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This modern romantic comedy about stand-up comedians generates a genuine warmth about people, the ones-who-need-people kind. Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s comic dramatization of the way they became a couple is a big winner, with heart-tugging performances from Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan, and fine characterizations by Holly Hunter, Zenobia Shroff, Ray Romano, and Anupam Kher.

The Big Sick

Blu-ray + DVD

Lionsgate

2017 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 120 min. / Street Date September 19, 2017 / 39.99

Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Anupam Kher, Zenobia Shroff, Adeel Akhtar, Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant, Kurt Braunohler, Vella Lovell.

Cinematography: Brian Burgoyne

Film Editor: Robert Nassau

Original Music: Michael Andrews

Written by Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani

Produced by Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel

Directed by Michael Showalter

These days even caustic mainstream comedies are trying to rediscover sentimentality, without being sentimental. The Big Sick succeeds in generating genuine warmth even though it’s set in the middle of stand-up culture,...

Louisa Mellor Aug 15, 2017

The pressure grows on Cath as she's forced to tell more lies in Trust Me’s second episode...

This review contains spoilers.

See related Top Of The Lake - China Girl episode 3 review: Surrogate Top Of The Lake - China Girl episode 2 review: The Loved One Top Of The Lake: China Girl episode 1 review

I’m not one for irritable reaching after fact and reason when it comes to TV drama. How does so-and-so afford a flat like that on a part-time superhero salary? I don’t much care. How did thingamabob drive all the way up there to launch that nuke without once stopping for petrol? Couldn’t give a fig.

We just want to be told a good story. TV isn’t real life - pointing out its logistical inaccuracies is a fun pub game at best and pedantically humourless at worst. Few of us...

A young Lithuanian couple’s idea of a road trip is to drive from the Baltics to the war-torn Donbass region, in eastern Ukraine, in Frost, the latest feature from Lithuanian auteur Sharunas Bartas (Few of Us, Seven Invisible Men). Shot on the road and on location over a period of three months, this dire drama gets full marks for authenticity, with a scene in which two (actual) Ukrainian soldiers explain to the protagonists why they are fighting the war they are waging a certain highlight. But beyond this sequence, there really isn’t all that much to recommend, with the lead...

Ryan Lambie May 31, 2017

A major exhibition at the Barbican explores the history of the sci-fi genre. We catch up with curator Patrick Gyger to tell us more...

Science fiction is now part of the mainstream. No longer confined to the pages of niche pulp magazines or cheap mass-market novels, no longer the preserve of low-budget B-movies, the genre is just about ubiquitous in modern pop culture. From hit films like Interstellar and Guardians Of The Galaxy to such TV shows as Black Mirror and best-selling novels like The Hunger Games, sci-fi has become a vital means of exploring and making sense of the world around us.

See related  John Wick 3 already on the cards John Wick 3: Keanu Reeves confirms his interest

For proof, look no further than Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction, a major new exhibition which starts at the Barbican Centre on the 3rd June.

This article was originally posted by Fortune

Few of us are especially radiant when we roll out of bed in the morning.

The beauty industry, however, has come up with plenty of tools to help us out—from hair gel to concealer to beard oil. Never one to be left out, tech companies are also looking for a bite of the market, which hit $56 billion in sales in 2015.

Some recent products are new takes on old standards. Others are potentially new solutions to problems we’ve been dealing with for years. But whatever the technology, its purpose is the same:...

The double feature has been a moviewatching mainstay since at least the 1930s. Their appeal is obvious: What better way to cap off a film than to delay real life for a few hours more with another one? Few of us catch double bills at a theater anymore, but their allure remains strong at home. As sites like Mashable and Uproxx reported this year, Netflix users can access double-feature-friendly micro-genres with ease. These days, the work of curating a dual bill of “critically-acclaimed gritty independent crime dramas” is practically done for you. You can even start the next film without […]...

Few of us can say we were born in an A&W restaurant. But multiple award-winning TV host, comedienne and philanthropist Jessi Cruickshank can. Maybe her unusual entrance gave her zest for showmanship. It’s certainly apparent in CBC’s daytime series The Goods, a light-hearted melange of trends, food, fashion, style and wellness and on her primetime gig, CBC’s weekly game show Canada’s Smartest Person — which returns for Season 3 on Sunday. It sees Jessi wrangle talented Canadians as they battle one another in games of brains, and matches them wit for wit. We spoke with Jessi in Toronto about the...read more...

Few of us remember middle school as being the time of our lives, what with navigating friendships, difficult authority figures and that whole puberty thing. Even the most popular kids couldn't avoid that. So you may find the situation that quiet and creative Rafe Katchadorian (Griffin Gluck) is in totally sympathetic. In Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, Rafe and his buddies resent their new principal for his endless rule mongering around everything from what he finds offensive to...

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Does Saturday Night Live have something to prove heading into its final three-weak stretch of the year? In terms of recent weeks, yes, but this has still been a solid season overall. Ebbs and flows are part of the natural order of this show, even if that's hard to see in the moment.

The real attention on the show will start this fall, when the Presidential election will be in full swing. For now, we get Oscar-winner Brie Larson kicking things off for the May run. It took some time...

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It's no disaster, but there's still not much point to the remake of Point Break...

Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break was fairly successful when it hit cinemas back in 1991, pitting Keanu Reeves' rookie FBI agent against Patrick Swayze's impossibly cool surfing bank robber in a film that landed with audiences but was largely dismissed by critics.

Its uniquely sensitive spin on macho action movies has led to its reappraisal as a cult classic, thus making this remake pretty much inevitable. Few of us would have predicted that director/cinematographer Ericson Core would convert it into an extreme sports movie, but that's one of the only surprises to be had here.

After a tragic accident, former poly-athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) leaves the adrenaline junkie scene behind and applies to join the FBI. He's still on probation when he discovers that a daring gang of bank...

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twitter

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It's no disaster, but there's still not much point to the remake of Point Break...

Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break was fairly successful when it hit cinemas back in 1991, pitting Keanu Reeves' rookie FBI agent against Patrick Swayze's impossibly cool surfing bank robber in a film that landed with audiences but was largely dismissed by critics.

Its uniquely sensitive spin on macho action movies has led to its reappraisal as a cult classic, thus making this remake pretty much inevitable. Few of us would have predicted that director/cinematographer Ericson Core would convert it into an extreme sports movie, but that's one of the only surprises to be had here.

After a tragic accident, former poly-athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) leaves the adrenaline junkie scene behind and applies to join the FBI. He's still on probation when he discovers that a daring gang of bank...

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twitter

google+

They may not be General Zod or Darth Vader, but these characters are the kind of mundane villains you might encounter in everyday life...

The most memorable movie villains are often also the most outlandish. If you were to stop most strangers on the street and ask them to name screen villain, they’d probably either tell you to leave them alone and stop making them nervous, or they’d instead name one of cinema’s big hitters: heavy-breathing cloak-wearer Darth Vader, or flesh-eating aesthete Hannibal Lecter.

In reality, villains are more mundane. They seldom wear outlandish costumes, and they don’t necessarily even kill or injure people. Real-world villains can range from bullying and self-important bosses to aggressively opinionated news anchors, and from sadistic physical education teachers to heartless politicians.

So here are 10 or so screen antagonists who've stuck in the memory without wearing hockey masks,...

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Just a few words for those of you dealing with the end of a relationship...

Welcome to our weekly series, where we look at some of the difficulties that many of us face in life, and try and come up with suggestions to get through them. Often that's easier said than done, of course, but we're damned if we're not going to try!

Links to previous articles can be found at the bottom. And please: do feel free to join in the comments. Across the months we've been running this series, the comments have been quite wonderful, warm and honest.

This week, then, we're looking at relationship breakups.

Few of us are ever more emotionally raw than at the end of a relationship, especially a long one. Nobody goes into a relationship wanting it to be end badly, yet sometimes, things just aren't meant to be.

So what can you do next?...

Davros, Missy, Daleks and sewers: here's our spoiler-packed look at The Witch's Familiar, the second episode of Doctor Who series 9.

This review contains spoilers. Our spoiler-free review is here.

9.2 The Witch's Familiar

"I'm dying, Doctor" "You keep saying that, and you keep not dying"

When it comes to the Doctor's key foes that aren't a) people in silver suits or b) killers with egg whisks attached, the best scenes have generally boiled down to two characters having a chat. The genial sequences between Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado in the old days, for instance. Or the prolonged chinwag between Davros and The Doctor we get in The Witch's Familiar. Heck, it's why I've got a soft spot for 2005's Boom Town. That the episode is willing to put the brakes on for a good conversation. I daresay a few biscuits were in the original draft.

Straight away justifying splitting series 9's opener across two episodes,...

As Parenthood, Jason Katims’ follow-up to Friday Night Lights, draws to an end, here’s what the Braverman family has taught us…

Warning: contains Parenthood spoilers.

For those of us whose real-life parents and siblings are too geographically distant, troublesome or simply few to play a big part in our day-to-day lives, for the last five years, NBC has offered a solution. Meet surrogate TV family, the Bravermans

Residents of Berkeley, CA, the Parenthood gang enjoy the kind of close-knit family life that TV often promises, but reality - with its inconvenient travel and time demands - rarely delivers. Few of us live in houses large enough to accommodate errant daughters and teenage grandchildren, and fewer of us are located so close to our grown-up siblings that we can bring coffee and problems to their workplaces on an almost daily basis.

Who has the time to gather the entire family for regular stand-up arguments,...

From the Pudsey The Dog movie to Joe Cornish and Roger Ebert, what happens when critics make films themselves?

Arts critics tend to get a rough time of it in the movies. Even looking at this year's awards season hopefuls, Birdman casts a wonderfully scabrous Lindsay Duncan as a theatre critic who is determined to kill the hero's play, and Mr. Turner presents John Ruskin as a lisping, pretentious fop, a representation that has led some to take mild umbrage.

To look even further back, at Ratatouille's sneering Anton Ego, or Lady In The Water's film-savvy 'straw critic', or Theatre Of Blood's gleefully murderous tract, there's not a whole lot of love for critics in film. Any of this might give way to the preconception that critics, especially film critics, don't actually like films and that they're out of touch with both the filmmakers whose works they...

Over 600 Gold Derby readers predicted the nominees for this year's Grammy Awards. In total, our Users logged more than 2,400 predictions. To see how you fared, log in to your account and under your profile picture click Grammy Awards Nominations 2014. Click here for a breakdown of all top scorers. And to see how we fared predicting each category, click here. -Break- Grammy Awards: Complete list of nominations  Once again, the blue panel ribbons comprised of members of the recording academy came up with some real headscratchers among the contenders in the four general field categories.  Few of us expected Beck to land an Album of the Year nomination for "Morning Phase." And only a handful predicted Taylor Swift to reap a Song of the Year bid for "Shake it Off."  10 biggest shockers in Grammys nominations: Taylor Swift, Usher, Beck, ... Even so, one of our Users -- jhadddad -- sc...'...

“I learned it from watching the movies” may seem like a humorous statement, but Hollywood has been imparting life lessons since its early days. From epic tales of warriors fighting tooth-and-nail to throw off the chains of oppression to stories of individuals taking smaller but emotionally monumental steps to better their own existences, the quest for the good life has propelled many a movie hero forward.

To us watching at home, it can be genuinely inspiring to watch these characters battle for freedom or struggle through personal obstacles, coming out better in some way on the other side. Few of us will ever stand before a Scottish army and scream, “They’ll never take… Our Freedom!!!” But the staggering impact that Braveheart had and still has on audiences suggests a deep connection to the idea of rising up and giving one’s all in the pursuit of something greater. That...

As Warner Bros announces its Fantastic Beasts set of Harry Potter films, Caroline wonders what other film spin-offs we could see next...

It’s around three years since Harry, Ron, Hermione and friends hung up their wands to much fanfare and box office revenue but, come November 2016, we’re all going back to the wizarding world for one (or three) more adventures.

Warner Bros. have released dates for a brand new trilogy set to hit cinemas in November 2016, 2018 and 2020 respectively. Few of us doubted that this would eventually happen – no matter how protective of her stories and their characters Jk Rowling might be, there was little chance that Deathly Hallows Part II was the last ever outing – even if no one saw a revival coming quite this soon.

The appetite for more Harry Potter-related movies is still there, and Hollywood knows it. The obscure choice of Fantastic Beasts And Where...

Surely by now, you are all up to date on the heartbreaking stories of Flight MH370 and Flight MH17. Both Malaysian Airlines flights have ended in tragedy and left families distraught and entire countries in need of answers. Flight MH370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean in March and its location is still unknown. Flight MH17 was likely shot down over eastern Ukraine last week with hundreds of casualties. Few of us can imagine something this horrible happening to someone we knew, let alone to ourselves. However, a Dutch cyclist has reportedly come awfully close. Twice. According to a a report out of the Netherlands, Maarten de Jonge, 29, was scheduled to fly on both...

Most of us can probably admit that, in all earnestness, we spend too much time online: whether it’s scrolling through Facebook past schoolmates you inexplicably stay friends with, browsing Bieber hashtags on Twitter (ironically of course) or binging on Game of Thrones. Few of us would say that we need psychological evaluation however, or to be sent to a “rehabilitation camp”. Yet this is what’s currently happening in China—largely Beijing—in which the government has declared that “Internet addiction” is the number one clinical disorder among teenagers. Still want to boot up that World of Warcraft account?

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam’s quirky film Web Junkie. It seems almost ludicrous that scores of young people are being sent to bootcamps (now over 400 in existence) to teach them order and discipline simply because they are hardcore gamers.

Few of us would argue that there’s anything quite as satisfying as a great home-cooked meal. Food Network hopes that watching talented home cooks hone their skills at the hands of famous mentors will come close. This month, the network introduces America’s Best Cook, a six-episode competition that features past and current Iron Chefs Alex Guarnaschelli (Team East), Michael Symon (Team North) and Cat Cora (Team South), plus The Great Food Truck Race’s Tyler Florence (Team West), coaching teams of amateur kitchen whizzes chosen from across America to see who can serve up the country’s best home cook. • Related: … Continue reading →

The post Food Network star-mentors seek out America’s Best Cook appeared first on Channel Guide Magazine.

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All Mariah Carey wants for Christmas is you. For her gigs, she wants a swan that sweats champagne. And a dwarf. And a puppy. The life of a famous entertainer is apparently quite charmed, as evidenced in the ridiculous demands made on promoters in what is known as the contract rider; a legal document that compels them to cater to the whims of their famous clients or risk financial penalty or cancellation.

On one side of it we could perhaps understand how this came to be. Few of us have ever toured the country stuffed into a van with our bandmates, pulling a U-Haul trailer full of instruments and doing all the heavy lifting ourselves. For unsigned artists trying to make it, even seedy motels infested with bedbugs are a luxury few can afford.

The contract rider stipulates what the artist requires by way of their dressing rooms and...

Warner Bros.

There was a time when a ticket from the box office gave you a full evening’s entertainment, and audiences could settle into their seats just after teatime to watch engrossed until the final reel ran off its spool, just in time to make if for last orders at the pub. Following on from a supporting program of newsreels, short films and trailers, cinema-goers could sit back and take in a short B-movie – low budget productions known as “quota-quickies” – warming them up nicely for the feature presentation.

Few of us will remember those days. As cinema-going declined after the Second World War, multiplexes struggled to get bums on seats in their increasingly dilapidated auditoriums and instead focused on cramming in as many presentations of the feature film as they could in an evening (sound familiar? Not much has changed since). It was left to the smaller, single-screen independent...

Food is often used as visual shorthand for sex at the movies – but, as in life, their real relationship is much messier

Fifty years ago came the release of a film with one of the most famous sex scenes in the history of cinema. Yet the couple don't even touch, let alone take their clothes off. In Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, Albert Finney and Joyce Redman share a wordless meal which becomes a kind of foreplay. They stare into each other's eyes as they lustily strip meat off bones, swallow whole oysters and stuff juicy pears into their dripping mouths. It is obvious from the first lick of the lips where this will end. And it's not washing up.

Food and sex seem as natural a screen coupling as Bogart and Bacall. Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger exploring the sexy potential of a fridge's contents in 9½ Weeks. The lusty wedding...