Renée Zellweger Makes Her Music Video Debut Harmonizing With Filmmaker-Singer C M Talkington, Three Decades After He Directed Her in ‘Love and a .45’ (EXCLUSIVE)

After losing its original director and facing multiple rounds of revisions on the script, the “Blade” reboot from Marvel Studios seemingly still has some creative challenges to overcome. The Hollywood Reporter reports that “True Detective” creator/writer Nic Pizzolatto has been tapped by Marvel to help on the latest round of rewrites for the supernatural action-horror film.

Gogglebox star Sid Siddiqui has received fan support after calling out the NHS when he was denied a doctor's appointment

Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross has told how he had to phone his wife at work to tell her a “credible” death threat was made against him.

Police have appealed for information after two teenagers were reported missing in the Edinburgh area.

Miranda Lambert and husband Brendan McLoughlin have offered rare insight into their marriage over the years.

Happily ever after! Prince William and Princess Kate are celebrating their milestone 12th anniversary with the release of a previously unseen portrait.

Luminate, which recently published its Top Entertainment Trends for 2023 report, “50 per cent of consumers who have bought vinyl in the past 12 months own a record player, compared to 15per cent per cent among music listeners overall” [via Music Business Worldwide].Luminate appears to have credited those statistics largely to “superfans” whom it defines as “music listeners who spend above average (median) time AND money on music, actively discover new music, participate in music-related activities on social media, and plan on attending a live music event in the next 12 months”.The majority of music revenue (84 per cent in 2022) still comes from streaming services.That suggests that many of these “superfans” buy vinyl as part of merch – not necessarily listening to it.The news follows vinyl outselling CD in the UK for first time in 35 years, according to figures released by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) in January.Overall music sales increased by three per cent in 2022 to almost £2billion, which is the highest figure since 2003 and nearly double the level of their low point in 2013.According to the published figures, physical sales fell slightly by 3.8 per cent to £280.4million, but levelled out as the vinyl format showed sustained growth while CD declined.Vinyl album sales grew 11 per cent to £150.5million, while CD album sales in contrast fell 17.4 per cent to £124million, the first time that vinyl has outsold CD by value since 1987.

ITV is set to follow Prince William in a new fly-on-the-wall documentary as he will travel through the UK on a homelessness initiative while giving a candid insight into his royal family. The new documentary revolving around Prince William, 40, will reportedly showcase his working life as a senior royal.

A Manchester medic trapped in war-torn Sudan has safely evacuated the African nation, according to reports.

The NHS has issued an urgent warning for Brits across the country over an expected surge in STIs throughout the bank holidays.

Kyle Walker admits to struggling with not always playing regularly for Manchester City - but is willing to park any grievances with manager Pep Guardiola and put the team first.

Michelle Pfeiffer is celebrating a milestone birthday. The critically acclaimed actress turned 65 on Saturday. Having starred in many memorable films, including "The Witches of Eastwick," "I Am Sam," "Hairspray" and "Dark Shadows," Pfeiffer has cemented her status as a Hollywood legend.

Jack Nicholson is back and better than ever.  The legendary Hollywood actor was all smiles during the Los Angeles Lakers versus Memphis Grizzlies in Game 6 of their first-round NBA playoff series.  The 86-year-old Laker’s superfan returned courtside with his lookalike son Ray to cheer on their favorite team.The father-son duo made the rare appearance after two years since the last season’s opening game in October 2021. "The Shining" star donned a dark plaid blazer with a black dress shirt underneath.

Inverness icon Billy Mckay made it 100 goals for the Highlanders with a Hampden double to ease Billy Dodds’ side into the Scottish Cup Final with a 3-0 win over Falkirk.

Former Celtic boss Neil Lennon insists Michael Beale's Rangers career could suffer a major bodyblow if they crash out of the Scottish Cup.

A couple with a 19-year age gap have told how strangers mistakenly believe they are father and daughter.

Bubbles, Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee, turned 40 and celebrated with a party befitting the King of Pop’s pet.“He did get a cake — but it’s a special ape-healthy cake,” said Patti Ragan, founding director at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla., the “retirement home” where Bubbles has lived since 2005.“We frost it with mashed bananas and add a little bit of blue food coloring … and then we wrote his name in blueberries,” Ragan said. The theme, fittingly, was bubbles.“We had tubs of bubble bath.

Next stop, Flavortown! Guy Fieri shows Us Weekly a unique spin on nachos that are perfect for Cinco de Mayo.

Nova Twins have been named as ambassadors for London’s Institute of Contemporary Music Performance brand-new Creative Musicianship Scholarship.The initiative was created to provide an opportunity to anyone passionate about creative musicianship who may not be able to seek Higher Education as part of their career.The duo – consisting of Amy Love and Georgia South – announced their scholarship with the IMCP on Twitter, sharing: “Being given an opportunity can make all the difference and certainly if it wasn’t for the opportunities we’ve had, then Nova Twins wouldn’t exist as we do today.”The scholarship is open for applications and will cover the cost of undergraduate tuition fees of one UK-based home fee status student or one international student for the entire three years of the BA (Hons) Creative Musicianship degree beginning September 2023.So excited to announce our brand new scholarship for @ICMPLondon’s BA Creative Musicianship degree, offering one lucky student full funding for the entire three years of their course! Can’t wait to see all of your audition tapes

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic A touring production of the stage version of “The Bodyguard” was brought to a halt and canceled in Manchester, England on Friday night after patrons would not stop singing along with the musical’s songs, leading to house lights coming up during the climactic number “I Will Always Love You.” Two women were forcibly pulled out of the theater by security, and several police cars arrived to oversee the evacuation of the theater after what patrons on social media described as “fights in the aisles” and even “a mini-riot.” According to news reports out of Manchester and tweets from those inside the Palace Theatre, the show — based on the hit 1992 film — had already been temporarily halted once during the first act because of the disruptive audience sing-alongs, but was resumed. Later, though, with only about 10 minutes to go before the end, it was put on pause again while its star, Pussycat Dolls member Melody Thornton, attempted to sing the climactic song made famous in the movie by Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You,” over the sound of semi-tuneless howling coming from audience members. Thornton’s mic was cut mid-song, the house lights came up and offenders were evicted — struggling against being pulled out by their shoulders, in video footage captured by attendees — and the show was officially called off.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic In 2002, director Sam Jones made what is widely considered a benchmark for 21st century music documentaries with “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco,” a movie that lucked into just about all the subject matter that could make B-roll footage of the making of an album into A-list material. It had conflict within the band, between an auteur and another member of great talent; conflict with the soon-to-be-ex-record label, over the basically unwanted classic-to-be “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel”); and said auteur doing his own demon-wrestling, outside foils notwithstanding. Now, it’s easier to see that Jones’ good fortune in happening upon all that wasn’t all luck. More than 20 years later, Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed,” newly streaming on HBO Max. This time, as the creation of another amazing record — Isbell’s “Reunions” (recorded in late 2019 and released a few months later) — is put under the filmic microscope, there are no record-company bookkeepers as unseen baddies in the backdrop to a making-of. Major labels and the conflicts that come with them are so 2002, right? But one common thread is intra-band tension… as it probably will be in most good rock docs now or 20 years from now. It gets more interesting than that, though. In this instance, the difficult vibes are between bandmates who double as a married couple — Isbell and his fiddler-spouse, Amanda Shires. Here, unlike the by-now iconic beefing between Jay Tweedy and Jay Bennett, we know no one’s ultimately going anywhere, right?

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “I carried those bastards for years,” says Mick Mars, telling Variety how he thinks his 41-year history with Motley Crue should not end with him facing off with the other three members in the halls of justice. The veteran band, now down by one original member, has sued to force Mars into arbitration, looking to get a ruling that he is officially a member or shareholder, with any of the rights that confers. They contend that when he announced he was quitting touring, that amounted to a resignation. Mars, 71, counter-sued on Thursday morning, contending that he didn’t give up anything, at all, by announcing last fall that effects of his longstanding arthritic disease made him no longer fit for the road. His legal filing was full of provocative assertions about the others, and so was the response Thursday afternoon from Crue’s lawyers, who believe he gave up all rights by putting away his touring suitcases — and further, the Crue camp maintained, Mars had become an instrumentally erratic drag on the band.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Motley Crue has responded to Mick Mars’ lawsuit alleging that the band is trying to force him out after 41 years, with the group’s attorneys contending that Mars already is out — having resigned, effectively, in their view, when he announced he was halting touring for good. Motley Crue’s attorneys also provided Variety with signed declarations from seven members of the touring crew that was out with the band when they toured with Mars for the last time on 36 stadium dates in 2022, alleging that his performances at the shows were under par and created problems for the entire group. “After the last tour, Mick publicly resigned from Mötley Crüe,” said Sasha Frid, the band’s litigation attorney. “Despite the fact that the band did not owe Mick anything — and with Mick owing the band millions in advances that he did not pay back — the band offered Mick a generous compensation package to honor his career with the band.  Manipulated by his manager and lawyer, Mick refused and chose to file this ugly public lawsuit.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Mick Mars, Motley Crue’s guitarist of 41 years, has filed legal papers bringing deep and apparently hostile divisons between him and the other three members of the band out into the open. The suit only demands that the group hand over relevant documents about their businesses in advance of arbitration. But the wealth of details in Mars’ filing offers a provocative look at the tension between him and the others, in what he says has been a pattern of “gaslighting” in an attempt to kick him out of the group. The paperwork was filed in Los Angeles County’s Superior Court Thursday filed through Mars’ attorney, Edwin F. McPherson, and says the band has deliberately withheld information about the various Motley Crue businesses that he has a 25% ownership share in. Mars says the band has demanded he sign a severance agreement that would divest him of those and other future interests, in return for a 5% stake in the group’s 2023 tour, which is going on without him.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The verdicts on the new Broadway musical-comedy “Shucked” are in, and the critics have asked you to lend them your ears — so to speak — as they’ve cobbled together their reactions to the possible sleeper hit. (Sorry, but once you’ve seen the production, it may take you six months or longer to stop speaking in puns.) Variety’s critic wrote that “with its exuberance, heart and non-stop yucks, ‘Shucked’ is the surprise delight of the Broadway season.” The New York Post’s notice trumpeted it as “Broadways’s best and funniest new musical.” Time Out said the show leaves theatergoers “gorged to satisfaction on a big, tasty bag of Broadway puff.” Entertainment Weekly wrote that “its refreshing embrace of diversity and unapologetically corny sincerity can definitely put a smile on your face.” Even one of the minority that was harder on it, the New York Times’ Jesse Green, begrudgingly admitted of the parade of laughs: “forced into submission,,” he wrote, “you eventually give in.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Tanya Tucker did not let much time slip away after the Country Music Hall of Fame announced her impending induction this week before coming out with an announcement of her own: She has a second album produced by the team of Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings coming soon, following up on a celebrated previous effort that earned Tucker her first two Grammy Awards. The album “Sweet Western Sound” will be out June 2 on Fantasy. A teaser track from the record, “Kindness” is out now. The song was written by Carlile’s bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth. The collection reunites the team that made Tucker’s comeback album, “While I’m Livin’,” a 2019 set that got the singer a Grammys for best country album, and its closing track, “Bring My Flowers Now,” which won best country song.

Christina Hall and her husband Joshua Hall celebrated their second anniversary with a romantic trip to Cabo!

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus spent the last few years of interviews generally demurring on when their group, Boygenius, would ever be collectively super again. There’s been a little bit of a Boygenius time-out, of course, since the trio’s fairly spontaneous debut EP came out in 2018 and the release of their first full album as a collective, “The Record,” on March 31. But it hasn’t been for a lack of thought and effort going on behind the scenes, as the waiting world has now learned. As Bridgers says in an interview with Variety, “We realized the other day that we’ve been making this record for longer than we haven’t been, as friends,” since she dates its origin point to the week after she issued her “Punisher” album in 2020.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Tanya Tucker, Patty Loveless and Bob McDill will be the Country Music Hall of Fame’s three 2023 inductees, it was announced in a news conference at the hall’s museum in Nashville Monday morning. Tucker will be inducted into the hall in the “Veterans Era Artist” category, while Loveless will get her entree in the “Modern Era Artist” category. McDill is to be inducted in the “Songwriter” category, which is in rotation with the “Recording and/or Touring Musician” and “Songwriter” categories, each coming up every three years. Cheers went up at the announcement ceremony as well as around Nashville, as all three have long been favored for induction, and Tucker and Loveless particularly talked up as should-be shoo-ins for their historical importance as leading women in the genre.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The wheels are not close to coming off the “Carpool Karaoke” franchise, as a series of new episodes was announced Monday morning for Apple TV+, featuring stars ranging from pop singer Avril Lavigne to TV star Sheryl Lee Ralph to current Broadway queen Lea Michele. The eight new “Carpool Karaoke: The Series” episodes will bow globally on the platform June 23. While most of the installments pair up two stars, three of the episodes promise to incorporate the cast of a series: Netflix’s “Girls5eva,” CBS’ “Ghosts” and Apple TV+’s “The Afterparty.” Some of the partners in carpooling have a joint project to promote. Alison Brie and Danny Pudi, for instance, are not only mutual “Community” alumni but recently reunited for the rom-com “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Not coincidentally, a teaser that was already posted for their “Karaoke” episode has them singing the Gotye song of that same name.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic During the opening monolog at Sunday night’s CMT Music Awards, broadcast from Austin on CBS, there was a comedic bit in which Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown exchanged anniversary presents to celebrate their cohosting of the show for the third consecutive time. Brown gave Ballerini a cowboy hat, and she reciprocated by giving him a pink hat to put on in return. At least a few audience members shared a joke about the exchange: By wearing pink, would Brown be breaking Tennessee’s recently passed law that some believe would ban most drag performances in the state, if they were back home? Viewers whose minds went there during that silly opening were just kidding — but Ballerini really went there later in the three-hour telecast, when she chose four “RuPaul’s Drag Race” queens to perform with her as she sang “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” That song, off her 2022 album “Subject to Change,” is Ballerini’s anthem of female friendship — and, with the way the CMT Awards routine played out, she very much seemed to be counting drag performers as among those friends. The performance was playful and ostensibly non-political, and in a different year might not have raised very many shaved or unshaved eyebrows. In spring 2023, it was hard to read it as anything other than a statement of: If drag queens are brought down, the rest of us will be dragged down with them.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic A couple of members of a fresh generation of country music — Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson — came away as the top victors at Sunday night’s CMT Music Awards, broadcast live from Austin for the first time. But the biggest winners may have been CMT and CBS, putting the three-hour telecast on the map as a show packed with enough performance firepower that it does merit having made the move from a cable platform to major broadcast premiere as of last year. However much the official winners may delight a core country crowd happy to see young radio and streaming favorites get rewarded, the big draw for the CBS audience was likely a series of collaborations between country stars and their pop or rock counterparts, as has been the custom for years on the rival CMA Awards. Most notable were the all-female collabs that had Carly Pearce dueting with Gwen Stefani on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl,” or Alanis Morissette trading lines with a slate of young female artists that included Lainey Wilson, Ingrid Andress, Morgan Wade and Madeline Edwards. The all-star teamings spread to those who presented, too, with Megan Thee Stallion providing the most enthusiastic introduction imaginable for “my new besty,” Shania Twain.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The vibe surrounding Joni Mitchell being bestowed with the Gershwin Prize in Washington, D.C. earlier this month — as seen in a new PBS special — couldn’t have been more harmonious, from all accounts. And that’s a good thing, because under less loving circumstances, there could have been a turf war over who would get to sing “Both Sides Now,” the song that was Mitchell’s first hit in 1967 and might still stand as her signature song, if someone had to pick one with a gun to their head. The victor, in this quiet, bloodless battle: the inimitable Annie Lennox, who performed at the tribute to Mitchell just months after being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Eurythmics.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When an all-star cast of musicians came together to rehearse their salute to Joni Mitchell for a Washington, D.C. tribute concert in February, in honor of her being the latest annual recipient of the Gershwin Prize for songwriting, executive producer Ken Ehrlich had an early epiphany about where Marcus Mumford’s cover of “Carey” should go. “During the rehearsal, it was obvious to me: that was the opening number.” As you watch the remainder of “Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song,” though — as it premieres on PBS tonight, and is available thereafter for streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app — you won’t see Mumford disappearing from the stage for very many extended periods. Mumford has been part of the parties at Mitchell’s home the last couple of years, and participated in the “Joni jam” at the Newport Folk Festival last summer, so he is well familiar with her and her catalog at this point. And so, as Ehrlich explains it, “When I reached out to him, it probably wasn’t a half hour before he got back to me and said, ‘Of course I’d love to do this.’ And then he quickly followed with: ‘Can I play with the band?’ And he became the resident percussionist, which I didn’t have.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic A short film that actor-turned-director Kristen Stewart made with the group Boygenius got an official Hollywood sendoff Thursday night at the El Rey Theatre, with a film premiere that also doubled as a launch party for the indie-rock trio’s new album, “The Record.” Stewart did not participate in the Q&A that Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus did with members of the press and public after the screening, but she stepped out to introduce the short film, which is essentially an interlocking combination of music videos for three songs from the new album: “$20,” “Emily I’m Sorry” and “True Blue.” The imagery is sometimes sentimental, sometimes bracing and vivid. Bridgers sings “Emily I’m Sorry” in front of a monster truck rally. Palms are cut for a blood oath. And there is some lip-locking through copious blue paint. The framing device is sweet, though, beginning with one band member sleeping fitfully in bed and waking up at the end embraced in a group cuddle.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The three women of Boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — have made alluding to their forebears a hallmark of their band. Witness the cover of their first EP in 2018, when they re-created the casual iconography of the debut album sleeve of a prior supergroup — Crosby, Stills & Nash — or when they posed as Nirvana on a recent Rolling Stone cover. On their first full-length album, prosaically titled “The Record,” the references come fast and furious, in song titles or random lines: the Beatles with “Revolution 0,” Sheryl Crow with “Not Strong Enough,” Virginia Woolf with “Letters to an Old Poet,” Joan Didion and the Cure with scattered borrowings or citations, and last but not least, Leonard Cohen with, um, “Leonard Cohen.”