraordinary high-pulp potboiler, one that mixes elements of indigenous mysticism, Greek tragedy and rural revenge flicks, along with a genuinely showstopping centerpiece (well get to that in a second). And if this take on the evil that folks do isnt quite as efficient or airtight as those aforementioned previous works, its mainly because Saulnier has set his own bar at nosebleed-level when it comes to crafting this type of thing. There are few current filmmakers doing what he does this well.

And what he does here is seed the ground for a winter harvest of madness. A boy has gone missing in a small village in Alaska; theres been an epidemic of wolves snatching local kids. His mother, Medora (Riley Keough), summons a writer and retired expert on the creatures named Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) to find the animal and kill it. He reluctantly accepts the gig, tracking the pack in the wild. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in the desert it could be Iraq or Afghanistan; were purposefully never told a solider (Alexander Skarsgard) catches a bullet in the neck from a sniper. The man, Vernon Sloane, is the childs father. He returns home to mourn and finds out that Mom has gone missing (we suggest you take another look at the mothers name and see if it resembles any famous theatrical heroines of the past). At which point this accomplished killer of men, his friend Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope), Core and the local sheriff (James Badge Dale) all seem to be heading toward a date with destiny.

Suddenly, what seemed like a man-vs-nature survivalist tale Hey, its the guy from Westworld fightin wild wolves! morphs into something thats part Arctic Noir and part violent art-horror. Saulnier knows how to use the frame to heighten tension, to drop things in the background that suddenly demand your attention, to help turn a casual aside (Those my boots?) into a small piece of a big-picture fatalistic puzzle and to make the score underline every bit of doom around the corner. He may be a mood-channeler, but he knows how to assemble the tools of moviemaking to play audiences like cellos. For the first hour or so, you constantly feel the ground shifting underneath you, as lost in the dark as Core is but, like our hapless hero, knowing a bad wind is blowing our way. Which brings us to the set piece.

The cops need to find Vernon, whos on the hunt. They head to Cheeons house to question him. Russell also happens to be nearby, having stumbled across a corpse. A conversation occurs on the porch, one that suggests things are not going to end quietly. In what might constitute a spoiler, a machine gun comes into play. And to call what follows a shoot-out is a bit like saying Gene Kelly splashing around in the rain is a musical number its technically correct but severely underplays the impact of watching the sequence. This is where everything, from the direction to screenwriter Macon Blairs facility for dialogue to the actors (Badge Dale and Black Antelope turn the back-and-forth into verbal game of chicken) to Magnus Nordenhof Joncks cinematography to Julia Blochs precise, razor-sharp editing, gets marshaled into creating something thats genuinely unforgettable. Its an action sequence that knows when to pump the adrenaline and when to make you feel the pain of human bodies being hurt.

If Hold the Dark peaks somewhat at that point, its only because the whole thing is such a virtuoso act the film uses it as a bit of a palette cleanser before getting back to the especially nasty business of tying up some loose ends. There are more revelations and surprises as this disturbing piece of work slouches towards its rough resolution, some of which feel surprising and others which feel inevitable in the ways that myths do. (Note to filmmakers: cast Wright in everything. The man does more with a pause then others do with a soliloquy and he goes a long way towards making the third act hold together.) Having gone from doing a film almost totally set in a claustrophobic neo-Nazi bunker, Saulnier pulled a 180-degree turn and made an ambitious B movie set in agoraphobe-unfriendly, wide-open expanse of nature. The snowy land his characters tread has a lot of history soaking in its soil, the film reminds us and a lot of blood, curses and Freudian insanity as well. You can only hold back the darkness for so long.

The First Time With Zoe Kravitz

Rolling Stone cover starZoe Kravitz talks about being starstruck by the Spice Girls at the VMAs, smoking weed when she was 14 and how shes often embarrassed by her ultra-cool parents, Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, in this installment of The First Time.

Despite having two famous parents, Kravitz admitted that she became starstruck when she encountered that Spice Girls when she, as an 11-year-old, attended an MTV Video Music Awards. Scary Spice let me sit on her lap, the actress revealed, adding that her favorite Girl Power songs are Wannabe and Momma.

Kravitz also recounted about her first encounter with marijuana and how, instead of being mad, Bonet instead offered to share a joint with her daughter. However, having Bonet as a mom wasnt always cool: Kravitz said that Bonet would beltThe Sound of Music songs loudly in public, while Lenny Kravitzs choice of wardrobe often embarrassed his daughter.

The netted shirts, the nipples out, Kravitz said of one time her dad picked her up at school. A lot of fashion stuff; I didnt get it.

Meet Awkwafina, the Breakout Star of Crazy Rich Asians

Its a good thing for moviegoers that Nora Lum was, in her own words, the worst at her chosen art: playing the trumpet. Oh my god, I was horrible, says the Queens-born actress known as Akwkafina, calling from China in June, where she was filming an as-yet-untitled movie with director Lulu Wang. Though she attended New York Citys prestigious LaGuardia High School forperforming arts (a.k.a. theFameschool) specifically to study the horn, the next Dizzy Gillespie she was not. Says Lum, My dad went to a parent-teacher conference and my teacher told him, Yknow, for some students, the best thing that ever happens to them is gettingintoLaGuardia.

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Thankfully, for Lum, that turned out not to be true. Instead of ending up in a jazz quartet, shes hit the big screen in two of this summers biggest films. To play stealthy pickpocket Constance inOceans Eight, alongside Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett, she was paired with a sleight-of hand coach and became proficient enough that she can snatch the watch off your wrist. For her role in Crazy Rich Asians (opens today), the highly anticipated adaptation of Kevin Kwans best-seller set in high-society Singapore, no special training was necessary. She imbued her character Goh Peik Lin, the bottle-blonde bestie to the lovelorn Rachel (played by Constance Wu), with a hip-hop swagger and a Miley Cyrus-meets-New Jersey patois, and improvised her way to some of the movies biggest laughs. (See: her gleeful gatecrashing of a party at Rachels billionaire fiancs opulent family estate.) Its a singular, unforgettable take on the often-forgettable BFF part.

So howd she get from LaGuardia misfit to blockbuster breakout? The fastest route possible: YouTube. Despite her teachers bleak assessment of her musical talents, Lum channeled a love of hip-hop into songwriting, unwittingly launching her career with the 2012 release, at the urging of a friend, of her first rap video, My Vag. Thanks to lines like My vag a chrome Range Rover, your vag hatchback 81 Toyota, it went viral (2,632,000 views and counting). And while it got Nora Lum fired from her job as a publicity assistant at a publishing company, it made Awkwafina an underground sensation.

That is what I did right, in my whole life, Lum says of posting the video. I didnt expect anything to happen. There was no game plan. I had nothing to lose, yknow. And to this day, everything that has happened to me my first movie gig, my first non-music gig was all from that.

Thats not an oversimplification. When it came time to castCrazy Rich Asians, director Jon M. Chu didnt need an agent to slide him a Nora Lum headshot. Ive watched her for years on YouTube, in her rap videos, and she had a show where she interviewed people in a bodega, Chu says. I was always a fan but had nothing to put her in, because shes just such a unique creature. Though the character of Peik Lin is very different in the book than the one on-screen (She comes from money, and thats pretty much where the similarity ends, he admits), once a friend brought up Awkwafina, I couldnt get her out of my head, Chu says. In a romantic comedy, you get very earnest, and you need someone who can pop it, who feels confident and different, not the same old sidekick.

Chu was so sure that Lum was right for the role, he included her name in his pitch packet to Warner Bros. Not that he told her that. We were coy with her, he explains. We had to do our due diligence and see everybody, but ultimately we knew she would hit it out of the park. He even had screenwriter Adele Lim start writing to her voice long before she was cast. With Awkwafina, I didnt want to give her an accent, I didnt want to lay anything on top of her spirit, he says. Shes a truth-teller. I wanted her to be the funniest, harshest she could be.

With that goal in mind, Chu also gave Lum free rein to improvise a privilege she ran with. The result: Some ofCrazy Rich Asians most uproarious scenes and, Lum notes with a mixture of pride and sheepishness, the movies only F-word. She apologized right after it slipped out, but Chu says the take was just too funny to cut. The cool thing is that Peik Lin was literally born on-screen, Lum says. Jon was never trying to steer me. A lot of times you do improv and it just goes into the heavens, but a lot of it made it into the film, and that was really, really cool.

In conversation, Lum toggles between the laid-back, unfiltered wisecracking Awkwafinatics love and a more contemplative, sincere side that may surprise those who only know her on-screen persona. Despite her bottle-rocket rise to fame, she still feels very much connected to the struggling twentysomething who just a few years ago took jobs at a video store and a sushi restaurant to pay the rent while she worked on her music and honed her comedic persona through her Verizon Go90 variety show,Tawk. Filmed in New York City delis and subway cars, it featured skits and interviews with comedians such as Pete Davidson and Hasan Minhaj, as well as a regular segment starring her sassy grandmother, whom she dubbed Grandmafina. When shes not on location in Barcelona (for the upcoming boarding school-set fantasyParadise Hills) or walking a red carpet in Hollywood, she returns to the same Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment shes been living in for years.

Its rent-controlled, says Lum, an only child who, after her mother died when Lum was four, was raised largely by Grandmafina. Sometimes Im sitting on my toilet, looking at my bathroom, and Im like, I cant believe this is my house, dude. This house is fucking gross. Laughing, she rattles off a laundry list of its lowlights, including foam, office-tile ceilings and a secondhand Ikea futon, adding, I need to upgrade.

Shes had a few flashes of amazement at the turn her life has taken, like when she was shooting a scene forOceanswith Rihanna in Manhattan and realized she was across the street from the publishing house that had axed her. Moments like that, I know I can tell myself, Youre OK now, she says. But then she quickly reverses course: The funny thing is, I never feel OK. Like everyone says, This is the best year of your life! Your life is never going to have any stumbles [after] this! But I dont want to think like that.

To that end, shes something of a workaholic. In addition to filming three movies set to bow in 2019 (or recording, in the case ofThe Angry Birds Movie 2), Awkwafina is fine-tuning her sophomore album, the follow-up to 2014sYellow Ranger. She considers music her first and longest-running love. Ive been with hip-hop since I was extremely young, Lum says. J Dilla, DJ Rashad, I worshipped these people. I had a Mac Book and GarageBand and started producing beats when I was 16 years old. By the time I was 18, I had 500, 600 songs I had produced or sung or rapped on, sitting on a hard drive. Even now, making beats is her escape, the first place she turns for relaxation when she gets back to her hotel after a long day on set.

People think Im a parody rapper, like a Weird Al type, but the tragic thing is, I would love to be considered a serious musician, she says. Then I did a song called Queef and that kind of shattered it. But thats how it goes.

That mix of drive and humility served Lum well on the Crazy Rich Asians set. Despite her being relatively inexperienced and self-conscious at the start of filming, Chu says Lum attacked the role, going all-out to bring Peik Lin to life. It was so fun to watch her grow and gain confidence, he says, to see an artist become the artist throughout a shoot. But as much as hes a fan of what Awkwafina brought to the role, Chu appreciates Nora more. Shes the kindest, nicest person. Yes, shes always ranting about one thing or another, but the other side of her is what I love most, actually, Chu says. Shes an observer, soaking everything in at every moment. It seems like shes always talking, but actually shes always listening. You can tell because she says brilliant stuff that you cant know if youre just always on. So my favorite part of her is her sensitivity and her anxiousness, because you know theres a real person there.

Star Wars: See First Trailer for Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker

The story of the Skywalker family ends December 20th, and in front of a cheering, lightsaber-waving crowd at Chicagos Star Wars Celebration convention Friday morning, director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy finally announced the title of the final film in the saga: Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker. The revelation came via the films teaser trailer, which also included a shock: the voice of the Emperor, played by Ian McDiarmid, who showed up onstage in person at its conclusion Roll it again, he growled.

The events surprise host, to the crowds delight, was Stephen Colbert. Am I really at this panel right now? asked Colbert, noting he was there at the request of Abrams. Isnt it just as likely that Im in the lotus position on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater, Force-projecting myself?

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Abrams revealed that some time has gone by in the narrative since the end of Last Jedi, which left the Resistance greatly diminished. Its about an adventure that the group has together, he hinted.

Billy Dee Williams, who will return as Lando Calrissian for the first time since the original trilogy, was on hand for the announcement, strutting to his seat despite using a cane. Colbert asked Williams how he found Lando again. Lando never left me, Williams replied, as fans roared. He also got laughs defending his characters betrayal of Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back: I was up against Darth Vader, he said. I had to figure something out.

Also on hand were cast members Anthony Daniels, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo and newcomer Naomi Ackie who, it was hinted, may play Landos daughter. (R2-D2 and BB-8 both rolled around the stage as well, along with a new droid from the film who looks like a bicycle wheel with a backwards megaphone on top.). Ridley turned 27 on the day of the announcement, and the crowd sang Happy Birthday to her.

The movie will also star Adam Driver, Lupita Nyongo, Domhnall Gleeson and Billie Lourd, along with new cast members Richard E. Grant and Keri Russell. Mark Hamill also returns, despite the fate of Luke Skywalker at the end of Episode VIII. Abrams directed the first chapter of the new trilogy, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and returned for the third, after Rian Johnson directed Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.

This movie is about this new generation, and what theyve inherited, Abrams said. The light and the dark. The movie is in the editing and visual-effects phase. I think what youre gonna end up seeing, youre going to be so happy with, Kennedy promised. As with Force Awakens, Abrams did his best to have as many real-life locations as possible, in lieu of CGI environments.

One of the most fraught issues in Episode IX is the loss of Carrie Fisher as General Leia Organa, who died before the release of Last Jedi. You dont recast that part, says Abrams. And you dont have her disappear. He confirmed reports that the film will utilize unused scenes shot with her from Force Awakens, with scenes written around them. She is there in these scenes, and in some scenes with her daughter. Princess Leia lives in this film in a way thats kind of mind-blowing for me.

Episode IX will, of course, not be the end of Star Wars movies Disney is planning more, with other casts of characters, but has yet to reveal any details beyond the facts that Rian Johnson is working on a possible new trilogy, as are Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The timeline is unclear, however: Disney CEO Robert Iger recently told Bloomberg that the franchise will take a hiatus from the big screen following Episode IX.

We will take a pause, some time, and reset, because the Skywalker saga comes to an end with this ninth movie, Iger said. There will be other Star Wars movies, but there will be a bit of a hiatus. We have not announced any specific plans for movies thereafter. There are movies in development, but we have not announced them.

Despite the big-screen break, a number of Star Wars television projects, including The Mandolarian and Cassian Andor, will debut later this year on the Disney+ streaming service.