TV and Movies to Catch This May/June 2024
The Boys: Season 4
Dropping just a few months ahead of America’s presidential election The Boys Season 4 is not being shy about tackling politics head on, starting with it’s season tagline “Make America Super Again”.
If you haven’t gotten onboard this particular hypetrain yet, The Boys is a gory, sexually perverse, gritty take on what would happen if superheroes were real. The answer is always going to be most likely a narcissistic psychopath rather than a good boy like Clark Kent.
Of all the places to find kiwi talent firing on all cylinders it’s sort of bizarre to find it at the very heart of this show, with the twisted and absolutely terrifying performance of Antony Starr as Homelander, and Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher.
In an interview for Amazon Prime Video, Starr admitted he never even wanted to become an actor, despite fans shouting out for him to land an Emmy or SOMETHING for his knockout performance. “I never wanted to be an actor, I didn’t know about the film industry. I’m still trying to figure out what I’m gonna do when I grow up.”
“I think that’s what makes your character so vibrant and so scary,” quipped Urban. “You just have no idea of what you’re gonna do at any particular juncture.”
Hit Man
Glen Powell is a man of many talents. You might know him most as the cocky guy with the most punchable face in Top Gun: Maverick, Hangman. He’s been slowly gaining a reputation and a loyal fanbase, in Hit Man that loyalty is paying off as Powell both wrote and acts in this action comedy based on a true story. Directed and co-written by Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Midnight) Powell plays a straight laced professor who moonlights as a fake hit man for the police. He’s a honeypot for would be criminals hoping to pay good money to knock someone off. His latest mark played by Adria Arjona, throws a spanner in the works as they both fall in love with each other, and the stakes rise as he has to keep up his ruse of being a trained killer.
It got a limited run at the NY Film fest with rave reviews, and everyone agrees that it’s getting under served not getting a proper theatrical run.
Kingdom Of the Planet Of the Apes
The franchise that has defined itself with CGI apes and too much usage of “of the” in it’s titles is back at it again, this time jumping several generations forward in time, getting incrementally closer to the timeline of the original movies. Humans are cavemen in rags, and Apes are building a society. One ape discovers that the world isn’t quite the way it’s been sold to him, and an alliance is struck with a particularly intelligent human played by Freya Allan (The Witcher). Directed by Wes Ball (Maze Runner).