Playboy Entertainment Spoken Edition

Otherworldly beauty and stomach-knotting horror walk hand-in-hand in Annihilation, the stunning, nerve-jangling, ambitious and nightmarish science-fiction thriller, one of the best and most ambitious genre movies to come along since Ex Machina. Both of those films were written and directed by Alex Garland, who hereby establishes himself as one our era’s great and most provocative filmmakers.

Berlin in the 1920s was the seed of every sexual revolution that’s rocked our world since then, from the mainstreaming of uncloseted gay life to badass women acting out a newly liberated, free-spirit autonomy. Even 90 years later, fashion designers, nightlife impresarios, boho arts buffs and erotic extremists of every variety still mimic its style.

Those of us allergic to pre-release hype know that the publicity machine is strong with Marvel’s Black Panther. For a solid year now, the buzz has now verged on deafening, and the movie’s record-smashing pre-ticket sales keep cranking up the anticipation. We all know that we’ve been here before and let down, though.

As Super Bowl Sunday dawned, America woke up to dire news: Pink had the flu. “I’ve arrived at another one of my dreams which is slowly becoming a sort of nightmare,” everybody’s favorite coiffed diva posted on Instagram. Rehearsals for her rendition of the National Anthem at U.S. Bank Stadium had apparently ended up mainly celebrating the land of the Vicks and the home of the Sudafed.

How about a break from superheroes, franchises, gunplay and things that are instantly forgettable? A Fantastic Woman—from the fine Chilean director Sebastian Lelio (Gloria) and a nominee for the best foreign film Oscar—is very, very good. In fact, it’s … well … fantastic.

There’s genuine beauty, complexity and power on display in the melancholic new Western epic Hostiles, starring Christian Bale. It’s scripted and directed by Scott Cooper, who earlier made Out of the Furnace with Bale and Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges. Deadly serious and earnest, set in the American West in 1892 and adapted from an unpublished manuscript by screenwriter Donald E.

In an era of unlimited TV, the new TNT crime drama The Alienist understands it has limited time to get your attention. Within the first minute of the series, a title card explains that an alienist was a 19th-century expert who studied mental illness, a police officer discovers a severed hand in the street, and a drop of blood lands on the officer’s face from above. The alienist in The Alienist is Dr.

It’s January, and that means the pickings at the local multiplex are among the leanest and least ambitious of the year. Enter—loud, blustery, rousing, paper-thin—12 Strong. Excitingly directed by newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig (Exfil) and based on Doug Stanton’s harrowing non-fiction bestseller 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers, the movie version is a yay-us (or yay-U.S.), Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, post-9/11 rabble-rouser and flag-waver.

This story appears in the January/February 2018 issue of Playboy. Subscribe “People don’t want to be in a cult; they want to be in a movement,” says Aaron Paul, star of the Hulu original series The Path. Paul plays Eddie Lane, a charismatic everyman who just may be extraordinary.

The three B-grade action flicks churned out in the past few years by star Liam Neeson and crafty, highly efficient Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra hum along with a weirdly likable, slick, machine-tooled efficiency. The duo’s newest is pretty much more of the same, only it’s sillier, less impactful and altogether worse for its lack of aspiration. The utterly unconvincing action thriller The Commuter could just as well have been called Unknown, Non-Stop or Run All Night.