by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent Hey, the German trailer for THUNDER FORCE starring Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer is almost more hilarious than the English version of the Netflix superhero flick to be released April 9. Can you imagine more unlikely Super Friends from childhood? No, you can’t, trust me. This is one caped caper worth the subscription fee alone for the super streamer. Watch… You’ll never listen to Seal again without a trigger-wa...

Onward, Review: Upward, downward, northward, southward, eastward, westward, and afterward A potpourri of various elements found across several genres, animation giants Disney and Pixar’s Onward is good fun while it lasts. The film uses motivational and familial themes to string together a tale of an era wherein everything modern co-exists with almost everything mythical and magical. It stretches your imagination to some limits, but once you set your disbelief to the required frequency o...

Dolittle, Review: Only a veterinarian can save the Queen Imagine a veterinarian doctor who can understand animal language and talk to any member of the animal, bird and fish kingdom. When translated to cinema, as in Dolittle, this story creates a dramatic premise where his unique ability would prove crucial in an effort to save the dying Queen of England, no less. It’s as preposterous a premise as the basic platform itself, but, nevertheless, adds to the cuteness value of the whole exer...

Siraj Syed reviews Hidden Figures: US-Russia space race & black women’s amazing grace Did you know that three black women played crucial roles in NASA’s space programme, and without them, John Glenn would not be remembered as the first American astronaut to make it back to earth, but as a young man who got burnt to cinders, along with his spacecraft, by the heat generated on his vehicle’s re-entry into earth’s orbit? This is the true story of the rather unimaginati...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent When the Oscars streamed the announcements for the first time in their history this morning, anybody in the world got a glimpse at who AMPAS deemed Oscar-worthy for the 89th Academy Awards. The net result? You get emails from everybody and your mother about how right, or wrong your predictions were — maybe not the result the Academy expected, but announcing online is here to stay. Meanwhile, what a line-up, and let’s create the hashta...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent Octavia Spencer stars as Dorothy Vaughan in HIDDEN FIGURES. Photo Credit: Hopper Stone. Who knew NASA and IBM would be the corporate darlings of this year’s Oscar race? Or, translated into Award Season trivia for 2017, who knew HIDDEN FIGURES from 20th Century Fox, about three NASA human “Computers,” would run up unexpected numbers at the box office and put stars Kevin Costner, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Mon...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent That’s not click-bait in the headline, and we will get to the Morgan Freeman Appreciation Society in a moment; but first Day One of the Produced By Conference held June 4-5 at Sony Studios by the Producers Guild of America (PGA). It was nothing short of a rousing success yesterday. To a person, attendees gave it raves, whether from Arkansas or Iceland or Pasadena. An Infolist sponsor rep even whispered it is the only must-attend event on h...

Zootopia (known as Zootropolis in some countries) is Disney’s 55th animated feature, in 3D computer graphics. The theme--unlikely buddies teaming-up to solve a crime--is not exactly a novel idea in Hollywood productions, but buddy comedy-drama takes an entirely new meaning when the buddies happen to be a rabbit and a fox, and the villains are animals too, for this make-believe tale is set in Zootopia, a highly civilised, modern and automated mammal world, sans human beings. Though there ...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent   What do Sir Mick Jagger and the late-great Mr. James Brown have in common? They both have Soul Power, and they are Super-Bad, and after the Aug. 1, 2014 release of the soul singer’s biographical film GET ON UP, quite a lot more. Firstly that the estate of James Brown approached Sir Mick to do the biopic, and second, as the lore goes, a fumbling 20-year-old Jagger once met the Man’s World singer and muffed it, an “awkward ...