ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY AND AWARD NEWS MARCH 21, 2019 A Dissenting View on Us Us, Jordan Peele’s hotly anticipated follow-up to the Oscar-winning smash hit Get Out, has earned an impressive 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a rating of 80 (out of 100) on Metacritic ahead of its release this Friday. But despite that wave of praise, V.F.’s own Richard Lawson is more mixed about the film—though he is certain of Peele’s talent, and acknowledges that the movie may be more appealing to him with the benefit of time. Us, he writes in his review, is “a frustrating movie, oddly inert despite all its thrashing. It’s a jumble of fascinating threads that Peele fails to weave together. It’s what you might call a junk-drawer movie, a collage of bits and bobs that have cluttered Peele’s brilliant mind for long enough that he thought he might try to synthesize them all into one movie. But the ball of rubber bands doesn’t really speak to the bottle-opener thingy; the eyeglass screwdriver doesn’t have much to do with the Ethernet cable. Each item has its own value, sure, but they don’t form a whole equal to the sum of the parts.” Elsewhere in HWD, Joanna Robinson chats with Joey King about the remarkable transformation she underwent for Hulu’s The Act; Nick Bilton examines the question of our age: whether Netflix can take over the world without turning evil; Krista Smith interviews rising actress Adria Arjona; and Yohana Desta investigates another pressing concern: the curious case of Elizabeth Holmes’s voice, which is in the news again thanks to HBO’s documentary The Inventor.

This Is Us An ambitious second feature from Jordan Peele, starring Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, finds the Get Out auteur trying to do too many things at once. READ MORE » Act One Teenaged star Joey King opens up about the tricky prospect of playing Gypsy Rose Blanchard—a real person with multiple conflicting layers—in Hulu’s new true-crime adaptation. READ MORE » It’s Not TV At its core, Netflix is a tech company, not the entertainment company it claims to be—and because of that, most people have been looking at the company all wrong. READ MORE » Introducing Adria Arjona The rising actress, who stars in the thriller Triple Frontier, on her international childhood, audition confidence, and her slate of upcoming roles, including a Marvel movie. READ MORE » Let Her Clear Her Throat Now that HBO’s The Inventor has brought chatter about Elizabeth Holmes’s voice to the fore, her family wants to debunk the conspiracy theories—but is this enough to dissuade the masses? READ MORE »