the last five years movie review

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The last five years, common sense media reviewers.

Musical adaptation has charming stars; some racy stuff.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Despite being about the demise of a marriage (due

Before their marriage goes south, Jamie and Cathy

Sex scenes include one when Jamie and Cathy first

A couple of uses of "s--t," plus one &qu

iPhone, MacBook.

Adults drink at parties and receptions. In a quick

Parents need to know that The Last Five Years is based on an off-Broadway musical from 2002 in which a man and a woman take turns chronicling the demise of their relationship, with the twist being that Cathy (Anna Kendrick) tells her story from end to beginning, while Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) tells his side from…

Positive Messages

Despite being about the demise of a marriage (due to physical separation and lack of emotional support), the movie has worthwhile messages about how insecurity and resentment can eat away at a loving relationship. Also, you can't avoid success to make someone else feel better about their own losses, and it's important to believe in yourself.

Positive Role Models

Before their marriage goes south, Jamie and Cathy are supportive and encouraging of each other. They're each other's biggest fans for a while. But they also let each other down, and Jamie betrays Cathy by cheating on her while she's working away from home.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sex scenes include one when Jamie and Cathy first meet; they're shown half-dressed tussling around on a bed (she's in just a bra, and he's shirtless as they're under the sheets). In another scene, they're in bed, and you see bare shoulders. And during one song late in the film, he commits adultery with various women, all of whom wear skimpy lingerie. Some song lyrics are suggestive.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

A couple of uses of "s--t," plus one "f--k," "bitch," "hell," "damn," "ass," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Adults drink at parties and receptions. In a quick shot of Jamie's ex-girlfriends, one smokes a bong.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Last Five Years is based on an off-Broadway musical from 2002 in which a man and a woman take turns chronicling the demise of their relationship, with the twist being that Cathy ( Anna Kendrick ) tells her story from end to beginning, while Jamie ( Jeremy Jordan ) tells his side from beginning to end. Although the film is being marketed as a romance, it's obvious from the very beginning (Cathy's first song is about grieving the end of her marriage) that things don't work out for the couple. The language is occasionally strong, including "f--k" and "s--t," and there are a few scantily clad love scenes, some of which include adultery. Lyrics include a few suggestive phrases, and there's also some drinking and a quick shot of a woman using a bong. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

At the beginning of THE LAST FIVE YEARS, a grief-stricken Cathy ( Anna Kendrick ) sings about the demise of her marriage to Jamie ( Jeremy Jordan ). In the next song, the story rewinds to Jamie falling into bed with Cathy for the first time. As in the original off-Broadway musical's stage performances, the movie alternates between the two main characters singing about their relationship, except that her story moves backward and his forward. Cathy is a struggling actress hoping to avoid yet another summer working in regional Ohio theater, while Jamie is a successful debut novelist whose book is toast of New York City publishing. As his star rises and her insecurities get the best of her, their sweet early romance turns into a challenging, resentful marriage.

Is It Any Good?

This is a heartbreakingly honest musical, with two charming actors in the lead roles. Fans of Jason Robert Brown's semi-autobiographical two-person musical (which in effect is two one-person shows with one duet in the middle and one at the end) will appreciate seeing it translated to the big screen. But those without any background knowledge of the musical may not immediately understand the overriding concept (that their stories are told on two different timelines) or why there's quite so much singing compared to dialogue.

Whether you like musicals or not, there are a few numbers that work remarkably well visually: "ShiksaGoddess" and "A Summer in Ohio" are both funny; Jamie goes through a list of his ex-girlfriends (whom the audience can see lined up) in the former, and in the latter, Cathy reveals the hilarity and embarrassment of working in an Ohio theater troupe with an eccentric cast of characters. Jordan and Kendrick excel at the humor, so those songs, in addition to Jamie's story-within-a-story "The Schmuel Song," are both visually appealing and fun to see performed. The sweet engagement duet "The Next Ten Minutes" is also done with loving attention using Manhattan as a backdrop. Director Richard LaGravenese clearly adores the musical, but despite the enthusiastic performances he coaches from his stars, there's not enough "between" the songs to make The Last Five Years appeal to those unfamiliar with the unique musical romance.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the popularity of movie musicals. Although many musicals are family friendly, is The Last Five Years appropriate for younger audiences? Why, or why not?

Do you prefer musicals like this one, with more singing than dialogue, or do you prefer more story with your musicals? Do you think this would appeal to audiences who aren't already familiar with the musical?

Do you think the story favors one person over the other? What are its messages about romantic relationships?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 13, 2015
• On DVD or streaming : May 5, 2015
• Cast : Anna Kendrick , Jeremy Jordan , Meg Hudson
• Director : Richard LaGravenese
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Radius TWC
• Genre : Musical
• Topics : Music and Sing-Along
• Run time : 94 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sexual material, brief strong language and a drug image
• Last updated : September 24, 2023

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The Last Five Years

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It sounds impossible: a musical about a failed five-year marriage in which Jamie Wallerstein (Jeremy Jordan), a successful young novelist, and his shiksa wife Cathy Hiatt ( Anna Kendrick ), a struggling young actress, never stop singing to each other. It worked like a charm when I saw it Off-Broadway in 2002 with the stellar Sheri Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz singing their broken hearts out. The score by Jason Robert Brown, a recent Tony winner for his musical of The Bridges of Madison County and now represented on Broadway by Honeymoon in Vegas, put a spell on anyone in earshot. The CD is a deserved cult item. But what works on stage becomes a dodgier situation when you put those two star-crossed lovers on camera in a near deserted New York. How do you reach lyrical heights when film grounds you to reality?

You don’t actually, despite director Richard LaGravense’s sincere efforts to do so. It helps that you can feel LaGravenese’s love for the material in every frame, even the contrived ones. He’s retained the film’s two-tiered structure in which Jamie sings his take on the story from the beginning of their relationship and Cathy goes backwards from the breakup. Don’t worry, you’ll find your balance. Kendrick and Jordan work miracles, giving  glorious voice to their roles in performances that brim over with humor, heart and ravishing romance. Kendrick is sublime at showing why Cathy is resilient and still hurting. And Jordan cuts to the quick in the lyric, “I will not fail so you can be comfortable, Cathy/I will not lose because you can’t win.” It’s easy to overlook the failings in The Last Five Years. Let it in and it knocks you back on your heels. Just like love.

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Anna Kendrick Is Infinitely Winning in the Tastefully Adapted The Last Five Years

Richard Lagravenese has adapted Jason Robert Brown’s two-character musical The Last Five Years with taste, feeling, and a vast reservoir of sadness. His camera moves gently—with gentlemanly discretion—through the Manhattan brownstone window of Cathy (Anna Kendrick) as she finds the good-bye note from her husband, Jamie (Jeremy Jordan). She sings, “Jamie is over and Jamie is gone,” and the feature-length flashback that follows is steeped in hurt. (That first song is called “Still Hurting.”)

When they meet, Jewish Jamie is dreaming of being a best-selling serious novelist, “ shiksa goddess” Cathy of a career on Broadway. He realizes his dream, and she doesn’t. In “I’m a Part of That,” she tries to tell herself—as he tells her—that she is a part of his achievement, but she knows she’ll be destined to “follow in his stride instead of side by side.” While she troops from one failed audition to the next, he succumbs to the lure of young hotties. In the final song, set in two time periods, the shining-eyed newlywed Cathy sings “Goodbye Until Tomorrow” while the grim, five-years-later Jamie sings, “I Could Never Rescue You.”

LaGravenese has written wonderful films, among them The Fisher King and The Ref, and wrote and directed the little-seen gem Living Out Loud . He shot The Last Five Years after the undeserved box-office fiasco of his Beautiful Creatures (more fun than most YA adaptations), and his evident melancholy harmonizes almost too well with Brown’s. Before I closed my notebook, I wrote “:(”. It doesn’t help that Jamie is insipidly self-involved and that Jordan (whom I’ve admired onstage) doesn’t draw you in as much as you’d hope; his face is a Broadway mask. His long, Yiddish-inflected song-story number “The Schmuel Song” should have been edited with a match.

I love the film anyway. The camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano. Once or twice a note comes this close to piercing but always softens into sweetness. There are so many shades to her tremulousness that we need some new names, the way Eskimos differentiate between grades of snow.

*This article appears in the February 9, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

• the last five years
• anna kendrick
• new york magazine
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The Last Five Years review – Anna Kendrick is spectacular in on-off love musical

Kendrick’s big, expressive voice, clever framing and strangely catchy showtunes carry this exciting, mostly dialogue-free movie

M ost film adaptations of stage musicals are quick to exploit the boundless nature of cinema. How about that opening to West Side Story, with helicopter shots, snappy editing and leaping all over Manhattan? That’s not exactly how Richard LaGravanese’s adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s off-Broadway show The Last Five Years plays it. Its opening number features lead performer Anna Kendrick and pretty much 50% of the cast standing on an X as the camera makes subtle moves around her. It’s not a minute before she’s belting out her minor-key breakup ballad Still Hurting to the cheap seats. It’s the first of 14 numbers in this mostly dialogue-free movie, and a great example of musical theatre’s best but sometimes most annoying feature – the new song that sounds like something you’ve heard a thousand times.

The tunes in The Last Five Years are so catchy you may wonder if you’ve taken part in some Manchurian Candidate -like experiment. But this queer familiarity enables you to focus not only on the lyrics, but on the non-verbal drama between the two leads. The star of this show is The Show, and while it makes use of New York and other outdoor locations, this is as straight a staging you can get without shooting in a surrealist black box. The story is very simple – a New York couple (she, a would-be actress, he, a successful young novelist) fall in, then out, of love. Kendrick’s Cathy and Jeremy Jordan’s Jamie trade off songs detailing their doomed romance. At first, it seems like a long flashback, but in time it is revealed that Cathy is starting at the end and moving backwards in memory, while Jamie starts with their first hookup and finally lands where Cathy began. It’s a gimmick that probably works better on the stage, where the songs are all unaccompanied.

My obliviousness to the clever framing didn’t detract much. While I now recognise that the marriage song in the middle is where they connect, I got that it represented their apex. It’s also a chapter with some lovely visual choices, such as focusing on a closeup of held hands walking through Central Park. It’s a searing image, especially considering how much of the film is a basic format of shot/reverse shot singing in interiors. Not that the movie needs much more. The lyrics swerve from clever (“I left Columbia and don’t regret it / I wrote a book and Sonny Mehta read it!”), to genuinely touching. Jamie sings an Isaac Bashevis Singer -like story he’s written about a shtetl tailor named Shmuel which begins as a goof but turns into a remarkable example of tenderness. There’s also a deliciously mean-spirited song about doing summer stock in Ohio. The Buckeye state’s estimated 11.5 million residents may want to duck out of the theatre during that number.

What’s most exciting about The Last Five Years is how, unless you are attuned to small, modern musical theatre, this will be an entirely fresh production, but not an amateur one. Jordan more than holds his own, but Kendrick is spectacular. Despite her tiny frame she has a big, expressive voice. She’s beautiful, but not a Hollywood bombshell. Her sharp facial features and slight overbite make her look like a real person. In continued close-up, chewing through these emotional show tunes, it’s another example of why she’s among the most exciting young actors in film right now.

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The Last Five Years Review

The Last Five Years presents Anna Kendrick as an official musical movie star...and in a film that actually sings.

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The movie musical has an expected disposition, especially in the modern age where it seems only the realm of lavish stage adaptations with glitzy spectacles and glitzier stars trying to compensate for the notes they barely carry past the camera operator.

Other than also being an adaptation from a stage show, Richard LaGravenese’s The Last Five Years avoids all of these frills, making for a strikingly intimate and stripped down affair—an indie that lives up to its Off-Broadway pedigree by resting solely on the performances of its leads Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, two performers who can more than carry a tune. Indeed, they fling them across an eclectic range from tragic to revelatory while still finding time to take a few deserved jabs at Russell Crowe’s singing voice. And they earn it too.

Playing the theatre world’s equivalent of Annie Hall (though at far higher stakes with the amount of time raised in this half-decade relationship), the two actors respectively embody the characters of Cathy and Jamie to soulful effect. Their reversed reflections on a shared love and marriage, and its ultimate disintegration (which is revealed in the first scene), commands the bright hot spotlight of Jason Robert Brown’s music, lyrics and book; it’s a private study for a couple whose love story got only solos, seemingly oblivious for both parties that it needed to be duets all along.

Like its title suggests, The Last Five Years chronicles a New York couple that has been together since right after college for the better part of a decade and married for several of those years. However, it’s all over when the picture opens with Cathy coming home to find that her lover is gone for good, leaving only a “Dear John” note in his absence. After a raw piano ballad about “Still Hurting,” we are treated to an intriguing narrative knot: Cathy begins recalling their love story in reverse—from the bad times to way back when, during their heavenly first Brooklyn date. Each of these sequences, which is colored in by Cathy’s singing voice alone, is contrasted with how Jamie remembers things during his solos with a chronological order of alternating scenes that start at their beginning–and for Jamie that is of course from the first time they went to bed together.

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With two separate perspectives and singing voices, we are constantly bearing witness to narrative confessions, harmonizing through a vocal mise en scene their pain and the joy of an eventually failed marriage. The only time the actual voices mingle is at the film’s midpoint where there is a proposal and a wedding; for a brief moment, they’re in perfect accord.

The nonlinear approach of The Last Five Years aptly plays to the film’s minimalist vantage, which puts a strong moratorium on dancing extras, save for Cathy’s scenes as a struggling actress who bounces from one failed audition or community theater production to the next. The technique for the most part wisely underscores the “independent” nature of both the film and its Off-Broadway source material, but it should be noted that that besides the engagement, the characters of Cathy and Jamie never shared the stage in theatre. Rather, they are singing to an invisible partner and before a judging audience. The film shrewdly takes a more straightforward approach to this love story, as the imagined fights and reactions are captured onscreen, finding a necessary vitality.

But lest musical theatre fans recoil, there is a strategy to how these characters interact with one another in a script that includes Cathy and Jamie talking to many friends, colleagues, and even one another, yet almost everything that comes out of their mouths seems a lie or a denial. They are never speaking their mind unless they’re singing it, and that is when the passion and romance, as well as the tears, really flow in a nearly wall-to-wall musical.

Showcasing a very 20 th century poppy sound, these characters retain Jason Robert Brown’s songs that feel intentionally rooted in the songwriter grooves of the 1970s. Jamie very well may have been born around the block from fellow New York storyteller Billy Joel, as there is a piano key rocker DNA to all of the highly descriptive melodies and lyrics, such as when Jamie, a successful novelist by trade, enchants his girlfriend (while talking about himself and his stories) during “The Schmuel Song.”

The film’s one drawback is that while the songs pulsate with life, either by design or budget, LaGravenese’s direction does little to compensate for the majority of the sequences taking place in an Upper West Side apartment.  Mostly panning back and forth, the camera usually does not get much more of a cinematic workout than that of the aforementioned dinged Les Misérables.  Otherwise, the traditional Manhattan Love Story  iconography is heavily relied upon to fill in the margins. Luckily, they know where their advantages lie too.

Neither Jordan nor Kendrick is a stranger to musical theatre, but the latter is determined to resurrect the phrase “movie musical star.” Kendrick got her start with a Tony nomination for a musical at 12-years-old and has since crossed over to the pop ballads of Pitch Perfect movies and the more impressive Stephen Sondheim adaptation Into the Woods . But it’s with The Last Five Years that Kendrick really announces herself as a powerhouse, handling Brown’s music with ease for a film musical that was recorded live on set—at apparently 15 to 20 takes a song, according to press materials. Without ever seeming to be in want of a studio’s protection, Kendrick’s vocalizations alternate from playfully aggravated and unapologetically romantic, and Cathy gets the best musical moment of the film during a hellacious community theatre montage that finally gets out of the apartment (and finds the big laughs) for the showstopper, “A Summer in Ohio.”

Jordan, also hailing from theatre (as we have reviewed in the past ), brings a similar choral powerhouse to Jamie, plus a needed boyish charm. However, he seems somewhat restrained in utilizing his charisma since Jamie’s inherent narcissism both handicaps the character in terms of sympathy and also sinaglone appeal during the film’s very stuffed 94 minutes.

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The Last Five Years offers a layered and adult vision for relationships and why they can end, leaving plenty of the blame at both parties’ feet in the process. But it also achieves this through a Valentine’s Day charm that never feels anything less than romantic or even sweet, in spite of the early taste of bitter. But its most impressive accomplishment is that it’s a dramatic musical about real people with a song in their heart and, for once, in their voice too.

The Last Five Years is in theaters and on VOD on Feb. 13th. In the meantime, join me for a few notes on Twitter .

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

Movies | Review: ‘The Last Five Years’

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Already, you can watch “The Last Five Years” on demand, on your couch, in your jammies. Adapter and director Richard LaGravenese’s film version of the Jason Robert Brown stage show was made available last week on multiple platforms simultaneously. At home or in what the old folks call “a theater,” the results — modest, shrewd, uncompromised — deserve the attention and the 94 minutes of any fan of the musical genre.

This is not to say “The Last Five Years” is out to beguile you at every turn, or to assure you of a happy ending. Since its 2001 world premiere at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Ill., it has left adoring fans, haters and ambivalents in its wake in roughly equal numbers. The film version, extremely faithful to the source material, is likely to lead to similar results while introducing composer and lyricist Brown (“Parade,” “The Bridges of Madison County,” “Honeymoon in Vegas”) to a wider audience.

On stage “The Last Five Years” was a two-person show; on screen, it’s more than two, but not so you notice the opening-up. Brown’s chronicle of an ill-fated romance begins with struggling musical-theater performer Cathy, played by Anna Kendrick, still hurting (that’s the title of the first vocal number) from the end of her five years with hotshot novelist Jamie, played by Jeremy Jordan.

Jamie’s scenes and songs proceed in chronological order, from the start of the affair; Cathy, meanwhile, gives us the end and takes us back through the middle, and on back to the start. We know where it’s going or, rather, where these two will end, but Brown’s musical has more than structural cleverness in its corner.

The thing that makes “The Last Five Years” not for everybody is the thing that makes it interesting. Brown can’t bring himself to turn Jamie, who can be read as a fictionalized version of Brown himself, into anything other than a career-driven narcissist. This gives the material its sharp edge. Jaunty and slightly jaundiced songs like “A Summer in Ohio,” detailing Cathy’s pathetically funny misadventures in summer stock, lend it spice and wit.

LaGravenese shot the film in three weeks. Kendrick is spectacularly good — moving and honest, able to deliver the big numbers without tiring out the audience or scaling her effects too aggressively for the camera. Jordan, too, sings the hell out of his songs, but he hasn’t yet learned what Kendrick has: how to do very little on screen and still make it register. (His brand of energy, outsized and showbizzy, would work better if “The Last Five Years” told the story of two struggling musical theater performers, not one.)

The highest compliment I can pay LaGravenese’s film is this: “The Last Five Years” is a small, shrewd movie about large, messy emotions and regrets. It is a grown-up work about people who grow up the hard way, leaving one heart in disrepair and the other in reckless forward motion. It’s a sad piece, but not maudlin. And as far as I’m concerned, Anna Kendrick can make a musical twice annually for the next few decades.

“The Last Five Years” – 3 stars

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sexual material, brief strong language and a drug image)

Running time: 1:34

Opens: Friday (also available VOD)

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The Last Five Years Reviews

Whilst the film version doesn't capture the full magic of the show, it's a close-enough stopgap till the opportunity arises to see it on the stage again.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2021

The he said/she said construction, played forwards and backwards, negates the possibility of a clear-cut climax. Add to that the non-chemistry between the leads and you have an all-singing-all-dancing musical that falls flat.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 2, 2021

An unpleasant couple sings ridiculously on-the-nose lyrics about the collapse of a romance that we are given no way to sympathize with or understand. Absolute torture.

Full Review | Oct 26, 2020

The film feels bigger yet intimate, stagey yet appropriate for the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 13, 2020

There is a sincerity and a lack of sarcasm overall that makes these two and their story approachable and devoid of extra fluff or cliche.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 7, 2019

It makes very clear how it is possible to tell a love story like any other in an original way, without falling into the conventions. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 11, 2019

Catchy at one moment and then poignant in the next to match the shifting narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2019

There are some musicals that just weren't meant to be turned into movies. The Last Five Years, perhaps one of the most emotionally honest stage musicals in recent memory, is one such show.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 5, 2019

Jordan and Kendrick have wonderful chemistry.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Apr 30, 2019

Kendrick, in particular, sparkles like a rare diamond in a coal mine... Her optimism is infectious, and because it was so, her disappointment and eventual heartbreak is catastrophically devastating.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 4, 2019

The Last 5 Years is enjoyable all the way through notwithstanding, with pleasant (if largely forgettable) songs and a unique storytelling structure that keeps you on your toes.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 14, 2019

But while Kendrick is the obvious life-force behind this film, unfortunately even she cannot save the unbalanced and lackluster story.

Full Review | Nov 9, 2018

[Demidov's] transformation from committed Communist to compassionate citizen is Hardy's gift to a film that rambles on but works well as a thriller while conveying the bleakness of life behind the Iron Curtain.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 18, 2017

The Last Five Years is Anna Kendrick's tour de force, and she sings her heart out, nearly breaking ours in the process.

Full Review | Aug 3, 2017

The two leads manage to carry the day through sheer gumption.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 26, 2016

It feels like a music video that refuses to end.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 2, 2016

The chemistry between Kendrick and Jordan is what stitches the film together and makes for an entertaining if maudlin watch.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2016

[The filmmakers have] crafted a love story so rife with cliché and stereotype that I was completely disinterested in the central break-up of two people I despised.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Feb 23, 2016

The unbalanced nature of the adaptation makes for a basically unsatisfying experience (Jamie, a jerk, gets his way with everything, and Cathy, a sweetheart, doesn't), but there are moments of real delight in the movie ...

Full Review | Dec 31, 2015

Kendrick in particular has never had a better showcase. She's always been a vivid screen presence, but when she sings she's electric.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2015

Movie Review: ‘The Last Five Years’

There are not many Valentine’s Day movies that begin with a breakup, but that is only one of the ways “The Last Five Years” distinguishes itself from the goopy, forced love stories that are spewed out every Feb. 14.  The movie is a breathtaking combination of charming and heartbreaking as it follows the five-year relationship of a young couple through song, demonstrating what musical theater-made-film ought to be.

Following the arc of a five-year relationship between struggling actress Cathy Hiatt (Anna Kendrick) and novelist Jamie Wellerstein (Jeremy Jordan), the movie is unapologetically real.  The plot of the movie is driven by two opposing timelines: Cathy looks back on the relationship from their breakup to their first date, and Jamie looks back in chronological order from first date to breakup.  This setup shows the full spectrum of a relationship — from the honeymoon phase to struggles to marriage and beyond.  “The Last Five Years” does not sugarcoat love as always blissful and idyllic; it deconstructs the romance, shows us its twists and turns and gives credit to the work and pain that goes into any real relationship.  Most importantly, it shows both Cathy’s and Jamie’s perspectives.  It does not pin the blame on anyone or anything, but reminds viewers that sometimes, things just don’t work out.

Kendrick and Jordan have incredible chemistry, and while Jordan is the better singer of the two, their vocals are extremely complementary.  The experience Jordan gained from his lead roles in Broadway musicals like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Newsies” help him confidently make the character of Jamie his own.  Jordan balances Jamie’s ego and career success with a boyish grin and genuineness that makes him likeable despite his faults.

Kendrick’s extensive film experience shows in her ability to captivate the viewer in the simplest of shots.  Though Cathy feels left behind in Jamie’s success and is frustrated with her career, Kendrick is still able to evoke empathy rather than disdain for Cathy’s jealousy.  Between this and her commendable performance as Cinderella in December’s “Into the Woods,” Anna Kendrick has firmly established herself as a vocal force.

Musically, the movie is opera-style, akin to “Rent,” and encompasses multiple genres including pop, rock, Latin and jazz.  The opposing timelines force a majority of solo songs, which indicate whose narrative is being portrayed.  The only musical intersection between the characters, which shows the unity of the characters’ beliefs and mindsets, happens briefly when the couple is engaged and married.

Jason Robert Brown wrote “The Last Five Years” based on his failed marriage.  The show premiered at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre in 2001, was produced off-Broadway in 2002 and was revived off-Broadway in 2013.  His ex-wife threatened legal action against the show if he portrayed their relationship too closely, causing him to rewrite one of his original songs.  Brown’s emotions were raw and came across as such in the movie.  Brown, as well as Betsey Wolfe and Sherie Rene Scott, who had both portrayed Cathy, have cameos in the film, showing the musical theater seal of approval given to the film.

The stage version of “The Last Five Years” only has two cast members, Jamie and Cathy, and is performed on a rather bare stage.  The stark setup emphasizes the skill of the actors and the excellent music.  Because of the visual demands of a film compared to those of a show, there are a number of rough transitions in moving “The Last Five Years” from the stage to the screen.  Although it is made clear which character is the primary vocalist, it is sometimes difficult to keep the timelines separate, requiring careful viewing.  The movie provides very obvious visual cues in location jumps by using landscape shots and iconic buildings to show movement.

The addition of dramatic sets and extras takes some of the original charm and simplicity away from the film version. For example, in one very jarring and unnatural scene, Jamie walks in time to the music in what seems to be a very half-hearted choreography.

The main downside of the film is that it did not have the luxury of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. It has a lamentable amount of public awareness, and despite Kendrick’s star power, the movie experiences the same setbacks as a typical low-budget indie musical.  The upside is that the film maintains the intimate feel of the musical.  How to best produce a stage-to-screen musical is still being worked out, but compared to other stage-to-screen adaptions, “The Last Five Years” feels authentic, as a musical should.

It is easy to look at the stories of perfect romance that are so pushed in our society and expect them to be reality.  “The Last Five Years” challenges viewers to not overlook the lessons that can be gained from failure.  When Jamie says, “Goodbye” and Cathy replies, “Goodbye until tomorrow” at the end of the movie, the prevailing feeling is a strange mixture of sadness at what is over and hope at what is only beginning.  Perhaps the most meaningful lesson to be learned from the film is this: just because a relationship ended doesn’t make it unimportant.

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The Last Five Years Review

17 Apr 2015

Last Five Years, The

A musical with barely any spoken dialogue is not for everyone, but in adapting Jason Robert Brown’s hit stage musical, writer-director LaGravenese does his best to make Cathy and Jamie’s five year romance irresistible, aided considerably by the casting of Kendrick.

The structure is gimmicky (Jamie’s story is linear, Cathy’s unfolds in reverse) and the songs will curl the toes of anyone not comfortable with the idea of a feature-length Girls-style relationship tale sung in rhyming verse. But if you’re a Kendrick fan – and legislation is currently pending making that mandatory – this should do nicely until Pitch Perfect 2 comes along.

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"I'm not a Dylan … I'm not somebody who can stoically write a clear picture of what's happening. But I can leave a very strong impression of how I feel about it." That's David Bowie , speaking in voiceover about a third of the way through Francis Whately's documentary “David Bowie: The Last Five Years.” Whately, a veteran of TV documentaries about English history, leaves a strong impression of Bowie as essentially unknowable, a smiling misfit who kept everything close to the vest. Even the news of his impending death was a secret. Bowie's mysteriousness was central to his appeal as an artist. Everyone could project themselves and their own ideas onto him: Todd Haynes' movie “ Velvet Goldmine ” is basically one long fantasy projection using Bowie as canvas. “The Last Five Years” is much simpler and much less illuminating about his art and his impact. Despite testimony from many of his closest friends and collaborators, “The Last Five Years” doesn't so much draw a picture of David Bowie as trace his outline.

“The Last Five Years,” as the title implies, was ostensibly made to shed light on the creation of his final two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar , and the musical Lazarus , based on both the Nicolas Roeg movie “ The Man Who Fell to Earth ” (in which Bowie starred) and a hefty chunk of Bowie's ‘70s musical output. But Whately either didn't have enough material or wasn't interested in making those projects the sole focus of the film, so he also spends a lot of time looking back on Bowie's life and career, his songs, his characters, and his final tour. This is plainly too much information for one film to handle. The film begins with The Reality Tour, his last series of public performances, and the health crisis that pulled him from touring after nearly 40 years on the road. When he resurfaced in 2011 to record in secret, it shocked even his closest friends. The resulting albums are correctly regarded as fascinating and brilliant, a worthy addition to his catalog of genre bending classics.

The insights Bowie's former bandmates provide about his life and these final records is valuable, but limited, and there's a yawning chasm of difference between the best and worst interview subjects. Listening to Carlos Alomar, Bowie's rhythm guitarist for most of the ‘70s, talk about his creative process during the recording of the album Heroes is humbling and fascinating, and it doesn't last longer than two minutes. A whole movie could be made about that album alone. Including a few seconds about it, in the middle of a movie about The Next Day and Blackstar , doesn't really make any sense. It's not called “The Last 40 Years,” is it? Early in the movie, Whately decides upon an interesting if ultimately frustrating device where the session players on the final albums play vocal-free versions of the songs from both albums, so we can see the way they're constructed. He abandons this approach after two songs on The Next Day , and only kind of picks it up again in the home stretch when discussing the creation of Blackstar with composers Maria Schneider and Donny McCaslin . Whately also talks to the directors of his last music videos, a mixed bag of information. Floria Sigismondi just describes the transparent thematic ideas behind her video for "The Stars Are Out Tonight" in the most ludicrously pretentious yet completely basic terms. Johan Renck, who directed the arresting "Blackstar" video, has the film's only real emotional moment when he describes Bowie skyping in to tell him he was dying of cancer.

The many threads ought to tell you how frustrating an experience the film is, leapfrogging from one formal choice or line of inquiry and never deciding what story it's telling. Bowie contained multitudes, and the best the movie can do is hint at a handful of them in frequently silly ways. Guitarist Earl Slick says things like "From a musical point of view, that's way old, old school, those chord changes…but if you listen to the lyrics…there's subject matter there." Get outta town. Slick later pops up to say that Bowie was "very interested in society." The movie is as formally and thematically vague as those statements. There's a borderline “ This is Spinal Tap ” moment where one of his associates describes the process of deciding The Next Day album art and the extremely profound revelation that occurred when they turned a photo upside down, and how that opened up so many possibilities for the record design. There's just no way any Bowie fan, casual or die-hard, needed any of that inanity. And then there are little careless mistakes, as when they introduce Donny McCaslin via text twice in the space of a minute, in case you'd immediately forgotten the name of the man with the enormous saxophone who leads the Donny McCaslin Band. No documentary should make you think of John Stamos being deliberately introduced twice in David Wain's “ They Came Together ,” let alone one about the most important artist of the 1970s.

Bowie's legacy—like those of Elvis Presley , James Joyce , Philip Roth , Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol , or Bob Dylan —is enormous and nebulous. Their intangible, indescribable effect on the world through their art has given us the space in which we now reside. 95 minutes of shapeless interviews, of men and women playing Bowie’s music as if they were attempting to catch his talent like lightning in a bottle, will never get us any closer to his spirit. He was too big for a movie like this, and Whately seems to know that, announcing up front that this film has never-before-seen footage of the great man, as if that in and of itself is enough to hook viewers.

Are we so desperate to solve our art? Genuine mystery these days is in such short supply these days, so my advice? Listen to 1977's Low and let it guide your thoughts like an oar on the river of your imagination and the current of art history. We didn't come to Bowie because he could be easily understood. We put his albums on because they made our collective emptiness bearable. His albums made the journey of life seem like it had a destination. A movie about him should aspire to do the same. 

Scout Tafoya

Scout Tafoya is a critic and filmmaker who writes for and edits the arts blog Apocalypse Now and directs both feature length and short films.

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Movie review: The Last Five Years

February 17, 2015 by John Dellaporta

Once upon a time, in 2001, there was a musical. Beloved by dozens, this teeny-tiny song cycle told the story of an ordinary, five year relationship in a highly unusual way – from the woman’s point of view, we would be traveling backwards through time, from the end to the beginning, while from the man’s, we’d start at the beginning and move forward. Written by hot up-and-comer Jason Robert Brown, and stuffed full of fodder for cabarets everywhere, to have even heard of this show indicated a pretty deep nerdiness for musical theatre.

Meanwhile, at the cineplex, things are looking pretty dry for the musical lover. Sure, Evita came and went in 1996, but let’s not talk about that. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut came out a couple of years ago, and that was actually a pretty good musical! Moulin Rouge looks pretty crazy, and apparently has movie stars doing musical numbers in it, and people are actually seeing it! There’s supposed to be a film version of Chicago coming next year. But I don’t know…can Renée Zellweger sing?

Flash forward to 2015. Chicago , of course, won a bunch of Oscars, and proved that the trend of movie musicals kick-started by Moulin Rouge wasn’t going to just be a fluke. In the intervening years we’ve had studio releases of Hairspray , Dreamgirls , Sweeney Todd , Into the Woods , heck, even Nine (actually…let’s not talk about that one either).

And now, we have a movie adaptation of that little musical-that-could, The Last Five Years , directed by Richard LaGravenese. In it stars Jeremy Jordan, straight from Broadway, and Anna Kendrick, a bonafide movie star with box office mojo (thanks to the surprise hit Pitch Perfect , another musicalized movie event), and then Into the Woods , which showed off her strong, trained musical theatre voice. The adaptation is aggressively faithful, with every song and only minor tweaks to smooth the transition to the screen. Moreover, it is an independent release, and simultaneously hitting limited theaters as well as video On Demand services like iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon Instant Video.

In short, if you explained this to someone in 2001, they would never believe you. I certainly wouldn’t have.

Right from the get-go, LaGravenese starts making choices that define this specific world. We enter through Cathy’s (Anna Kendrick) point of view, after Jamie has already left her, and the world is awash in grey, courtesy cinematographer Steven Meizler, a world made emptier through wide angle lenses in small spaces. Cathy laments the lost time in “Still Hurting”, during which she barely moves, sings half the number in one take, welling up tears before your eyes, as the camera floats around her and through her empty apartment.

Kendrick sounds terrific, as usual, but it’s her emotional connection that really draws us in. Throughout the movie, we see a Cathy with a lot bubbling under the surface, yet so determined to say and do the “correct” thing that communication starts to suffer. You can see this in “See, I’m Smiling”, where she is clearly holding back her real feelings of frustration that Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) hasn’t been giving her more than the bare minimum of time. In this case, the acting choice benefits the biggest conceptual change from the stage musical – Jamie is physically present in the scene. Costumed by Ciera Wells in a suit and parted hair that may as well be a suit of armor, it’s still clear that Cathy is our P.O.V. character. We’re in an awkward moment, which Cathy is trying to fill with words, until things inevitably explode. (As a PG-13 release, the movie gets one f-bomb, and chooses it wisely.)

We’ve already met a young Jamie by this point, having jumped back after “Still Hurting” to 2008 or so, where Jamie and Cathy are consummating their relationship. The filters get warmer, the world gets sunny and bright (the over- vs. under-saturated picture being our main way of telling the halcyon past from the drab present). Once again, the choice to have Cathy physically present is justified by the two of them having VERY different priorities at the moment. Storyteller Jamie can’t stop editorializing (and, crucially, slipping into little un-realistic fantasy worlds), while Cathy just wants him to stop talking about his mom and exes and just, y’know, get to it! (Once again, Wells separates our non-P.O.V. character from us, with Cathy sporting intense highlights and looking like a pin-up girl).

For his part, Jordan oozes charm, and is a dynamite singer, naturally. I’ve had mixed opinions of Jordan in the past, but it’s safe to say that Smash ’s Jimmy is finally dead and buried. Jordan turns in a deeply open performance, and his choices vocally prove consistently unique. As we progress down his road, we watch that suit of armor get put on, and how, indeed, success as a novelist really is “Moving Too Fast”, as he’s still too young to deal with all the attention, the women, and the focus asked of an eventual wife struggling with her own career. “Nobody Needs to Know,” Jamie’s late film reflection on his choices and failures, and where he makes a choice to ultimately abandon the relationship for his own survival, proves simultaneously the most I’ve ever sympathized with AND the most I’ve ever disliked Jamie, a remarkable simultaneous feat.

Jordan and Kendrick show real chemistry throughout, best evidenced in “The Schmuel Song”, while Jamie uses his ample charms, impressions, and apartment choreography to get Cathy out of a rut. Here we see the biggest strengths of both actors, in Kendrick’s flawless, dry reaction quips, and Jordan’s seemingly boundless gusto. Chemistry isn’t limited to appealing moments, as the fights between the couple crackle as well. Even in “Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You”, where each character sings from a different time, you can see the deep connection that each character has to the idea of the other one, simultaneously hopeful and emblematic of the problems each one has in the relationship.

So here we are then, The Last Five Years on film and readily available for couches everywhere. I’m convinced that this release strategy is ingenious, and will work to the movie’s benefit for years to come. Case in point – during my first viewing, I found the individual vignettes to be quite strong, but the overall pacing of the movie to be a little jagged and seamed. Yet now, having watched it again, moments I found stylistically jarring, like fantasies or subtextual talking in real environments, meshed more into the whole.

In this world of shared clips and viral videos, I can picture individual chunks of this movie being shared and appreciated for their detail, priming the viewing experience to come of watching the whole piece. On first viewing the whole was not equal to the sum of its parts, but deeper understanding of those parts begins to reverse that. It is truly an instance of something getting better as you grow more familiar with it (unlike Into the Woods , a movie I loved that I can only see more flaws in each time I watch). For example, an idle spin of a lamp in “Nobody Needs to Know” proves a haunting reminder of better times from “Schmuel”.

As you can tell, I liked The Last Five Years quite a lot, and my appreciation is only deepening with familiarity. Only time, and the next five years, can tell if this is fleeting infatuation or the real deal.

Learn more at TheLastFiveYearsMovie.com

About John Dellaporta

John Dellaporta is a DC-based actor, singer, and guy who “moves well”. Onstage credits have included performances at Adventure Theatre, the Olney Theatre Center, Toby’s Dinner Theatre, and Washington Savoyards, where he now also serves as a senior staff member. John intermittently posts television recaps and thought pieces on his blog, johndellaporta.blogspot.com.

February 18, 2015 at 5:27 pm

I was fortunate enough to be in NYC this past weekend where a theatre in the East Village was one of only three screens in the country showing the film. Having both characters involved in the songs made a huge positive difference in the musical. I appreciated the couple dynamics far better in this production than in the three stage versions I have seen (one off-Broadway directed by Jason Robert Brown himself). Also, the reaction shots made some songs much funnier and/or more engaging. Anna Kendrick in particular demonstrated that an important part of acting is reacting to the other person.

February 17, 2015 at 9:25 pm

Just watched it on Comcast On Demand. Absolutely spectacular!

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Marvel’s Most Important Movie Gave the MCU Its Best Shot at an Ending

In 2019, Marvel miraculously stuck its landing.

From 2008 to 2019, Marvel Studios attempted to do something no film studio had ever done: tell an interconnected, years-spanning cinematic story unlike anything moviegoers had seen. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was born from that pursuit, and the franchise’s Infinity Saga frequently felt like the ideal cross between an ongoing television show and a splashy, action-packed comic book run. However, while building the MCU was no easy feat, the real question everyone had heading into 2019 was whether or not Marvel would be able to actually bring its Infinity Saga to a satisfying end.

Fortunately, that's exactly what the studio did when it released Avengers: Endgame in April 2019. The film, a direct follow-up to 2018's Avengers: Infinity War , turned out to be a three-hour epic that was more reflective, bombastic, and celebratory than anything that Marvel Studios had previously produced. It was the studio’s crowning achievement, and it delivered an ending that honored (nearly) all of the MCU's biggest characters.

When it was released, Endgame seemed like proof that Marvel really could pull anything off. Five years later, it looks more like the best shot the MCU may have had at truly going out on top.

Avengers: Endgame is, by no means, a perfect film. It isn't even the best MCU movie. (That title, arguably, still belongs to 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier , which celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this month.) Some of its VFX moments and digital backgrounds are blander and rougher than anyone would like, and the lackluster death of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) at the end of its second act still feels like a disservice to the character.

That said, Avengers: Endgame ultimately gets far more right than wrong. It takes big risks (see: its entire, somber first act) and pushes certain characters in directions that few could have seen coming (namely, Chris Hemsworth's Thor and Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye). Even more importantly, the Avengers' climactic victory over Thanos at the end of the movie feels like not only a hard-won triumph but also the culmination of several major storylines and character arcs. That is particularly true of the often contentious bond between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), which was first established in 2012’s The Avengers .

After letting their rift from Civil War get in the way of them beating Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War , the two men set aside their differences in Endgame and put more trust in each other than ever before. In its third act, the movie then sends Tony out with a sacrificial act that fits his character and caps off his 11-year journey from selfish war profiteer to selfless hero. It subsequently rewards Steve for his lifetime of service with a seemingly impossible happy ending — one that also allows the massive, explosive blockbuster surrounding it to conclude on a moment of unexpectedly quiet romance.

Avengers: Endgame , in other words, puts its characters first, and it makes the considerable time that the MCU demanded its viewers invest in it for over a decade seem justified.

“I am... Iron Man.”

In the years since Avengers: Endgame hit theaters, Marvel has struggled to justify the MCU's continued existence. The franchise's so-called Multiverse Saga has been unfocused and messy. Interest in the MCU has, consequently, plummeted over the past few years, and it's unclear what — if anything — can be done to redeem the franchise in viewers' eyes. Marvel clearly hopes it will be able to rope moviegoers back in with this summer's Deadpool & Wolverine , but even the franchise reset promised by that film doesn't seem as appealing right now as the studio wants.

Marvel's inability to live up to the standards set by Avengers: Endgame has greatly impacted the way fans perceive the movie. On the one hand, it's only made the film’s storytelling accomplishments seem all the more impressive. On the other hand, it's made it seem more and more like Marvel would have been better off either taking a multi-year break after Endgame or altogether rebooting the MCU in the aftermath of the movie’s release.

The fact that the studio is rumored to be considering the latter option right now is just further testament to how good Avengers: Endgame is. It's been five years since the film was released, but Marvel still has yet to provide a good enough reason why the MCU didn't end with it.

Avengers: Endgame is available to stream now on Disney+.

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Happy 5th anniversary to Avengers: Endgame and one of the best cinema experiences of all time

Fans celebrate the 5th anniversary of Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame is five years old, which means two things: 1) We’re getting old (if we're not there already, if we’re being honest) and 2) It’s time to take a trip down memory lane on what was one of the best cinema experiences of all time.

In truth, Endgame delivered on the impossible hype. In the run-up to release, we were all distracted by debates over the three-hour runtime, the surprisingly spoiler-free marketing, and even what was then-Avengers 4 would be called (we still recall an A-shaped upright ladder in a Russos Brothers tease leading people to speculate it would be called Avengers: Annihilation).

Then, we got it. The portals. On your left. The snap. Each moment left an indelible mark on pop culture. For many, it was their Star Wars – something they’d tell the grandkids they lived through. 

For me, personally, it was the wildest audience I’ve ever seen. UK crowds are used to a quick chuckle and maybe a light applause if we’re really feeling it. This was unprecedented. People were hugging strangers when Captain America caught Mjolnir.

Marvel Studios , of course, has been chasing that high ever since – and it’s no surprise that audiences have dipped in Marvel Phases 4 and 5 given just how well they stuck the landing. It felt like the end of everything. And it’s that lightning-in-a-bottle farewell that fans are fondly remembering five years on.

"Five years ago, I walked out of AVENGERS: ENDGAME and said it was one of the best movie experiences I'd ever had. Now...I'd still say it. An event that honestly, as a kid, I thought I'd never see, and I'm glad I got to," critic Shaurya Chawla said on Twitter .

"Endgame wasn’t a film, it was an experience, you had to be there to enjoy it Pure goosebumps," another wrote . 

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Elsewhere, the praise is similarly still effusive. "It still feels like the super superhero event that no one has been able to top," one fan remarked .

@3801productions said , "A lot of people say the MCU should’ve ended with this movie. Safe to say it just hasn’t quite been the same ever since…." 

"Since today is the 5th anniversary of the release of Avengers: Endgame, I wanted to give an appreciation shoutout to the real MVP of the whole dang movie: Alan Silvestri," one tweeted , referring to Endgame’s composer. "His score absolutely MADE this movie. The ‘Portals’ theme is nothing short of iconic."

Inevitably, in the years since, there has been talk of the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans reprising their long-departed roles as Iron Man and Captain America respectively.

The Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo, in turn, have responded to Downey Jr’s claims that he would "happily" return to the MCU fold with some bemusement. 

"I don’t know how they would do it. I don’t know what the road to that would be [laughs]," Anthony Russo told GamesRadar+ at the Sands: International Film Festival in St Andrews, Scotland. 

Joe Russo added: "I mean we closed that book so it would be up to them to figure out how to reopen it."

Next up for Marvel is Deadpool & Wolverine , starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. For more on the MCU, check out the latest on these upcoming Marvel movies . Want to relive the road to Endgame? You’ll need our guide on how to watch the Marvel movies in order .

I'm the Senior Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, focusing on news, features, and interviews with some of the biggest names in film and TV. On-site, you'll find me marveling at Marvel and providing analysis and room temperature takes on the newest films, Star Wars and, of course, anime. Outside of GR, I love getting lost in a good 100-hour JRPG, Warzone, and kicking back on the (virtual) field with Football Manager. My work has also been featured in OPM, FourFourTwo, and Game Revolution.

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Romantic Revenge Thriller ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Starring Kristen Stewart Is Now Available at Home!

After earning rave reviews on the festival scene before landing in theaters last month, Love Lies Bleeding , a revenge thriller from  Saint Maud  director  Rose Glass , has released at home on VOD this week.

Love Lies Bleeding is now available for digital purchase ($24.99) and rental ($19.99)! We’ve also learned that the film is coming to Blu-ray on June 6, 2024 .

Katy O’Brian  stars alongside  Kristen Stewart  ( Underwater ) in the new film from A24, which is said to be “a romance fueled by ego, desire and the American Dream.”

I wrote in my  Sundance review , “ With a visionary at the helm and an impressive cast willing to follow along with every wild turn thrown at them,  Love Lies Bleeding makes for a captivating ‘80s set crime thriller unafraid to get deeply weird and ultra-violent.” Expect things to get weird and violent: “That it devolves into madness, complete with humor and surreal imagery, means that it’s the precise type of gonzo cinema that’ll likely prove divisive. But Glass makes it so easy to fall on this movie’s wavelength, and the unpredictability of it keeps you deeply invested and often breathless from the suspense.”

In the film, “Reclusive gym manager Lou falls hard for Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder headed through town to Las Vegas in pursuit of her dream. But their love ignites violence, pulling them deep into the web of Lou’s criminal family.”

Kristen Stewart ,  Katy O’Brian  (“The Walking Dead”),  Dave Franco  (“The After Party”),  Ed Harris  (“Westworld”),  Anna Baryshnikov  (“Dickinson”) and  Jena Malone  (“Goliath”) star.

Acclaimed director and double BAFTA nominee Rose Glass teams with A24 and Film4 for the new film. Glass directed from a script she co-wrote with  Weronika Tofilska .

A24 produced alongside Andrea Cornwell for Lobo Films and Oliver Kassman for Escape Plan Productions. A24 will handle the global release of the film.

If you missed out on Love Lies Bleeding in theaters, add it to your watchlists this weekend. If you need additional ideas on what to watch, here’s more on this week’s new releases .

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Sony returns to their own Marvel universe with the upcoming Kraven the Hunter , which has been bumped all over the release schedule. This week, it’s been bumped once more.

There was a time when Sony was going to unleash Kraven in theaters in October 2023, but the film was then bumped to August 2024. It’ll now release on December 13, 2024 .

Kraven the Hunter  will be the very first Marvel movie from Sony to be released into theaters with an “R” rating, with lots of bloody violence being promised.

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“Kraven the Hunter is the visceral story about how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Set before his notorious vendetta with Spider-Man, Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the titular character in the R-rated film.”

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Next year's wizarding world release will ease the wait for hbo's harry potter tv remake.

HBO's Harry Potter remake won't premiere until 2026, but, lucky for us, another Wizarding World release in 2025 will make this long wait a lot easier.

• Audible's full-cast Harry Potter audio production offers a more detailed and immersive experience than traditional audiobooks, bringing the beloved story to life in a whole new way.
• Warner Bros' upcoming Harry Potter TV remake promises to fill the gaps left by the original movies, creating a more faithful adaptation with a deeper exploration of key moments and characters.
• While the Harry Potter TV remake won't be completed until 2036, Audible's audio production is set to release much faster, providing fans with a quicker and nearly as exciting way to experience the magical world of Harry Potter.

We still have a long wait before HBO's Harry Potter remake premieres, but a new Wizarding World release will make the time go by a little faster. Following the announcement that Warner Bros and HBO's TV remake would be coming sometime in 2026, Pottermore Publishing announced an unexpected addition to the franchise that would be arriving first. Though the project isn't quite as large in scale as a TV show, this Harry Potter adaptation can satisfy our need for a more book-faithful version of Harry's story a little sooner than expected.

Warner Bros' original Harry Potter movies concluded back in 2011, but the franchise as a whole didn't end with it. The Wizarding World is more significant than ever, with new generations discovering the magical story year after year. Unfortunately, the Fantastic Beasts movies didn't perform quite as well as their predecessors, revealing a need for new installments that are more faithful to the beloved Harry Potter books . The answer to this seemed to be HBO's remake, which is meant to be a far more in-depth screen adaptation than the movies. Still, there's more to come than just this.

HBO's Harry Potter TV Show: Updates & Everything We Know

Audible is producing a full-cast audio production of the harry potter books in 2025, amazon's audible & pottermore publishing are coming together to adapt all the harry potter books into audio productions.

Amazon's Audible and Pottermore Publishing announced in April 2024 that a new full-cast audio production of all seven Harry Potter books was in the works, with the first installment expected to be released near the end of 2025 . The dramatized audiobooks will feature over 100 voice actors, each portraying characters like Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Rubeus Hagrid, and much, much more. They will also come to life through quality sound through Dolby Atmos, with a full musical score and "real-world sound capture." In all, this Harry Potter production will have everything aside from the visual element .

Of course, traditional Harry Potter audiobooks are already available on Audible. These were recorded with narrators Jim Dale and Steven Fry beginning in 1999 and, according to Audible, have garnered over 1.4 billion global listening hours. As beloved as these versions of J.K. Rowling's books are, the upcoming full-cast audio productions will be far more dramatized and will lack the traditional narration of a book. In this way, Harry's story will be told at a level in which it never has before , without any of the pesky omissions of Warner Bros Harry Potter movies.

The Harry Potter audiobooks narrated by Jim Dale and Steven Fry will still be available on Audible after the 2025 audio productions are released.

Audible's Harry Potter Production Can Contain All The Moments The Harry Potter Movies Missed

Audible will adapt missed harry potter moments before hbo has a chance.

The primary draw of HBO's Harry Potter remake is the chance to finally see the plotlines , characters, and key moments that the Warner Bros movies cut. There are significant limitations to film, and a TV show adaptation of the books will have a lot more time to include every layer of Harry's story. Things like the Marauders' story, the Quidditch World Cup, SPEW, Barty Crouch Jr's story, Harry's day-to-day at Hogwarts, and much much more can finally be brought to life, with full episodes available to cover each. Of course, we have quite a long way to go before this becomes a reality.

Each installment can go several hours long, and with such an extensive cast and excellent sound quality, listeners can be fully immersed in scenes that have thus far never made it off the page.

Though the full-cast Harry Potter audio production can't bring these moments to a screen, it will still be free of the limitations that held back Warner Bros' movies. Each installment can go several hours long, and with such an extensive cast and excellent sound quality, listeners can be fully immersed in scenes that have thus far never made it off the page. Everything from Peeves heckling Mr. Filch to Percy crying over Fred Weasley's death at the Battle of Hogwarts can finally play out in more than just our imaginations. It's the book-faithful adaptation everyone has been begging for , just in an unexpected format.

A Harry Potter Audio Production Will Be Far Less Divisive Than HBO's Remake

Hbo's harry potter remake is already facing heavy criticism.

In some ways, an audio production of Harry Potter will go over better than HBO's 2026 TV remake. The upcoming series has been divisive for an array of reasons. Though many are excited for a chance to see a book-faithful adaptation, others find that it competes too much with the already beloved Harry Potter movies. The idea of recasting actors like Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, and Robbie Coltrane is uncomfortable , and J.K. Rowling's controversial involvement with the HBO TV show adds further fuel to the fire. No matter how the series is approached, it's sure to be criticized heavily.

Additionally, after the shortcomings of the Fantastic Beasts movies, Warner Bros has been accused of using the Harry Potter remake as a money grab, capitalizing on the ongoing fandom without putting thought into extending the franchise. This is supported by the fact that the Harry Potter movies concluded only just over a decade ago, so the remake is coming surprisingly early. In comparison, an audio production of the Harry Potter books is a far more honest and logical endeavor and is far less likely to cause controversy within the Wizarding World fandom. As an entirely different medium, it won't step on any toes.

The Full Harry Potter Audio Production Will Release Much Faster Than The Harry Potter TV Remake

Hbo's harry potter remake won't be finished until about 2036.

Another benefit of Audible's audio production over the Harry Potter remake is that it won't take nearly as long to produce. Warner Bros and HBO made 2026 the release window for Harry Potter season 1 , which is three years after the series was announced. From there, the release window will vary between one and two years between seasons, with the installment depicting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows not expected until 2036. Therefore, even after the Harry Potter remake has started, it will be a pretty long time before we see moments like the true final battle between Harry and Voldemort brought to the small screen.

Though the audio production of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone won't be released on Audible until 2025, the subsequent installments will likely fit within a much smaller timeline. Without the need for visual effects, these dramatizations will be far quicker to produce. It's probable that the entire series will be completed and available to the public before we are even halfway through HBO's remake . So, while there is a lot to look forward to with the Harry Potter TV show, the Audible production is a far shorter-term (and nearly as good) option. It's at least enough to hold everyone over until the bigger production premieres.

Harry Potter

Harry Potter is HBO's remake of the iconic Wizarding World film series that consisted of eight films between 2001 and 2011. Each season adapts a book from JK Rowling's popular series and provides more book-accurate details than the movies did. Upon the announcement of the Harry Potter TV show, the series received harsh criticism for the involvement of Rowling and for many thinking a reboot was unnecessary.