Denzel Washington

Surely it is a sign of these hard cinematic times that an auteur-helmed remake of a midcentury international cinema classic is also the most exciting, engaging movie of the summer. Before Apple Original Films removes it from theaters for its future life on streaming, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest appears in US cinemas amid the usual summer commotion: comic-book movies and assorted remakes or sequels. As noted, Highest 2 Lowest is a remake too, but a remake of a work so remote from the cultural consciousness of most 21st-century moviegoers (Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low) that it feels fresh.

So, in the end, it wasn’t so much Oh, Mary! as it was Not Tonight, Mary! Cole Escola’s out-there, queer-as-they-come farce, revolving around the strained relationship between the “foul and hateful” Mary Lincoln, a dipsomaniac with ambitions to be a cabaret singer, and honest Abe, here presented as a pitiful figure so deep in the closet he may as well be in Narnia, was widely regarded as the play to beat at this year’s Tonys. There hasn’t been an out-and-out comedy that’s won the major awards for a considerable time, let alone one that emerged from off-Broadway, and it’s testament to Escola’s prowess (as well as some of the most laudatory reviews in recent memory), that it was front-runner for Best Play.

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s new epic, Gladiator II, is undeniably impressive, but then it rather had to be. Rumors that its already massive budget had ballooned to as much as $310 million — which would mean it would have to be one of 2024’s highest-grossing movies just to break even, never mind making a profit — may have suggested that the film was in trouble, but an early screening of the preview at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas reassured exhibitors and studios alike, with the few journalists who had seen the footage rushing to extol its scale and grandeur. Now it’s been released online, and viewers have a chance to judge for themselves. (Its cinematic debut will come with Deadpool vs Wolverine.) Does it look like a worthy follow-up to Gladiator? https://www.