PD STREAM CLUB NEWS TODAY

 Animation fans young and old will recall the familiar tune and look of the Moon Child for DreamWorks, and the animation studio has now revealed a new opener for their films. Keeping the framework of the iconic score, the new intro features some of DreamWorks' most familiar faces, from Shrek's titular character, Fiona, and Donkey to Kung Fu Panda's Po. This new intro helps to harken in the latest era for the veteran animation studio, and will play before the studio's newest film next month, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Running for 32 seconds, the intro opens with the group from DreamWorks' latest feature, The Bad Guys. Toothless, the iconic dragon from the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, then swoops in, followed by Po from Kung Fu Panda, the titular character from The Boss Baby films, and Princess Poppy from the Trolls franchise. The intro is concluded with the trio of Shrek, Princess Fiona, and Donkey from the Shrek films. Veteran animators at DreamWorks colla

Disney and Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has topped the half-billion mark at the global box office in just over a week of release. With $288 million domestically and another $258 million from international territories, Wakanda Forever’s global haul stands at an excellent $546 million. The film made an estimated $67.3 million in its second weekend domestically, and added around $69 million from 50 international markets this weekend. Wakanda Forever is currently the seventh-biggest movie of the year worldwide, and is expected to eventually top both previous Marvel Cinematic Universe releases of the year — Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ($955 million) and Thor: Love and Thunder ($760 million). The film's top-performing international territories are the UK ($27.1 million), Mexico ($22.8 million), France ($21.6 million), Brazil ($14.2 million) and Korea ($14 million). In the context of the MCU — the biggest movie franchise in the world — Wakanda Forever has alread

  Some of the best comedies are the ones that feature genuinely horrible people. Think how It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia centers on a cast of characters that create chaos and absurdity through their own despicable nature. While certainly less committed and creative by comparison, the surprisingly solid comedy The Estate operates in a similar vein in telling a story of various members of a family willing to do anything to secure the inheritance of a terminally ill aunt. Even as it is often overstretched and carries on for too long, it still provides more than enough laughs in a cinema landscape that has been missing out on mid-budget comedies. Written and directed by Dean Craig, most known for his Death at a Funeral films, it begins with an animated introduction to the members of the family we’ll come to know. The two at the center, Toni Collette's Macey and Anna Faris' Savanna, have fallen on hard times that now threaten the family café they run. When Savanna proposes that

  When we first meet Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), she can barely take care of herself. She struggles to get a toothbrush in her mouth, spouts at things that she doesn’t mean to say, and needs help learning how to do the everyday things she used to take for granted—all thanks to a brain injury she suffered while serving in Afghanistan. As soon as she starts to feel some semblance of normalcy, Lynsey starts trying to figure out how to reenlist, an idea that everyone but herself believes to be a terrible idea. Ever since she has returned home in New Orleans, Lynsey feels the need to escape this place she already made it out of once before. Causeway, from Maid director Lila Neugebauer, has its moments where it seems like a story we’ve seen all too often before, as a person who has left the service attempts to return to this dangerous line of work. Causeway shows the nightmares that come out of nowhere, the moments where the past hits the lead character, and just looking at Lawrence as she r

 The American West is a dangerous place for a woman, but so is England and the façade of safety that it offers women—even for wealthy, privileged women like Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt). The English doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the 1890s, but it also carefully avoids turning its portrayal of period-typical violence, racism, and sexism into voyeuristic fodder. Across the six-episode limited series, writer-director Hugo Blick delivers a very even-keeled, but rarely glossy Western that interweaves Locke’s thirst for revenge with Eli Whipp’s (Chaske Spencer) own journey, as they come together to brave the bloody and cruel plains. Their first encounter is one of sheer chance. Shortly after her arrival in Wyoming, Locke happens upon Whipp, near death and left out to hang, and they forge a wholly unexpected friendship (with tinges of something more). They both have more emotional baggage than could easily fill their saddlebags, with Locke’s entire journey centering around her desire f

 Rambo is an interesting character. Initially conceived as a scathing criticism of America’s treatment of veterans (specifically veterans of the Vietnam War), Rambo became an avatar of muscle-bound jingoism, the prototypical American hero who spawned an entire genre of action films in the 1980s. The downtrodden forgotten soldier with crippling PTSD and no friends or family left to turn to was even adopted by the Reagan administration to sell its blatantly pro-corporate policies to working-class Americans inflicted with soaring economic and public health crises as a direct result of those same policies. (Reagan literally used a quote from Rambo: First Blood Part Two to push Reaganomics as some kind of victory of individualism and the American spirit instead of the cynical tax shelter for the super-rich it actually was.) The point is, Rambo is as iconic as he is deeply misunderstood, and Lionsgate’s lavish Rambo: The Complete SteelBook Collection box finally gives the character his due w