Latest news with #AmericanFiction
Perth Now
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
‘I'm liking what I'm hearing!' Jeffrey Wright teases The Batman: Part II
Jeffrey Wright is 'liking what [he's] hearing' about The Batman: Part II. The 59-year-old actor is due to return as Gotham City police officer James 'Jim' Gordon in director Matt Reeves' upcoming superhero sequel, and although Wright hasn't read the script for The Batman: Part II yet, he is happy to hear that progress on the movie is moving along smoothly. Speaking about the film's script with Den of Geek, he said: 'I haven't read it yet, no. But I've heard some things.' The American Fiction star added: 'I'm liking what I'm hearing. And I have huge respect for Matt's Gotham-building skills. 'So I'm excited to jump in there and read what he has, which I'm sure will be rich and satisfying to play, and ideally for audiences to take in as well.' As well as Wright's Jim Gordon, The Batman: Part II will see the return of Robert Pattinson's Caped Crusader, Zoe Kravitz's Catwoman, Colin Farrell's Penguin and Andy Serkis's Alfred Pennyworth. The DC blockbuster - which is slated to hit screens in October 2027 - is reportedly due to start filming at the beginning of next year. Last month, DC boss James Gunn confirmed the script for The Batman: Part II was finished. When Screen Rant asked the Superman filmmaker for an update on the movie's screenplay, Gunn simply replied: 'It's great!' The Batman: Part II was initially due to release in October 2026, though it was pushed back a year to give Reeves more time to work on the story. In June, Gunn said DC was feeling 'really good' about The Batman: Part II, and noted he was expecting to read a draft of the script later that month. The Guardians of the Galaxy director told Entertainment Weekly: 'Listen, we're supposed to get a script in June. I hope that happens. 'We feel really good about it. Matt's excited. I talk to Matt all the time. I'm totally excited about it. So we can't wait to read the scripts, but we haven't read it yet, if that's your question.' Gunn added 'people should get off Matt's nuts' and stop hassling him for updates about The Batman: Part II. He continued: 'People should get off Matt's nuts because it's like, let the guy write the screenplay in the amount of time he needs to write it. That's just the way it is. 'He doesn't owe you something because you like his movie. I mean, you like his movie because of Matt. So let Matt do things the way he does.' The Peacemaker creator admitted he was 'irritated' by the constant bombardment of questions about the movie online. He said: 'I am irritated by people. I mean, it's just that thing people don't need to be entitled about. It's going to come out when he feels good about the screenplay. 'And Matt's not going to give me the screenplay until he feels good about the screenplay.'
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
Keith David left awestruck after Hollywood Walk of Fame star announcement
The actor posted his reaction on social media. 4:21 Actor Keith David was in shock after learning about his latest accolade this week. David, known for his roles in " American Fiction," "Armageddon," "The Princess and the Frog" and more, shared a video on social media Wednesday showing his disbelief as he heard his name read during the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce Class of 2026 Walk of Fame announcement. In the video, after presenter Eugenio Derbez reads Davis' name out loud, David lurches forward, eyes wide and mouth agape. He looks around at his loved ones, who are off camera, before leaning back in his chair and becoming emotional. "Happy 70th birthday," someone says in the background as David mutters, "Oh my God." David's wife Dionne Lea then rushes to his side, and the two share a loving kiss and heartfelt embrace. The sweet video concludes with David appearing to catch his breath as he wipes his eyes. "What a surprise! Being blessed to get to do this for a living is enough for me; to be recognized for my contribution to the arts is the cherry on top," David wrote in the post's caption. He also thanked the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and his wife, whom he called "my greatest supporter!" He also noted the star will be a "wonderful birthday present next year" for his 70th birthday. David's decadeslong career has spanned film, television and the stage. In 1992, he received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in "Jelly's Last Jam," and in 2024, he received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination alongside the ensemble cast of "American Fiction." David, who is known for his trademark deep voice, has also scored three Emmy Awards for his narration of "A Necessary War," "Jackie Robinson," and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise And Fall Of Jack Johnson."
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flashlight by Susan Choi review – big, bold and surprising
The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer's The Slip, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They're big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled. While it's less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi's Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi's sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires. Flashlight first appeared in the New Yorker as a short story – a standoff in a psychiatrist's office. The novel opens here too. It is the late 1970s: 10-year-old Louisa has been dragged in for a consultation, and she's not playing nice. She waits out the clock, evading, deflecting; a tight little knot of fury. 'This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you're too smart for them,' the doctor flatters her. 'I'm too smart for compliments,' Louisa snaps back. Louisa's father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn't mourning, it's mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office and smuggles it home – a low-stakes theft with high-voltage meaning. The night Louisa's father disappeared into the water, he was holding a flashlight. Portentous torches will appear throughout these pages (it's not the subtlest of metaphors for a novel about absence and secrecy). There's one at a seance, its battery case loosened to summon some otherworldly flickering. Another at an archaeological dig in Paris. This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a torch in a dark bedroom. Slices of light; slices of life. We begin with a flashback to Louisa's parents, meeting them before they meet each other. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan, is a child of postwar limbo. Caught between two nations, and claimed by neither, he trades his borderland life for a blank American slate – or so he thinks (America has other ideas). Louisa's father will be known by many names over the course of his life – Hiroshi, Seok, the Crab – but none of them will quite belong to him. Louisa will know him as Serk, an anglicised version of his Korean name. Louisa's mother, Anne, is an obstinate, spiky creature, allergic to expectation. Pregnant at 19, she gives birth to a child she's not permitted to keep, and her adult life shapes itself around her son's absence, like a house built around a locked room. Louisa will inherit her mother's bone-deep stubbornness – twin contrarians. They make an implacable, inscrutable pair, Serk and Anne; secret-keepers to the core, lonely apart and lonelier together ('Anne the odd white woman who had married the foreigner; Serk the odd foreigner who had married a white woman'). When Serk drowns, he leaves behind a silence so complete it swallows the past whole. And so Louisa is left with two absent parents: one right in front of her; the other near mythic. 'The sum of things she knew about her father could fit inside the sum of things she'll never know about him an infinite number of times,' Choi writes. 'The things she knows are as meagre as a pair of backgammon dice rattling in their cup.' Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there's no story to inherit, no history to claim? How might that void be filled, or inhabited or weaponised? It's a year for canon building, and as the best-of-the-century (so far) lists are tallied, Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, remains firmly on mine. It begins as a high-school drama, libidinous and gossipy, but midway through, Choi triggers a controlled implosion. From the wreckage, another story emerges: one about power, authorship and blame. Truth isn't fixed, Choi shows us here – it's framed. I love this novel's confident chaos, its metafictional brio. Flashlight delivers a comparable jolt – a truth-rattling rupture. We feel it building with a cruel inevitability, and when it arrives, it shifts the novel's moral (and political) terrain. To spoil the reveal would be churlish. The question is whether the novel can withstand the shock. It can – just. Choi is one of contemporary literature's great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates. Choi gives her cast the room they need to live; to be more than vessels for political wrangling. The opening of Flashlight isn't the only set piece that could stand alone – and tall – as a short story. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. Choi confronts a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched. But there is something missing. That Y2K brand of irony – glib, evasive, laddish – is gone. Good riddance to it. It's hard to be flippant when you know which way the arc of the universe really bends. Flashlight by Susan Choi is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flashlight by Susan Choi review – big, bold and surprising
The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer's The Slip, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They're big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled. While it's less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi's Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi's sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires. Flashlight first appeared in the New Yorker as a short story – a standoff in a psychiatrist's office. The novel opens here too. It is the late 1970s: 10-year-old Louisa has been dragged in for a consultation, and she's not playing nice. She waits out the clock, evading, deflecting; a tight little knot of fury. 'This room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you're too smart for them,' the doctor flatters her. 'I'm too smart for compliments,' Louisa snaps back. Louisa's father has drowned, and her mother has turned into a strange new invalid. What the girl feels defies grief or sympathy. This isn't mourning, it's mutiny; and it will take more than some avuncular desk jockey to tame her. While the doctor is distracted, she steals an emergency flashlight from his office and smuggles it home – a low-stakes theft with high-voltage meaning. The night Louisa's father disappeared into the water, he was holding a flashlight. Portentous torches will appear throughout these pages (it's not the subtlest of metaphors for a novel about absence and secrecy). There's one at a seance, its battery case loosened to summon some otherworldly flickering. Another at an archaeological dig in Paris. This is a story told in brief illuminations, like a child spinning a torch in a dark bedroom. Slices of light; slices of life. We begin with a flashback to Louisa's parents, meeting them before they meet each other. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan, is a child of postwar limbo. Caught between two nations, and claimed by neither, he trades his borderland life for a blank American slate – or so he thinks (America has other ideas). Louisa's father will be known by many names over the course of his life – Hiroshi, Seok, the Crab – but none of them will quite belong to him. Louisa will know him as Serk, an anglicised version of his Korean name. Louisa's mother, Anne, is an obstinate, spiky creature, allergic to expectation. Pregnant at 19, she gives birth to a child she's not permitted to keep, and her adult life shapes itself around her son's absence, like a house built around a locked room. Louisa will inherit her mother's bone-deep stubbornness – twin contrarians. They make an implacable, inscrutable pair, Serk and Anne; secret-keepers to the core, lonely apart and lonelier together ('Anne the odd white woman who had married the foreigner; Serk the odd foreigner who had married a white woman'). When Serk drowns, he leaves behind a silence so complete it swallows the past whole. And so Louisa is left with two absent parents: one right in front of her; the other near mythic. 'The sum of things she knew about her father could fit inside the sum of things she'll never know about him an infinite number of times,' Choi writes. 'The things she knows are as meagre as a pair of backgammon dice rattling in their cup.' Flashlight is a study of absence – absence of narrative, of inheritance, of place, of affection. Who are you, it asks, when there's no story to inherit, no history to claim? How might that void be filled, or inhabited or weaponised? It's a year for canon building, and as the best-of-the-century (so far) lists are tallied, Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, remains firmly on mine. It begins as a high-school drama, libidinous and gossipy, but midway through, Choi triggers a controlled implosion. From the wreckage, another story emerges: one about power, authorship and blame. Truth isn't fixed, Choi shows us here – it's framed. I love this novel's confident chaos, its metafictional brio. Flashlight delivers a comparable jolt – a truth-rattling rupture. We feel it building with a cruel inevitability, and when it arrives, it shifts the novel's moral (and political) terrain. To spoil the reveal would be churlish. The question is whether the novel can withstand the shock. It can – just. Choi is one of contemporary literature's great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates. Choi gives her cast the room they need to live; to be more than vessels for political wrangling. The opening of Flashlight isn't the only set piece that could stand alone – and tall – as a short story. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. Choi confronts a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched. But there is something missing. That Y2K brand of irony – glib, evasive, laddish – is gone. Good riddance to it. It's hard to be flippant when you know which way the arc of the universe really bends. Flashlight by Susan Choi is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Washington Black' Trailer: Sterling K. Brown and Ernest Kingsley Jr. Travel the World in Coming-of-Age Story (TV News Roundup)
Hulu has released the official trailer for its latest limited series, 'Washington Black,' starring Ernest Kingsley Jr. ('The Sandman,' 'War of the Worlds') and Sterling K. Brown ('American Fiction,' 'This Is Us.') The eight-episode series is set to release on July 23 on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. The series, based on Esi Edugyan's best selling novel of the same name follows George Washington 'Wash' Black, an eleven-year-old boy born on a Barbados sugar plantation, whose prodigious scientific mind sets him on a path of unexpected destiny in the 19th century. After an accident forces him to flee, he is thrust into a globe-spanning adventure that challenges and reshapes his understanding of family, freedom and love. As Wash begins to navigate his journey into uncharted lands and impossible odds, he finds the courage to imagine a future beyond the confines of the society he was born into. More from Variety How to Watch 2025 NCAA Men's College World Series Live With Hulu + Live TV Advocate Originals to Launch on Hulu for Pride Month (EXCLUSIVE) 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' Season 17 Trailer Teases 'Abbott Elementary,' 'Golden Bachelor' Crossovers Additional cast members for 'Washington Black' include Tom Ellis, Rupert Graves, Iola Evans, Edward Bluemel, Charles Dance, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Eddie Karanja, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Blaine Dorey, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, and Billy Boyd. Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and Kimberly Ann Harrison will serve as showrunners for the series, with Esi Edugyan as a co-producer. 'Washington Black' will be executive produced by Brown, Hinds, Harrison, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Wanuri Kahiu, Mo Marable, Rob Seidenglanz, Jeremy Bell, Lindsay Williams, D.J. Goldberg, Jennifer Johnson, and Anthony Hemingway. The series is produced by 20th Television Production in association with Indian Meadows Productions and The Gotham Group. Watch the trailer for 'Washington Black' below. CJ ENM America has announced Courteney Tarantin as the company's new Vice President of Scripted TV. Tarantin will be have a key role in the production and development of original scripted series for audiences, while working behind the scenes in adapting IP from CJ ENM's content library. Tarantin will also serve as a creative lead for various scripted projects from CJ ENM, working between the company's international production partners and studios around the United States. Before joining CJ ENM, Tarantin was Vice President at Rideback, where she contributed to the sales of scripted series to Amazon, Paramount+, Hulu, Showtime, CBS, The CW, ABC, and NBC. Tarantin worked on projects such as 'Walker' and its prequel series, 'Walker: Independence.' Before working at Rideback, Tarantin previously worked at Sony Pictures Television's TriStar TV, contributing to projects such as 'Shut Eye,' 'Good Girls Revolt,' and 'The Last Tycoon.' 'Courteney brings an exceptional blend of creative instincts, strategic thinking, and deep industry experience to CJ ENM America at a pivotal time in our scripted expansion,' says Elsie Choi, the Executive Vice President of Head of Scripted TV at CJ ENM America. 'Her track record of championing distinctive voices and delivering compelling series across platforms aligns perfectly with our mission to build global stories that resonate. I'm thrilled to welcome her to the team.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
