MOVIE ★

Paramount and Temple Hill are beaming broadly. Their new film, Smile 2, is leading the US box office with an estimated $23 million after grossing $9.4 million on Friday, including more than $2 million in previews. That would place the film's premiere just ahead of the first Smile, a sleeper smash that opened to $22.6 million in late September 2022 and went on to generate more than $217 million globally against a $17 million budget. Naomi Scott in ' Smile 2. ' Paramount Pictures According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film, written and directed by Parker Finn, follows an evil spirit that jumps hosts via a diabolical grin, this time infecting a troubled pop diva (Naomi Scott) with a ton of pain to feed on. Scott stars alongside Lukas Gage, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Miles Gutierrez-Riley. This time, the budget was $28 million, which is a low figure for a large studio. Smile 2 received a B CinemaScore from audiences, matching the score of the first picture. It faces s...

Sony Pictures has released the final trailer for "Venom: The Last Dance." Tom Hardy reprises his role as Eddie Brock, or Venom from the "Spider-Man" comics, in the concluding installment of the trilogy. According to the official logline, "Eddie and Venom are on the run." Hunted by both worlds and with the net closing in, the two are forced to make a heartbreaking decision that will mark the end of Venom and Eddie's final dance. Sony Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, and Stephen Graham star alongside Hardy. Kelly Marcel, the writer and producer of the original two "Venom" films, directed "The Last Dance" from a screenplay she authored. The story for "Venom 3" was developed and produced by Marcel and Hardy in collaboration with Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal, and Hutch Parker. Joe Caracciolo Jr. is the executive producer. Hardy's previous two comic book tentpoles, 2018...

Hollywood has a history of resurrecting the decaying corpses of long-dead films with belated sequels, so it was only a matter of time before someone dug into the tomb marked Beetlejuice. That someone was always going to be Tim Burton, the director of the original 1988 film, and despite rumors that a Beetlejuice sequel was in the works for decades, Burton insisted that he would only consider it if Michael Keaton reprised the title role and any sequel remained true to the spirit of the morbidly eccentric original film. On both criteria, Beetlejuice succeeds. A suitably manic Keaton as the mischievous demon "bio-exorcist" scuttles across the film like a huge cockroach in a striped costume, while the decaying DNA of the original picture is evident in every hyperstylised frame of the sequel. Michael Keaton in ' Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. ' Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Possibly a touch too much at times. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice teeters on the brink of the same ...