Author: BRWC

Praised by Heat magazine as “Sky 1’s finest home-grown drama ever,” The Five may be Harlan Coben’s first UK series, but the American superstar author is in good company when it comes to American heavyweights who’ve crossed the pond to do excellent work. To list a few: Stanley Kubrick relocated for Eyes Wide Shut, Meryl Streep took on Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth McGovern joined the cast of Downton Abbey, and Tim Burton has assimilated into British culture so smoothly people often forget he’s actually American.

With the imminent release of The Five to Blu-ray, DVD & Digital HD July 4^th, 2016, what better time to celebrate American rebels that have found success in the UK.

Harlan Coben | The Five (2016)

With the killer combination of Happy Valley, Ordinary Lies and Last Tango In Halifax producer Nicola Schindler, BAFTA and Emmy award-winning writer Danny Brocklehurst (Clocking Off), and international best-selling crime author and creator Harlan Coben, it’s no wonder people can’t get enough of this delightfully chilling series.  Starring Tom Cullen (Downton Abbey, The Trials Of Jimmy Rose), O. T. Fagbenle (Looking, The Interceptor), Sarah Solemani (Him And Her, The Bad Education Movie), Lee Ingleby (The A Word, Detective George Gently) and Geraldine James (Utopia, State Of Play), The Five tells the story of four friends bound together by tragedy all their lives who are suddenly forced to face the past in the most horrifying way possible.  The ten part series is an unmissable maze of twists, turns and dark secrets that has kept viewers glued to their televisions.   It’s safe to say, The Five has solidified Harlan Coben’s successful entry into UK television.

Stanley Kubrick | Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Although Stanley Kubrick first bought the filming rights for this adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novel Traumnovelle (Dream Story) in the 1960s, the notoriously perfectionist director of legendary films such as The Shining and Dr. Strangelove delayed actually making the film until the 1990s.  Born in the Bronx, Kubrick first moved to England to film Lolita in 1962, and he never left.  Ironically, though Eyes Wide Shut was set in New York, Kubrick insisted on shooting the film in England.  This was due to both his preference for the UK, and also his severe aversion to flying.  Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Eyes Wide Shut is an erotic drama that follows one night in the life of Dr. Bill Hartford (Cruise) as he explores the masked orgy of an unnamed society after discovering that his wife has been unfaithful to him.  As with much of Kubrick’s work, Eyes Wide Shut was a film well ahead of its time.  Though not appropriately appreciated by the public until years later, Kubrick’s final film is now acclaimed as one of the best of the 1990s.

Meryl Streep | The Iron Lady (2011)

The film that garnered Meryl Streep an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Best Actress, The Iron Lady is a British biopic narrating the controversial reign of the UK’s longest serving Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  Shifting between present day scenes of an elderly Thatcher struggling with dementia, and the prime minister’s own flashbacks of her youth, and eventual ascension to power, the film paints an evocative and human portrait of one of Britain’s most complex leaders.  As supported by the trifecta of awards she merited for her work in this film, Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady is one of her best yet.

Elizabeth McGovern | Downton Abbey (2010- 2015)

Elizabeth McGovern’s first commercial success came early in her career for her Oscar nominated performance as Evelyn Nesbit in the American musical, Ragtime (1981).  A decade later, the Julliard graduate and Illinois native married British film director and producer Simon Curtis, and moved across the pond permanently.  Over the next two decades, McGovern landed numerous smaller roles including frequent BBC TV appearances, but it was only once she assumed the role of Cora Crawley, the kind yet firm American matriarch of the Crawley family of Downton Abbey, that she returned to the spotlight in a big way.  Downtown Abbey is a British and American TV series by ITV and PBS.  The historical drama details the lives and events of the household at Downton Abbey, an English Country-side estate owned by the Crawley family in the post- Edwardian era.  McGovern plays alongside a terrific cast of actors including Hugh Bonneville as Robert Crawley, and the three Crawley daughters played by Michelle Dockery, Jessica Rose Brown Findlay, and Laura Carmichael.  Other notable characters include the colourful cast of servants that help run the estate including Brendan Coyle, Joanne Froggatt, and Lilly James.  The series has been a smash hit and won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy award for Best Mini-Series.  McGovern’s performance in Downton Abbey brought the 54 year old actress her first Emmy Award nomination, and her first Golden Globe nomination.

Tim Burton | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – Alice through the Looking Glass (2016)

Perhaps no American Hollywood figure has assimilated so well into British culture as the prolific actor, producer, writer, and director, Tim Burton.  Despite deep ties to England in both his personal life (Burton recently split from long-time partner and English actress Helena Bonham Carter), and his inclination for British literary giants such as Roald Dahl and C.S. Lewis, Burton is in fact from California.  The visionary creator first took up residence in London after uniting with then romantic partner Bonham Carter on the set of Planet of the Apes in 2001. During this time, Burton took on the remaking of a number of quintessentially British stories beginning with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), followed by Alice in Wonderland (2010), and most recently Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) in which each of these Bonham Carter played a memorable role.  This body of work has been essential in developing Burton’s now iconic style of equally fantastical and horrific storytelling.

Don’t let the list above mislead you.  It’s not just Americans that are doing great work in Britain.  Let us remind you of Indian actress Freida Pinto’s breakout performance in the Academy Award winning British film Slumdog Millionaire (2008); or, Taiwanese- American director Ang Lee’s Academy Award winning films: Sense and Sensibility (1995), and Life of Pi (2012).  Both of which were also shot in England.  Even the famously eccentric Lord of the Rings director, Peter Jackson is toying with the idea of jumping from New Zealand to the UK for a short stint to direct an episode of the BBC’s Dr. Who.  We are beginning to see a pattern here.  And we like it…

Harlan Corben’s The Five comes to Blu-ray, DVD & Digital HD from July 4^th, 2016, courtesy of STUDIOCANAL

By Alison O’Brien.

Film franchises gross billions of dollars each year, and draw in millions of viewers at the box office. They engage their audiences with spectacular effects and star-studded casts who play characters with richer backgrounds than your typical 90-minute flick. These actors and actresses deliver powerful performances and amass fans across the globe.

The celebrity experts at PrettyFamous, an entertainment research site part of the Graphiq network, ranked the actors and actresses who have tapped into blockbuster franchises. Using data from Box Office Mojo and Gracenote, PrettyFamous found the actors in each film from the 15 highest-grossing franchises. Then they ranked each actor by their “Actor Score” which is based on number of Wikipedia page views over the past 30 days, total number of award nominations, and total number of IMDb ratings for the movies and TV shows that they have been in. Actors and actresses who only appeared in one movie were excluded.

Note: Ties were awarded to the actor/actress with the most 30-day Wikipedia page views.

#10. James Franco

#9. Scarlett Johansson

#8. Cameron Diaz

#7. Sally Field

#6. Amy Adams

#5. Morgan Freeman

#4. Tom Cruise

#3. Christian Bale

#2. Jennifer Lawrence

#1. Johnny Depp

Research All Celebrities On PrettyFamous

The Five, written by international best-selling crime fiction author Harlen Coben and coming to Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD on July 4^th courtesy of STUDIOCANAL, is just the latest in a crop of classy TV mysteries that have had viewers hooked in what has to be a decidedly golden age for TV of all genres. Here we take look at The Five and some of its similarly gripping mystery bedfellows to see what keeps audiences coming back:

The Five

Harlan Coben, the internationally best-selling author has sold millions of books around the world and has had a staggering eight consecutive number ones in the New York Times bestseller list so you’d think he’d know a thing or two about putting together an enticing mystery. Turns out you’d be right – The Five delivers one of the juiciest set-ups for a mystery in recent times (the DNA of a young boy who went missing 20-years earlier turns up at a murder scene being investigated by a friend of the missing boy’s brother) and turns it into the televisual equivalent of one of Coben’s un-put-downable page turners. Throw in a superb cast of British rising stars (including Tom Cullen from Downton Abbey, Sarah Solemani from Him & Her and OT Fagbenle from Looking) as well as respected stalwarts like Geraldine James (Utopia) and the overall effect is one of extreme class and quality that stands up alongside some of the big US guns for binge-ability.

The Night Manager

Another author fairly familiar with the top of the bestseller list was behind what has arguably been the biggest UK TV production of recent years, with Tom Hiddleston perfectly capturing John Le Carre’s heroic, eponymous central character alongside a faultless-as-usual Olivia Colman and a never better Hugh Laurie. The twists and turns in the relationship between sort-of double agent Jonathan Pine and the moral black hole that is Laurie’s Richard Roper form the spine of the series, with the mystery element coming as much from the cat and mouse of that relationship as from the slight fear throughout that Pine might be playing everyone to advance his own interests. With stunning cinematography and a drum-taut script, it’s hardly a surprise that both Hiddleston and series director Susanne Bier are both apparently in the running for the next entry into the James Bond franchise.

And Then There Were None

We could have included just about any Agatha Christie serial in this list, such is the continual level quality being administered to adaptations of Christie’s work over 40 years since her death, but And Then There Were None stands out for multiple reasons. It was a beacon of originality amid a sea of safer Christmas 2015 television, it re-told a familiar story almost in the vein of a horror film, and it had the good sense to cast Aidan Turner, now almost as famous for some of the best abs in the land as he is for his intense, brooding performances in hits like Poldark. Teamed with a cast that also included Charles Dance (Game Of Thrones), Toby Stephens (Blacksails) and Miranda Richardson (An Inspector Calls), the series saw a collection of guilty parties invited to a bleak island for a mysterious dinner party, only for the guests to start dropping like flies and/or unravelling through a combination of guilt and abject fear. Essential stuff for mystery fans.

Broadchurch

When your script is written by Chris Chibnall, responsible for some of the best and scariest episodes of the reborn Doctor Who, as well as other TV classics like Law & Order: UK and Life On Mars, you already know you’re in quality territory. Broadchurch, detailing a murder investigation in the titular coastal town, brought together former Doctor Who star David Tennant and the aforementioned Olivia Colman as the cops investigating a murder that’s just the tip of the iceberg in a town full of secrets. The series quite literally had the nation gripped and whilst it’s arguable that the second series didn’t strike quite the same chord with viewers, the third and final season which is forthcoming, is still a reason to be cheerful. Unless you’re the inevitable victim, of course.

River

Like ITV’s recent Scandi-influenced hit, Marcella, River took its inspiration partly from the Land Of The Midnight Sun by infusing an on the face of it straightforward police procedural drama with some of the leftfield tropes that have made Nordic thrillers as de rigeur as they currently are. River starred global superstar Stellan Skarsgaard (Thor: The Dark World) as a brilliant but fragile policeman haunted not only by the death of his partner but also by the ‘ghosts’ of the victims of the cases he hasn’t solved. Created by the brilliant Abi Morgan, the mind behind silver and small screen classics like The Hour and The Iron Lady, River was, well, riveting viewing to Nordic and home grown mystery fans alike.

Sherlock

Like Agatha Christie, possibly a little unfair to include this in the list and it’s hardly as though Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s world-conquering re-imagining of Arthur Conan-Doyle’s superstar sleuth needs any introduction but there’s no denying that the reinvention of the character as a borderline sociopathic loner waging war on villainy in the streets of modern London has reinvigorated the legendary character. That the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (as Holmes and Watson respectively) was also pitch perfect can only help but plaudits have to go to Messrs Moffat and Gatiss for taking a premise that made many shudder when it was announced and turning it not only into essential viewing (when they get around to actually making the episodes, that is) but also a global phenomenon.

The Five is available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD from July 4, 2016, courtesy of STUDIOCANAL.

By Dustin Clendenen.

When the Golden Raspberry Awards (affectionately called the Razzies for short) were started in 1981 to honor the worst movies of the year, creator John J.B. Wilson probably didn’t expect them to catch on the way they did. But more than three decades later, the organization handing out annual awards for worst actor, worst screenplay, worst director, and of course, worst picture, has become a veritable institution.

PrettyFamous, a division of the Graphiq network, compiled a list of every Razzie award winner for worst picture since 1981 and ranked them by Smart Rating in descending order to identify the ten worst films in the last 35 years. Smart Rating assesses a movie’s overall success and considers ratings from Gracenote, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Metacritic and the movie’s cumulative, inflation-adjusted U.S. box-office gross.

So bad they’re good, many of these worst films are well-known and even loved by audiences. See how your favorite guilty pleasures rank in notoriety.

#10. Jack and Jill

#9. Movie 43

#8. Gigli

#7. Swept Away

#6. Inchon!

#5. Lonely Lady

#4. Bolero

#3. Leonard Part 6

#2. Saving Christmas

#1. Battlefield Earth