The Hollywoodland Revue

Memorial Day weekend arrives with one of the most eclectic groups of new theatrical releases in recent months. Hollywood is offering audiences a little of everything this week: major franchise spectacle, offbeat satire, psychological horror, survival thrillers, romance, and prestige drama. Whether moviegoers are searching for pure escapism, thoughtful independent filmmaking, or something strange and unsettling, theaters are once again providing several intriguing reasons to leave the house and buy a ticket. Here is a look at the major releases opening this weekend and what critics and audiences are already saying about them.

Judy Garland's turbulent personal history features several prominent figures, particularly men who influenced her career, finances, and public image. Among these individuals, Mark Herron, her fourth husband, remains relatively indistinct despite his close association with one of Hollywood’s most scrutinized lives. Herron's brief and volatile relationship with Garland was ultimately overshadowed by her enduring legacy. However, his story offers valuable insight into the complex intersections of celebrity, anonymity, and personal struggle in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, amid orange groves, dusty streets, and the rising fantasy factories of the silent-film era, a cluster of tiny storybook cottages appeared on Formosa Avenue just south of De Longpre. With their crooked roofs, curved chimneys, uneven shingles, leaded windows, and whimsical medieval styling, the homes looked less like Southern California real estate and more like something torn from the pages of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Nearly a century later, the so-called Chaplin Cottages — also known as the Hansel and Gretel Cottages — remain among the most enchanting and mysterious architectural survivals from Hollywood’s earliest golden age.

In the final, fading years of Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the old studio system was beginning to crumble and once-mythic stars drifted uneasily toward obsolescence, one last scandal exploded across newspaper headlines with the force of a dying era’s final gasp. At the center stood Beverly Aadland, a blonde California teenager whose dreams of movie stardom became forever entangled with the tragic last chapter of screen swashbuckler Errol Flynn.

I almost skipped The Sheep Detectives entirely. The poster wasn't inviting. Neither was the premise. Animated CGI sheep that talk solve a murder mystery. Sounds like the type of movie that studios unleash upon theaters, complete with ear-shattering trailers, cheap laughs and a screenplay your patience tests while your kids bounce in their seats. The stellar cast didn't even sway me at first. We've all come to learn over the years that a great cast doesn't guarantee quality entertainment. Then something happened that caught my interest.

In the spring of 1922, at the very height of his meteoric rise to international fame, Rudolph Valentino found himself not on a film set but at the center of one of Hollywood’s most sensational legal scandals—a case that revealed both the rigid morality of the era and the volatile intersection of celebrity, law, and public fascination.

For a brief but unforgettable moment during the 1960s, Claudine Longet seemed to embody the very image of Continental sophistication in American popular culture. Petite, soft-spoken, and possessed of a whispery, breathless singing style that perfectly suited the era’s fascination with bossa nova and romantic melancholy, she became a familiar face on television screens and record players across America. Yet despite her musical success, film appearances, and high-profile marriage to entertainer Andy Williams, her name would ultimately become inseparable from one of the most sensational celebrity scandals of the 1970s: the fatal shooting of Olympic skier Spider Sabich in Aspen, Colorado. Now, with the death of Claudine Longet at the age of eighty-four, a complicated and controversial chapter of Hollywood history has closed.

The middle of May brings one of the more eclectic release weekends of the year, with Hollywood offering audiences everything from Guy Ritchie-style action mayhem and supernatural horror to psychologically driven revenge thrillers and nostalgic franchise revivals. Several of the weekend’s films arrive carrying strong critical buzz from festival screenings, while others appear aimed squarely at popcorn audiences looking for escapist entertainment as the summer movie season begins accelerating toward blockbuster territory. Whether viewers are seeking violent action, cerebral horror, prestige drama, or pure spectacle, theaters are offering a surprisingly varied lineup this weekend.

While there are many forgotten pioneers of early American theater and motion pictures, few are remembered with the recognition they deserve. Beatrice DeMille managed to link the nineteenth century theater world with the developing motion-picture industry in America. DeMille was the mother of two influential filmmakers, but she was also a playwright and theatrical manager, and a cultural force in her own right.

Before Batman became a television sensation, before Tim Burton restored his gothic grandeur, and long before the character became one of the most profitable properties in modern film history, he first stepped onto the screen in a wartime Columbia serial. Released in 1943, Batman was a 15-chapter cliffhanger starring Lewis Wilson as Batman and Bruce Wayne, with Douglas Croft as Robin and Dick Grayson. It was cheaply made, briskly paced, politically charged, and at times startlingly crude by modern standards, yet it remains historically indispensable: this was the first live-action appearance of Batman, Robin, Alfred, and several elements that would help shape the character’s screen mythology.

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle died in his sleep early on June 29, 1933, in a suite at the Park Central Hotel in New York. Once America’s favorite movie comedian, he was just forty-six. Newspaper accounts say his wife, former actress Addie McPhail, awoke around 2:45 a.m. and found him groaning. When she roused him, he didn’t respond. Doctors were summoned, but it was soon clear that Arbuckle had died of heart failure. Just hours before, he had been joyously celebrating “the happiest day of my life”—his anniversary.

When so many movies are defined by explosions, sneers, and resurrecting decades-old franchises, Remarkably Bright Creatures dares to be something we see far too rarely these days: a heartfelt film unafraid to embrace feeling, compassion, and gentle human interaction. Directed by Olivia Newman and based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel of the same name, Remarkably Bright Creatures had all the ingredients to easily turn maudlin or gimmicky. Particularly because its main storyline centers around the unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly widow and a giant Pacific octopus. Instead, Remarkably Bright Creatures manages to become one of the most emotionally rewarding films of the year, buoyed by a transcendent performance by Sally Field and a truly compassionate ensemble that fully understands what’s at stake with this material’s balance of sadness, comedy, and optimism.