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movie review love and death

On July 13 th , 1980, Candy Montgomery struck Betty Gore with an axe roughly 41 times. This is undisputed. Even Montgomery herself admits it. And yet she’s the only person who knows exactly what happened. The story of the death of Betty Gore was a true-crime staple for years for many reasons—foremost among them the uniqueness of an average suburban mom becoming an ax murderer—but it’s also become a streaming mini-series obsession with Hulu’s “Candy” premiering almost exactly a year before David E. Kelley and HBO Max’s take on the subject in this week’s “Love & Death.” The differences between the two projects are interesting, but the ultimate takeaway is largely the same—this is another version of the Montgomery story that works primarily because of its talented cast. The storytelling leaves something to be desired here, and yet star Elizabeth Olsen ’s work becomes increasingly mesmerizing, ably supported by solid turns from the entire ensemble, particularly Jesse Plemons and Tom Pelphrey . After all the podcasts, true crime series, and now both mini-series, I’m still not sure exactly what really happened in that laundry room over four decades ago, but it’s undeniably rich material for Hollywood to keep excavating.

Olsen plays Montgomery, an ordinary citizen of the very ordinary Wylie, Texas. She’s a devout Methodist who seems happy with her church and her husband Pat ( Patrick Fugit ), who’s a nice-but-bland individual. He likes to chuckle slightly at “The Love Boat,” and one gets the impression that such moments are the peak of excitement in his day, but he doesn’t mind it that way. One of the interesting elements of Kelley’s approach is in how the legendary creator captures mundanity that can still be satisfying; lives that are being lived everywhere that may not have a typically Hollywood degree of excitement but don’t seem to mind it. Even the affair that eventually leads to the murder has a fascinatingly practical air about it—two people who decide to start having sex the way they decide to bring muffins to a church social.

Those two people are Candy and Allan Gore (Plemons), the husband of Betty ( Lily Rabe ). After a few flirtations, Candy immediately asks Allan if they could start sleeping together. They have a few meetings about it, break down the pros & cons, and decide to go for it. Allan has had such a repressed sex life, even with a wife and children, that Candy is the first to use her tongue when she kisses him. There’s notable empathy for both people trying to break out of their suburban ruts with inherently human passions. And yet “Love & Death” is not a story of obsession. It seems clear that Kelley and company want to avoid that potential reading of the murder right from the beginning. Olsen’s version of Candy enjoys her time with Allan and regrets when it appears a support group has repaired the Gore marriage, but it’s not set up as simple as a love triangle with a jealous participant. This is far more complicated than that.

Again, we know that Candy butchered Betty with an axe. Candy has always claimed self-defense. Betty found out about the affair and threatened her. Candy had to pull the axe away to save her own life. But did she have to strike Betty 41 times? Kelley gets to the crime in the middle of the seven-episode mini-series, which allows him to dive into what he’s always cared about most as a creator: The courtroom. “Love & Death” shifts its storytelling from churches and houses to the trial of Candy Montgomery, which allows for some excellent work by Tom Pelphrey as her attorney Don Crowder (somebody give him a “Law & Order”). The “Ozark” star is excellent at conveying the legal pitfalls he’s trying to avoid in a contentious trial of an admitted murderer.

However, is the best approach to the story of Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore to give so much storytelling thrust to the defendant's attorney? (It’s certainly a very Kelley approach.) I also missed the character work of Melanie Lynskey in “Candy” as Rabe’s version of Betty is pretty shallowly sketched. Perhaps because of the casting of the always-excellent Plemons, the balance shifts to Allan more than Betty. While that shift arguably diminishes the actual victim here, it allows the Oscar nominee for “ The Power of the Dog ” to remind viewers how much he can do with a simple line reading or dejected body language. He’s great here.

Everyone is, but “Love & Death” belongs to Elizabeth Olsen. The fourth centerpiece episode is a master class on her part, capturing how Candy could have gone through the day after such a brutal crime. Olsen becomes increasingly riveting as “Love & Death” unfolds, forcing us to question how much we should like, forgive, or understand her. I’m not sure we ever will. But we’ll clearly continue to be fascinated by her.

Starts on HBO Max on April 27th. Whole series was screened for review.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Love & Death movie poster

Love & Death (2023)

420 minutes

Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery

Jesse Plemons as Allan Gore

Patrick Fugit as Pat Montgomery

Lily Rabe as Betty Gore

Tom Pelphrey as Don Crowder

Keir Gilchrist as Ron Adams

Elizabeth Marvel as Jackie Ponder

Krysten Ritter as Sherry Cleckler

  • David E. Kelley
  • Lesli Linka Glatter

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‘Love & Death’: Elizabeth Olsen Falls in Love and Then Kills Her Friend With an Ax

DEADLY AFFAIR

“Love & Death” is the second telling of ax-murderer Candy Montgomery in less than a year. It’s a sympathetic take on the true story. But is it all worth watching again?

Nick Schager

Nick Schager

Entertainment Critic

movie review love and death

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/HBO

Love & Death has a pedigree that’s as illustrious as any recent HBO effort. It comes from David E. Kelley, the prolific showrunner who’s most recently had success with Big Little Lies and The Undoing . It stars Elizabeth Olsen as a confused, disaffected and ultimately volatile suburban housewife—a role that more than faintly recalls her Emmy-nominated turn in WandaVision . It features a stellar cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Elizabeth Marvel , Tom Pelphrey and Krysten Ritter. And it’s based on a notorious true-crime case that remains hotly debated today.

The sole thing missing from it, actually, is originality, given that audiences just received a dramatic retelling of this tale last year, courtesy of Jessica Biel’s five-part Hulu venture Candy .

It’ll be up to viewers to decide if twice is nice (or necessary) when it comes to Candy Montgomery, whose bloody saga is rehashed with aplomb, if few revelations, in Love & Death . Kelley’s seven-part HBO Max limited series premieres Apr. 27, and its prime contribution to the discourse surrounding its murder is to portray its subject in a relatively empathetic light.

Basing its take on a collection of Texas Monthly articles as well as Jim Atkinson and John Bloom’s book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs , it forwards a version of events that’s supposedly definitive; “This is a true story,” it proclaims at the beginning of each installment. But, in the end, the series is apt to still raise some questions, as well as eyebrows.

The main attraction of Love & Death is the lead performance of Olsen, who—temporarily released from her Marvel duties—shines charismatically as Candy, the Wylie, Texas, wife and mother who, on June 13, 1980, killed her friend Betty Gore (Rabe) by striking her 41 times with an ax. Candy claimed that this slaying was committed in self-defense after Betty attacked her in the wake of learning that her husband Allan (Plemons) had carried on an extramarital affair with Candy. That Candy chopped up Betty is not in doubt, nor is her prior tryst with Allan, although the true nature of the two women’s fateful encounter continues to be a matter of speculation—this despite the fact that, as true-crime aficionados (and Candy viewers) know, Candy was eventually found not guilty of homicide.

movie review love and death

Krysten Ritter and Elizabeth Olsen in Love & Death .

Jake Giles Netter/HBO

In the early going of the show (which commences two years before Betty’s demise), Olsen embodies Candy as a vivacious, if bored woman. It’s her day-to-day tedium that inspires her to matter-of-factly propose to Plemons’ dull, schlubby Allan that they sleep together. Saddled with a wife suffering from postpartum depression and oppressive separation anxiety (Betty acts miserable every time he has to leave on a business trip) Allan hems and haws before reluctantly agreeing to a sexual arrangement that’s as neatly constructed as the place settings that Candy arranges in motel rooms for their lunches together.

Far from a “whirlwind romance,” theirs is a relationship meant to restore a bit of spark to their lives, if not to decimate their marriages, with Allan doggedly putting Betty’s well-being first and Candy exhibiting no signs of wanting to abandon her dry, but kind spouse Pat (Fugit), whose defining characteristic is that he’s a good choir singer.

Candy and Allan’s affair, the central crime, and the ensuing trial aren’t complicated enough to require seven episodes, and yet Love & Death never feels unduly padded. Kelley and his collaborators (including director Lesli Linka Glatter) use their considerable time to paint a comprehensive picture of their milieu, where the Methodist Church (run by Marvel’s pastor Jackie Ponder and, later, by Keir Gilchrist’s less popular replacement Ron Adams) is the focal point of everyone’s lives, binding them together in a spirit of pious altruism and camaraderie.

movie review love and death

Elizabeth Olsen, Patrick Fugit, Lily Rabe, and Jesse Plemons in Love & Death .

At the same time, they capture the particular circumstances of Candy’s headspace, thanks in large part to Olsen, whose wide eyes and cheery smile convey the pragmatic and confident can-do attitude that compels Candy to become involved with Allan and powers her through her scandalous arrest, indictment, and prosecution.

In many respects, Love & Death feels conclusive: its many characters are all well-defined; its plot’s ins and outs are thoroughly dramatized; and its multiple viewpoints are adequately investigated. Still, while it’s eminently watchable from start to finish, Love & Death is missing something.

Part of it has to do with Candy herself, who as embodied by Olsen is almost too foxy, charming, and self-possessed for this tale; it’s hard to imagine someone this magnetic (and striking) being stuck in such dead-end circumstances, replete with a paramour who has to be initially goaded into sleeping with her. Olsen inhabits Candy from the inside out, authentically capturing her ennui, frustration, and pent-up anger. Yet she’s almost too movie-star charming for a figure like Candy, which undercuts the material.

movie review love and death

Patrick Fugit, Elizabeth Olsen

Patrick Fugit and Elizabeth Olsen in Love & Death .

Even more problematic is that, by sticking closely to Candy’s POV, the series generates compassion for her (innocent) plight and, in doing so, avoids any complexity that might make revisiting this story worthwhile in the first place. Love & Death gives voice to a range of damning prosecutorial arguments. However, it only really imagines one scenario: Candy defending herself against Betty’s attack, during which she snaps and goes more or less berserk.

Consequently, there are no great bombshells to be found here, just a sympathetic portrait of a woman who wound up in a mess of her own (and Allan’s) making and had to convince the world that she didn’t intend to massacre her lover’s wife. The show is reasonably persuasive on that front, although as it moves through its litigation-centric second half—buoyed by Pelphrey’s enlivened turn as Candy’s lawyer, who fights regularly with the presiding judge—there’s a sense that the proceedings have assumed a narrow perspective on the mystery at hand.

Glossy and engaging, Love & Death does allow a touch of skepticism to emerge about Candy’s defense-team narrative—specifically with regards to the notion that Candy lost control and hacked Betty 41 times because of long-buried maternal trauma that was unearthed via hypnosis. Too often, though, Kelley’s latest has nothing especially fascinating to say about its protagonist, nor anything novel to add to the conversation about her infamous encounter. It leaves one wanting more, and not in the way it intends.

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Love And Death Review

28 Jul 1975

Love And Death

One of Woody Allen’s few excursions out of Manhattan, but definitely a fully paid up member of the Early Funny Ones club, this magnificent, often anarchic pastiche of Russian literature’s portentous habits with a side order in Bergmanesque death wallowing actually finds Allen at his silliest. Which also means it is extraordinarily clever silliness, with designs deliberately stolen from Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers. It is film that explores comedy’s infinite variety via the medium of the existential philosophy of those big Russian sagas slumped in history like sulking teenagers.

Slapstick, mime, and knockabout comedy spill about the chaotic story of a wimp intellectual having to play hero, alongside divine wordplay and clever-clever musing (catch the speech entirely made of Dostoyevsky book titles). Allen does his Allen thing, that fumbling if randy neurotic intellectual, only this time stuck out of time in rural Russia at the time of the Napoleonic invasion. In short, and it had to be, he’s cross-the-road-to-have-a-gander hilarious. Diane Keaton is nearly better as the terrible love of Boris’ idiotic life, who marries him as a last resort and keeps drifting into indecipherable philosophical spiel: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving…”

Fans of his caustic views on real relationships will find none of such honesty hereabouts, this is borderline spoof, but infinitely more informed than the work of Mel Brooks. You get Woody fired out of a cannon, and jokes so good you weep to be in possession of such divine wit: “And so I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Actually, make that, ‘I run through the valley of the shadow of death’ — in order to get OUT of the valley of the shadow of death more quickly, you see.’”

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‘Love & Death’ on HBO Max Review: An Excellent Elizabeth Olsen Can’t Save this Tasteless True Crime Drama

Where to stream:.

  • Love and Death

HBO Max

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Burning Body’ On Netflix, Where A Cop Is Murdered And Burned, And Two Unexpected People Take The Fall

Emmys 2023 snubs and surprises: elizabeth olsen is out, ‘jury duty’ is in, where was hbo max’s ‘love and death’ filmed, will there be a season 2 of ‘love and death’ on hbo max what we know.

As soon as I saw the opening credits sequence for HBO Max ‘s new crime drama Love & Death , I understood the show was taking the “ Big Little Lies approach” to the grisly source material. Nina Simone croons “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” over bright, breezy images of 1970s suburban Texas. An angelically sad Elizabeth Olsen plays house with a vintage meat grinder and broken china. The show’s vibe is so Big Little Lies- core that it even shares that HBO hit’s creator, David E. Kelley . And therein lies the total assonance in this project. BLL was a glossy, star-studded show adapted from a best-selling beach read, but Love & Death is based on a true story about a real murder victim who deserved so much more than this uninspired schlock.

In giving the tale of Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) and Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) the glossy BLL treatment, real human beings are flattened into Lifetime movie archetypes. Love & Death ‘s treatment of Betty Gore is one of the most heinous portraits of a murder victim I’ve ever seen in any true crime series. Instead of lending Gore any shred of dignity, she is depicted as a shrill, egocentric, annoying hindrance to the happiness of those around her. Treated appropriately, this could actually play out just fine if it were in the realm of fiction. In fact, many mystery classics play on the audience’s sympathies to illuminate complexities about morality. ( Murder on the Orient Express , anyone?) But Betty Gore was a real woman who was murdered and Love & Death only massacres her all over again.

Candy Montgomery (Jessica Biel) in Candy

‘Candy’ and ‘Love and Death’: The Candy Montgomery Case, Explained

Love & Death is prestige TV’s latest swing at dramatizing the horrific 1980 murder of Texas housewife Betty Gore; Jessica Biel’s Candy covered the same story over on Hulu at this time last year (more on that in a bit). What made the real life case so scandalous was the sheer outrageousness of the crime and its circumstances. Betty Gore was struck 41 times with a wood-splitting axe in her own home by Candy Montgomery, a family friend who had just concluded an extramarital affair with Gore’s husband Allen eight months prior. While the evidence is overwhelming that Candy killed Betty, a jury found her not guilty of murder, per se, deciding she was acting in self defense. Candy’s story was that when she visiting Betty’s home to pick up the Gores’ eldest daughter’s swimsuit, Betty confronted her about the affair and then threatened her with said axe. After Betty swung it hard twice at Candy, the other woman acted in self defense…by striking Betty 41 times.

Love & Death retells this story largely from Candy Montgomery’s point-of-view. When we first meet bubbly Candy, she is an active member of her local Methodist church where she sings in the choir, plays on the volleyball team, and gossips with the hip female minister Jackie (Elizabeth Marvel). After Jackie leaves the parish, Candy is adrift. When a chance collision on the volleyball court gives her a whiff of married pal Allen Gore’s (Jesse Plemons) natural musk, she confesses to gal pal Sherry (Krysten Ritter) that the paunchy dad smells like “sex.”

Candy becomes obsessed with the idea of having an affair with Allen just for that sex. Over a course of several awkwardly straight-forward conversations, the two bored adults agree on some extramarital schtupping. Just as Candy starts to catch real feelings, though, Allen and his wife Betty work through their issues in a marriage camp. The adulterers amicably split, but their lives are still intertwined thanks to their kids, who are friends. So when Candy stops by the Gore residence to pick up the aforementioned swimsuit, a tense conversation with a post-partum depressed Betty goes south really fast.

Candy is repeatedly presented to us as a sweet, beautiful, likable woman who accidentally hacked her friend to death in self-defense. Betty, on the other hand, is so intensely dislikable, you spend the first few episodes wondering what’s taking so long to off her. It’s incredibly uncomfortable whenever you remember Betty Gore wasn’t an annoying paperback villainess, but a real human being.

There are many shows that sympathize with killers and vilify their victims, but Love & Death never earns privilege. That’s because outside of Elizabeth Olsen’s devastatingly layered performance, Love & Death is a disaster. The usually wonderful Jesse Plemons is acting on autopilot, Lily Rabe is borderline deranged, and Krysten Ritter seems to be performing in an SNL skit set in Texas. Hurting matters even more are the show’s flat, uninspired visuals and atrocious styling. The plotting is staid and boring; the dialogue cliché. More effort seems to have been put in sourcing Candy’s gorgeous era-appropriate kitchen dishes than giving any character besides Candy a modicum of depth.

Also dogging Love & Death is the aforementioned fact that another streamer got to the Candy Montgomery story first. Hulu’s Candy , executive produced by and starring Jessica Biel as the titular axe-murderer, did a much better job handling both the darkness of the subject matter and the humanity of its real life participants. Melanie Lynskey’s Betty Gore isn’t a campy take on a shrew, but a deeply depressed woman suffocated by her circumstances. (As is Candy!) But while Love & Death is hyper-fixated on sympathizing with Candy, and only Candy, Hulu’s Candy gives Betty a chance to counter her killer’s courtroom confession. Through its stark visual aesthetics and narrative calls, Candy is able to drive home that even if you can understand how Candy Montgomery could have been cornered into killing Betty Gore, it was Betty whose disfigured corpse was left for a day in pool of blood while her baby daughter was left to cry alone in her crib. Betty was the victim of the crime, not Candy.

On paper, Love & Death had all the makings of a brilliant limited series. Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons are both lauded actors firmly in their prime, writer David E. Kelley and director Lesli Linka Glatter are talented TV vets known for their smart approach to mature material, and the story of Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore remains haunting to this day. Unfortunately, Love & Death is disturbing because of how little it examines the nuances of that horrendous crime in favor of transforming Candy into the real victim.

The first three episodes of Love & Death premiere on HBO Max on Thursday, April 27 with one episode premiering weekly on Thursdays through May 25.

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‘Love & Death’ Boasts a Delightfully Gonzo Elizabeth Olsen and Little Else

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

Why does the new HBO Max miniseries Love & Death exist?

On a certain level, yes, I understand why it exists. This is prime Emmy-bait season, and the role of Candy Montgomery — a Texas housewife who, on a warm Sunday in 1980, killed her friend Betty Gore, striking her with an axe 41 times — is an obvious awards play for star Elizabeth Olsen . It may also be for supporting actors like Jesse Plemons , who plays Betty’s husband — and, crucially, Candy’s lover — and for its Emmy-adored creator David E. Kelley ( Big Little Lies ), and for chief director Lesli Linka Glatter ( Homeland ). Plus, true- crime docudramas remain one of television’s most durable genres, with Hollywood executives looking at infamous murders as just another form of IP.

What is so special, so fascinating, so essential that the story of this one particular killing has to be told over and over again? Perhaps each creative team has a unique and deeply insightful take on the case that demands public consumption. Maybe Candy and Betty’s tragedy can be used to make a wide variety of larger points about female friendships, changing sexual mores, the intersection between spectacle and criminal justice, or anything. Maybe it’s a Rorschach test, and every writer and director sees something different when they look at Candy swinging that axe, over and over and over again.

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Love & Death is seven episodes in total, which should in theory have given Kelley, Linka Glatter, and everyone else even more time to enumerate what is important about this tale. But other than some strong work from Olsen, this new take seems just as lost as its Hulu counterpart was at trying to find a deeper meaning here.

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Speaking of which, the second significant change from the Hulu version is that Candy felt equal empathy for both killer and victim. Love & Death, on the other hand, is entirely in Candy’s corner, and barely even considers the inner life, or the sadness of the death, of poor Betty Gore. The Lynskey version is clearly depressed and isolated, but the Lily Rabe version is simply presented as an insufferable shrew who chased Allan into adultery. (Even when they have sex, it’s terrible, like when we see her barking orders at him as they try to conceive another child: “If you can squirt rather than drip, that helps too! But slower! Deeper! And squirt!”) The sequence where Allan — off on a business trip and increasingly panicked that Betty isn’t answering the phone — has to goad his neighbors into breaking into the house is shorter and less harrowing than the Candy version, as if Kelley and company are reluctant to make us appreciate just how terrible this all was. In later episodes, we see glimpses of Betty’s parents struggling with both their grief and their outrage that their son-in-law’s philandering led to this, but for the most part, that is treated as besides the point of understanding who Candy was and how she got to this moment of extreme violence.

(*) Where Jessica Biel sported a period-appropriate permed helmet like the real Candy, Olsen is styled with much softer, shoulder-length curls, not too dissimilar from what a woman might wear today. In general, Linka Glatter aims for the story to look and feel as contemporary as possible, even if there are distinctly late-Seventies elements, like both couples attending a church-run Marriage Encounter getaway at different points. 

(**) Elizabeth Marvel, who’ s also great right now on Peacock’s Mrs. Davis , has a good supporting role as the local minister, who is also Candy’s best friend. When she departs for another congregation, both Candy and Betty struggle to get along with her young and abrasive replacement, played by Keir Gilchrist from Netflix’s Atypical . The material about church politics is among the more specific and interesting threads of the whole show.   

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Limited Series – Love & Death

Where to watch, love & death — limited series.

Watch Love & Death — Limited Series with a subscription on Max.

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A terrific Elizabeth Olsen gives Love & Death some life, but this rote retelling of a grisly murder does little to distinguish itself from other true crime tales.

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David E. Kelley

Elizabeth Olsen

Candy Montgomery

Jesse Plemons

Patrick Fugit

Pat Montgomery

Krysten Ritter

Sherry Cleckler

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  • The True Story Behind HBO Max’s <i>Love & Death</i>

The True Story Behind HBO Max’s Love & Death

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Love & Death

In Elizabeth Olsen’s first television series since the 2021 Disney+ hit WandaVision , the formidable actor plays the notorious Candy Montgomery—a real woman who killed the wife of the man she was having an affair with in 1980. The HBO Max limited series Love & Death , which is based on Jim Atkinson and Joe Bob Briggs’ 1984 book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs , follows Olsen as Montgomery, a God-fearing housewife beloved by her small Methodist community in Collin County, Tex. before the turn of events that would upend many lives.

The first three episodes of the gripping limited series are now out on HBO Max. Here’s everything you need to know about the true story behind Love & Death and how close the show hews to reality.

What happens in Love & Death ?

A church choir singing in front of a congregation

When we first meet Candy, she has an infectiously sweet personality that makes her, by all appearances, a great mother to her kids and wife to her husband, Pat Montgomery (Patrick Fugit). Candy and her husband seem to have some marital woes, and it’s clear that she feels less desired by her husband than she wishes to be. So she sets out to have an affair with Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons), a longtime friend who is also in her group of church friends and is married to Betty Gore (Lily Rabe).

The pair’s love affair heats up quickly, and their rendezvous become more frequent, so they decide to stop seeing each other. But Betty catches on and confronts Candy about the affair. Betty’s rage takes over, and she tries to kill Candy with an axe, but Candy fights back and kills Betty. At first, Candy tries to circumnavigate the judicial process, lying and not turning herself in immediately, but the police eventually catch up with her, and Candy is put on trial for the murder of Betty Gore.

The trial became a national sensation because of the ethical murkiness of the killing, with questions involving childhood traumas and self-defense. In the show, Candy’s trial attracts hordes of reporters, photographers, and spectators—to the point that the judge requests the trial be moved to a bigger courthouse. In the end, in the series as in real life, Candy is found not guilty. Still, given that her name had been tainted by the trial, she decides to move her family out of their hometown to Georgia.

Does Love & Death stay true to the original story of Candy Montgomery?

Elizabeth Olsen staring at a person across a table

The series reminds viewers at the end of each episode that it is based on a true story, but that it is “a dramatization of actual events. Dialogue, scenes, and some events have been modified or created for dramatic purposes.” Love & Death is the third adaptation made using this case as a subject, following the 1990 CBS movie A Killing in a Small Town and the 2022 Hulu miniseries Candy starring Jessica Biel. As Rolling Stone ’s TV critic Allen Sepinwall wrote in his review of the show, “If you’ve seen Candy, you not only already know all the details, but will be shocked by how many of the beats of the story are presented in identical fashion,” noting that what feels like a “half-dozen scenes in each installment were practically word-for-word.”

TIME critic Judy Berman writes in her review that Love & Death provides new dimensions for these characters that weren’t previously seen in the Hulu series, or other series about rich women in living in idyllic surburbia. “What sets Love & Death apart from its predecessor, and so many other superficial, ripped-from-the-headlines murder shows (Dahmer—Monster, The Thing About Pam, The Serpent), is [creator David E. Kelley’s] refusal to reduce real people to cartoon killers or weirdos or fools.” She continued to write that it’s a “welcome correction” from his series following Big Little Lies , like The Undoing to Nine Perfect Strangers , which have “suffered from similarly broad characterizations.”

Where is Candy Montgomery now?

Love and Death

At the end of the last episode, right before the credits roll, there are updates for each of the main characters. The last scene in the series shows Candy and Pat moving out of Collin County to Georgia. The updates say that the couple divorced shortly after they moved to Georgia and that she began working as a family therapist. At one point, the text says, she practiced with her daughter, Jenny, and they focused on teen and adult depression. According to People , she is still alive and resides in Georgia.

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What happened to everyone else?

A group of people standing in front of a model building

The series also states that Pat still lives in Georgia and continued to work in defense technologies. Allen remarried shortly after Betty’s death to the church organist, Elaine Williams. The two eventually got a divorce and Betty’s parents adopted her and Allen’s children. He got remarried again and now lives in Maine.

After helping Candy avoid prison, the updates at the end of the series says that Don Crowder (Tom Pelphrey), Candy’s attorney, ran for governor of Texas in 1986. He managed to secure 11% of the vote but ultimately lost the race to Mark White. A story published in the Dallas Observer reported that Crowder suffered from depression and his wife, Sheri, became concerned with his drinking and a DWI arrest. The series’ final update about Crowder states that in 1998, Crowder died by suicide due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

What drew the creators to this particular story?

'Love and Death'

In an interview with D Magazine , the show’s director, Lesli Linka Glatter, acknowledged that although people might already know the ending of the story, she was still interested in telling it. “This is about a Texas town and its characters,” she said. “I fell in love with all of them, but there’s also a deep hole inside of those characters. It was a mile wide and unfulfilled, so that intrigued me.” Glatter added, “The story was so juicy and the characters were complex and human. It’s not often you find a nostalgic, warm community series that ends with an axe murder.”

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

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‘love & death’ review: elizabeth olsen and david e. kelley struggle to shed fresh light on the candy montgomery case.

One year after Hulu's 'Candy' comes another show based on the murder of Betty Gore, this time on HBO Max and starring Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe and Patrick Fugit.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Elizabeth Olsen, Patrick Fugit, Jesse Plemons and Lily Rabe in HBO Max's 'Love & Death.'

As fodder for true-crime dramas, the gruesome facts of the Candy Montgomery case are hard to top: On June 13, 1980, nearly two years after Candy (played here by Elizabeth Olsen ) and Allan Gore ( Jesse Plemons ) began their extramarital affair, Candy stopped in for a visit with his wife, Betty ( Lily Rabe ), and somehow wound up hitting her 41 times with an ax.

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Aside from a bloody in medias res opening, the first three hourlong episodes play out like a domestic drama under Lesli Linka Glatter’s sensitive direction. In late 1978, Candy is coming to realize she wants something more than the picture-perfect family and home she works so hard to maintain. Allan Gore, meanwhile, has been feeling stuck with a wife who seems to need him more than like him. So when Candy hops into Allan’s car after a church volleyball game one evening and suggests a fling — “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about so I want to say it, so I don’t have to think about it anymore,” she adds so casually she might be brainstorming ideas for a bake sale — he eventually decides, after much hemming and hawing, to take her up on it.

It’s in the fourth episode that Love & Death finally reaches the death in question, and from there its tone grows darker and more unsettling. In what feels like a more grounded extension of her work in WandaVision , Olsen begins with Candy’s bubbly façade dialed up just a little too high to seem entirely believable — and then, as Candy falls apart, chips away at it to reveal rawer, harder depths. Her saucer-like eyes prove to be her most effective weapon. At times, they seem to shine so big and bright it’s almost unnerving; at others, they court sympathy by flooding with tears or dimming completely.

Through Candy’s case, Love & Death considers how the media and the law distort the truth. What actually happened matters less for either side than the ability to spin a better story. When the papers began painting Candy as a murderous hussy, her lawyer, Don Crowder (a zesty Tom Pelphrey), demands she adjust her hair, wardrobe and weight to look the part of a frumpy housewife. When she takes pills to numb her emotions during her court appearances, Don orders her to stop — it’s a better look if the jury can see how vulnerable she’s truly feeling. And the very public ordeal will leave Candy forever under scrutiny no matter the verdict. “The jury can’t find you innocent. They can only find you not guilty. And there’s a difference,” Candy’s husband Pat (Patrick Fugit) points out.

The reported facts of the Candy Montgomery case aren’t hard to find. Love & Death draws from the two-part Texas Monthly article “ Love and Death in Silicon Prairie,” as well as the book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson. Their sick appeal is clear too, as evidenced by the fact that it’s still captivating audiences more than four decades later. The challenge has always been grasping why it happened — how a lukewarm romance could yield such a grotesque turn, how a seemingly ordinary Texas woman could butcher a friend to death. On that front, Love & Death has plenty to say, but frustratingly little insight to offer.

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Love & Death review: Elizabeth Olsen delves into brittle psyche of axe-murderer Candy Montgomery

‘big little lies’ creator david e kelley has mastered the repressed violence of american domesticity, but this drama still feels by the numbers, article bookmarked.

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Of all the marriage vows, “til death us do part” is perhaps the most famous, and the most frequently ignored. But for a congregation at a Methodist church in late-1970s Texas, there aren’t many parts of the wedding ceremony that will survive intramural desecration. This is the backdrop to  Love & Death,  a lavish HBO true crime series, now making its way to ITV to show that America’s famous Bible Belt gets loosened sometimes…

Elizabeth Olsen is Candy Montgomery, a well-coiffed stay-at-home  mom  in Carter-era America. She puts beef through the mincer to make hamburger patties, sings alto next to her husband in the church choir, and forces a comb through the unruly hair of her unruly children. In short, she’s a bored housewife. “If you ain’t searching,” she tells her friend Sherry (Krysten Ritter), “you’re lost.” And Candy is lost; a disorientation that leads her into the arms of her friend, and fellow churchgoer, Allan Gore ( Jesse Plemons ). Candy is the congregational Queen Bee and Allan a slightly lumpen goofball, but somehow the affair ignites. “It’s nice to be noticed,” she confesses, “to be adored a little.”

But this is a David E Kelley show, and from the opening shot we know where it will end: with a blood-spattered bathroom and an unknown dead body. Kelley’s most recent hit,  Big Little Lies , pulled the same trick, with disaster constantly foreshadowed (clearly this is the creative tension  du jour , as the much-heralded  White Lotus  series also employed the device). Candy is indiscreet, letting both Sherry and pastor Jackie (Elizabeth Marvel) in on her secret. As the entanglement rumbles on, Candy’s position becomes more confused. Allan becomes a second husband: she cooks him lunches in seedy motel rooms, leaves cookies on his car at work, and asks after the emotional wellbeing of his wife, Betty (Lily Rabe). But before this seven-episode mini-series is out, one side of this love triangle will be dead and another in the dock for their murder.

Love & Death  is based on a true story, which was, bizarrely, already dramatised in a 2022 five-part mini-series, Candy , starring Jessica Biel as Montgomery and Pablo Schreiber and Melanie Lynskey as the Gores. I suppose prestige dramas about historic murders are like London buses, but, all the same, it speaks to a lack of imagination that is present in  Love & Death . Kelley is adept at handling the creeping sense of dread and has mastered the repressed violence of American domesticity. Yet Love & Death  feels by the numbers. Humanising the adulterous Candy – a task that other representations of the story have skipped on – is a noble addition to the rote true crime story, but the lure of the salacious proves too strong. Before long, the shadow of the axe is, quite literally, looming.

But in a television landscape where standalone mini-series increasingly dominate the prestige end of the scale,  Love & Death  is another suitably glossy addition. Olsen is an excellent screen actor whose career has been derailed by an oppressive commitment to Marvel Studios (she has starred in six movies and two TV series as Wanda Maximoff). Alongside Plemons – a heavyweight of American TV, from  Breaking Bad  to  Fargo  – she has enormous fun demonstrating the brittle psyche behind the buttoned-down dresses and perfect smile. “You’re the belle of the ball at church,” the pastor tells Candy, who is dogged by persistent thoughts about her close friend’s husband’s “perfectly shaped penis”. It is a cognitive dissonance that Olsen inhabits flawlessly.

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Yet the structure of the show – which, in its first half, builds up to the crime, and then spends the second act resolving that in a Texas courthouse – is simple to the point of unambitious. It lacks the devilish intricacy of  The White Lotus , the fastidious detachment of  Mindhunter  or the emotional messiness of  Mare of Easttown . It is a bit, as the teens would say, mid.

But, at present, even the most mid-tier of American crime mini-series is still a league above its British counterparts. For ITV,  Love & Death  is a savvy acquisition. Anchored by true A-list firepower in its central performance, the plot – stretched thin over the seven-hour duration – survives the protraction. Overlong, imperfect and yet basically enjoyable,  Love & Death  is, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for marriage itself.

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'Love & Death': Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and Everything You Need to Know About the Elizabeth Olsen-led Series

Elizabeth Olsen turns into a murderer in this upcoming limited series.

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When and where is love & death releasing, watch the trailer for love & death, what is the plot of love & death, who's in the cast of love & death, who's making love & death.

The saga of true-crime installments lives on with yet another chilling investigation on the horizon. Coming up next is the limited series Love & Death , which recounts Betty Gore's ( Lily Rabe ) gruesome murder. The killer was none other than her neighbor and friend Candy Montgomery ( Elizabeth Olsen ), who was having an affair with Gore's husband at the time. The limited series will be based on John Bloom and Jim Atkinson 's book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs , as well as a few articles that were published in the Texas Monthly regarding the case. Since the upcoming series might be of interest to true-crime fans searching for a new recommendation, here is a breakdown of all the information that we know so far about the project.

Editor's Note: This article was last updated on March 24 with the latest trailer.

Related: 8 Underrated Elizabeth Olsen Performances to See Before 'Love and Death'

It is only a matter of months before Love & Death comes out. The first three episodes of the limited series will drop on HBO Max on April 27. The remainder of them will be released every week until May 25, which is a common rollout schedule for many titles within the streaming service. HBO Max has many crime shows under their belt, including Mare of Easttown , The Undoing , and The Staircase . Since Love & Death is an original HBO Max title, you must have a subscription to the streaming service to watch all the episodes. For the basic plan that includes ads, the cost lands at $9.99 per month. If you prefer to exclude the ads from your plan, so you can watch exclusive TV shows and films without interruptions, the cost would be $15.99 per month. Use the following link to head to the show's landing page on HBO Max (and to watch the series once it premieres):

Watch on HBO Max

HBO Max released a teaser on February 16 , hinting at what we can anticipate from this true-crime adaptation. It starts with Candy being the typical housewife, doing household chores, setting up the dinner table, and taking care of the children. Yet, she doesn't feel there has been any payback for all that she does at home. To amend the void in her life, she approaches Allan Gore (played by Jesse Plemons ) at a Sunday service about them having an affair. During the rest of the teaser, there are shots of the two meeting in hotel rooms and going on rides at the fair. They seem happy, but Candy can't help but look nervous whenever she sees him with his family across the street. In the end, a murder takes place and given that Candy's face and hands are filled with blood stains, she is the primary suspect in the case.

The first full-length trailer for Love & Death was released on March 23, revealing a deeper look into Candy's character. Check it out in the player below:

Here is HBO Max's brief synopsis:

"Two church going couples enjoying small town family life in Texas, until somebody picks up an axe."

Given that this is an onscreen adaptation of a true story, here are a few details you should know about what happened. Before Candy murdered Betty, the two had a friendship and lived right across from one another. That is until Candy started to harbor feelings for Betty's husband, Allan, and initiated an extramarital affair with him. The relationship began after she became unfulfilled with the demands of her life as a housewife and mother. The more the couple grew closer together, the more Candy and Betty's friendship turned sour. On June 13, 1980, when Allen was out of town for a business trip, his wife was found dead after being stabbed 41 times with an ax. Since Candy was the last person who saw Betty alive, she became the primary suspect in the murder investigation and was summoned to court for a trial. Yet, the verdict played in her favor when she was found not guilty of the crime, after pledging that she had killed Betty in self-defense. In her statement, the housewife said that Betty had found out about her affair with Allan and proceeded to attack her in fury, so that was why she was forced to counteract.

After Barbara Hershey ( A Killing in a Small Town ) and Jessica Biel ( Candy ) took turns playing the housewife turned murderer, Elizabeth Olsen will portray Candy in the HBO Max series . This is a very different character from her previous well-known role as Wanda in the MCU. Her performance in the Disney + series WandaVision lead the actress to get nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award. Joining the ensemble as Betty Gore is Lily Rabe, most known for her work in Ryan Murphy 's anthology series American Horror Story and her prior collaborations with HBO in The Undoing and The Wizard of Lies . Jesse Plemons will play Allan Gore in Love & Death and the two-time Emmy nominee was recently involved in The Power of Dog , a Netflix western drama with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst as the leads which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Other names that will be part of the cast are Keir Gilchrist ( Atypical ) as Ron Adams, Krysten Ritter ( Jessica Jones ) as Sherry Cleckler, Elizabeth Marvel ( The Dropout ) as Noel Holmes, Patrick Fugit ( Almost Famous ) as Candy's husband Pat Montgomery, Tom Pelphrey ( Ozark ) as Don Crowder, Beth Broderick ( Sabrina the Teenage Witch ) as Bertha Pomeroy, Brian d'Arcy James ( Spotlight ) as Richard Garlington, Mackenzie Astin ( The Magicians ) as Tom O'Connell, Bruce McGill ( Reacher ) as Judge Tom Ryan, and newcomer Fabiola Andújar as Mary Adams.

Related: New 'Love and Death' Poster Features Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery

David E. Kelley , writer, and creator of another HBO installment Big Little Lies , will present his spin on the shocking story of an affair with a tragic ending. He is also an executive producer of the true-crime drama. Leslie Linka Glatter directed the first four and final episodes of the series and here are what she had to say about the project in an interview with Vanity Fair :

“This is about women and men in this period—they did everything right. They got married at 20, had kids. [Candy’s husband] Pat was a wonderful supporter and scientist. They moved to the suburbs. They built their dream house. Then why do you feel so profoundly empty inside? Why is there a hole in your heart and psyche a mile wide? She makes a horrible choice how to fill that void.”

Lionsgate is a co-producer of the series, while Blossom Films ( Nicole Kidman and Per Saari ), Texas Monthly ( Scott Brown and Megan Credyt ), Matthew Tinker , Helen Verno , and Michael Klick are executive producers.

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The Dead Don't Hurt

Viggo Mortensen, Garret Dillahunt, Danny Huston, and Vicky Krieps in The Dead Don't Hurt (2023)

Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War. Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War. Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War.

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  • The film pays homage to the stunt community with explosive action sequences and dangerous stunts, showcasing the skills of these performers.
  • Director David Leitch, a former stuntman, brings his experience to the film, creating breathtaking and thrilling moments for audiences to enjoy.

David Leitch's new action blockbuster The Fall Guy pays tribute to stunt performers in the movie industry, and it's packed with tons of explosive and dangerous stunts which highlight their incredible work. Leitch started his filmmaking career as a stunt performer, doubling for stars such as Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, so he was able to draw on his experience for The Fall Guy. He includes fight scenes, car crashes, huge fires and plenty of other potentially deadly stunts.

Any stunt can be dangerous, and they all require a lot of experience and technical expertise to make them safe enough for stunt performers. However, despite the safety measures put in place, stunt performers always take on a certain amount of risk when they put their bodies on the line. The Fall Guy shows just how dangerous the job can be behind the scenes, and this acknowledgment makes its huge stunts feel even more terrifying.

The Fall Guy is playing in theaters everywhere, and it can also be seen in IMAX.

17 Jody Fights Colt In His Alien Disguise

Jody and colt's reunion is a comedic moment.

Colt sneaks back onto the set of Metalstorm to reunite with Jody after faking his own death, but he makes the mistake of sneaking up behind her while wearing an alien costume from the movie. The fight in her trailer is played for laughs , but there's still potential danger due to the small area that the stunt performers have to work in. Director David Leitch started out as a stuntman , so some aspects of Jody and Colt's relationship reflect him at two different stages of his career.

The Fall Guy Review: Ryan Gosling Leads A Thrilling & Wildly Fun Love Letter To The Stunt Community

The Fall Guy features great comedic performances, fun action sequences & a nice homage to the stunt community, who keep these kinds of films afloat.

16 Colt Goes For A Joy Ride In A Parking Garage

Colt decides to get back in the game.

After breaking his back on set, Colt takes an uneventful job as a valet at a restaurant. He tries to keep a low profile and forget what happened to him, but someone recognizes him from his past. The humiliation of this meeting, coupled with his phone call from Gail offering a job in Australia, inspires him to blow off some steam. He takes the customer's car for a spin, reliving his stunt performer days as he does a few donuts outside the restaurant.

15 Colt Fights Off Doone's Men

The nightclub fight is a piece of beautifully stylized action.

As Colt follows the trail that he hopes will lead him to Tom Ryder, he gets a tip to talk to a man named Doone with a leopard-print tattoo on his head. Colt puts on a garish neon suit and approaches Doone in a nightclub, but he soon has to fight off several of his goons while battling the effects of the drugs he's been given. The nightclub fight seems to reference director David Leitch's previous work in the John Wick franchise, and also his 2017 action thriller Atomic Blonde.

14 The Sydney Opera House Fight

The fall guy's movie within a movie is a strange sci-fi epic.

The Fall Guy takes place in Australia, and it makes good use of its beautiful surroundings. Colt steps in for Tom during the filming of a complex fight scene right in front of the iconic Sydney Opera House. There are a lot of moving parts to the Metalstorm fight scene , and this obviously increases the potential risk that something could go wrong for the stunt team, even if there aren't any particularly eye-catching stunts.

13 The Fire On The Dock

Colt escapes death more than once.

Colt finally finds Tom Ryder alive after a long search, but the actor immediately tries to kill him. This is the final phase of Tom's plan, but Colt manages to escape just in time by cleverly spitting a mouthful of gasoline on Dressler just as he ignites his lighter. The fire spreads over the entire dock, meaning that multiple stunt performers are on fire at the same time .

Fall Guy 2 Seemingly Confirmed By Ryan Gosling In Major Script Update

Ryan Gosling shares a bombshell about the script for The Fall Guy 2, offering an optimistic update on the possible action-comedy sequel.

12 Iggy Attacks Colt With A Katana

Iggy doesn't get much screen time, but she leaves her mark.

The Fall Guy 's cast includes some actors who only get one or two scenes, but they still make an impact with their limited screen time. Australian actor Teresa Palmer plays Iggy Star, Tom Ryder's girlfriend and co-star in Metalstorm. Her most memorable scene comes when she finds Colt snooping around her boyfriend's apartment, so she attacks the intruder with a sword. As it turns out, the katana is just a prop from a movie , but prop swords like this can still cause serious damage if someone makes a mistake.

11 Colt Gets Hit By A Taxi

Stunt performers are paid to take big hits.

Colt often uses his skills as a stuntman to help him find Tom Ryder, but one of his greatest skills is simply his willingness to take a hit. That's precisely what he does to stop Doone from escaping from the nightclub. His plan to slow the taxi down with his own body isn't very elegant, but it gets the job done . Colt's little pep talk that he gives himself is a good example of how Ryan Gosling blends action with humor in The Fall Guy. The movie has all the elements of a potential franchise-starter for Ryan Gosling .

10 Jody Repeatedly Sets Colt On Fire

Jody enjoys taking revenge on colt.

As an act of revenge for ghosting her, Jody uses her power as the director of Metalstorm to put Colt through as much punishment as possible. This involves repeating the same stunt over and over again, which requires Colt to be set on fire and thrown backwards into a rock. Stunt teams use a special fire retardant gel for stunts like these , so they aren't as dangerous as they look, but doing this multiple times and slamming into a rock would be no picnic.

9 The Boat Chase

Colt knows how to drive boats from his miami vice days.

Colt narrowly escapes from being set on fire, but he is soon being chased around Sydney Harbor by men with machine guns. The boat chase ends in a remarkable explosion as Colt's boat flies into some oil tankers, but this happens with nobody on board. There are still several dangerous stunts before then, such as when Colt jumps the boat over a dock while his hands are tied behind his back.

The Fall Guy director David Leitch explains how the Ryan Gosling-Emily Blunt action-comedy movie pulled off its surprise major ending cameo.

8 Colt & Dan Get Ambushed In Tom's House

Winston duke's dan walker is colt's closest ally.

Dan makes a great sidekick to Colt as he tries to unravel the mystery surrounding Tom Ryder. Winston Duke strikes up a fun comedic dynamic with Ryan Gosling, but they also have a couple of exciting action sequences together. Their finest moment, and the best fight scene in The Fall Guy, comes when they are ambushed by Dressler and his man. Armed with a rubber tomahawk and a gun full of blanks, they somehow manage to fight off their attackers. The fight scene has a few spectacular falls and crashes, which make it even more dangerous than a normal fight.

7 Colt's Back-Breaking Accident

Colt's accident is actually not an accident at all.

The first stunt in The Fall Guy, aside from an explosive montage of stunts pulled from other movies, shows how dangerous the job can be, and how easily things can go wrong for stunt performers. Colt's accident isn't the most dangerous stunt in The Fall Guy, but this just proves that almost any stunt can cause a massive injury if something isn't quite right . Naturally, Colt gives a thumbs-up as he drifts in and out of consciousness.

6 Dan's Stunt Team Fight Tom's Security Guards

The fall guy's big finale is a whirlwind of action.

In the chaotic climax of The Fall Guy, Dan's stunt team orchestrate a plan to catch Tom in a confession, but they have to keep Dressler and the rest of his bodyguards away. The sequence is a dazzling mix of fight choreography, explosives and stunts using both cars and motorbikes . This scene is another tribute to stunt performers everywhere, as the real-life stunt performers get their moment to shine just like Dan's fictional team.

Hit rock songs from the 80s and 90s, Taylor Swift, and more make up The Fall Guy's soundtrack. Here's when each song plays in the movie.

5 The Helicopter Fight

Colt's fall is one of the most remarkable stunts in the fall guy.

Colt has to chase after Tom and Gail before they can escape in a helicopter with the evidence of Tom's confession, or else his entire plan, and the efforts of Jody and the stunt performers, would be a failure. There's some great fight choreography as the helicopter tilts and spins out of control, but the most eye-catching moment is when Colt falls backwards from the helicopter and tumbles acrobatically in the air before hitting an inflatable crash pad. David Leitch's framing shows the amazing stunt in full, which highlights just how far the stunt performer fell from the helicopter. Any miscalculation could have killed him.

4 Colt Chases The Garbage Truck

Jean-claude and colt make a great team.

Hot on the heels of Tom Ryder, Colt ends up chasing a garbage truck full of men who have kidnapped Alma Milan, played by Stephanie Hsu. Colt takes Tom's dog, Jean-Claude, into his GMC pickup truck, which is a callback to the 1980s TV series which The Fall Guy is based on. The car chase ends in spectacular fashion, as the truck slams into a parked car and flips over. This scene combines high-speed stunt driving with a huge crash, both of which can be very dangerous. The Fall Guy 's post-credits scene also references the TV show.

3 Colt & Alma Take Control Of The Truck

Dressler leads colt on a chase through the streets of sydney.

When Colt eventually pulls himself onto the garbage truck, he has to fight a couple of men in a skip hanging off the back while Alma tries to slow down the driver in the front. This is one of The Fall Guy 's most ambitious and complex action set pieces , with a fast-paced string of dangerous stunts, including the skip being dragged sideways along the street and Colt tumbling through the truck's windshield when it comes to a screeching halt. The most memorable image from the sequence comes when Colt skids behind the truck on a sheet of metal like it's a skateboard.

2 Colt Takes Tom For A Drive

Colt and jody's final plan is a big risk.

The Fall Guy 's finale delivers a rapid succession of huge stunts, starting when Colt jumps into the seat beside Tom Ryder and takes him for a terrifying ride around the set of Metalstorm. He barrels along as multicolored explosions go off all around the car, trying to scare Tom into confessing to his crimes on tape. The scene ends with a death-defying 250-foot jump across a ravine , all filmed using practical effects. This is one of many stunts in The Fall Guy that could be potentially lethal if anything doesn't go to plan.

The Fall Guy ends with a bang. With such an exciting conclusion to the story, we break down the action comedy's ending, sequel plans & major cameos.

1 The Fall Guy's Record-Breaking Roll

David leitch and his stunt team made history.

The most jaw-dropping and dangerous stunt in The Fall Guy broke a world record previously held by the James Bond franchise. The Fall Guy 's stunt team managed to roll a car eight and a half times, with it eventually landing upside-down in a heap. This beats the record from Casino Royale, when Bond's iconic Aston Martin went for a tumble down the side of a hill. The stunt used pressurized air to flip the car, and it was an unusual technical challenge to try and go for as many rolls as possible, but it created the most shocking moment in The Fall Guy.

The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy is an action thriller from Bullet Train and Deadpool 2 director David Leitch. Ryan Gosling stars as a stuntman who is forced to find a missing movie star, investigate a conspiracy, and repair his relationship with the love of his life. The film was written by Drew Pearce and inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same name.

  • The Fall Guy (2024)

comscore

Love Lies Bleeding review: The best grubby, bloody lesbian thriller of the season

Kristen stewart and katy o’brian’s fiery, gut-clenched romance keeps rose glass’s slice of americana ticking.

movie review love and death

Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding

The best grubby, bloody, vaguely sub-Coen period lesbian thriller of the season turns out to the be the one with no actual Coen involvement. Whereas Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls got exhaustingly caught up in its own cutesy-pie snark, Love Lies Bleeding is an altogether more robust specimen. The film will take you around the back of the shack and give you a few sharp kicks to the head. If that Coen comparison is of any value (and it probably isn’t) it takes in the viscera-filtered noir of Blood Simple and the nihilistic abandon of No Country for Old Men. But scrappy. And funny. And sexy.

Rose Glass rides on no other film-makers’ shoulders. Five years ago the English woman broke through with Saint Maud, a searing religious horror, and now, as many Europeans have before, builds on home acclaim to have a crack at high Americana. It is 1989 and we are in a blistering, unkind corner of New Mexico. Kristen Stewart , as so often, hiding sensitivity behind a bluster of shrugs, plays the grumpy Louise Langston, first seen unblocking a graphically overflowing lavatory in a low-rent gym. Anna Baryshnikov, teeth yellow as overripe banana skins, plays Daisy, a clingy admirer who later comes close to going full-on stalker.

It is the sort of grim environ that Jim Thompson enjoyed exploiting in his literary pulp: cheap booze, hurried sex and improvised corruption. You can always do with Ed Harris in such situations, and, as Lou, Louise’s kingpin father, he does a good job of not being outacted by the maddest hair in recent cinema.

You just know some stranger is going to ride into town and shake up the unstable equilibrium. Here it is Katy O’Brian as a volatile bodybuilder, Jackie Cleaver. She ends up with a job at Lou’s shooting range and a space in Louise’s bed. Played with the presence of an ambulatory tree, Jackie comes across as an erratic sort even before Lou hips her on to steroids. Thereafter, the slightest provocation can provoke tornadoes of fury. Eventually, an act of extreme violence – graphically depicted – sends all characters scurrying in all directions.

Met Gala 2024: Irish stars shine among the bold blooms and botanical-inspired designs

Met Gala 2024: Irish stars shine among the bold blooms and botanical-inspired designs

Eurovision 2024: Bambie Thug goes through to Saturday’s final, Ireland’s first since 2018

Eurovision 2024: Bambie Thug goes through to Saturday’s final, Ireland’s first since 2018

This couple lived on Great Blasket with no electricity or running water. Here’s what they did next

This couple lived on Great Blasket with no electricity or running water. Here’s what they did next

Bambie Thug: ‘I fully support anyone boycotting Eurovision’

Bambie Thug: ‘I fully support anyone boycotting Eurovision’

Could you tell a non-American had made this film if you didn’t already know? Maybe not. But the wallowing in a particular class of borderland decline feels like something you’d expect from a dazzled outsider. The Berlin Wall is about to fall. The larger American car is still about the place. Such isolated locales could still behave as if the rest of the universe didn’t exist. All the currency of postwar noir is here. Lou is prepared to solve any problem with a bullet and a silencer. Louise and Jackie couple in an atmosphere of growing unease as the FBI circle. Ben Fordesman’s cinematography trades in neon even when no such illuminated signs are present.

One might reasonably wonder if those pieces all fit together. The late-stage collapse into near magic realism is not a problem – grand metaphors are plainly at work here – but the inconsistency on the ground is more of a worry. The absurdly hirsute Lou spends days at the back of a decaying warehouse but looks to live in a sort of mansion. A sequence in Las Vegas seems bolted on.

[  Kristen Stewart: ‘Diana was cool. She made the world feel pretty special’  ]

What keeps it ticking is the fiery gut-clenched romance between the two leads. There are cunning games being played here. Jackie, the sensitive fugitive, is also the hulking brute, the unhoused weapon. Louise, initially impotent, is forced into becoming the force for change, the quiet alpha female. One can scarcely imagine anyone else but Stewart making sense of the role. Like all the great noir actors, she has carved her own space – one accommodating a character who is inventive, open, but ultimately ruthless.

Not for the timid.

Love Lies Bleeding is in cinemas from Friday, May 3rd

Donald Clarke

Donald Clarke

Donald Clarke, a contributor to The Irish Times, is Chief Film Correspondent and a regular columnist

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A close-up portrait of the author, her head leaning against a mirror.

She Wrote the First Great Perimenopause Novel

Miranda July is experimenting again — on the page and in her life.

Credit... Dana Scruggs for The New York Times

Supported by

Marie Solis

By Marie Solis

Reporting from Los Angeles

  • May 5, 2024

It was not exactly urgent to get the rug, but the larger question the rug had to answer was urgent enough. That’s why, on a bright afternoon at the end of March, Miranda July and I were driving toward Irvine, Calif., where she planned to meet a man about a listing on Facebook Marketplace.

She had recently moved out of the large home she shared with her husband and child in Silver Lake and into a small two-bedroom house behind her writing studio in Echo Park. It meant she needed new things for a new place. A toilet, for example. A coral one, ideally, to match the tub and sink. Flooring for the kitchen. A refrigerator. And an antique carpet for the walk-in closet she was fixing up in her studio space. In this new life, would it all fit together?

Ms. July, a writer, filmmaker and artist whose work plays with the boundaries of intimacy, was wearing round tortoiseshell sunglasses, and her hair was pulled back in a velvet bow. We were just getting acquainted as she carefully merged on and off a series of highways in her blue Toyota Prius. Irvine was more than an hour away. There was going to be traffic — of course there would be traffic — and it began to dawn on us that this was going to be a long drive.

In such close quarters, Ms. July suggested we might define the terms of our relationship more clearly.

“What if you just said what the premise was of each thing you were entering into, and both people said their take on it?” she said. “Like even today, in the car. It could be like: ‘What’s your sense of this? Do you think we’re going to get hungry? What are our bodily concerns? Is there something you need to get back to?’

“There are a lot of basic things we could’ve discussed that actually may have made everything easier and clearer, you know?” she added, laughing. “We have yet to see what anxieties are to come!”

I felt my stomach flip, but she had a point. I was unbearably thirsty, for one. Suddenly, it seemed absurd we had left these things unsaid, and a relief someone had brought them up. Now we could really talk.

Sitting on a chair, Ms. July wears a black spaghetti-strap tank top underneath a leather jacket with fleece trim.

The characters in Ms. July’s films and books are often hoping for some kind of breakthrough. They go about their daily routines, longing for someone to say that unspoken thing. Maybe they’re on the brink of being truly understood.

In her new novel, “All Fours,” the unnamed female narrator — a 45-year-old “semifamous” artist who shares some biographical details with Ms. July — considers that a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York could be a turning point in her life.

She doesn’t get very far. About 30 minutes in, she checks into a motel and spends the next two and a half weeks redecorating her room, taking up with a younger, married man and contemplating a totally different way of living. When she returns home to her family, she realizes she can’t quite reacclimate to the old domestic rhythms.

As she confronts what seems like the imminent death of pleasure, foretold by a graph about hormonal changes she finds online, she sees no choice but to strike out into new territory. Masturbation, fantasies of sex and plenty of actual sex help propel her onward.

The heroine of “All Fours” is not a woman in a midlife crisis, but — in the epic, Dante-esque sense — a woman in the “middle of her life,” Ms. July said. She found that little else had been written about this phase, particularly about perimenopause, the transitional time before full-fledged menopause.

The existential quandaries raised in the book — Can the world accommodate the idea of an ever-changing self? How do you reconcile your desires (sexual, creative and otherwise) with your circumstances? — are ones the author has been tangling with in her own life.

In an Instagram post a few summers ago, Ms. July announced that she and her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills , were no longer in a romantic relationship, although they were still living together most of the time to parent their child, Hopper, who was 10 at the time.

“We feel good about this twisteroo in our long story and await further twists and turns over the course of our lives,” she wrote beneath a photo of her standing barefoot in front of three pairs of shoes. The next slide is a video of her dancing in her underwear to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money.”

The post, Ms. July said, had been “carefully worded.”

“Mike and I are public enough — just barely recognizable enough, to some very small sliver of the population — that one of us out with our girlfriends in New York could, to some people’s eyes, look like we’re cheating or something,” she said in the car.

Ms. July, who recently turned 50, is aware that readers may conflate the protagonist in “All Fours” with herself. The notion that her work is autobiographical has followed her since she wrote, directed and starred in “ Me and You and Everyone We Know ,” which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2005, when she was 31. And she sometimes inflects her characters with her own habits or ailments — like the passing throat condition she embellished and gave to the protagonist of her last novel, “ The First Bad Man .” But she says she never intended them to be her avatars.

In the new book, she has borrowed a bit more from life. “The only way I can put it really is ‘closer to the bone,’” she said. “But it is still fiction.”

“All Fours” grew out of a story Ms. July published in The New Yorker in 2017, “ The Metal Bowl .” It continued to take shape when she spoke to other women about how they were dealing with this stage in their lives.

“I remember driving and talking to Miranda about marriage, talking to her about sex,” said the writer Sheila Heti , a close friend of Ms. July’s who read an early draft of “All Fours.” “I remember feeling that she was trying to map the world through her conversations with people; she was interested in hidden desires, in the desires we can’t quite articulate to ourselves or are afraid to.”

Ms. July had similar conversations early in the pandemic with the sculptor Isabelle Albuquerque — to whom the novel is dedicated — sometimes on long walks, sometimes while they sat 10 feet apart in Ms. July’s backyard, “yelling across the void,” as Ms. Albuquerque put it.

“Sometimes it felt like we were trying to create a new society,” she said. “We were talking about the ideas but also trying to live them. Trying to make adjustments to our lives that would allow us to have a kind of freedom we both really crave.”

They conducted various experiments together. Living by their infradian rhythms, including their menstrual cycles. Spending one night a week at their studios, away from their partners. Ms. July kept that up for years. She had Wednesdays.

The challenge wasn’t to blow up your life. It was to set off tiny bombs all the time. Maybe no one even noticed but you. It could be as small as clenching your fist.

The entire world should probably be reorganized in a more feminist way, Ms. July said, but “the micro, everyday version is like, What can we do right now?”

Ms. July pulled into a parking lot of an affluent residential complex. In search of the rug merchant, we wandered past tennis courts and a pool.

Just as she called him on her phone, the man appeared. He introduced himself as Gino Gucciano and pointed down the street, toward a house around the corner.

He strode off, and we went back to the Prius.

“Are you ready for things to be maximum weird?” Ms. July said.

After the short drive from the parking lot to Mr. Gucciano’s house, we found that the garage door was open, revealing a vast collection of carpets. Standing beside a stack, Ms. July vetoed the one she had come to see, which was listed for $600. “Too brown.”

“If there are ones that had pinks. …” Ms. July said, taking a closer look.

Mr. Gucciano and a business partner, Sam Hossaini, unfurled several more on the floor of the garage. Some were too big, though Ms. July discovered she had not written down the measurements for the room in her studio where the rug would end up.

At last, they rolled out a deep rose Persian rug, laying it across the lawn in the sun. It was 150 years old, they said. The price was $2,600.

“So if I just Venmoed you $1,000 right now, that’s not going to cut it?” Ms. July asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” Mr. Gucciano said. “We paid more for it than that. It’s hard to get them that old.”

“At the thousand level for me, that’s — I have a whole home to figure out,” Ms. July said. “You know, I just got divorced. I have to quickly make a home.”

“Yeah, I went through that five years ago,” Mr. Gucciano said. “I lost a lot, and my home. But I have my kids, so I’m happy.”

“Oh, OK, yeah.”

“I want to make you happy, Miranda,” Mr. Gucciano said. “But we paid a little more than a thousand for it.”

Ms. July offered to tag them on Instagram, where she has been sporadically chronicling her sometimes comical efforts at home improvement in a highlight reel she calls “ MJHGTV .”

Mr. Gucciano and Mr. Hossaini deliberated. They had just started an Instagram page for their business that very day. They knocked down the price to $1,300.

Ms. July began recording on her phone. She reviewed the pros and cons of the different rugs, until she turned to the pink one, the winner. The two men hauled it into the trunk of Prius.

“We have a lot to debrief,” Ms. July said, once she was behind the wheel again.

On the ride back to Echo Park, she admitted that she hadn’t meant to blurt out that she was divorced. It wasn’t quite true — she was in the middle of mediation.

“It’s a big piece of information, given how little information I’m giving about us,” she said. “And I actually think every divorce is different, and the reasons for doing it are very specific.”

In “All Fours,” the protagonist and her husband try out a new arrangement, which evolves throughout the novel. He is only one of the people she has sex with; and she never does consummate her emotional fling with the young man who sets off her quest.

Whether the marriage survives these evolutions is ambiguous. At the end of the book, the narrator is walking by herself, now awed rather than panicked by life’s curveballs.

“I really love where the book ends, because it’s fairly open-ended, and I actually still have that open-ended feeling,” Ms. July said. “And so I guess I hate to sort of take away from it.”

A Studio of Her Own

The next day, I visited Ms. July at her studio, which, together with her new home directly behind it, forms a sort of “compound,” she likes to say.

Her artist friend Nico B. Young was working in the garage, sawing a countertop and some shelving for Ms. July’s kitchen that he had designed himself. Almost every surface had been covered in a light yellow mixture of epoxy resin and pigment, making each cabinet resemble a perfect stick of butter.

A pair of 20-pound dumbbells lay just outside on the concrete, where Ms. July exercises with a trainer twice a week, beneath an orange tree in blossom.

She nimbly lifted the rug out of the car and into her studio, which is cluttered with hundreds of books, along with ephemera from her movies and other projects. In the main room is the long table where she writes, sitting on a hard wooden chair. Often when she works, she locks her phone in a box and unplugs the Wi-Fi. During breaks, she sometimes dances.

Down a hall is a bedroom where she now keeps much of her wardrobe of mainly vintage and thrifted clothes. She thought this might be the right place for the rug, giving the space a Parisian feel, maybe. But it was too big. It curled up against the wall, ever so slightly.

We tried sliding it around.

“Maybe if I got a rug pad, it would sort of rest on the edge,” Ms. July said.

We left the rug to settle and sat across from each other at her writing table.

Throughout “All Fours,” the protagonist is often grounded by her best friend, a sculptor named Jordi who, toward the end of the book, unveils a sculpture of a headless woman on her hands and knees. “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” Jordi says. But, she explains, the position is actually quite stable: “It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

Ms. July told me she was excited to have women over to her new place for a party after her book tour, when things calm down. She wanted to spool a string of lights connecting the home she shares with Hopper and her work studio. The guests would float between the two.

“I’m kind of just looking forward to having time to just enjoy the world that I’ve made for myself,” she said. “A lot of steps along the way were hard and scary, and so it’s not that everything to come is going to be easy.”

“But now I’m not the person who has to write that book,” she said. “I’m the person who wrote it.”

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‘Slow’ Review: A Swoon-Worthy Romantic Drama Grapples With Asexuality With Loving Care

Marija Kavtaradze and her two leads, Kęstutis Cicėnas and Greta Grinevičiūtė, craft a beautifully choreographed study in coupled intimacy.

By Manuel Betancourt

Manuel Betancourt

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Slow - Variety Critic's Pick

Romantic dramas — and romantic comedies, for that matter — hinge on the conviction that when we find “the one” we will be all the more malleable for it. It’s not so much that we will change who we are but that who we will become alongside our lover will be a better version of who we are without them. In Marija Kavtaradze ’s intimate and touching “ Slow ,” a budding couple put such a belief to the test, sketching out the challenges of what it means to balance the selfishness and selflessness that’s required when being in a committed relationship.

Popular on Variety

As “Slow” unfolds, Kavtaradze’s script takes you through the requisite challenges Elena and Dovydas face as they try to build a life together — one that, as Dovydas reminds Elena, necessarily has to make room for his sexual preferences, or lack thereof. At times that feels incredibly easy, like when she sees how thoughtful and caring he can be on any given day, his mere touch (like when they hold hands for the first time) making her feel whole — wanted, even, though not in the way she’s used to. At others, their rather sexless relationship feels incredibly hard, with Dovydas constantly feeling like he needs to either apologize for his lack of sexual interest in her or wildly compensate in order to satiate her needs. That back and forth, a dance in and around intimacy, structures much of “Slow” which, in the end, is a heartbreaking study of what it means to try and meet your partner where they’re at all while demanding they do the same for you.

Playing with the genre trappings of a modern-day romance, “Slow” demands we assess what those familiar beats reveal about how it is we understand such seemingly self-evident concepts like “love,” “desire” and “commitment.” It helps that with a dancer on one end and a sign language interpreter on the other, Kavtaradze’s film benefits from being rooted in a sensual rather than a sexual world. The writer-director gets her actors to embody moments of closeness that cannot be collapsed into lust, nor conceived as mere preamble for something else. Indeed, those dance numbers Elena is choreographing with her colleagues and those love songs Dovydas ends up interpreting on camera work as fitting interludes that further stress how in tune this couple is with their own bodies, and yet how their joint intimate language proves hard nevertheless to harness and make sense of.

Theirs is a love story that touches on well-worn tropes (about jealousy, commitment and the like) and yet they’re made to feel quite new. Neither dryly didactic nor neutered when it comes to its depiction of asexuality, “Slow” reveals itself to be quite a tender portrait of love and companionship, of what our bodies yearn and want in others, and how we could do well to upend the stories we tell each other about living and loving another.

Reviewed online, April 18, 2024. In Sundance Film Festival 2023. Running time: 108 MIN.

  • Production: (Lithuania-Spain-Sweden) A KimStim release of an M-Films, Frida Films, Garagefilm International, Film Stockholm production. Producer: Marija Razgutė. Co-producers: Luisa Romeo, Anna-Maria Kantarius.
  • Crew: Director, writer: Marija Kavtaradze. Camera: Laurynas Bareiša. Editor: Silvija Vilkaitė. Music: Irya Gmeyner, Martin Hederos, Vincent Barriere.
  • With: Greta Grinevičiūtė, Kęstutis Cicėnas. (Lithuanian, English, Sign Language dialogue)

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movie review love and death

10 Best One Season Anime You Can Stream on Netflix Now

  • Netflix offers a diverse selection of anime, including popular series like Death Note and new originals like Cyberpunk Edgerunner .
  • Toradora! showcases a heartwarming story of friendship and romance, with relatable characters and high school drama.
  • Devilman Crybaby delivers a dark and tragic tale of demons, exploring deep themes of anti-war and human nature.

Although many anime series run for many seasons, a select few are so brief, they only lasted for one. What these anime lack in length, they make up for in entertainment value. With memorable characters, complex and incredible plots, and breathtaking visuals, these short series will undoubtedly be remembered by viewers for years to come.

Netflix has really expanded their anime offerings over the past few years, even creating a handful of popular Netflix original animes. The series available on the platform span many genres, including adventure, romance, thriller, drama, and countless others . From fan-favorites Death Note and Neon Genesis Evangelion , to new Netflix originals like Cyberpunk Edgerunner, there are a variety of options on Netflix to please every kind of watcher.

Toradora!'s Lighthearted Slice-Of-Life Romance Is Relatable & Fun

Produced by j.c. staff, based on the original light novel series by yuyuko takemiya.

Toradora! is a delightfully lighthearted and fun romance anime. Ryuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka cross paths and truly hate each other at first, because Taiga is quite abrasive and mean to everyone she meets. Eventually, they make peace and strike up a friendship, mutually scheming to help the other person woo their crush.

The series includes everything one would expect from a romantic anime set in high school: hilarious moments, dramatic love triangles, misunderstandings, and great bonds of friendship. One aspect fans particularly enjoy is Taiga's character development throughout the series, as she becomes a kinder person and more loving in her friendships. The characters in Toradora ! may not be perfect, but no one is. Because of this, they are relatable, and they continue growing and maturing together throughout the anime.

Watch on Netflix

Darwin's Game Offers a Perfect Introduction To Death Game Anime

Produced by nexus, based on the original manga by flipflops.

Kaname Sudō, an ordinary high school student, gets more than he bargained for when he discovers a simple game app he downloaded is actually a deadly fight to the death competition . Kaname swears he won't stop until he eliminates the Game Master and wins, but only time will tell if he can accomplish his goal. The series is fast-paced and follows the characters as they fight for their lives with the help of the Sigils they each received in the game.

Due to the fast-moving nature of this series and the relatively low episode count, there is no filler. Each battle or encounter between the main character and another player is integral to the plot. An abundance of death game anime have been released lately, and the genre has grown in popularity, with Darwin's Game capturing the essence of this genre perfectly . With a dedicated and admirable protagonist, a horrifying competition, and thrilling battles packed with many contestants that reveal their own interesting goals and motives, the series is a perfect starter death game anime for someone looking to try the genre.

10 Best Death Game Anime

Violet evergarden inspires with a beautiful and profound story about emotion, produced by kyoto animation, based on the original light novel series by kana akatsuki.

Violet Evergarden follows a main character by the same name, who is looking to make a new life for herself in the aftermath of war. She begins work at a letter writing agency and finds great pleasure and fulfillment in her new job. Violet slowly begins to build new relationships, rediscover beauty in the world, and make sense of long forgotten memories of her beloved old master.

The story of Violet Evergarden is worth watching to experience its emotional moments, drama, and overall, the breathtaking beauty of the series in both narrative and visuals . Through Violet's clients' stories at the writing agency, the anime is able to impart countless lessons on the importance of human connection and what love looks like in practice. These experiences also shape Violet herself, expanding her understanding of the range of emotions and helping her recover from the horrors she has been through and form a new life.

Violet Evergarden: The Movie Blu-ray Review - A Beloved Series' Ultimate Love Letter

Romantic killer defies the conventions of romance anime, produced by domerica, based on the original manga by wataru momose.

The premise of Romantic Killer is quite hilarious and offers a twist on the typical romance anime . Typically, the protagonist in a romance anime is eager to find love, but the same cannot be said for Anzu Hoshino. She is adamantly against romance, but love wizard Riri has other plans and continually pushes Anzu into awkward situations with potential partners in hopes of sparking a connection.

Romantic Killer is humorous and pokes fun at typical rom-com clichés by pushing the main character right into these standard romantic scenarios, much to her dismay. The series is also unique for the genre since it includes a protagonist who is disinterested in love and unable to be swayed by societal norms or the opinions of others, making her truly strong in her convictions. Romantic Killer is certainly worth watching to experience a new take on the popular romance genre, with a story that heads in an entirely different and unexpected direction than the typical love story.

Blue Period Is an Artist's Dream Anime

Produced by seven arcs, based on the original manga by tsubasa yamaguchi.

Yatora Yaguchi, the high school main character of Blue Period, is hopelessly bored with life. He feels as if he is missing something and feels like there is more to life than what he is currently experiencing. Thankfully, once Yatora tries his hand at art, he discovers this is the passion and creative outlet he's been missing.

This lighthearted coming-of-age story will be enjoyable for almost anyone, but art lovers will especially enjoy Yatora's devoted passion and the scenes of him painting with great vigor. Almost everyone can relate to the feeling of being lost in life and seeking out a greater purpose, making Yatora's journey incredibly relatable. Fans will certainly feel inspired by his heartwarming story and lofty dreams of attending Tokyo University of the Arts. Blue Period is a wonderful watch that is sure to spark any viewer's creative side and inspire them to work hard towards their dreams too.

Blue Period: What The Animes Name Really Means

Cyberpunk edgerunners reveals a dystopian world overrun by crime, produced by trigger, screenplay written by masahiko otsuka and yoshiki usa.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is one of Netflix's best original series yet. The series explores a world that has fallen into dystopian conditions , filled with nothing but crime, danger, and fighting. With no other choice, protagonist David Martinez takes a job as a mercenary to make a living. This position is called an "edgerunner," hence the show's title.

This anime is one of the shortest out there, with only 10 episodes, but fans would argue that this is sufficient to tell a remarkable and memorable story. The series does a great job building a grim dystopia, and showcasing the high-stakes battles the characters are faced with in order to survive in a world with seemingly no hope. Although it is a tragic show at its core, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is also visually stunning in its bold character designs and bright animation and perfectly captures the unique "cyberpunk" aesthetic .

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

David Martinez (Kenichiro Ohashi) is a streetwise kid living in the slums of Night City in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. To survive, David becomes an edgerunner, also known as cyberpunk, taking on mercenary jobs outside the system. Together with a group of new and veteran edgerunners, David will shoot for the moon to escape the underbelly of the increasingly cyber-obsessed city. Unfortunately, the law isn't the only group that the edgerunners will have to contend with, as other heavily cyber-augmented humans will pose an even more significant threat. 

Cast Tomoyo Kurosawa, Kenjiro Tsuda, Kenichiro Ohashi, Kazuhiko Inoue, Aoi Yuki

Release Date September 13, 2022

Genres Animation, Action, Adventure

Network Netflix

Streaming Service(s) Netflix

Franchise(s) Cyberpunk

Writers Masahiko Otsuka, Yoshiki Usa, Mike Pondsmith

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Expresses the Importance Of Living Life Fully

Produced by bug films, based on the original manga by haro aso.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead follows protagonist Akira Tendo as he makes the best of a terrible situation: a zombie apocalypse. Unlike everyone else, Akira is delighted by the zombie outbreak , as this gives him a chance to leave his draining job and accomplish his dreams in a way he never could before. He races around town with friends, ticking as many items off his bucket list as he can before he transforms into a zombie . This series is strikingly different from any other zombie apocalypse series, since Akira does not become depressed or terrified, instead he is joyful.

The anime is fairly lighthearted but also imparts a core message that is very inspirational: the importance of living life fully. Akira's office job caused him to fall into a boring and depressing routine, but this new set of circumstances, although scary, gave him the freedom to rediscover what is really valuable to him and how he wants his life to look. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is a fun watch on its surface with great action and visuals, but fans will hopefully also take away the pivotal moral of the series too and apply it to their own lives.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is a horror-comedy anime series based on the Manga by writer Haro Aso, and illustrator Kotaro Takata. The show follows a twenty-something young man with a routine life to which he has resigned. However, his fortune changes when a zombie outbreak claims his city, prompting him to create a bucket list of 100 things to do before he dies as he now finds the new world as a bastion of lost opportunities waiting to be seized.

Cast Zeno Robinson, Laura Post, Abby Trott, Xander Mobus

Release Date July 9, 2023

Genres Comedy, Horror, Anime

Franchise(s) Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Writers Hiroshi Seko

Directors Kazuki Kawagoe

Rating Not Rated

Devilman Crybaby Is a Tragic, Anti-War Story

Produced by science saru, based on the original manga by go nagai.

For a phenomenal dark fantasy series, look no further than Devilman Crybaby. The series follows Akira Fudo, a high school student with a deadly secret: he can transform into a powerful demon. As humanity discovers the presence of demons on earth, havoc ensues and Akira must fight to protect those he cares about from the human vs. demon war occurring around him.

Devilman Crybaby is short, at only twelve episodes, but the sobering story it tells will stick with viewers long after watching. A horrifying twist is revealed towards the end of the series, unveiling the secret identity of one important character, and this reveal leads to a tragic ending. The anime contains a lot of interesting religious imagery and focuses heavily on the idea of demons entering the human world and battling humanity. But at its core, Devilman Crybaby 's author describes the main moral of the story as anti-war , and his hope was to showcase the cruel actions people resort to in battle.

Devilman Crybaby's Blu-ray Extras (& Why It's So Rare)

Neon genesis evangelion explores the battle between mechas & angels, produced by gainax, based on the original manga by yoshiyuki sadamoto.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is an older series originally from the late 1990s, but is still incredibly popular today, and for good reason. Shinji Ikari, a seemingly ordinary teenager, becomes thrust into a terrifying war between evil beings called Angels and the Evangelion mecha robots that an organization called Nerv created to fight back against these threats. He is terrified at first, but as the series progresses, he becomes a more talented fighter and a better pilot of the Evangelion mechs.

This anime was one of the first mecha series of its time, paving the way for more excellent additions to the genre and even inspiring other mangakas like Gege Akutami who wrote Jujutsu Kaisen . The concept of angels and mechas battling to the death is fantastical, but the series also unpacks realistic interpersonal issues and human feelings like inadequacy and isolation perfectly. It takes a truly great anime to be both relatable and unbelievable, and Neon Genesis Evangelion is definitely both.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Created by Hideaki Anno

First Film Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth

TV Show(s) Neon Genesis Evangelion

Character(s) Shinji Ikari, Misato Katsuragi, Gendo Ikari, Mari Illustrious Makinami, Kaworu Nagisa, Toji Suzuhara, Asuka Langley Soryu, Rei Ayanami

Video Game(s) Neon Genesis Evangelion

Death Note Follows The Main Character's Tyrannical Scheme To Kill All Criminals

Produced by madhouse, based on the original manga by tsugumi ohba.

Death Note is a true classic and a must-watch for every anime fan. The main character, Light Yagami, is a typical high school honors student who finds a strange notebook one day, and discovers writing someone's name in it causes them to die. Armed with this new power, Light plans to eradicate all criminals and create a better world , where he will reign as "god." The anime is spectacular on so many levels, but one of the most intriguing but devastating aspects is watching Light gradually become less and less like himself as the Death Note's power gets to his head.

Light becomes increasingly desperate as he tries to keep his serial killer identity hidden, and this desperation leads him to commit many unbelievable actions, causing the series to have many jaw-dropping twists and deaths. Death Note is a flawless addition to the psychological thriller genre. Although the series is indeed filled with remarkable action scenes and horrifying death sequences, the most interesting battles occur in Light's own head . This anime does a stellar job depicting an average person getting caught up in power and losing themselves.

Created by Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata

TV Show(s) Death Note

Character(s) Minoru Tanaka, Teru Mikami, Mello (Death Note), Near (Death Note), Misa Amane, Ryuk, L Lawliet, Light Yagami

Video Game(s) Death Note: Kira Game

10 Best One Season Anime You Can Stream on Netflix Now

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Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian leaning against a pick-up.

Love Lies Bleeding review – Kristen Stewart keeps it real in deliciously lurid outlaw romance

Rose Glass’s follow-up to her acclaimed Saint Maud is a scorchingly sexy, darkly violent tale of a gym manager’s love affair with a bodybuilder

T his may seem an unexpected point to make about an actor who is arguably one of the coolest people on the planet, but the key to Kristen Stewart ’s mesmerising screen presence is her ordinariness. I don’t mean her looks, although as Lou, the manager of a bodybuilding gym in an insalubrious New Mexico backwater, Stewart’s natural magnetism is somewhat muted behind a whey powder pallor, an air of defeated weariness and hair that looks as if it’s been deep-fried rather than washed.

Rather, it’s the unstudied, naturalistic quality of her performances, which are seeded with little glitchy details and gestures – the way she rakes her fingers through her fringe; the moment when she nervously wipes her nose on the sleeve of her T-shirt. Small things, perhaps, but these seemingly unconscious tics humanise her characters. They are recognisable, relatable moments of social awkwardness that anchor her in (or at least near) the real world. It’s a quality that adds to all her performances, but which is particularly invaluable in British director Rose Glass’s second picture, the deliciously lurid and thrillingly degenerate outlaw romance Love Lies Bleeding . When the rest of the movie launches itself headlong into outlandish, almost cartoonish excess, Lou is plausibly three-dimensional and grounded. The rooted realism that underpins Stewart’s performance offers a necessary balance to some of the more untrammelled impulses in Glass’s follow-up to her impressive debut feature, Saint Maud (2020).

Another significant asset is newcomer Katy O’Brian, who shoulders what is probably the most demanding role in the film. Jackie is a bodybuilder from the kind of Godfearing midwestern farming country that views a “muscle chick” as an unnatural abomination. Blowing into Lou’s grim home town, more a collection of strip malls and casual violence than a functioning community, Jackie decides to hole up for a while and earn some money while she prepares for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas.

She is a magnificent creature, glistening with confidence and physical assurance. It’s no wonder that Lou gawps across the gym, mouth agape, when she catches sight of Jackie, with her dark honey tan and a swarm of men preening around her. Eager to impress the new arrival later that evening, Lou scurries off into the office to fetch a box of steroid shots; she lays them in front of Jackie like an offering to a deity. The relationship that ignites between them is sweaty, grubby and scorching hot, but as the steroids do their work, warping and distorting Jackie’s body and her mind, a savage, self-destructive, simmering violence creeps into their romance.

And this is where Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) and her husband, JJ (Dave Franco), come in. At first glance the pair seem to be woefully underwritten, schematic cardboard cutouts rather than layered characters. She’s the battered wife; he’s the short-fused bully who takes out his inadequacy on his spouse. Concern for Beth’s safety is why Lou can’t bring herself to leave this spiteful small town, despite numerous reasons to do so (first of these being her gun-toting estranged father, played with reptilian menace by Ed Harris). But I suspect that Glass intends Beth and JJ to be more than just the dramatic device that unleashes the film’s dark heart and violent impulses. They also serve as a kind of twisted mirror image of Lou and Jackie’s amour fou and a cautionary warning that any relationship this thoroughly soaked in blood can’t, ultimately, end well, however invincible the partnership and the passion that drives it might seem at the time.

And there’s a whole lot of blood, in a movie that embraces full-bore nastiness on every level. With the lip-smacking relish that she brings to the body-horror elements of the picture, and the sickening, sinewy crunches in the sound design, Glass ranks alongside the French director of Titane , Julia Ducournau , as one of the most exciting film-makers working in genre cinema. Both she and Ducournau share a heady, freewheeling independence in their approach and a healthy resistance to genre conventions. Both combine an appetite for gruesome excess with an impressive intellectual rigour.

Love Lies Bleeding won’t be for everyone. I’ve watched it twice, and it plays rather better to an up-for-it, late-night audience than it does at 11am on a Sunday morning. But this is a movie that will find its people. And once it does, cult status is more or less assured.

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  2. Love and Death Movie Review & Film Summary (1975)

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  4. ‘Love & Death’ Review: Elizabeth Olsen Gets Lovely and Bloody in This

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  5. ‘Love & Death’ Review: Psychological Portrait As One-Dimensional Headline

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COMMENTS

  1. Love & Death movie review & film summary (2023)

    Love & Death. On July 13 th, 1980, Candy Montgomery struck Betty Gore with an axe roughly 41 times. This is undisputed. Even Montgomery herself admits it. And yet she's the only person who knows exactly what happened. The story of the death of Betty Gore was a true-crime staple for years for many reasons—foremost among them the uniqueness ...

  2. Love and Death

    Feb 3, 2024. Rated: 3.5/4 • Feb 13, 2023. Jul 13, 2022. In Woody Allen's comic take on 19th-century Russian philosophical novels and the Soviet-era epic films made from them, Boris (Woody Allen ...

  3. Love and Death Review: A Corrective to Crime Sensationalism

    April 27, 2023 2:43 PM EDT. N obody was supposed to get hurt. This is the irony that drives Love & Death, creator David E. Kelley's empathetic HBO Max docudrama based on the true tragedy that ...

  4. Love & Death review

    Love & Death is a seven-part dramatisation of the story of 1980s Texas suburban housewife Candy Montgomery, who killed her friend and neighbour Betty Gore with 41 blows from an axe. She claimed ...

  5. 'Love And Death' HBO Max Review: Stream It Or Skip It?

    LOVE & DEATH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? Opening Shot: An overhead shot of a small town. "Wylie, Texas.". As we pan to the front door of a house, we see a date, "Friday, June 13, 1980.". The ...

  6. 'Love and Death' Review: Elizabeth Olsen's Ax Killer Candy Montgomery

    The main attraction of Love & Death is the lead performance of Olsen, who—temporarily released from her Marvel duties—shines charismatically as Candy, the Wylie, Texas, wife and mother who, on ...

  7. Love and Death

    Love and Death strikes me as majestically funny: the most shapely piece of cinema that Woody Allen has yet made, and one of comedy's hardiest ripostes to extinction. Full Review | Mar 5, 2024.

  8. 'Love & Death' and the Feminine Urge to Commit Murder

    11. Elizabeth Olsen stars in "Love & Death" as Candy Montgomery, a Texas mother of two who killed her friend with an ax in 1980. Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max. By Alexis Soloski. Published April ...

  9. Love And Death Review

    Original Title: Love And Death. One of Woody Allen's few excursions out of Manhattan, but definitely a fully paid up member of the Early Funny Ones club, this magnificent, often anarchic ...

  10. 'Love & Death' on HBO Max Review: An Excellent Elizabeth ...

    Love & Death retells this story largely from Candy Montgomery's point-of-view. When we first meet bubbly Candy, she is an active member of her local Methodist church where she sings in the choir ...

  11. 'Love & Death' Review: Elizabeth Olsen Is Outstanding in ...

    HBO Max series Love & Death, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons, tackles the true story of lies, infidelity, and murder with complexity.

  12. 'Love & Death' Review: Elizabeth Olsen Stars in HBO Max Miniseries

    Screenwriter David E. Kelley adapted "Love & Death" from the work of journalists Jim Atkinson and John Bloom, who co-authored a series of 1984 articles for Texas Monthly as well as the 2018 ...

  13. 'Love & Death' Boasts a Delightfully Gonzo Elizabeth Olsen and Little Else

    Crime, David E. Kelley, Elizabeth Olsen, HBO, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Murder. HBO Max miniseries about the real-life Texas mistress who killed her lover's wife with an axe comes in the wake of ...

  14. Love & Death (TV Mini Series 2023)

    Love & Death: Created by David E. Kelley. With Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit. Two churchgoing couples enjoy small town family life in Texas - until somebody picks up an axe.

  15. Love & Death: Limited Series

    Sophie Butcher Empire Magazine Love & Death lives and dies by Elizabeth Olsen's excellent, charismatic central performance. Rated: 3/5 Sep 11, 2023 Full Review Jasper Rees Daily Telegraph (UK ...

  16. The True Story Behind HBO Max's Love & Death

    Love & Death is the third adaptation made using this case as a subject, following the 1990 CBS movie A Killing in a Small Town and the 2022 Hulu miniseries Candy starring Jessica Biel.

  17. Love & Death (miniseries)

    Love & Death is an American biographical crime drama television miniseries directed by Lesli Linka Glatter and Clark Johnson, written by David E. Kelley that premiered on April 27, 2023, on HBO Max. It stars Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Krysten Ritter, Tom Pelphrey, Elizabeth Marvel, and Keir Gilchrist.. The series is based on the true story of Candy Montgomery, a ...

  18. 'Love & Death' Review: Elizabeth Olsen in David E. Kelley's Drama

    Love & Death. The Bottom Line Maybe it's time to put this case to rest for a while. Airdate: Thursday, April 27 (HBO Max) Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Krysten ...

  19. Love and Death (1975)

    Love and Death: Directed by Woody Allen. With Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Georges Adet, Frank Adu. In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.

  20. Love & Death review: Elizabeth Olsen delves into brittle psyche of axe

    Love & Death is based on a true story, which was, bizarrely, already dramatised in a 2022 five-part mini-series, Candy, starring Jessica Biel as Montgomery and Pablo Schreiber and Melanie Lynskey ...

  21. 'Love & Death': Everything You Need to Know About the True ...

    To amend the void in her life, she approaches Allan Gore (played by Jesse Plemons) at a Sunday service about them having an affair. During the rest of the teaser, there are shots of the two ...

  22. The Dead Don't Hurt (2023)

    The Dead Don't Hurt: Directed by Viggo Mortensen. With Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Solly McLeod, Garret Dillahunt. Two pioneers fight for the survival of their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War.

  23. Every The Fall Guy Action Scene, Ranked By How Dangerous The Stunt Is

    Colt sneaks back onto the set of Metalstorm to reunite with Jody after faking his own death, but he makes the mistake of sneaking up behind her while wearing an alien costume from the movie.The fight in her trailer is played for laughs, but there's still potential danger due to the small area that the stunt performers have to work in. Director David Leitch started out as a stuntman, so some ...

  24. Love Lies Bleeding review: The best grubby, bloody lesbian thriller of

    Love Lies Bleeding review: The best grubby, bloody lesbian thriller of the season Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian's fiery, gut-clenched romance keeps Rose Glass's slice of Americana ticking

  25. With 'All Fours,' Miranda July Experiments in Fiction and in Life

    The latest in fashion, trends, love and more. Meet This Year's Met Gala Co-Chairs: This year, Anna Wintour, Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Chris Hemsworth and Bad Bunny will head up the gala .

  26. 'Slow' Review: Romantic Drama Treats Asexuality With Loving Care

    With 'Slow,' Marija Kavtaradze and her leads, Kęstutis Cicėnas and Greta Grinevičiūtė, craft a beautifully choreographed study in coupled intimacy.

  27. 10 Best One Season Anime You Can Stream on Netflix Now

    Violet Evergarden: The Movie Blu-ray Review - A Beloved Series' Ultimate Love Letter Violet Evergarden: The Movie is a sequel to the beloved anime series, and with a new blu-ray release, the movie ...

  28. Love Lies Bleeding review

    Love Lies Bleeding won't be for everyone. I've watched it twice, and it plays rather better to an up-for-it, late-night audience than it does at 11am on a Sunday morning.