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Tyra Banks reveals her idea for Life-Size 3. Life-Size was originally a 2000 TV movie featuring Lindsay Lohan as a young girl named Casey Stuart who, in the wake of her mother's death, casts a spell to bring her back to life but accidentally brings her doll to life. Banks starred as the resurrected doll opposite Lohan's Casey, with a supporting cast that includes Jere Burns, Anne Marie DeLuise, Garwin Sanford, Tom Butler, and Jillian Fargey. Almost two decades after the original was released, Life-Size 2 was made in 2018, wherein Banks reprised her role.

Speaking on the Drew Barrymore Show, Banks discusses her idea for Life-Size 3. When asked about the possibility of another Life-Size movie, Banks mentioned that she "feel[s] like [they] should do one." Banks even had a specific idea for what Life-Size 3 could be, posing "what if she [Lindsay Lohan] was a doll?" This would involve Casey being "magically turned into a doll" in some way.

"The Twilight Zone" isn't any old kind of zone. It's a bizarre place where anything can happen. Aliens can invade at any moment, William Shakespeare can get a job as a Hollywood ghostwriter. Heck, the creator of the series, Rod Serling, even got killed by his own creations once. The limits are only those of the human imagination, which are damn near infinite, except maybe without the words "damn near."

Yes, sometimes "The Twilight Zone" shows us things we never expected to see, which are hard to describe without making it seem like you're the one making it up. This is especially true for the less-popular, but still sometimes great reboots, which in the 1980s, early 2000s, and late 2010s allowed a whole new generation of actors, writers, and filmmakers to play in Rod Serling's unusual sandbox. Unlike the 1960s series, which was a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s and...

Once more the multiplex turns into a “rec center” for another sports-themed flick (after all, the Olympic torch was extinguished more than a month ago). Oh, and this is another “inspired by true events’ athletic film, which usually means a tale of tragedy and ultimate triumph. It’s been a winning movie formula for decades, from The Pride Of The Yankees to We Are Marshall to 2016’s Bleed For This. Fate throws a curve at a plucky young athlete, forcing them to pick up the pieces and return to the arena (or field, or ring, etc.) by sheer force of will along with a winning spirit and attitude. Sure, there are countless docudramas set in the competitive worlds of baseball, football, basketball, even soccer. This new release highlights a sport rarely seen in feature films, aside from bits in bikini beach fluff and that Top Gun shirtless hunk fantasy, namely...

Evidenced by closing-credits photographs and footage of the real athletes and adults involved, “The Miracle Season” could have worked powerfully as a documentary. But as a faith-based re-enactment of Iowa high school students rallying for a second championship volleyball season after suffering an unimaginable personal loss, Sean McNamara’s film barely qualifies as a story at all — except where dramatic license was conspicuously taken to make sure it adhered to almost every cliché in the sports-movie playbook.

Danika Yarosh (“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”) plays Caroline “Line” Found, an effervescent, beloved, boundlessly energetic senior at Iowa City West High School. As captain of the women’s volleyball team, she led them to victory as a junior, and considers back-to-back championships an inevitable fulfillment of their athletic destiny, especially after dedicating their season to her ailing mother, Ellyn (Jillian Fargey, “Bates Motel”).

But when Line dies in a scooter accident the night after their first game, her best friend, Kelly (Erin Moriarty, “Captain Fantastic”), and the rest of the team are devastated, and not even Kathy “Coach Bres” Bresnahan (Helen Hunt), their stern, no-nonsense coach, can rekindle their love for the game.

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Coach Bres eventually tasks Kelly with the responsibility of rallying her teammates, despite Kelly’s reservations over whether she can fill Line’s shoes as team captain. But after scoring their first victory, the team decides to dedicate its season to her and to follow through with their tribute by overcoming those early losses to win another state championship on her behalf.

Movies like are typically so saccharine that audiences end up with a cavity by the final scene, but the only way in which “The Miracle Season” distinguishes itself is by being so clean-cut and wholesome that it makes a Noxzema commercial seem gritty by comparison. (It features possibly the only scene in movie history where a group of otherwise unsupervised teenagers are actively disappointed that the only attending parent, who was performing magic, no less, decides to turn in for the night.)

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McNamara, who directed “Soul Surfer,” exerts a light touch on the spiritual themes — worry not, those of ye who are uncertain whether Line’s father, Ernie, played effortlessly by William Hurt, will reconcile with God after losing his daughter and his wife within two weeks of one another — but in this case, that’s a bad thing: There are no other themes to replace them, leaving only the wheezing machinery of a sports underdog story in which the team is comprised of title-winning athletes.

Portraying a real-life teenager, much less such a revered one as Found, was no doubt a challenge for Yarosh, but I’m not fully sure her “more is more” approach to the role turns the character’s charm offensive into actual charm. Moriarty, on the other hand, wrestles with more emotion than her co-star, but despite the appealing balance of reluctance and determination she brings to Kelly, she occasionally seems adrift in the formulaic adversity thrown into her path to make their journey seem not quite as predestined from the first frame.

Meanwhile, Hunt throws her all into the coach who learns how to feel again by coaching these grieving young women to victory, but Midwest mannerisms (like repeatedly calling Line, and later Kelly, “cap’n”) disrupt what never seems to settle into a consistent take on the character. Does Bres struggle with literally any emotion? Did Line’s death specifically affect her? Or is there an additional or other back story, hinted at in her opening scene, that we don’t know about?

And as Ernie, Hurt supplies unsurprising volumes of gravitas and vulnerability, but the work is all so simple and surface-level for a guy capable of such powerful depths that none of it resonates particularly deeply.

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There’s also a love interest for Kelly, a hunky Anson Elgort type played by Burkely Duffield (“Warcraft”) who, in an almost refreshing reversal, has literally nothing to do except look good and blandly support his lady. But otherwise, the film isn’t interested in challenging conventional expectations, or much of anything else; last year’s nonfiction “Step,” by comparison, chronicled the adversity of a group of reigning champions with much more complexity, and consequently, emotional heft.

Ultimately, “The Miracle Season” mistakes an inspiring true story for one that needs or deserves to be told cinematically; it isn’t awful, but it’s not a film, it’s a tribute, and unfortunately, one to the memory of a young woman who would be better honored by people actually “living like Line” than watching a formulaic, fictionalized retelling of her community learning what that means.



Read original story ‘The Miracle Season’ Film Review: Volleyball Drama Serves Few Dramatic Spikes At TheWrap...

“The Miracle Season” is a religious sports film — and by that, I don’t just mean that it’s a drama sprinkled with faith-based fairy dust (though you don’t have to look hard between the lines to see that it is). I mean that it’s a movie of fundamentalist feel-good fervor.

Set in 2011, it’s based on the true story of a high-school girls’ volleyball team — the West High Trojans of Iowa City — who won the state championship two years in a row, and it’s all about how they took their inspiration from tragedy. Just as that second season was getting under way, the team’s star center and most popular player, a 17-year-old senior named Caroline Found (known by her nickname, “Line”), was killed in an accident while driving a moped. Caroline, by all accounts, was a highly adored student: fiery, virtuous, charismatic, good. Her disconsolate...

Hey, "Once Upon A Time" fans. It's time to get even more excited. ABC just recently put out their very first episode press release for the show's upcoming premiere episode 1 of it's 7th season! The press release contains a teaser description for the episode. They also revealed what the episode's title is. It's named, "Hyperion Heights." This first episode sounds like it'll be quite interesting as we'll see Henry leave Storybrooke to see if he can make his own story. Cinderella's evil step-mother Lady Tremaine shows up to pose a threat and more! ABC's press release started off by putting the Henry storyline in all caps. It reads like this: "Henry Mills Embarks On A New Journey Where Adventure Awaits And Danger Looms On The Season Premiere Of ABC’S ‘Once Upon A Time.’" In this first press release, they provided a general description of the new season. In it,...

Stars: Christian Slater, Vinnie Jones, Jake Croker, Emily Tennant, Aren Buchholz, Matthew Robert Kelly, Brittney Wilson, Jedidiah Goodacre, Jillian Fargey, Chris Shields, Anna Galvin, Sydney Waack, Ryan Grantham | Written by Matthew Robert Kelly | Directed by Kevin Carraway

Sometimes you see actors turn up in movies and you just know what to expect. I find though that to be fair to the film I look to be pleasantly surprised, and sometimes I even am…but this tends to be rare. Way of the Wicked stars Christian Slater and Vinnie Jones and for fans of bad movies I don’t really need to say much more than that do I?

When Robbie (Jake Croker) returns to the town where he was once implicated in the death of a classmate it’s not long before another student dies. Detective John Elliot (Vinnie Jones) begins to suspect Robbie as being to blame, especially when...

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from the season one finale of Bates Motel, titled "Midnight."] Norma Bates may have just traded one set of problems for another during the freshman season finale of A&E's Bates Motel. As the clock wound down to Jake's deadline for Norma (Vera Farmiga) to fork over the money she actually didn't have, Romero (Nestor Carbonell) comes up big and takes Jake out. However, the good sheriff reveals isn't completely innocent after paying a visit to Keith's home to retrieve the money and have a word with his sister, Maggie (Jillian Fargey). Elsewhere, Norman's (Freddie

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I’m Gonna Wreck It: Sweeney’s Latest a Meek Exercise In Neo Noir

Canadian filmmaker Bruce Sweeney returns with his latest, Crimes of Mike Recket, a police procedural neo-noir black comedy that attempts to use the current economic crises as impetus for a good guy turned bad scenario, one who makes poor moves to rectify his mounting debt. There’s a certain degree of playfulness at work here, with Sweeney giving us a rehash of those old B noir narratives from the forties and fifties, replete with a protagonist making unbelievably dumb decisions to fix his current economic situation. But despite this and all around enjoyable performances, there’s simply not much to get worked up about in this tale that ends up being more derivative than it perhaps meant to be.

Mike Recket (Nicholas Lea) is a failed real estate agent in a huge amount of debt, which...

If you are a fan of Syfy's Battlestar Galactica, you probably know that some scenes of the series were filmed in and around the extensive forests of western British Columbia. What you may not realise, however, is that two of the show's stars - Tricia Helfer (Number Six) and Tahmoh Penikett ('Helo') - have lent their talents to a new indie docu-drama that is intended to raise awareness of issues associated with cutting down some of these forests.

The film, called The Green Chain, was written, directed and co-produced by Vancouver-born Mark Leiren-Young. His previous credits include scripts for episodes of the series The Collector, Blood Ties and Psi Factor. He has also written a book, 'Never Shoot a Stampede Queen', articles for 'Time Magazine', 'Maclean's' and 'The Utne Reader', and stage plays.

True to his roots, Leiren-Young focuses The Green Chain on the debate in British Columbia, but it...