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Twin Peaks fans who were left wanting more following the series’ long-awaited third season in 2017, rejoice: Top members of the original cast are set to tour the country later this year. Starting in early August, stars of the surreal David Lynch and Mark Frost-created saga will be sitting down for nostalgic conversations in cities across the U.S., from Tysons, Virginia, to Seattle, Washington. Ray Wise (who played Leland Palmer), Harry Goaz (Deputy Andy Brennan) and Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran) as well as Twin Peaks: The Return executive producer Sabrina S. Sutherland will share their experiences on the series and swap behind-the-scenes stories at the ticketed events. Sheryl Lee, who played the high school homecoming queen whose murder formed the central mystery of the story and gave a startling starring turn in 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, will additionally appear at certain stops in...

Paramount Global wants to take Las Vegas visitors to the Danger Zone. The media company is partnering with Advent Allen Entertainment to create and launch a fully immersive experience based on its Top Gun franchise, which stars Tom Cruise. The experience will be built on an undeveloped site at The Strat Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, and while details remain, uh, classified for now, the companies promise a combination of rides and storytelling, utilizing advanced technology and, of course, jet simulators. Top Gun has had a resurgence since the success of Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, and Paramount is betting that its adrenaline-soaked nature will translate to an exciting experiential business. While the initial Top Gun Las Vegas (working title) is set to open in 2028, the companies say that they are actively exploring potential expansion locations in the U.S. and elsewhere around...

In the first minutes of Netflix’s Bad Thoughts, creator and star Tom Segura explains what it’s like being a comedian. “You know that dumb shit you get sent to HR for saying?” he smirks. “I get paid for that.” He’s elucidating the broad theme of the episode — “jobs” — but really, he could be explaining his series as a whole. And his promise (or threat) is not an idle one. Bad Thoughts’ entire raison d’être is pushing past the boundaries of good taste, in hopes of provoking delighted horror or disgust. How successful you think Segura is at it, and whether you think it’s a worthy goal to begin with, is a matter of personal sensibility. I will say this: You can’t accuse the guy of not committing to a bit. Bad Thoughts The Bottom LineRude and crude, not necessarily in...

Many questions were raised when Warner Bros. initially announced “HBO Max” (and then “Max”) as the name of its big streaming platform. The first and most obvious question was, “Why take a brand name as established and curated as HBO and dilute it with proximity to this much corporate flotsam and jetsam?” Duster The Bottom LineNot much depth, but star power and ersatz grooviness. Airdate: Thursday, May 15 (Max) Cast: Josh Holloway, Rachel Hilson, Keith David, Sydney Elisabeth, Greg Grunberg, Camille Guaty, Asivak Kootachin, Adriana Aluna Martinez, Benjamin Charles Watson Creators: J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan Somewhere among the top five questions, though, was “Wait, can you use ‘Max’ when HBO already has ‘Cinemax’ as a corporate sibling?” HBO’s disreputable younger brother, Cinemax attempted to shed or expand on its “Skinemax” reputation with a fairly successful run of originals between 2011 and 2019, a small group that...

It’s been several years since I graduated from college, so I’m unqualified to say with certainty whether or not it’s a regular occurrence for today’s savvy students to bond over their love of Ashlee Simpson, whose last album came out before some of them were born. This unexpected celebration of the “Pieces of Me” auteur is one of several moments in Benito Skinner‘s new Amazon comedy Overcompensating that feel not exactly “wrong,” but more appropriate for juvenile millennials than Zoomers. Almost every pop culture reference in Overcompensating, including extended nods to Twilight, Glee and the reappropriated Megan Fox classic Jennifer’s Body, comes across, at best, as a thing that the main characters might have discovered from their much older siblings. Or parents. Overcompensating The Bottom LineCollege tropes, done well. Airdate: Thursday, May 15 (Amazon) Cast: Benito Skinner, Wally Baram, Mary Beth Barone, Adam DiMarco, Rish Shah It all fits because the...

There are times in Amazon’s Motorheads, especially during the Neil Burger-directed premiere, when it feels like you’re not really supposed to have been paying attention. Or, at least, when it feels like the show presumes you haven’t been. Character introductions and plot developments are prefaced by blaring musical cues to let you know in no uncertain terms how to feel. The dialogue is bloated with exposition: “I mean, your dad just lost her,” a girl says to her boyfriend of his own recently dead mother, as if he might have forgotten. And in case none of that might be enough to redirect your attention from whatever TikTok video you were watching simultaneously, the soundtrack is crammed with recently huge, surely expensive hits by the likes of Benson Boone, Teddy Swims and Olivia Rodrigo. Motorheads The Bottom LineAdolescent angst by...

Mortal women tend to get a bum deal in classical mythology; it isn’t uncommon to see them reduced to simple, ill-fated victims or, in more complicated instances, turned into literal monsters for offenses they didn’t commit. It’s almost progressive that princesses and washerwomen alike get crushed by the caprice of misbehaving immortals — but only “almost.” This is a prism through which one might find some almost admirable subtext in Netflix‘s new five-part limited series, Sirens, but only “almost.” In a show awash in references, thematic coherence and tonal consistency are much harder to come by. Sirens The Bottom LineNot tantalizing enough to lure wayward sailors. Airdate: Thursday, May 22 (Netflix) Cast: Meghann Fahy, Julianne Moore, Milly Alcock, Kevin Bacon, Glenn Howerton Creator: Molly Smith Metzler Created by Molly Smith Metzler (Maid), Sirens is an aggressive hodge-podge that tries to blend very broad class satire, very broad melodrama, very...

One of the most audacious young auteurs working today, 35-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan makes movies that don’t pull you in as much as they slowly wash over you. Moody, melancholic and filled with daunting technical feats, especially the director’s signature logistics-defying long takes, his films are beautifully realized meditations on nostalgia and loss in which the cinema is often a character itself. In his beguiling new feature Resurrection, movies are both subject and object of a story spanning a hundred years of film history, from the silent era to the end of the last century. Reflecting on the seventh art’s past, present and possible future at a moment when many believe it to be in its death throes, Bi Gan has crafted a time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen in which he revives the films...

In Amrum, Fatih Akin stages a sentimental conversation between himself and his mentor, the German director Hark Bohm. This project, which premiered at Cannes outside the main competition, was born of a collaboration between the two filmmakers: Bohm wrote the screenplay, which is based on memories of his youth in the waning days of World War II, and Akin directed (as well as helped edit the script). Indeed, one of the film’s intertitles calls Amrum a “Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” That’s a useful note, because it announces Amrum as atypical of the Turkish-German filmmaker’s usual offerings. It doesn’t have the thriller textures of In the Fade or the grittiness of Head-On. With its focus on the experiences of a young boy, Amrum most closely aligns with Akin’s 2016 coming-of-age drama Goodbye Berlin. Amrum The Bottom LineA war-time coming-of-age tale that's a bit too lovely for its own good. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Premieres) Cast: Jasper...

Leave it to Kelly Reichardt to make a ‘70s movie that looks and feels like a lost ‘70s movie, from its scruffy visual aesthetic to its muted colors, its patient character observation and unhurried pacing to its unstinting investment in an underdog protagonist whose careful planning results in a coup that soon goes south. Josh O’Connor’s rumpled appeal makes him an ideal fit for the title role in The Mastermind, a minor-key heist caper that spends as much or more time on the aftermath of the crime, when it morphs gracefully into another of the director’s singular character studies of struggling Americans. The film is set in Massachusetts circa 1970, two decades before the infamous art theft at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose walls still conserve the empty spaces where stolen paintings by artists including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet...