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This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on May 5, 2024. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger. Oliver Oguma and Evelyn Robinson in Charlotte Ballet’s production of “Swan Lake,” with live music from the Charlotte Symphony, playing through May 12 at Knight Theater.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real. — “Did you know there are some members of the hive called ‘queen slayers,’ whose job is to kill the queen if she produces the wrong kind of offspring?

Barring a severe underperformance this weekend, Dune Part Two will end its first global opening weekend as the year’s top-earning Hollywood flick. No, that’s not counting the handful of big Chinese tentpoles that debuted amid a conventionally crowed Lunar New Year frame, films like Bonnie Bears: Time Twist ($256 million), Article 20 ($289 million), Pegasus ($433 million) and Yolo ($466 million), but I digress. The presumed over/under $170 million global launch for Warner Bros.

When I think of Thanksgiving movies, I think of Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) and Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters (1986). While Allen’s film takes place over two years and three Thanksgivings in the mid-1980s, The Ice Storm is set over one fateful Thanksgiving weekend in 1973. A real atmospheric masterpiece, it is the artful production and costume design that imparts so much of the mood—it reads as the Seventies but with an icy detachment that imparts extra layers to the fraught lives of the characters.

“Do you understand? It’s metaphorical.” — Barry Keoghan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer Deep into Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Steven Murphy (Colin Ferrell), a heart surgeon in Cincinnati, finally has to square up to the absurd and terrible choice he’s been deferring throughout most of the film: Which one of his family members should he sacrifice? He could kill his wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), though as she firmly notes a bit later, she could mitigate the loss of one of their two children by bringing another into the world.

Stop me if you’ve lived this one before: from out of nowhere, a vague threat spreads across America. No one really knows where it comes from or what caused it. Even its nature is unclear. What is clear is it kills all those who come into contact with it. Unless it doesn’t. There’s a lot about the threat those who face it don’t understand. This confusion allows room for misinformation. The misinformation opens up opportunities, giving confidence and fervor to those who would have been dismissed as crazy in the times before the threat arrived—even hours before the threat arrived—and making them look like prophets worth following.

Temptation is the silent killer that has claimed many victims within the horror genre. In 2002’s The Ring, Naomi Watts plays a woman who falls deeper into this fear-inducing story about how people die seven days after watching a mysterious tape. Of course, her character, Rachel, had to watch it, so now all she can do is figure out where the cursed enter… ncG1vNJzZmirpKS%2FurLOq5inp6SdsrOwwLJlrK2SqMGir8pnmqilX6V8tbTEZqmippdif3F8kWapnq6ZmsQ%3D

Mike Veeck, it turns out, doesn't actually hate disco music.  That's one of many surprises in The Saint of Second Chances, the astonishing new documentary that debuted on Netflix this week, following a brief festival run.  Veeck's story — some of it, anyway — is well-known to baseball fans. He is the son of Bill Veeck, the legendary owner of the St. Louis Browns and later the Chicago White Sox, and a man whose greatest contribution to the game was his flair for over-the-top stunts.

Except for the 9/11 attacks, I don’t know that any news story in my lifetime has affected me the way the Sandy Hook school shooting did in December of 2012. I was a new father with a two-year-old and a newborn, and the violent deaths of 20 6- and 7-year-olds just about broke me- and that was before I learned that one of the kids who died that day, Noah Pozner, had the same first name as my older son.