Latest news with #Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro
6 days ago
- Business
- Metro
'Loopy' action thriller lands on Amazon Prime with viewers cancelling plans
A new action thriller film has already landed on Amazon Prime Video despite its UK cinema release date only coming two months ago. The Accountant 2, starring Ben Affleck, is a sequel to the 2016 action film The Accountant, which also starred Ben in the lead role of Christian Wolff. Following the story of autistic accountant Christian, The Accountant followed Ben's character as he secretly reworked accounts for international criminal organisations. It received a mixed response from critics, and has a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has developed a cult following in the nine years since its release. And while it was made on a budget of $44million (£32.5m), the film – directed by Gavin O'Connor – made back $155m (£115m) at the global box office. Starring Anna Kendrick too, The Accountant was popular with viewers, and a sequel was greenlit by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after years of development. Directed again by Gavin O'Connor, The Accountant 2 saw Ben Affleck reprise his role and starred opposite Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, and JK Simmons once more. The sequel sees Christian drawn back into the criminal underworld after a mutual acquaintance is killed, uncovering a deadly conspiracy along the way. Critics were much kinder to it upon release earlier this year, with the film currently boasting a solid 72% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on more than 200 reviews. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Fans are super keen too, with the audience rating sat at 92%, which is a marked improvement upon the 77% audience rating from the first film. On X, user @4P1HT commented: 'The Accountant 2 is a solid action entertainer. It also gets unexpectedly quite intense in some places.' @PlanetReview concurred: 'The film is a fun buddy comedy. It's proof that a movie doesn't have to be deep to have a good time at the movies, and that's perfectly fine! 'The action is fun too. The characters are funny. However, the chemistry between leads Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal is as charming as it is electric.' Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman referred to The Accountant 2 as 'agreeably loopy' and described it as a 'hyperviolent good time'. @UcheKL said 'Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck have amazing screen chemistry,' while @HeyKayKay described 'the brother chemistry' as 'top notch'. @HayKayKay also argued: 'Wait. I thought [The Accountant 2] was even better than the first one and so heartfelt. Like, I'm over here crying.' More Trending @MarkOwenH raved: 'The Accountant 2 was not good… it was excellent. Normally the second installment is mailed into the viewer. Not in this case. Well done gentlepeople. Well done indeed.' And @RobertPalacios2 said: 'I enjoyed The Accountant 2 even more on a second viewing. Affleck and Bernthal are a great pairing.' While The Accountant 2 has gone over better with fans and critics, its box office figures didn't quite match up, with the film making back just $101m (£74.5m) against a budget of $80m (£59m). View More » The Accountant 2 is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Amazon Prime fans heartbroken by 'tear-jerking' show – with only days left to binge MORE: I binge-watch TV for a living – here are my recommendations for June MORE: Amazon Prime fans urged to binge 'excellent' sci-fi series before all episodes disappear
New European
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
No, Greta Garbo didn't want to be alone
The suave 47-year-old said nothing. He simply picked up his fountain pen and drew a large rectangle on the back of an envelope in black ink to represent a billboard. And then, inside it, he wrote just two words: 'Garbo Talks!'. In less than five seconds, he had delivered an unimprovable marketing slogan. Frank Whitbeck was a big deal at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had acted in and produced a few big films for the studio but by the late 1920s was in possession of a key to the executive washroom as chief of the gloriously titled 'Publicity/Exploitation Department.' Over the next two decades, he would feature as narrator in dozens of films and voice theatrical trailers for classics such as National Velvet and The Wizard of Oz, but it is what happened in a hitherto uninspiring meeting to discuss promotion for forthcoming major release Anna Christie that cements his place in movie history. Anna Christie featured MGM's (and, at that point, the world's) most bankable and fascinating movie star, Greta Garbo, in a film that would make or break her career. Warner Brothers had released The Jazz Singer two years earlier, 'talkies' were taking over and while MGM had begun to follow suit, they were worried that Garbo's Swedish accent would stop her making a successful transition from silent films. The actress shared their trepidation. At 2.30am on the day filming in sound began – October 14, 1929 – she called her young compatriot Wilhelm Sörenson and demanded he come round to her mansion on Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills to drink coffee with her. At 6am, on their way to the studio, he heard a voice from underneath the rug beside him in the car. '[It was] the moving plaint of a little girl,' he recalled later. 'Oh, Sören, I feel like an unborn child just now.'' Yet the concerns of both studio and actress were laughably unnecessary. About 16 minutes into Anna Christie, the queen of working a pause and holding the attention of the audience enters a down-at-heel bar stage right, shoots a stare at the barkeeper and, clearly carrying heavy baggage both literal and metaphorical, slumps into a wooden chair. Pause. All eyes (and ears) on Garbo. ANNA: 'Gimme a whiskey. Ginger ale on the side… And don't be stingy, baby.' BARMAN: 'Shall I serve it in a pail?' ANNA: 'That suits me down to the ground.' Garbo's Anna Christie is very far from being a 'little girl' or any of the other characters she had become famous for playing during the silent era. As Robert Gottlieb, one of her many biographers, put it, she had been 'the prima donna, the vamp, the spy, the flaunter of furs and jewels, the doomed driver of an Hispano-Suiza, the murderess, the mistress of Deco'. For this part, the most important of her career, she was to play a cynical, shambolic, world-weary former prostitute seeking comfort from the bottom of a glass. The performance was sophisticated and acclaimed but almost lost to the reaction of an adoring audience finally putting a voice to the beautiful face they had already fallen in love with. The Herald Tribune gushed: 'Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky, throaty contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.' American film magazine Picture Play went route one with 'The voice that shook the world!' Anna Christie helped earn Garbo her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1930. By the time Grand Hotel was released in 1932 she was the top box-office draw in the world. Less than a decade later, at the age of just 36, she would shock the world once again by announcing a complete withdrawal from Hollywood and the high-profile celebrity lifestyle associated with it – a 'temporary retirement' that would last 49 years. As exhausted ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, Garbo had delivered her most iconic line: 'I want to be alone'. It had been appropriated even before she retired as a shorthand explanation for her reluctance to give interviews and or be photographed in public, but now it survives as a de facto five-word epitaph and explanation for her incredible life and the sudden decision to turn her back on Hollywood. It lends her an enduring mystique, but is also key to a resurgence in her popularity among a new generation intrigued by the idea of one of the most glamorous and famous women in the world seemingly determined to reverse-engineer something like a normal life for herself. Add rumours about her private life (she never married but had a number of documented love affairs including one with silent-movie star John Gilbert and, it has been suggested, liaisons with several women including Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday and writer Mercedes de Acosta), her subsequent status as both an LGBTQ+ icon (her lead in Queen Christina, playing up her androgyny to the max, is now regarded as a gay cinema classic) and an exemplar of timeless style and it is not hard to detect a note of longing and loss in the title of Sky Arts' new documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go?. British film-maker Lorna Tucker had access to home movie footage from one of Garbo's Swedish friends, archive phone calls and over 200 unpublished letters belonging to Garbo's great-nephew Scott Reisfield, who has also just written Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. It joins at least another five other biographies published since 2020 but both Tucker and Reisfield present us with an unfamiliar Garbo, one that challenges the 'I want to be alone' cliche. The documentary shows her relaxing and enjoying time with friends, larking about for the camera, guard dropped, being silly and enjoying life, while Reisfield's letters reveal the domestic Garbo talking about moving back to Sweden with her family and buying a farm, the emotional Garbo who writes a note to herself on the death of longtime intimate George Schlee in 1964 and the ambitious post-retirement Garbo talking of future acting roles and directing films. 'The whole 'Garbo is a recluse' meme was a media creation,' laughs the 67-year-old from his home in Colorado. 'Sure, she was private. But not in a JD Salinger kind of way… Yes, she did sometimes hold her hand up to ruin a paparazzi shot, but that then became the shot and the story around it would be: 'This is a woman who never goes out,' but she did go out.' Tucker agrees. 'She partied like mad but just at friends' houses,' the director points out. 'She was having a wild time, but in private.' Garbo hated the constant harassment that began in earnest on a trip to New York in 1931 (a development many consider to be the birth of paparazzi-style reportage) and was aware of but powerless to resist the vicious circle that came with it. The more she kicked back against the attention, the bigger the story, the more valuable the next photo, the more photographers chasing the money, the more coverage and column inches she received, the more famous she became. 'There were plenty of people who stalked Garbo,' claims Reisfield, 'And people who came to LA to marry her but there was no infrastructure, like there is in the current celebrity culture, to insulate her from that.' Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she soon became psychologically intimidated by crowds to the extent that it became an issue she needed to work through with psychiatrists. At the same time, chased everywhere by the world's press, she had nowhere to hide but, as both documentary and book are at pains to point out, just because she wanted to be alone it did not necessarily mean she shunned personal contact. In fact, there is still a debate in certain quarters about whether her signature line in Grand Hotel was actually 'I want to be let alone' rather than 'I want to be alone'. Garbo had mischievously suggested as much in an interview shortly after the film was released. 'There is all the difference,' she went on to add. The actress had no children but was very close to Scott's mother Gray Reisfield, her brother's daughter, who inherited her entire estate in 1990. 'I think of Garbo's presence in my life as like a bonus grandparent,' says her great-nephew now. 'I didn't have the relationship with her my mom had, which was much closer, but she would come to our house or we would meet her in New York. I have a whole bunch of memories of her doing cartwheels or walking with her so she was in my life over decades and you just get a sense of a person even as a kid. 'That gave me background knowledge that other biographers do not have in order to strip out certain bogus sources that cashed in by talking to the press back in the day but who were not necessarily telling the truth. That's when you get a different picture of Garbo. The real one.' It's the same person who emerges in the documentary: A woman tired of the studio ('MGM is pretty rotten'), its lack of artistic integrity ('Many of the directors here know nothing about emotional life') and, of course, the whole Hollywood machine ('They're marrying me for the 759th time, can you think of anything lower than the people who are in charge of this so-called art I'm part of?'). But not tired of life. To answer the question posed by Tucker's film, Garbo: Where Did You Go? directly, after she quit in 1941 she went wherever she could go to avoid the stalkers, fans and photographers. She moved to Manhattan in 1951, taking quarters in the Hotel Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and then Hampshire House before moving to the seven-room apartment at 450 East Fifty-Second Street in 1953 that she would call home for the rest of her life. Hidden in plain sight, she loved to go shopping behind a large pair of sunglasses and/or a hat. She threw herself into collecting art (and at one point owned three Renoirs) and expensive pieces of furniture including a carved Louis XV chair that lived next to a dime-store blow-up snowman in her apartment. She dated, maintained relationships and was still being propositioned at the age of 80. She holidayed extensively but always to places where she knew she could be herself. 'Her year had a pattern and she did similar things at the same time every year,' says Riesfield. 'So she would always go to Europe, in the 1950s it was mostly on the French Riviera but from 1960 on, even if she went to the Riviera for a couple of weeks, she then spent most of the fall in Klosters. She would always go to California or New Mexico and often Wisconsin because there was no media covering her there, but I think she thought of herself as more European than American, and then after that, maybe a citizen of the world.' It doesn't read much like a woman who has chosen isolation because she wants 'to be alone', does it? It reads more like the life of a modern and emancipated woman years ahead of her time and living life on her own terms with the financial freedom her own remarkable talent and hard work has earned. One story has it that a fan recognised her at a road junction in Manhattan in the late 1950s and asked: 'Are you Greta Garbo?' To which she simply replied, 'I was Greta Garbo'. Then, without waiting for either the signal or a response, she crossed the street. Garbo: Where Did You Go? is on Sky Arts, Freeview and streaming service NOW Bill Borrows is a journalist, feature writer and columnist
Time of India
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
The Accountant 2 OTT Release: Where to watch Ben Affleck & Jon Bernthal's action thriller online after theatres
The Accountant 2 OTT Release: Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal recently headlined this action thriller, which arrived in theatres globally on April 25, 2025. A sequel to The Accountant (2016), the film has received positive reviews from both critics and audiences. If you are wondering where to watch it online, then The Accountant 2 will be streaming on Amazon Prime Video after its theatrical run. The Accountant 2's cast and crew Directed by Gavin O'Connor and written by Bill Dubuque, The Accountant 2 is produced by Ben Affleck, Lynette Howell Taylor and Mark Williams under the banner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Artists Equity. Other than the dashing duo, the thriller also stars Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniella Pineda, Allison Robertson, J. K. Simmons, Robert Morgan, Grant Harvey and Andrew Howard, among others. The Accountant 2's plot overview The story begins with the assassination of Raymond King (Simmons), the former director of the Treasury Department's FinCEN, who leaves behind a cryptic message: 'Find the accountant.' Marybeth Medina (Cynthia), King's protégé and current deputy director, seeks out Christian Wolff to help solve the case. Reluctantly, Wolff enlists the aid of his brother Brax, a highly skilled assassin, to navigate the dangerous conspiracy they uncover. Their investigation leads them to a human trafficking ring involving a Salvadoran family, with the child possibly being neurodiverse, hinting at a connection to Harbour Neuroscience Academy, a school for neurodiverse children. The Accountant 2's review A Google review of the film read, 'Very rarely do you see a sequel that can hold a flame to the original. Ben Affleck has a habit of making incredible films and then making a few dumpster fires. I loved the accountant. I wish that they explored the dynamic between him and Jon Bernthal more in the first film, and that's exactly what they did with this film. This movie is entertaining as all hell while maintaining an enticing storyline. Don't miss this movie.'
Epoch Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Old-School: In the Classroom With Mr. Chips and Miss Dove
In 1934, James Hilton's short novel, ' Frances Gray Patton's 1954 ' Correctly described by reviewers as sentimental, though without being saccharine or emotionally overblown, these two stories convey some insights into the teaching arts, their impact on students, and the culture from those now bygone days. Miss Dove: 'The First Duty of a Teacher' When readers fell in love with the story of English schoolmaster Arthur Chipping, 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips' became a Hollywood film in 1939 starring Robert Donat. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer During his interview for teacher at Brookfield, a boarding school for boys, Chipping is told by the headmaster, 'Take a firm attitude from the beginning—that's the secret of it.' Chips, as he is nicknamed by the boys, follows that advice, assumes the role of a disciplinarian, and operates his classes with little difficulty. Years later, he marries a much younger woman, Katherine, who tones down his tough standards of order, a change which transforms him into the 'Mr. Chips' fondly remembered by so many of the school's 'old boys' well into their own adulthood. At 19, Miss Dove is on the crest of a romance when her father drops dead of a heart attack. After learning that he has 'borrowed' a considerable sum of money from the bank where he was employed, she vows to replace the embezzled funds by working as a geography teacher in Liberty Hill's elementary school. With fortitude and self-discipline as her mainstays, she provides for her mother, oversees and finances the education of her two sisters, and, after many years, squares the accounts with the bank. To her classroom, Miss Dove brings a special brand of discipline. 'All in all, in bearing and clothing and bony structure, Miss Dove suggested that classic portrait of the eternal teacher.' What is more, she brought that portrait to life through her rectitude and high expectations. She demanded and gave respect, she insisted on manners and even correct posture from her students, she believed in the efficacy of rules and saw that they were enforced. She taught the town's children geography for all six of their elementary school years and so imprinted on them a code of standards which, as some of them later explicitly discovered, would carry them through life's roughest waters. Tradition As they age, both Mr. Chips and Miss Dove cast a gimlet eye on some of the modern methods of pedagogy. Related Stories 3/10/2025 1/14/2024 Jennifer Jones plays the 'terrible Miss Dove,' an elementary school geography teacher, in the 1955 film 'Good Morning, Miss Dove.' 20th Century Fox After Mr. Chips has become something of a Brookfield institution, Ralston, a new headmaster who is 'efficient, ruthless, ambitious,' attempts to force retirement on Chips: 'You haven't been pulling your weight here. Your methods of teaching are slack and old-fashioned.' Later in the conversation, Ralston says, 'You live too much in the past, and not enough in the present and the future. ... Modern parents are beginning to demand something more for their three years' school fees than a few scraps of language that nobody speaks.' Fortunately for the school, the boys—and Chips—it is Ralston who eventually leaves Brookfield. Miss Dove's stern but just governance of her classes could also rile up resistance among parents. 'Occasionally a group of progressive mothers would contemplate organized revolt. 'She's been teaching too long,' they would cry. 'Her pedagogy hasn't changed since we were in Cedar Grove. She rules the children through fear!'' They would nominate the boldest among them [to speak with Miss Dove on their behalf]. ''You go,' they would say. 'You go talk to her!'' Even on entering Miss Dove's classroom, however, this emissary 'would begin to feel—though she wore her handsomest tweeds and perhaps a gardenia for courage—that she was about ten years old and her petticoat was showing.' What Ralston missed in his criticism of Mr. Chips, and these mothers in their appraisal of Miss Dove, were the gifts bestowed on them and on their children via that vintage pedagogy. Premier among these were the virtues. Character Builders Mr. Chips counsel and kindness earn him the affection and respect of the boys in his class. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer His long and deeply affectionate association with Brookfield, his counsel, and his kindness earn Chips the affection and respect of the boys in his charge. During the World War I, by which time he has retired from teaching, the headmaster asks him to return to his duties: 'You'd help to hold things together.' In that capacity he continues, with a light touch, to model certain virtues for the students. During an aerial bombardment near the school, for instance, he instructs a Latin class to read a passage from Caesar about the Germans at war, which brings laughter and also demonstrates courage under fire. Miss Dove's lessons in geography are accompanied by much more explicit training in such virtues as fortitude and wisdom. The bar she sets for achievement is high, her tolerance for misbehavior, shoddy work, and indifference low. Given that the children have her throughout elementary school, these standards become embedded in many of them, even when they don't realize it. We learn the stories of several of these former students and their links with the 'terrible Miss Dove,' one of whom is Thomas Baker. He first appears in the novel as a young physician summoned to examine Miss Dove after she is stricken with pain and partial paralysis in her classroom. During World War II, having helped rescue some of his shipmates after a battle at sea, Thomas had floated on a raft for days with only a canteen of water before he was rescued. In a letter to his brother Randy describing this ordeal, which Randy shares with the class, Baker wrote of the 'fishy stare [Miss Dove] used to give us when we needed a drink of water. So to make my supply hold out I played I was back in the geography room. And even after the water was gone I kept playing. I'd think, 'The bell is bound to ring in a few minutes. You can last a little longer.' It took the same kind of guts in the Pacific it did in school.' The Essentials Always Matter The inside of an American schoolhouse, in Shelby County, Iowa in 1941. National Archives. Public Domain Teachers like Miss Dove and Mr. Chips may seem as distant from contemporary America as ancient Rome, idealized anachronisms and therefore unreal. That impression would be mistaken. My third-grade teacher, Miss Sadie Fleming of Boonville Elementary School, who was born in the first decade of the 20th century, was very much my Miss Dove, while a history professor, Ed Burrows of Guilford College, served as a Mr. Chips in my life. And no matter the changes in education and culture, the basic needs of the young have remained the same. Children and teenagers—and adults, for that matter—still function best in an atmosphere of order. Whether self-imposed or provided by outside authority, discipline is still key to most of our successes. Moreover, many parents and teachers know or have rediscovered that the old, time-tried ways of learning, like memorizing the times tables or reading classic literature, still work best for most students. Most importantly, like Miss Dove and Mr. Chips, they understand that a true education involves absorbing points of virtue, etiquette, and other basics of our civilization. Time has transformed our methods of passing along the essentials for living a good life, but the essentials themselves remain unchanged, largely because human nature itself remains unchanged. This is the most important lesson we learn sitting in the classrooms of Mr. Chips and Miss Dove. What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to
New York Times
20-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Amazon Gains Creative Control Over the James Bond Franchise
The British family that has steered the James Bond franchise for more than 60 years, zealously protecting the superspy from the indignities of Hollywood strip mining, has agreed to relinquish control to Amazon. The deal, which was announced Thursday morning, comes after a behind-the-scenes standoff between Barbara Broccoli, who inherited control of Bond from her father, and Amazon, which gained a significant ownership stake in the franchise in 2021 as part of its $8.5 billion purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ms. Broccoli and her brother, Michael G. Wilson, another Bond producer, had chaffed at some of the ways in which Amazon hoped to capitalize on the property, The Wall Street Journal reported in December. In a statement released by Amazon, the siblings and the tech giant said they had agreed to form a new joint venture to house Bond; the parties will remain co-owners. But Amazon MGM Studios 'will gain creative control' after the transaction closes later this year. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson previously had ironclad creative control, deciding when to make a new Bond film, who should play the title role and whether remakes and television spinoffs got made. They also had final say over every line of dialogue, every casting decision, every stunt sequence, every marketing tie-in, and every TV ad, poster and billboard. Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, thanked the siblings for their 'unyielding dedication' to the franchise and said the company looked forward 'to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.' Mr. Wilson, 83, said he planned to retire from producing. 'Therefore,' he said, 'Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future.' Ms. Broccoli, 64, said she felt it was time 'to focus on my other projects.' Mr. Wilson noted that his sister had dedicated her life to 'maintaining and building' the franchise, which was started by her father, Albert R. Broccoli, who was known as Cubby. The Bond franchise was at a crossroads even before the deal. The most-recent movie, 'No Time to Die,' which collected $774 million worldwide in 2021, marked the end of a four-film series with Daniel Craig in the lead role. No decisions have been made about a successor. Bond is unlike any current Hollywood franchise. For starters, it is gargantuan: The 25 movies have taken in more than $6 billion at the domestic box office, after adjusting for inflation, according to Box Office Mojo. The series — the first to go after a global audience — has generated billions more in overseas ticket sales, home entertainment revenue, television reruns, marketing partnerships (Omega watches, Aston Martin cars, Gillette razors) and video games. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson have also fought to keep Bond almost exclusively as a movie property, believing that television spinoffs would diminish the character's value. It has been a harder and harder line to hold, especially with a streaming service as a co-owner — one eager to show that its purchase of MGM was worth the price. In particular, it has been the steely-eyed Ms. Broccoli running the Bond franchise. She has said that she thought James Bond was a real person until she was 6 or 7. She was a toddler on the set of 'Dr. No' in Jamaica in 1962. In 1967, while in Japan on the set of 'You Only Live Twice,' she became ill and recuperated in Sean Connery's suite, which was the best appointed. Although she almost never speaks in public, Ms. Broccoli has a tough reputation in Hollywood. 'Barbara scares the hell out of people,' Mr. Wilson said in an interview with The New York Times in 2015. 'Everyone is frightened to death of her.' 'Good!' shouted Ms. Broccoli, who was seated beside him. She laughed.
