Tag: Cynthia Erivo

Film Feature: Carrie and Chris Pick the 2020 Oscars

Film critics Carrie and Chris on who will – and who should – win the 92nd Academy Awards

The 92nd Academy Awards air tomorrow, Sunday, February 9th, on ABC at 5:00 pm PST. Once again, Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chris Piper share their predictions — and hopes — for the major categories. A lot of the winners feel like locks, based on earlier award season wins, but, honestly, we’d rather have some upsets to make for an interesting show then have all our predictions come true. Fingers crossed for some liveliness!

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Film Review: Widows

Men … and their messes

From left: Elizabeth Debicki, Viola Davis, Michele Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in Widows

Steve McQueen’s new film Widows opens high above a modern Chicago, in a lofty lovers paradise of pearly white sheets, bodies in contact, and a feeling of time standing still. It’s a cunning and perplexing opening. It leads us to place of hope and optimism, and sets us up for the dark brutality to follow.

Passion gives way to the realities of the day, and Veronica (Viola Davis) and her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) part ways, she to her job as a school district administrator, and he to his gang’s heist of two million dollars.

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Film Review: Bad Times at the El Royale

Bad times at this hotel make for good times at the cinema  

A disparate trio of guests (from l., Jon Hamm, Jeff Bridges, and Cynthia Ervio) wait to check in to Lake Tahoe’s El Royale hotel.

Mad Men fans still mourning the end of that show have reason to rejoice: Jon Hamm revisits the late ‘60s in Bad Times at the El Royale, a period noir mystery that has stylistic echoes of Matthew Weiner’s acclaimed series. Imagine if Don Draper were a southern appliance salesman (still with a deep secret, of course) instead of a New York ad man, and you’ve got a sense of Hamm’s role here. But Hamm’s return to a 1969 persona is just one small reason to see this well-crafted and well-acted thriller, which has retro style and clever twists to spare.

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