Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
May 26 - June 1st

APPLE TV
Apple TV+ unveiled the trailer for “Hijack,” the upcoming, high-octane thriller starring and executive produced by SAG Award winner and Emmy Award nominee Idris Elba (“Luther”). Created by George Kay (“Lupin,” “Criminal”) and Jim Field Smith (“Criminal,” “Truth Seekers”), who also wrote and lead directed the series respectively, the seven-part series also stars Emmy Award and NAACP Image Award winner Archie Panjabi (“The Good Wife,” “Snowpiercer,” “Blindspot”). “Hijack” takes flight on Apple TV+ on Wednesday, June 28, 2023, with the first two episodes, followed by one new episode every Wednesday through August 2...

David Zaslav has only been CEO of the now-merged Warner Bros. Discovery since April 2022, but his reign is already an infamous one. Zaslav, previously the CEO of Discovery Inc., is a reality TV mogul, and his decisions as head of Warner indicate a man out of his depth at a Hollywood studio. His most controversial decisions included shelving the completed "Batgirl" film in an unprecedented move, purging films and TV from HBO Max, and relaunching that service as just "Max" — a baffling failure to understand brand recognition. Zaslav has expressed disinterest in scripted programming and his decision-making reflects that. As a result, he's become public enemy number one for many cinephiles on the internet, especially as screenwriters stand up for fair wages and treatment in the ongoing Writers Guild of America (WGA) Strike. Boston University invited him to be its commencement speaker for the Class of 2023 and receive an honorary degree (Zaslav graduated from BU with a Juris Doctor in 1985)...

Christopher Nolan has endeavored to make his new film "Oppenheimer" — a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the men behind the invention of the atomic bomb — with a minimum of computer-generated images. For "Oppenheimer," special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher and Nolan thought of old-fashioned miniatures, but for explosions. Big enough to look real, but small enough to put a camera kind of close to: "It is like an old-school technique. We don't call them miniatures; we call them big-atures. We do them as big as we possibly can, but we do reduce the scale so it's manageable. It's getting it closer to camera, and doing it as big as you can in the environment."...

MoviePass is officially back. Moviegoers who wish to give this thing a test run over Memorial Day weekend can do precisely that. Anyone can subscribe to the new MoviePass, but it will be structured very differently than the $10 per month all-you-can-movie price that made the service famous in the first place. Plans will start at $10, but there are four tiers and none of them are unlimited. MoviePass will be available at some 4,000 theaters. Users can see what theaters are near them using the app and what showtimes for which movies are currently available. The Basic plan users can expect to be able to see between one and three movies per month, depending on the cost per movie...

The question of how "Yellowjackets" managed to amass such a uniquely intense fanbase can actually be answered by the particular ways in which the show diverges from the prestige template that's had TV in a vice-grip since "Mad Men." And the best way to illuminate that connection is not to explore what the showrunners, Showtime, and the marketing team do to court that fanbase, but what it is about the show, formally and aesthetically, that no one else is doing. "Yellowjackets" is a lot of things. It's a show about survival, a dark comedy, a coming-of-age story, and a performance showcase. If you had to fit it into a broad category of series formats that work in today's TV ecosystem, though, you'd call it a mystery. That's the way "Yellowjackets" first hooked its audience, by asking a series of huge questions in the pilot that would slowly be answered over the course of the show. In fact, most of the intrigue that "Yellowjackets" is still riding on was generated by a single question posed in a single scene: the pilot's cold open. Watching a band of feral, fur-clad warrior girls chase one of their own through the forest and into a spike-filled pit at the behest of some kind of antler queen begged the question: how did these normal suburban teenagers come to this? ( Courtesy Ryan Coleman)...

The Sundance Film Festival Asia, an offshoot of the Sundance Institute, is to set up camp in Taipei, Taiwan this summer. The three-day mini festival will run Aug. 18-20 and be put together in association with local organizer G2Go Entertainment. The event will showcase a handful of films curated by the Sundance Institute and host a short film competition that is open only to Taiwanese productions. Panel discussions will accompany the festival to foster artistic exchange, providing opportunities for the Taiwan film industry to connect with Sundance’s executive team, and elevating Taiwan’s image and presence in the global independent film industry. The jury for the Taiwan short film competition, includes: Kim Yutani, director of programming, Sundance Film Festival, Heidi Zwicker, Sundance senior programmer and Mike Plante, Sundance’s senior programmer, for short films. The winning film will receive a Nt$50,000 cash prize...