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Jordan Peele has announced his new film called Nope. Peele’s latest entry in the horror genre arrives July 22, and stars Get Out lead Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer (Hustlers, Alice), Michael Wincott (Hitchcock, Westworld), and Brandon Perea (The OA). Peele wrote and directed the movie, which seems to take place on a desolate film set subjected to a mysterious, supernatural invasion. Universal Pictures describes Nope as an “expansive horror epic” that ponders the question: “What’s a bad miracle?” Check out the trailer below.

In 2020, Peele cast Sky Ferreira in Peele’s reboot of the The Twilight Zone and announced he would be co-producing a new film called Sinkhole with Issa Rae. Peele won the 2018 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his film Get Out. In 2017, Chance the Rapper famously rented out an entire theatre to screen the film for free.

Vanessa Hudgens, Vanessa Hudgens, and Vanessa Hudgens starring in The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star.

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Mark Mainz/Netflix © 2021/Mark Mainz/Netflix © 2021

Vanessa Hudgens, Vanessa Hudgens, and Vanessa Hudgens starring in The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star.

Mark Mainz/Netflix © 2021/Mark Mainz/Netflix © 2021

Do holiday movies actually make money for networks like Hallmark and Netflix? How many Vanessa Hudgens characters is too many Vanessa Hudgens characters? Sam is joined by Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Linda Holmes and author Kat Chow to discuss the best and worst 2021 holiday movies on TV and talk about the business behind them.

This episode of ‘It’s Been a Minute’ was produced by Anjuli Sastry and Audrey Nguyen. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. You can follow us on Twitter @NPRItsBeenAMin and email us at samsanders@npr.org.

Slowly, cautiously, vaccinated to the nines, we are returning to some of the basic pleasures of ordinary life. A few nights ago, my wife and I went to our local movie theatre, a multiplex with huge screens and blaring sound systems. I love all of it: the coming attractions for horror flicks I’ll never see and for spy films I wouldn’t miss; the chattering crowd; the Brobdingnagian snacks; the adhesive floors. Our choice for the night was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” a film set in the San Fernando Valley of the nineteen-seventies. It’s about the strangeness of being young, the experience of becoming a human being and shaping a self. The fractured narrative is wised-up and sly, but also winningly sincere. It’s been a long pandemic, and this was an exhilarating reminder of what joy is like.

Anderson is fifty-one, and he has been making movies since he was an adolescent. He is a Valley kid, and he’s never really left those suburban streets. His first features—“Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights”—came out when he was in his mid-twenties, and, ever since, he has been the sort of artist whose new work is always an event. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tom Cruise, Melora Walters, Julianne Moore, and Joaquin Phoenix are among the veteran actors who have appeared in his best films, which include “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” and “Phantom Thread.”

Anderson rarely speaks to reporters. I was reminded of that when I got on a Zoom call with him the day after seeing his movie. His square was not indicated by his name but, rather, “Mason Dixon,” a sign of his admiration for the reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon. (Anderson made a film of Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice.”) I spoke with Anderson for The New Yorker Radio Hour; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. He was speaking from his home in the Valley. And, since he has set “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” and, now, “Licorice Pizza” in that territory, I began the conversation by asking him why the place resonates so deeply for him.

I love it. It’s as simple as that: it sort of begins and ends there. I can remember being a kid and thinking at a certain point, probably in my teen-age years, I’ve got to get out of here. “Out of here” being over the hill, not in the San Fernando Valley. Maybe that’s L.A., maybe that’s New York, maybe that’s London, maybe it’s Shanghai—whatever it is, I have to get out of here.

But I’m one of those people who loves to get away for twenty-four hours and then I start getting itchy and thinking about home. I just want to come back home. I’m one of those homebody-type people. I’m comfortable here. My family’s here, my friends are here. It’s a place I keep returning to. Whatever ambition you have to spread your wings, I always find myself returning here. After London, when we were making “Phantom Thread”—it was a dream of mine to be able to work there—but when I got back home, I was just so thrilled. The Valley is not the prettiest place in the world, it’s not the most cultured place in the world, I understand that, but it’s home.

When I was a kid, I’d listen to late-night radio and watch late-night television, and everybody from California would make jokes about the Valley. I didn’t know what that was. What was the joke? What is the Valley in a spiritual sense and in terms of the landscape of your youth?

It’s funny—I wonder if Johnny Carson might’ve contributed to that because he would always say, “Beautiful downtown Burbank!” It may not be beautiful. And there is no real downtown. . . .

I mean, the San Fernando Valley—what is it? It’s a flat space between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains. Its primary reason for existing, at one time, was farmland. And, famously, there’s the story from “Chinatown” of how water was diverted from the Valley.

It’s a suburb. And the suburbs seemed to always come in for a beating. I’m not quite sure why. When I was first writing “Boogie Nights” when I was a teen-ager, there was a terrific story in my own back yard. I didn’t have to go far. I didn’t have to make things up. I could do the research, learning more about these people in this industry, but it was familiar to me. At some point, I probably read that I should “Write what you know.” That’s a good place to start. This work is hard enough. So why am I struggling to try to learn something that’s beyond my grasp or that doesn’t speak to me?

“Licorice Pizza” centers on two characters. One is Gary Valentine, played by Cooper Hoffman, a teen-age guy who is incredibly charismatic for his age. He’s a small-time actor. He starts a water-bed business and then a pinball palace. His patter, his bravado, is amazing for somebody fifteen years old. He falls for a girl, Alana Kane, played by Alana Haim. She’s much older than he is. She’s in her mid-twenties, with a thwarted life but an inner intelligence that’s also magnetic. How is that rooted in your experience? If you’re writing what you know, what’s the germ of the story of “Licorice Pizza” for you?

I was the second of four [children], so I had an older sister and she had older friends. She is a good two, three, four years older than me. And a buddy of mine had an older sister. So, we just sort of happened to fall in the cracks so that, when we were fourteen, fifteen, these were girls that were around us—our sisters’ friends—were eighteen, nineteen. And they had cars! So, every waking hour was devoted to trying to get them to drive us somewhere! And behind it was trying to flirt with them or hang out with them or get noticed by them in some way that was more than just being an irritating little brother.

I can remember having a couple of friendships with some of those girls who I met along the way. They were just friendships, but they were fantastic. They were fantastic just because they were just friendships, you know? To have a friendship with a just slightly older woman, who wasn’t your sister—I had a toe in a version of the adult world or what started to feel adult just because of the transportation that they had.

Maybe the greatest assertion of power and age difference in the movie is not the erotic one but the driving one. At one point, Alana is driving not a car but a truck, and she’s driving it at one point backward at full speed down a hill, down into the center of town. [Gary is her terrified and thrilled passenger.] This is high drama. It’s better than Grace Kelly driving at top speed along a mountain road in the South of France with Cary Grant.

That sequence that you’re referring to is a catchall for any number of episodes that were either that dangerous or slightly less dangerous. And they happened particularly in Southern California because it’s such a driving community. We are slaves to our cars. We love them. Especially at that age—your whole life was dedicated to getting a car somehow. And the kind of trouble that you found yourself in as a result was usually vast; you look back and think, I cannot believe I made it out alive. So, that sequence taps into those episodes. At the time, you just think it was just hilarious fun, but with a little bit of distance you realize it was really life-or-death.

We see on the screen a title card. And it announces that this production is by Ghoulardi Film Company [Anderson’s production company]. This name is something with incredibly deep meaning for you and your family, and it’s rooted at home, in the San Fernando Valley.

My father—his name is Ernie Anderson, and he was originally from Boston. After the war, he came back and was a radio d.j. in Vermont, and he ended up in Cleveland, Ohio. He was on the ground floor of some television programming that was happening there. He created and was the host of one of those classic late-night horror shows. And his character’s name was Ghoulardi. [The show ran on WJW on Friday nights, from 1963 to 1966, and was an influence on everyone from Drew Carey to the Cramps.] He wore a fake Van Dyke beard and sunglasses with one lens popped out. His job was to introduce these horror films and show the kids a good time. Ghoulardi was an incredibly popular character locally in Cleveland. [My father] eventually came to Southern California, to the San Fernando Valley, and worked as a voice-over announcer with ABC, he did lots of different commercials. He became the booth announcer for “The Carol Burnett Show.” But Ghoulardi always kind of followed him around for anybody who was in Cleveland at the time. The list is surprisingly long—there were amazing people who were children in Ohio at the time, from Chrissie Hynde to Jim Jarmusch.

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If you were looking for an excuse to re-watch all the Star Wars movies, this is that excuse.

We’ve all seen E.T. in The Phantom Menace (if you haven’t, here you go), but that only scratches the surface of all the hidden details throughout Star Wars. The lore of this iconic galaxy far, far away has become so big that there are Star Wars scholars. And after over 50 years of Star Wars stuff, it’s safe to say there are still some Easter eggs out there no one has caught yet. But don’t worry, you don’t have to sift through all the timelines, canon, and legends to find the best hidden details in Star Wars. These are 23 of my favorites that you might not already know.

Story: Pushpa Raj is a coolie who rises in the world of red sandalwood smuggling. Along the way, he doesn’t shy from making an enemy or two.

Review: With Pushpa: The Rise, Sukumar ventures into unchartered territory by making a rustic masala film filled with punch dialogues, characters that speak in a Chittoor dialect and a story that’s rooted deep in the region it’s set in. And seeing as how expectations were sky-high after Rangasthalam, what he delivers turns out to be a mixed bag that’s over-long, falters at times and delivers what it promises at others.

Pushpa Raj (Allu Arjun) is one of the many coolies in Seshachalam who chop down red sandalwood illegally and sell it by the kilo to powers-that-be. In a syndicate that consists of numerous players, Pushpa slowly learns to find his footing and rise in ranks till the man who would once chop down these trees becomes the one giving the orders. However, his Achilles heel is not his lady love Srivalli (Rashmika Mandanna), or the big-wigs Konda Reddy (Ajay Ghosh), Jolly Reddy (Dhananjay), Mangalam Srinu (Sunil) and his wife Dakshayani (Anasuya Baradwaj). It is the fact that his brother (Ajay) won’t let him claim his lineage, something that takes Pushpa from zero to hundred in no time and often becomes the reason for this laid-back, sarcastic, arrogant, even funny man to lose his cool. And right as he gets where he wants to be in life, in comes IPS Bhanwar Singh Shekawat (Fahadh Faasil) threatening to upend the carefully constructed order that Pushpa has put in place.

Pushpa: The Rise is backed by a story that’s often explored in cinema – the rise of the underdog. So Sukumar really has nothing new to explore here. What’s new is the way he chooses to expand the story and spend time on setting up Pushpa’s character for a whole film, spanning three hours, before getting into the thick of things. And this move really might not sit well with everyone because despite all the hoopla, that is essentially what this film is. Pushpa might have made foes of numerous people, but none of them seem to even remotely be a match to his unbending nature, that is, till Shekawat comes into town. Sukumar’s film fares well when it sticks to the story at hand and focuses on the nitty gritty of red sanders smuggling, Pushpa’s contribution to smoothening things out, etc. Where the film falters is when it tries to pull off an odd (and problematic) romance between him and Srivalli, this doesn’t always work or even add to the larger story at hand. Sure, Pushpa gets a chance to be her knight-in-shining-armour but it seems to move the story in a direction it would’ve gone anyway. The final confrontation between Pushpa and Shekawat also doesn’t have the desired effect, coming off as rushed and the latter’s character seeming underwhelming.

Also underwhelming are the VFX, art direction, editing and sound design in certain scenes. The team of Pushpa: The Rise did not hide the fact that they had to rush to release the film on time and it shows through the cracks. Given the run-time that seems unwarranted already, the technical glitches only make the flaws all the more glaring. Where Pushpa: The Rise shines is when it comes to the casting, direction, cinematography, costumes and music for the most part. Sure, the BGM by Devi Sri Prasad might seem underwhelming at times, but his music more than makes up for it because it blends well into the story. Cinematographer Mirosław Kuba Brożek and director Sukumar seem to have found the perfect groove for this film, complementing each other with their work. Pushpa’s character’s costumes see a change depending on his standing in this world. The supporting cast also gets a chance to shine, despite sometimes being pigeon-holed into playing characters that are nothing more than cookie-cutter. Rashmika also seems misplaced in a film that’s high on testosterone. Anasuya on the other hand gets a scene with Sunil that proves she’s a fit in this world. Samantha’s cameo in Oo Antava Oo Oo Antava elicits whistles, to no one’s surprise.

With all said and done, Pushpa: The Rise is Allu Arjun’s show all the way. He shines in playing this rustic character that is hard on the surface but vulnerable in ways that others don’t see. Allu Arjun’s fans might be happy to see him shaking a leg briefly in numbers like Saami Saami and Eyy Bidda Idhi Naa Adda but he truly shines when he’s in a tussle for power, with Peter Hein, Ram-Laxman choreographing some stunning action sequences or when he’s brushing off being called coolie oda constantly because he knows he’s too good for whatever others stereotype him as. He also gets a chance to show off his acting chops, apart from the dialect he worked hard on, when he shoulders a film as massive as this one, sometimes he even makes you laugh.

Sukumar’s Pushpa: The Rise shows promise when it wraps things up and sets up things for Pushpa 2. Despite the film being a mixed bag, it does make you curious for what’s to come. If only to see if Fahadh and Allu Arjun get to set the screen on fire.

Note: Quotes have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has revealed that he’ll be starring in another movie based on a video game.

Although he didn’t confirm the game in question, Johnson told Men’s Journal that it’s based on something he’s “played for years”.

When asked about his connection with video games and whether he had plans to make any more game-related movies in the future, Johnson shared that he was a big fan of the Madden games before adding: “I can’t tell you which game in particular we’re doing, but there will be an announcement this year.

“We’re going to bring one of the biggest, most badass games to the screen – one that I’ve played for years.

“I’m really excited to bring it to fans around the world. Of course we’re going to do right by our gamer friends, but really we’re just going to make a great movie.”

Johnson is no stranger to movies about video games. One of his earlier film roles was in the 2005 movie adaptation of Doom, where he played squad leader Sarge.

More recently, he also starred in the 2018 film Rampage, which was based on the Midway arcade games of the same name.

He was also in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and its sequel Jumanji: The Next Level, in which he plays a video game character.

Johnson has also dabbled with video game appearances. The 2006 game Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run starred Johnson as the protagonist, while most recently he’s portrayed The Foundation in Fortnite, where he made an appearance during the end of Season 2.

Other upcoming movies based on video game properties include February’s Uncharted film starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, April’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 featuring Jim Carrey and Idris Elba, and December’s Illumination-produced Super Mario animated movie, in which Chris Pratt will voice the Nintendo mascot.

A sequel to last year’s Mortal Kombat movie is in the works at New Line Cinema.

The Warner Bros.-owned film studio has hired Fantastic 4 and Moon Knight writer Jeremy Slater to pen the Mortal Kombat 2 script, Deadline reports.

Last year’s Mortal Kombat film was helmed by Simon McQuoid, making his feature directorial debut, and produced by James Wan (Aquaman), Todd Garner (Into the Storm), E. Bennett Walsh (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and McQuoid.

It released in April and helped drive what was then the US box office’s biggest weekend since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The video game adaptation generated some $22.5 million in its opening weekend and has reportedly exceeded Warner’s expectations.

Its worldwide box office gross stands at almost $84 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

The movie launched simultaneously in cinemas and on HBO Max and is reportedly one of the streaming service’s top feature titles to date.

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While it was poorly received by critics, the original Mortal Kombat movie grossed over $120 million worldwide following its release in 1995. Its sequel, 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, grossed $50 million.

The Mortal Kombat video game franchise launched in 1992 and had sold 73 million units as of July 2021, according to Warner, including 12 million copies of the latest series entry, 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11.

Other upcoming movies based on video game properties include February’s Uncharted film starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, April’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 featuring Jim Carrey and Idris Elba, and December’s Illumination-produced Super Mario animated movie, in which Chris Pratt will voice the Nintendo mascot.

Actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson recently teased plans to bring “one of the biggest, most badass games” to cinema screens, with an announcement planned for later this year.