The teaser trailer for “Bizarre: The Al Yankovic Story,” a brand new biopic concerning the comedy singer, dropped on Tuesday.
And within the minute-long trailer, Radcliffe holds nothing again — screaming on stage whereas he performs an accordion and flips his mop of curly hair.
“What can I say, I am stuffed with surprises,” he says, full with clear-framed glasses straight from the Nineteen Eighties.
The movie was first introduced in January, and is written by each Yankovic and Eric Appel. In a press release on the time, Yankovic stated he was “completely thrilled” about Radcliffe’s casting.
“I’ve little doubt in any respect that that is the position future generations will keep in mind him for,” he stated.
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The movie is ready to be launched this yr on The Roku Channel.
The film, in line with a press launch, “holds nothing again, exploring each aspect of Yankovic’s life, from his meteoric rise to fame with early hits like ‘Eat It’ and ‘Like a Surgeon’ to his torrid celeb amorous affairs and famously wicked life-style.”
1 of 5 | Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) hangs on in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” in theaters May 23. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
LOS ANGELES, May 14 (UPI) —Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, in theaters May 23, delivers on the level of the franchise’s most recent films once it gets going. It does, however, have the slowest start of all eight Mission: Impossible movies.
In 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) took on the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) to retrieve the key that unlocks the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as The Entity. Final Reckoning opens two months later, with Ethan unsure what to do with such power.
As The Entity holds hostage all of cyberspace and the world’s electronics, including military weapons, there is a deadline before the AI will control the world. That is, if Ethan doesn’t stop it first.
The plan to destroy The Entity requires Ethan’s teammates, hackers Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Gabriel’s turncoat assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). The mission is complicated by U.S. President Sloane (Angela Bassett) sending agents to recover The Entity’s controls for U.S. purposes, which Ethan knows will backfire.
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The missions live up to the movie’s title by devising ways to keep making the task harder for Ethan. For example, he’s already diving to crushing depths to activate computers in a sunken submarine when the sub rolls towards an abyss.
Not only does this add another ticking clock to his task, but the water level rotates around Ethan and causes missiles to fall and shift, blocking his path and exit route.
The climax, which has already been shared during the film’s publicity, features Ethan hanging from a propeller plane. The scene is more than just a spectacle — writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen craft a sequence that justifies the stunt and continues to build as the pilot attempts many different ways to shake Ethan.
Final Reckoning does play the same trick one too many times, where Ethan’s team goes to meet someone and finds someone else waiting for them. The second and third iterations lack surprise, but the interlopers at least complicate Ethan’s plan, necessitating some fun improvisation.
Leading up to such sequences, this Mission: Impossible unfortunately becomes tedious and repetitive. The problem could easily be solved by cutting 40 minutes out of the film — which would still leave it at over two hours long.
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Final Reckoning recapping Dead Reckoning is the least of these worries, as it gets handled before the title sequence, which admittedly comes some 20 minutes in. What does become redundant are long sequences of Ethan walking through a war room looking at models as the DEFCON clock ticks down to The Entity’s takeover.
Ethan explains to Gabriel, then to the President, then to Admiral Neely (Hannah Waddingham), how dangerous The Entity is. There’s buildup and then there’s just wallowing, and this leans towards the latter.
He keeps warning that The Entity expects them to act a certain way and advising they should instead surprise the AI. He says it enough times that the audience has surely caught on, if not The Entity itself.
Furthermore, The Final Reckoning becomes the most convoluted of all the Mission: Impossibles, which is no small feat, by connecting the plot to all seven previous films. It is an odd choice in a series predicated on standalone entries, and a mistake also recently criticized in the James Bond films starring Daniel Craig.
Bringing back some characters from previous entries is fun and gives them satisfying character arcs to imagine in the time between films, while others concoct unimportant connections. Just let some people be new characters.
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For example, tying in The Entity with the Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III is wholly unnecessary. The Rabbit’s Foot was one of that director J.J. Abrams’ trademark unanswered mysteries, so saying now that it was a component of The Entity adds little to the current film.
The pieces of The Entity could be any Maguffin. Making Ethan feel responsible for it just forces more spurious connections. Ethan was going to stop The Entity anyway, whether he indirectly helped build it or not.
This is not to criticize the scenes explaining the missions, which effectively establish the impossible tasks at hand. Those scenes are not included in the superfluous 40 minutes of exposition.
Potentially interesting threads are also abandoned, such as a doomsday cult that worships The Entity but never becomes a factor in the mission.
When the screen expands to fill the entire IMAX frame, rest assured the show is about to start — and it is worth it. The unfortunate issue is that it happens about 80 minutes into the film, not including a few earlier IMAX shots of The Entity’s core. The submarine is the first proper IMAX action scene.
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During the intense scenes, the film has a sense of humor about its own tropes of deadlines and cutting wires. It’s only when it’s taking itself seriously that it drags.
Gabriel becomes more of a mustache twirling, cackling villain in this film. It’s motivated by his loss in Dead Reckoning but still a drastic shift, though the film has a sense of humor about his behavior too.
The second half of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning makes up for earlier mission failures, and this level of craftsmanship is still worth experiencing. Otherwise, the script problems would be unacceptable.
For a Bay Area band famous for selling out stadiums with immaculately dramatic ’80s rock, Journey had some country roots too.
“I was raised in the San Joaquin Valley,” the band’s former singer Steve Perry told The Times. “My grandfather had two dairy farms. I remember getting ice cream made from that fresh cream at the top of that vat. I saw the commitment that farmers have to what they do.”
That might explain a bit of Perry’s new single, a duet with country godfather Willie Nelson, where the pair revisits “Faithfully,” one of Journey’s finest, high-lonesome ballads with a weary tenderness that leans into their respective ages (92 for Nelson, 76 for Perry).
The single, out today, benefits Nelson’s longtime go-to charity Farm Aid. But it’s an unexpected return to the Journey canon for Perry, who left the group for good in 1998 and then disappeared from public life for two decades, give or take a prime “Sopranos” sync.
The Times spoke to Perry, from his San Diego-area home, about his long history with Willie Nelson and country music, how Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” almost wrecked him and if he’ll ever have a tour or follow-up to 2018’s comeback LP “Traces” in the works.
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This new version of “Faithfully” with Willie was really moving. It takes on new gravity to hear this song from your perspective later in life. How has the the meaning of this song changed for you over the last 40 years?
I think that the lyrics are so sound that they’re timeless. But I must tell you that Willie Nelson set a tone when he sang it. That launched me in his direction, of how to interpret those lyrics and sing with him. It sets the tone and the watermark. Willie is the Sinatra of country music. When you sing laid back like that, like Tony Bennett does, he just says it like he feels it, and he puts it where he feels it. It takes a minute to really fall into that relaxed emotional expression. It was a new experience for me to sing with such a legend like this guy.
You can hear the weight of everything that’s happened in your life over the decades. There’s a lot of personal loss behind lyrics like “Wonderin’ where I am lost without you / Being apart ain’t easy on this love affair / I’m forever yours, faithfully.” Do you feel like the sound of your voice carries any different meaning now than it did 40 years ago?
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I think that back then, the interpretation of what it should be was a different approach. It was a band sound. It was sort of an R&B rock ballad thing, and I think that that was the template to drop into it and drive it vocally. This one is completely the other way. Wherever Willie goes, it’s so definitive that you would be silly not to drop in there with him.
This is your second country duet in recent years, after you sang with Dolly Parton on her “Rockstar” album. Why is that such a fun format for you now?
At this point in my life, I’m really enjoying doing anything that feels just emotionally expressive to me. It’s a new freedom for me. You know, Willie used to come to the shows in Texas when we were touring in the early ’80s, that’s where I first met him. When we were doing the song “Faithfully,” I swear to you, back then, I always wanted to hear his voice on it. This is the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid, so it was the perfect time to just for us to be together, and it’s a bucket list thing to sing with Willie Nelson.
You were raised in the San Joaquin Valley, I imagine that’s a cause close to your heart.
Farm Aid is close to my heart, because I know how difficult it is to be a farmer. You’ve really got to love it.
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You famously spent decades out of public life after leaving Journey. But at the behest of your late partner Kellie Nash, you eventually recorded a solo album “Traces” in 2018, and put out some Christmas records more recently. Does being in public feel easier now than it did, say, a decade ago?
That’s an interesting question. I think I really do enjoy the solitude and privacy that my life has right now. I enjoy my studio. I’m staring at my speakers right now, and it’s an environment that is so creative and so fruitful with all these other ideas that I have coming that need to be finished. So, I don’t know. I think I really enjoy committing to this creative new buzz that I’m falling into with new music, new writing, new recordings.
Steve Perry of Journey at the Alpine Valley Music Theater in Wisconsin on June 17, 1983.
(Paul Natkin / Getty Images)
Whether it’s two years or two decades, how do you know when it’s the right time for you to reemerge?
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I think the emotion just came back to me to write and sing. I wasn’t quite sure it was going to, because I had worked so hard for so many years touring and writing, and that’s when I left Journey. I didn’t even know I needed a sabbatical. I just took one. Then music returned to my soul. Some of the early music of my youth started to become something that rescued me emotionally, like when I was young. It came back to me and rescued me again. My dad was a singer, and he used to sing around the house, and I got to sing with him on the Christmas record — I found a cassette of him singing, so we put that together. I think it’s always just been part of my life.
Does writing or listening to music affect you in different ways now than it did as a child, or when you joined Journey?
Songwriting is the most important thing to me, whether it’s the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or, more recently, I love this guy Leon Thomas. He’s got a song called “Answer Your Phone.” When I hear him sing, it just resonates with what feels right, because the songwriting he’s doing. “Answer the phone / I need to talk to you” — it’s an honest emotion in the lyric.
I think that’s always been something I’ve heard in country music too. Growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, with the Everly Brothers or Willie, there’s just a certain believability to their performance and songwriting that I’ve always reached for, no matter where I was.
It does seem like there are some young guys like Teddy Swims or Benson Boone that are drawing from your vocal style. Do you feel like young singers today are rediscovering the pleasure and nuance in the way you perform?
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I can’t attribute it to anybody saying “I think I like this guy, Steve Perry,” but I’ll tell you what, when Teddy Swims is singing “Lose Control,” when I first heard that, I had to pull the car over. The track is fantastic. His vocals are fantastic.
When he hits that [singing] “Contro-o-o-l,” he sounds just like you.
Hey, that was nice, August. But yes, it’s songwriting, songwriting, songwriting. There’s certain newer artists like Leon Thomas and Leon Bridges that really are paying attention.
Any desire to get on the road with all this new material?
You know, I really don’t have any plans for that at this moment. I’m really having so much fun recording, writing, mixing and mastering at this moment that I just don’t want to break up the flow I’m in right now.
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Your music has always had a unique place in film and drama history — the “Sopranos” final shot, obviously, but also inspiring the play “Rock of Ages” and your friendship with Patty Jenkins, who used your music in “Monster.” Ever given any thought to how you might want to handle a Journey biopic?
I don’t have any plans for it. It’s hard to imagine what that might be.
You reconnected with your old bandmates at your Rock Hall induction in 2017. I know they’ve been through some recent personnel challenges, but what’s your relationship with the band these days?
I mean, we’re all good. We were great together. I think the material and our accomplishments stand the test of time, which proves that we were good together. I’m really proud of what we accomplished together, because we were kind of like soldiers in the trenches trying to do something together. We knew we could do what we believed in.
But I really love new music, and when I’m writing here in the studio, I try to remove myself so I can continually chase after these new ideas, and not be influenced by anything except these new ideas wherever they show up. That’s the thing that has always been a goal, to come up with the definitive version of something you’ve never heard before, the true struggle to make it that believable.
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There’s also this timeless, yearning quality to your work in Journey. It’s hard to imagine a world where those songs didn’t already exist. I think that’s why filmmakers are so attracted to them, or why “Faithfully” can sound compelling today.
You just nailed it. The believability of something that never existed before, but you have a familiarity like it did exist. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s reaching and never giving up, reaching for that definitive version that makes you or everyone else feel like they’ve heard it before.
Ma Dong-Seok as Ba Woo in ‘Holy Night: Demon Hunters’ (2025), Capelight Pictures
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Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Lim Dae-hee, Holy Night: Demon Hunters follows three underground demon hunters, operating like private investigators who are too unorthodox to be cops and too accepting of the occult to be associated with the church.
The demon-hunting trinity is led by Ba Woo (Ma Dong-seok), a beast of a man capable of solving most of his problems with his bulking fists. Whatever slips through Ba Woo’s fingers is typically dealt with by Sharon (Seohyun), a woman who can sense and exorcise demons. Then there’s Kim Goon (Lee David), a demon hunter in training who is the team’s tech support.
(L-R) Seohyun, Ma Dong-seok, and Lee David as Sharon, Ba Woo, and Kim Goon in Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025), Capelight Pictures
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A neuropsychiatrist named Jung-won (Kyung Soo-jin) is trying to help her sister Eun-seo (Jung Ji-so) who is in desperate need of an exorcism. With the church unable to assist with their stance on exorcisms, it’s up to Ba Woo and his team to save Eun-seo.
It feels like Holy Night: Demon Hunters is the second installment of a franchise that nobody knew about. A prequel webtoon called Holy Night: The Zero is available on Naver Webtoon and is currently 13 episodes long. The webtoon could add more depth to the film since Holy Night: Demon Hunters seems to struggle to keep your interest for its measly 92-minute duration. Like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales though, viewers shouldn’t have to read or watch something else to fully appreciate a director’s vision.
Jung Ji-so as Eun-soo in Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025), Capelight Pictures
The action horror film teases a real-world takeover by not only demons but Lucifer himself. The credits introduce the audience to every demon that could come into play. Holy Night: Demon Hunters barely scratches the surface of the ideas it introduces, so it’s a bit confusing why so many aspects are shown and not utilized. The film then decides to vaguely describe semi-intriguing backgrounds for characters barely seen through to completion.
Ba Woo is using all the money he’s making as a demon hunter to build an orphanage. He grew up as an orphan. And the people from the orphanage he grew up in were slaughtered by his best friend, whom he viewed as a brother. The two of them gained a demonic power, and Ba Woo used his power for good while his brother became a demon.
The majority of the rest of the film is devoted to Eun-Seo, her exorcism, and which demon has possessed her. The exorcism Sharon uses on her is broken down into six stages (and a piece of bamboo since it thwarts off demonic energy for whatever reason). The six stages of exorcism are presence, deception, break point, voice, clash, and expulsion.
Most of the characters in the film are underdeveloped. Ba Woo is a big, buffed dude struggling with both literal and inner demons inside of him. Sharon is in the same boat, and her power could easily sway her to the dark side. Apart from asking for a raise and being the most sympathetic of the bunch, Kim Goon doesn’t do much.
(L-R) Seohyun, Ma Dong-seok, and Lee David as Sharon, Ba Woo, and Kim Goon in Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025), Capelight Pictures
Jung-won is so annoyingly written. The character is meant to be a burden by being in the room during the exorcism for no reason other than being an obstacle, making stupid decisions at every turn, and being an inconsolable crier at every turn.
The VFX in the film is a mixed bag. Sometimes they look almost great, like when Ba Woo punches demon-possessed people, as smoke seeps from their bodies or the weird shadow demon that haunts him throughout the film. But the CGI highs come with a lot of visual lows, and Holy Night: Demon Hunters struggles with decent-to-janky CGI the majority of the time.
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(L-R) Ma Dong-seok, Seohyun, and Lee David as Ba Woo, Sharon, and Kim Goon in Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025), Capelight Pictures
Holy Night: Demon Hunters is a punchier version of Constantine. There are some fun sequences, but the film is a bummer overall. Ma Dong-seok typically chooses great projects to be a part of, and it’s unfortunate that Holy Night: Demon Hunters feels so rushed and incomplete. A big dude storming around the city punching demons into submission sounds so awesome, but somehow Lim Dae-hee turned it into this thin, dull, and lifeless attempt at purification.
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