Sure, 2005’s Pride & Prejudice has been sitting right there at home to watch with my Netflix subscription (until it leaves at the end of the month anyway), but I had a feeling going out of my way to see the movie’s 20th anniversary re-release in theaters would be a unique experience I wouldn’t forget, and I was absolutely right. But, I wasn’t expecting Donald Sutherland’s performance as Mr. Bennet to be the thing about it that I walked away wanting to talk about the most.
I can’t believe Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice is two decades old because the movie doesn’t feel like it has aged a day, except for seeing its incredible cast in their younger years, of course. My recent in-theater viewing experience cemented for me how timeless and exquisite it is, making it absolutely one of the great movies based on classic literature in my book. While I went into it ready to be dazzled by Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s romance (including that iconic hand flex), the way the filmmakers intended, instead, I want to take some time to appreciate the late Donald Sutherland’s part in the movie.
(Image credit: Focus Features)
Donald Sutherland’s Performance As Mr. Bennet Really Floors Me
the actor’s passing in the summer of 2024 at the age of 88, so maybe my attention was more keenly focused on Mr. Bennet, but honestly I don’t think that would have made a difference, because wow, is he the underrated highlight of this movie.
Mr. Bennet is Elizabeth’s father, and Sutherland takes a supporting role in most of the story, as most of the focus goes to Knightley’s performance as the young, headstrong woman navigating being courted by numerous men alongside her four sisters while living in 18th-century England. While his role is small, Sutherland makes a huge impression because he’s the character who ended up getting me to tear up by the movie’s conclusion.
best Donald Sutherland movies. Anyway, you can still catch the movie in select theaters and stream it at home. I wonder if the Pride & Prejudice series, which is among upcoming book adaptations, will spend time on this plotline, too, or go in another direction.
Certain movies come every once in a while that blow you away, but for me, that hasn’t really happened in a long time.
Sure, I do love movies. It’s why I literally work as a movie and TV journalist. But, there haven’t been that many recent movies that have utterly left me breathless and staring at the screen. I did enjoy all the 2025 Best Picture nominees, and I can admit that I want a great action flick now and again and look forward to upcoming Marvel movies just as much as the next. Very few, however, remind me of why I fell in love with movies in the first place.
Sinners was the first in a long time to do that. But not because of the movie overall. One scene in particular slammed me in the face like I was hit by a truck, leading to an overwhelming wave of feelings that I have to talk about.
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
I Originally Wasn’t Going To See Sinners, But I Was Convinced By The Box Office
2025 movie schedule is already filled to the brim with highly anticipated new releases this year, and truthfully, because of that, I was saving a lot of my time for the later releases. Life has been hectic, and I thought that taking the time to go see a vampire movie was something that I didn’t have the energy to do.
That’s another thing – I’m not a big vampire person. I don’t necessarily enjoy the best vampire movies because even if I do love fantasy, there’s just something about these mythical beings that always rubs me the wrong way. I’ve viewed all the Twilight movies and seen some scary flicks, too, but none ever really sat well with me.
However, my opinion was altered when I began to notice the box office numbers coming in for this drama. It is so rare for a movie that’s not a franchise to end up becoming a major hit nowadays – you can see that just from the 2024 top box office alone how many were sequels. When Sinners began to make waves as an R-rated movie, it earned my interest.
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Of course, it was critically praised—which makes sense. Anything that Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan touch is usually gold, so I wasn’t expecting any less. But as the box office grew (Sinners had an astonishing second weekend), and social media began to buzz over this film, I knew I was missing out.
On a Tuesday night, I drove to Regal and decided to sit down and watch the movie, expecting the theater to be mostly empty. It was not. I would say it was about 80% filled – on a Tuesday night. This never happens nowadays, so I knew I was in for a good ride.
Rocky Road to Dublin” and “Pale, Pale Moon.” But, this moment was utterly captivating…and I still think about it rent-free.
best Pixar movies, Ratatouille, when Ego is transported back to his youth because of a dish his mother used to make? That’s how it felt for me to watch this film. I felt as if I was a little girl, sitting in the movie theater for the first time, watching a scene from a movie that had my heart racing, my eyes widened, and my butt on the edge of my seat.
You might wonder why, but it’s because of the utter wonder I felt watching this. There are so many movies nowadays that feel so soulless. But this? This has a soul. This has heart, passion, and adoration poured into every damn frame of this film, and I love it. I can feel it.
I wanted to see this movie again, literally right after the first viewing – and I haven’t had that urge in a long time.
This is the kind of movie where you can tell everyone involved cared so deeply about creating a piece of art that they did everything they could to achieve that. They created a masterpiece of cinema, one that I genuinely hope will be looked at in years to come as not only one of the best films of 2025, but also one of the best of this decade.
Future filmmakers should study this scene because it’s the kind that makes movie lovers like me want to keep going back to the theater.
If you haven’t seen Sinners, I highly suggest checking it out. If you have, well, go see it again, like I will.
Warning! The following contains spoilers for the 90 Day Diaries episode “Dear Diary, It’s Decision Time.” Stream it with a Max subscription and read at your own risk!
90 Day Diaries continues to give us big updates on people we haven’t heard from in a while, and I’m so happy we got to check in on one of my favorite veteran cast members. Colt Johnson has been through the wringer, it seems, as the latest updates I heard from him after cutting ties with his mother, Debbie, were that he broke his leg and his wife, Vanessa Guerra, left him. I’ve been hungry for news on Colt, and it came in the form of some revealing information about his split.
formerly married 90 Day star split with his first ex, Larissa, and he ended up leaving his rebound girlfriend Jess for her. I assumed that Colt and Vanessa’s breakup came via the usual online cheating scandals he’s been accused of in the past, and while we can’t 100% rule it out, this marriage ending had one key element that set it apart from his previous relationships in the franchise.
Colt Told His Mother One Big Detail About His Split With Vanessa
Colt met up with Debbie on a visit to Canada, where she’s still living with her boyfriend Tony. It was there he told his mother about his recent divorce, and added some previously unknown information that 90 Day Fiancé fans hadn’t already learned. Colt said that he didn’t want a divorce, seemingly indicating that it was Vanessa who ultimately pulled the trigger on ending the relationship.
Those who have followed Colt since the beginning know that his previous two breakups had more of a mutual split, and he seemed happy to move on from both. I was shocked to learn that wasn’t the case for what happened with Vanessa, though I guess it made sense. Unlike Larissa and Jess, he was friends with his latest ex-wife before a romance began, so I think it’s fair to speculate their relationship was a little deeper.
When Will We See Colt In 90 Day Fiancé Again?
Colt will get another chance at love, and 90 Day Fiancé fans will get a chance to see it. He’s part of the upcoming spinoff 90 Day: Hunt For Love, which I’m 1000% ready to see. I’m guessing his appearance on 90 Day Diaries was done in part to catch up the loyalists who watch every spinoff to what’s happening in his life.
Will Colt find some love in the spinoff? Well, we have no idea what to expect, but there have been rumors that Colt sustained a bad injury in the spinoff, and based on the trailer showing someone being carted off in an ambulance, I think there’s a chance that’s true. Fortunately, it appears he’s okay in the present, so no need to be alarmed should that moment be featured on the show.
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90 Day Diaries airs on TLC on Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET. While this was only a brief check-in on Colt Johnson, it seems like we’ll be getting more scenes with him in the upcoming spinoff soon.
Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS episode “Nexus” are ahead!
Last week, Wilmer Valderrama shared that the NCIS Season 22 finale would deliver a major death, though it thankfully didn’t end up being any of the characters I speculated about ahead of time. Instead, “Nexus,” which just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule, ended with Gary Cole’s Alden Parker discovering his father Roman, played by Francis X. McCarthy, having been poisoned by Rebecca De Mornay’s Carla Marino, the head of the Kansas City mob. It was one hell of a game-changing scene to wrap up this season, and Cole told CinemaBlend why he found it “intimidating” to shoot what’s unquestionably Parker’s most emotionally devastated moment on NCIS yet.
big shakeup to the LaRoche storyline delivered last week, but arguably the most notable of them was that Carla Marino was actually the new head of Nexus, the drug cartel that’s been causing trouble since the start Season 22. But even when remembering that she and Parker have also been adversaries for years, the fact that Carla stooped to murdering Roman was shocking. In real life, Gary Cole was pleased with how this twist turned out, tell me during my interview with him earlier today:
I mean, we know when we do the last show, they’re gonna push things. But I thought it was a really dynamic ending, and the way they arrived at it I thought was, as I always think about our writers, well thought out. You didn’t really necessarily see it coming, which I think is good. I was glad to have something to play that was that intense. It intimidated me because a lot of things had to happen quickly in the in the last scene, but I think the way that they built it was good.
Carla Marino was introduced in the episode “Knight and Day,” where it was established that Alden Parker had tried for years to apprehend her when he was working at the FBI. So there was already no shortage of attention when she returned in “Nexus” to offer her services to NCIS to help with stopping Nexus. But as mentioned, it was actually Carla running the cartel these days, with the originally-presumed leader known as The Butcher being fictional. And while Nexus did indeed want to steal uranium to make a dirty bomb so Carla could eliminate the heads of the other four crime families, she was also insistent on exacting revenge for the role she believes Parker played in her son’s death.
Carla had discovered Alden Parker was the one who told her son Jason about her criminal activities, which is what caused Jason to flee from her and put him on the path to dying in a motorcycle accident. After kidnapping Parker during “Nexus,” it initially looked like she was going kill him, but not so. Instead, Parker came back to his apartment and found his father’s lifeless body sitting in a chair in front of the playing TV with blood on his shirt. When I asked Gary Cole how into the right kind of mental headspace for this scene, he started off by saying:
Well, the one thing I recognized was that just as you described it, there was a big transition, maybe even two transitions, and that was a little intimidating. I was like, ‘Boy, is that gonna work?’ But the way it was laid out and the way we shot it and the way José [Clemente Hernandez] directed it, I think it was pulled off. One is obviously just the discovery of the body. So that’s a shock.
So how do we know with 100% certainty that Carla Marino killed Roman Parker? Well, earlier in the episode, Carla stopped by Parker’s place as he and his father were having dinner, and she invited herself in. Roman, unaware of Carla’s criminal activities, was charmed by her, so evidently he let her into her son’s apartment while Parker was gone, and they enjoyed some wine together. Sadly, Carla laced Roman’s wine with poison, and the lipstick stain left on the other glass was enough to clue Parker in on what happen, sending him into a rage and throwing his TV to the ground. Gary Cole continued:
Then there’s the immediate recognition that it was a murder, which kicks it up even another level. Because discovering a dead body is one thing of a loved one. Discovering a loved one that is murdered is a whole other animal. Because all of a sudden, you’re not just in shock and grief. You’ve got shame and guilt and rage and everything blowing through your head. It’s hard to process. And then the necessity was for it to turn into just vengeful rage. Or at least the premeditation of something to come. They built in something physically with destroying the television and all that stuff.
Parker already had more than enough incentive to put Carla Marino behind bars, but now she’s taken away his father away before it was his time. It’s hard to say how soon this will be followed up on in NCIS Season 23, but I’m already curious to see if Parker will step outside the law to dispense what he sees as justice to his adversary. “Nexus” also ended with yet another tease with the show’s ongoing Lily mystery, with Jimmy Palmer telling Jessica Knight that “something doesn’t add up” with Parker’s mother’s original death certificate. Something tells me, though, that Parker’s not in the right frame of mind to go down that road right now.
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NCIS Season 23 premieres this fall alongside NCIS: Origins Season 2, and we’ll let you know when the specific day and time is announced. NCIS: Tony & Ziva will also premiere on Paramount+ around the same time, while NCIS: Sydney Season 3’s arrival isn’t narrowed down just yet.
Spoilers for The Equalizer’s series finale are ahead! To catch up, you can stream the CBS drama with a Paramount+ subscription.
CBS has been brutal with the cancellations this year. The network has axed a number of shows, with The Equalizer most recently joining the list of shows canceled and ending in 2025. The Queen Latifah-led crime drama officially ended on Sunday on the 2025 TV schedule after five seasons, and as expected, plans were already in place for Season 6. The showrunner even revealed what would have happened had the show continued on beyond Season 5.
TV Insider conducted prior to the cancellation, showrunner Joe Wilson said that he hoped to see the two walk down the aisle for Season 6:
That I hope we get it. [Laughs] I can say is if we do get it, there are wedding bells. We will see that wedding. It is going to be crazier than the proposal. It is feature worthy, what we would do with it. And just the continuing, what does their relationship look like equalizing as a family business as she says in this episode. So those are the things we’d focus on.
Hearing what could have been with the wedding is sad, knowing that fans will never see that happen, at least for now. Though perhaps this could be a good thing, especially since it sounds like the wedding would have been a whole lot crazier than the proposal, whatever that could mean. Robyn and Dante certainly deserve a peaceful wedding, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t sad that the wedding will never happen on-screen.
The wedding isn’t all that Wilson and the writers were cooking up for Season 6. Wilson also shared that although it’s hard to tell what else could happen in the sixth season, especially with Robyn’s daughter Delilah going off to college, mostly the entire cast of The Equalizer, more or less, would have returned, even if not full-time, and keep that family dynamic that fans loved so much:
We’d have to see how it unfolds. Our plan is to set it up for the audience to not miss the family dynamic as it currently is. So they’ll be in different capacities, but with technology and travel, we don’t want to lose that core. That’s the core of the show, these three generations of black women and their relationship and the strength and support. We don’t want to lose that. So if anything, we’ll dial it in even more so we can focus on that a little bit more. Even if you don’t see it every episode, you won’t miss it.
It’s unknown if The Equalizer will be shopped around elsewhere, especially since it’s clear that more stories are waiting to be told. Queen Latifah has spoken out about the cancellation, assuring fans that she will return to “kick ass” in the future. So at the very least, she may no longer play Robyn McCall, but she is still going to leap into action. That doesn’t make the cancellation any easier, though.
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It’s always tough whenever a show gets canceled before its time, especially when plans for the next season were already in place. Not even Tracker could save it. This certainly makes me want a sixth season even more, knowing what could have happened, and the fact that it never will is certainly hard. But with Robyn and Dante living happily ever after, it’s better than nothing.
May is now in full swing, and that means it’s time for the annual summer movie season. This may draw a lot of viewers back to theaters, but considering all the same studios that are releasing movies also run streaming services, you can bet they don’t want to take all your attention away from the TV.
If the new movies in theaters aren’t quite your cup of tea, this week’s streaming highlights include a couple of theatrical releases you may have missed, as well as new seasons of several different popular streaming series.
(Image credit: Peacock)
Poker Face, Season 2 – May 8 (Peacock)
Peacock subscription so I could watch Poker Face, and now I finally have the Season 2 I’ve been waiting so long to see. Natasha Lyonne returns with a who’s who of guest stars as she solves new mysteries, all while trying to keep herself alive.
cancel the popular procedural Criminal Minds, only to revive the show on CBS. The series clearly never lost a step, as this week, your Paramount+ subscription will bring you the beginning of the third season of Criminal Minds: Evolution.
he’s already been asked back. He’s also, as it turns out, the perfect host for a travel show. If you have a Max subscription, you can use it to watch the new season of Conan O’Brien Must Go and see the hilarious man visit beautiful and exotic places, and make a fool of himself while there.
Netflix subscription, now you can fix that.
Hollywood screwed up by not making Quan a leading man decades ago. Take the opportunity when it arrives on Peacock to check this one out.
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(Image credit: Hulu)
Summer of ‘69 – May 9 (Hulu)
Co-written and directed by Jillian Bell, Summer of ‘69 tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a teenager and the exotic dancer she hires to help her seduce her high school crush. The R-rated teenage sex comedy isn’t a genre that’s gotten a lot of attention of late, but perhaps telling the story from a female perspective is what has been missing.
The rest of May still has plenty to bring fans, including the final three episodes of Andor on Disney+ next week.
