Latest news with #MaryElizabethWinstead
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Netflix Assassin Movie More Deserving Of A Prequel Than John Wick
This year, we got the John Wick prequel spinoff Ballerina, set between the events of John Wick 3 and John Wick 4. It underperformed at the box office. It didn't have to be that way. There were already other action movies ready-made for a prequel that were ignored. At the top of our list is Kate, the Netflix film starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a ruthless assassin. Why are we so confident that Kate deserves a prequel just as much (if not more so than) John Wick? Without getting too much into the way of spoilers, Kate is a movie in which our heroine sets out on one last bloody adventure, and it ends with enough finality that we know that Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character won't be picking up her sniper rifle ever again. We love the idea of a prequel because it shares another important quality with the John Wick films: specifically, our titular character's misadventures can be as by-the-numbers or as ambitiously odd as the writers want. In short, we can always expect more John Wick adventures in sequels, but the only way we can expect more Kate is by exploring this character and her world in a prequel. That brings us to a more relevant question, then: out of all the films that tried to bite John Wick's style, why is Kate the one that we want to return to? The short answer is that Kate managed to deliver one kickass action scene after another while engaging in some beautifully subtle world-building. In this way, it surpassed rivals like Gunpowder Milkshake (a movie whose colorful characters couldn't disguise its weak story and lore) and Nobody (a movie that played its main character's deal up so mysteriously that it completely killed our curiosity about his past). Additionally, we love the idea of a Kate prequel because it shares another important quality with the John Wick films: specifically, our titular character's misadventures can be as by-the-numbers or as ambitiously odd as the writers want. Kate's skills as a hitwoman for hire certainly would make it easy to create 'villain of the week' television stories, for example, in which she tangles with one perfectly cast bad guy after another. We want a prequel even more than a John Wick prequel because there is so much of this character and her world left to explore. But a prequel series also has room to tell more powerful stories, including what it was like for Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character to be raised by an employer-turned-father figure (Woody Harrelson) who is destined to eventually betray her. In addition, the Kate we see in the original movie has followed in John Wick's footsteps in another big way: She wants to walk away from the entire bloody affair and start a brand new life. We'd love a prequel that explored Kate's background and how she transitioned from someone who loved what she did to someone who couldn't wait to bail. We could even learn more about her understandable hesitation to commit murders in front of children… where did this personal code come from, and how much has it cost her to maintain it? The final reason that we want a Kate prequel even more than a John Wick prequel is that there is so much of this character and her world left to explore. While later Wick sequels threw in everything but the kitchen sink in terms of action and story, part of Kate's charm as a movie is that it is so wonderfully streamlined. That kept the story moving at a breakneck pace, but if we slowed things down with a prequel series, we could learn more about Kate's background, her colleagues, her family, and the future she dreams of for herself (all of which the finished movie completely glosses over). Realistically, we know it will be difficult for Netflix to create a Kate prequel series to rival the John Wick prequel series, especially since Mary Elizabeth Winstead is so busy playing Hera Syndulla in Star Wars. Still, that means she is spending plenty of time in the fictional galaxy far, far away that helped to make prequels commonplace in Hollywood. Maybe that will be enough for her to trade her blaster for a sniper rifle and help us return to the universe of Kate, one of the coolest action movies we've ever seen.
Daily Mail
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Rainspotting! Ewan McGregor loses battle to replace damaged lead roof at his luxury £2m mansion that is letting in water
Hollywood star Ewan McGregor has been refused permission to replace a ravaged lead roof at his luxury £2million mansion after it was letting in water. The Trainspotting and Star Wars actor, 54, wanted to carry out work at his Carse of Gowrie retreat in Perthshire, Scotland, and applied to his local council for permission. Documents submitted by his architect showed plans to replace the lead roof with the single-ply membrane Sarnafil. The architects said the work on the lead roof was necessary because the property was at 'high risk' of being targeted by thieves. But the plans have now been thrown out by Perth and Kinross Council, who ruled the proposals would not preserve the 'fine detail character and special architectural interest' of the C-listed building. A planning report recommended the proposals be rejected, in a setback for McGregor and his actress wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead, 40, who he wed in 2022. The couple had met on the set of the TV series Fargo, following McGregor's earlier marriage to first wife Eve Mavrakis with whom he has four daughters. Property records have shown McGregor bought his Perthshire home in 2023 for £2.35million after it had been on the market for offers above £2.15million. It comes with a gate lodge and a courtyard of outbuildings and has more than 15,000sqft of living space on three floors - while also featuring a two-bedroom flat, stores and a wine cellar on the lower ground floor. Since buying the home, he has been given permission to erect a replacement garage and to create a new master bedroom and bathroom suite. McGregor also won a bid to repair 'yellowing' and 'water damage' to the mansion. But the rejection of his latest attempts to repair the lead roof comes despite documents submitted by David Bell Architect that said: 'The existing lead roof is beyond repair, suffering from fatigue cracking, splits and failed flashings. 'Patch repairs are no longer viable and have led to water ingress, threatening the historic fabric below. 'Lead theft may also be a recurring issue, making replacement with like-for-like materials unsustainable from a security perspective. 'The building is at high risk due to the value of lead. Sarnafil has no resale value, making it a non-target for thieves.' Refusing him permission, the council said: 'The proposed replacement roof structure, single ply membrane and PVC battens, and lantern roof light features would not preserve the listed building's fine detail character and special architectural interest.' The authority also ruled the proposed changes 'would not be an appropriate solution or approach in protecting and enhancing the existing roof form and materiality'. They added that it would be contrary to the local development plan by 'virtue of re-profiling the roof' and the use of 'non-traditional methods and materials'. McGregor had been given the green light last December to renovate a lodge on the grounds of the estate. The actor, whose other hit films include Moulin Rouge and Black Hawk Down, is said to be spending extended periods at his property near his hometown of Crieff, Perthshire, which is set in more than 18 acres of land and gardens. In an interview last year, he said: 'I definitely started to feel this pull home. I never saw it coming, it's weird. 'I think whoever made the world started with Scotland and got it right.' He also has properties elsewhere including in St John's Wood, north-west London. He is currently starring in London's West End on stage in My Master Builder, an adaptation of Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play The Master Builder, alongside Elizabeth Debicki who previously played Princess Diana in The Crown. McGregor, who also has a home in Los Angeles, previously told of missing living in Scotland, in an interview at Comic Con exhibition in Edinburgh in 2023. He said: 'What I miss the most about Scotland, is of course my family. 'My mum and dad and my brother (Colin) and his wife Sarah and my nephew and my niece. 'I miss the landscape. I miss the air in Scotland. 'I miss the smell of the rain, the smell of the green and the colours of Scotland. 'And the people and the culture. I could just keep going on and on.'
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Which ‘Final Destination' Is the Best? All 6 Installments (Including 'Bloodlines') Ranked From Worst to Best
After a 14-year hiatus, the Final Destination franchise returns to cinemas with the franchise's sixth installment, Bloodlines. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein's update-cum-soft-reboot has scored franchise-best critical notices, with our review noting it's 'exactly what fans are after' and a perfect entry point for newcomers while also providing ample fan service. One of the most consistent franchises ever produced (there's no outright bad installment in the Final Destination series, just some less-than-stellar ones), the films roundly follow a teenager who has a psychic vision of a terrible, mass-casualty event before saving most of the people whom Death is about to claim. But, unfortunately for them, Death likes to have his way and sets out balancing the scales by knocking them off in excessively grisly accidents, most of which involve formerly benign household implements like beer bottles and cuticle scissors. With Final Destination: Bloodlines now in cinemas, we've ranked each movie in the Final Destination series from worst to best. Do you agree with our picks?At a merry high school graduation party held at an amusement park, Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) envisions a deadly rollercoaster crash. After saving her friends, Death begins picking them off one by one. Part one director James Wong returned to helm this second sequel, but it proves only that Wong misunderstands the series he helped create. There's an odd line of leeriness which runs through this one, which dooms the female characters to the most gruesome fates and casts all the male figures as hollering, pumped-up bullies of different stripes. There's fun stuff here, like a grisly nail gun gag, but it's the closest the series has come to being an outright drag. Whilst enjoying the reverie of youth at a NASCAR event in this fourth installment, Nick (Bobby Campo) envisions a grisly crash in which the stands are wiped out. After saving his friends, Death begins picking them off one by one. Incredibly cheap-looking but undeniably fun in a no-frills exploitation kind of way, The Final Destination sees part two director David R. Ellis return for another round of carnage — this time in 3D! The addition of another dimension (several months before the release of Avatar, no less) gives this sequel a bit of a jolt, though the amateurish acting and achingly overlit color palette (to counterbalance the darkening effect of 3D, one assumes) give the whole enterprise the feeling of a cheap Syfy channel on a corporate retreat, Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) envisions a horrific bus crash which claims the lives of himself and his co-workers. After saving his friends, Death…well, you get it. The second installment to receive the 3D treatment, Final Destination 5 is a particularly clever sequel that proved the franchise still had legs. Directed by James Cameron protégé Steven Quale, the film is notable for two reasons: It introduces the oft-derided twist that its characters can cheat Death's plan by killing another person, therefore adopting the time they have left; and it ends on a terrific twist which, at long last, ties the franchise together. It's too good to spoil here. Embarking on a class trip to Paris, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) envisions a disaster which claims the lives of everyone on their flight. After the survivors begin dying in bizarre ways, Alex and fellow survivor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) set out to unravel the mystery behind Death's plan. Final Destination is a very good post-Scream teen chiller, but it's just an above-average Final Destination movie. After you've seen the sequels and have an awareness of the franchise's general concept, it feels as though this first installment takes altogether too much time to get to the point. Despite clever set piece design and some very fine acting, Final Destination feels like an outline of itself. There are just brief flashes of the Rube Goldbergian antics that would arrive in sequels; only one sequence achieves the silly yet visceral terror that the franchise would soon by disturbing visions featuring her grandmother as a young woman, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) returns to her estranged family to figure out why Death has his sights set on them. An exceptionally well-tuned sequel. As fun as the Final Destination series has always been, few would argue that they were genuinely good movies with proper arcs and character development. Quite surprisingly, Bloodlines reverses course and delivers a Final Destination movie which is unabashedly gruesome, terrifically silly and overwrought, but admirably heartfelt and well-produced. A great deal of thought went into this sequel, and it shows. On her way to a spring break getaway, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) envisions a gruesome highway pileup. She teams with a cop (Michael Landes) and original survivor Clear Rivers to put a stop to Death's plan. Unequivocally the most fun and most disgusting of the Final Destination flicks, stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis's cracking sequel kicks off with one of the best car crash sequences ever put to film and gains speed from there. There is a gleefully politically incorrect, Italianate video-nasty quality to Final Destination 2, which makes rewatching it even two decades later feel taboo and slightly indecent. That's a huge compliment, by the way.
The Independent
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
17 times great movies were ruined by terrible endings
It's as true of movies as it is of air travel: if you mess up the landing, people aren't going to care about how smooth the journey was. The history of cinema is littered with films that spend an hour or two deftly courting their audiences, only to drop the baton at the final sprint. Whether that's through a shocking, misjudged twist, such as the soppy drama Pay It Forward or M Night Shyamalan's The Village, or simply down to a film running out of steam, there have been many movies with endings that left a foul taste in viewers' mouths. Sometimes, this is out of the filmmakers' hands. This was the case with Fight Club, which saw its original ending entirely removed by Chinese censors and replaced with a terrible alternative. Other times, it's solely the choice of the writers, with a finale simply misjudged in story or tone. Here are 17 otherwise impressive films that were ruined by their endings… 10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above – a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before. Baby Driver Even leaving aside the Kevin Spacey of it all, there are serious problems with the ending of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, the film that heralded the Shaun of the Dead filmmaker's big leap to Hollywood. While the early parts of the film are characterised by an enjoyable, rhythmic lightness of touch, the last act of Baby Driver shifts gears into gurning action melodrama, as Ansel Elgort's headphone-addict getaway driver faces off with a demonic Jon Hamm. Compared to what came before, it's a car crash – or engine failure at the very least. Bad Times at the El Royale Seldom have films taken as radical a turn for the worst as Bad Times at the El Royale, which starts out as a witty, unpredictable Tarantino riff. As it careens towards an endgame, Chris Hemsworth's preening cult leader takes over, and Bad Times becomes a tedious and overblown mess. A royale disappointment. Fight Club (Chinese cut) The original ending to Fight Club is a striking one – Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter holding hands while watching buildings explode outside the window. The Chinese cut of the film, however, replaced this moment with a radically underwhelming postscript, reading: 'The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.' The ending was more than a damp squib; Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk sarcastically shared the news, writing: 'Have You Seen This S***? This is SUPER wonderful! Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' Happiest Season In many regards, the 2020 Christmas romcom Happiest Season was a spiriting success – a queer love story that was largely charming, and suitably festive. Over the course of the film, however, Aubrey Plaza's character demonstrates such potent chemistry with lead Kristen Stewart, that the latter's ultimate decision to get back with the (unintentionally) toxic Mackenzie Davis feels like a thumbtack in our figgy pudding. Humbug. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull For all the fuss about the 'nuclear fridge' scene, Steven Spielberg's return to the adventure serial franchise is largely a well-made and entertaining piece of popcorn entertainment. That is until its climax, when Harrison Ford's intrepid archeologist activates an alien spaceship. Indy's pivot to science fiction isn't really any more far-fetched than the pseudo-religious magic of the first three films, but Crystal Skull inflates the sequence into something not just daft, but deeply uncompelling. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King All of Peter Jackson's fantasy epics were indulgent when it came to storytelling: their hefty, three-hour runtimes are part of their intrinsic appeal. But it's only at the end of the third film, Return of the King, that patience tips over into outright frustration. With the drama of the trilogy all resolved, we are treated to a seemingly interminable sequence in which Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) reunites with his old friends, one by one… it drags massively, and is a large part of why Return of the King is the weakest entry of the three. The Magnificent Ambersons The original cut of Orson Welles' 1942 drama is often heralded as a masterpiece on par with Citizen Kane; it's a shame nobody is able to watch it. The studio-mandated 'happy ending' tacked onto this intelligent period drama is now the only version available. While the film is still well worth watching, it succeeds despite its ending, with the ghost of Welles' original intentions haunting the film like a phantom. Now You See Me This 2013 thriller seemed to want to emulate Christopher Nolan's The Prestige – a film about magicians that managed to pull off an almighty illusion of its own. Now You See Me, however, ended up botching its big reveal, as it ultimately turns out that the magic is real… and deeply unsatisfying. 'The wizard did it' ends up being just about the biggest cop-out around, and the film fails to tie up many of its loose ends. A dismal sequel did nothing to rescue things. Pay It Forward Say what you will about the ending to Pay It Forward, but it's certainly unexpected. The uplifting drama, which stars Haley Joel Osmant as a young child who tries to change the world for the better, turns out to be no so uplifting after all – as the wee'un is stabbed to death in a shock twist. It's dark (much, much too dark) and left audiences feeling like they'd just been slapped in the face. Psycho Alfred Hitchcock's seminal horror contains several cinematic moments for the ages — including the iconic climax, in which it's revealed that Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has been dressing as his mother to commit murder. Taking the shine off the film's ending, though, is a clunky, tacked-on epilogue, which over-explains the psychology behind Norman in stiff and outdated terms. Lose the scene, and the film would only be better for it. Remember Me Few would argue that this Rober Pattinson drama was a great film for the first 100-odd minutes, but it was only in its final shot that Remember Me became a disaster. The last-minute twist — that Pattinson is standing in the World Trade Center, moments before the 9/11 terror attacks — is so catastrophically misjudged that it turned the film into a kind of poor-taste laughing stock. Spectre There's quite a lot to like about Sam Mendes's maligned return to the James Bond franchise – beginning with the arresting set piece at a Mexican Day of the Dead festival. But once Christoph Waltz's Blofeld comes into play, things start deteriorating – and the final set piece is somehow both overblown and witheringly anticlimactic. Split M Night Shyamalan's 2016 film starts out as an intriguing psychological horror. James McAvoy is given free reign to do a lot of capital-A Acting, playing the various personalities of Kevin Wendell Crumb, a kidnapper with dissociative identity disorder. All through the film, we are teased with the threat of one of Crumb's personalities, known only as 'The Beast'. The reveal? The beast isn't just another personality, but in fact a giant supernatural being, into whom Crumb transforms. It's then revealed that Split is in fact a stealth sequel to Shyamalan's previous film Unbreakable. Unexpected? Sure. But it kills the tension – and takes the film down with it. Sunshine Danny Boyle's 2007 sci-fi was, for much of its runtime, a deft, intelligent drama set aboard a vehicle bound for the sun. It was a film built on character and psychological believability. In the last act, however, it takes a sharp pivot into slasher territory, which undermines much of what came beforehand. Reviewers singled out the ending for criticism, with The Austin Chronicle 's Marrit Ingman among those disparaging the 'profoundly implausible plot turn that sends the movie skidding into bogeyman horror', which 'cheapens the sentiment, and the film doesn't recover'. The Village Sorry, M Night, but you've got another film on this list. Hollywood's 'master of the twist' held true to form with this 2004 period drama, which, in its big turn, is revealed to not be a period drama at all. The late, great critic Roger Ebert tore the film apart in his review, writing: 'To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore'. The World's End Until it's climax, the third film in Edgar Wright's so-called Cornetto Trilogy is up there with his best work: funny, propulsive and packed with clever Easter eggs. The final confrontation, in which Simon Pegg's obnoxious Gary King faces off with alien body snatchers, kills the momentum entirely; it's neither funny or satisfying enough to pay off everything that came before it.
