Author: Curated by: NewYorkGazette.com Est. 1725

Braun Strowman has a huge appetite for life. Speaking with “The Monster Among Men” in a Greenwich Village coffee shop ahead of his season-two launch party, a few things are immediately obvious. First, Adam Scherr (“WWE Icon” Strowman’s real name) is every bit as big as he’s billed, and second, he loves this food thing maybe even more than wrestling. You don’t get to 6’8″ and nearly 400 lb. (Scherr’s biggest) without doing a fair bit of eating. But to talk with the TV veterans around the USA Network series is to learn that Scherr is a legit foodie with…

When Mario Cuomo is discussed today, it’s most frequently in the context of how disappointing his son Andrew has become (and Chris, too, if you happen to work in the media), or his universally relevant observation that politicians “campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” It’s one of those maxims so indelible it’s hard to imagine that it emanated from any single person, and it hovers over every moment of Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt’s new documentary, Mario, whether it’s being discussed or not. Mario The Bottom Line Dry but persuasive. Venue: Tribeca Festival (Spotlight Documentary)Directors: Peter Kunhardt,…

Dozens of advertising and media buying executives convened in late April at an event space near the west side of New York City, eager to get a look at what Paramount Skydance had to offer in its first “upfront” market under the control of CEO David Ellison. Attendees sat at long tables, dined on exquisitely prepared meats and fish, and listened to Ellison and actors from the company’s various “Yellowstone” programs talk about the alliances they might build with Madison Avenue. When the showcase ended, guests could sample from an array of desserts and hit a well-stocked bar far into…

The American Federation of Musicians is suing major record companies Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group over the labels’ recent moves to settle their lawsuits with AI music generators Suno and Udio, arguing that the settlements’ benefits aren’t reaching the musicians themselves. “While the Defendants protected their own interests and created a significant source of new revenue with the retrospective settlements and prospective licenses, they have refused to compensate the musicians whose work – created with their own instruments and through their talent, creativity, and hard work – is fed into AI machines for profit,” the AFM said in…

Lee Sung Jin, the creator, executive producer and director of “Beef,” and Jason Bateman, who executive produced, directed and starred in “Black Rabbit,” sat down with Variety’s Clayton Davis to discuss their directing techniques and stylistic choices. Variety moderated this conversation in partnership with Netflix.Lee – who directed one episode in “Beef” Season 1 – spoke about taking on a larger directing role in Season 2, saying he wanted to “push the surrealism a little bit more.” Bateman, who joined the Director’s Guild of America at the age of 18, mentioned that he grew up acting and began paying attention…

Susannah Flood is nominated for the best actress in a play Tony for her performance in Liberation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last month. What does it mean to me to be nominated for a Tony for the first time? To answer that question, I really need to go back to my parents. Allow me to explain. They move to New York, young, with their own dreams and ambitions; she’s from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and he’s from Texas. She stands in the non-equity line all day to try to get auditions. He tries his hand at…

Across four documentaries — the Oscar- and Grammy-winning “Summer of Soul,” “Sly Lives,” “Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of Saturday Night Live Music” and the new “Earth, Wind & Fire (to Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World),” which arrives on HBO Sunday night — Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer and leader of the Roots and musical director for “The Tonight Show,” has established himself as one of the greatest music documentarians of this era. When artists who are also fans embark on such projects, the results can be too admiring, too fanboy, too hagiographic. But Thompson’s films are clear-eyed…

Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow didn’t mean to be so on the nose with the title of their HBO comedy “The Comeback.” But, it turns out, that has actually been the case for the show — every ten years, it makes another comeback. “It’s more meta than we tried to be,” Kudrow tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. Adds King: “The second season we thought was going to come back right after the first season, and that did not happen, and here, it became our brand to be this thing that comes back every decade!” “The Comeback” first launched in…

“So what’s your take?” That’s Kareem Rahma’s signature question on his buzzy video series SubwayTakes, and he lobbed the question in Jennifer Lopez’s direction on a brand new episode. The veteran superstar, who is in the middle of promoting her new Netflix romantic comedy Office Romance opposite Brett Goldstein, shot back a take that went viral in short order. “You have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker,” said the “Jenny From the Block” singer who hit the block after being born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents. “Everybody wants to claim our city, but…

With the FIFA World Cup literally kicking off next week in the U.S., Canada and Mexico — an unprecedented triple-nation collaboration that makes the last of those countries the first in history to host the soccer tournament a third time — Netflix‘s release of “Mexico 86” is opportunistically timed. Unfolding largely off the pitch, Gabriel Ripstein‘s loosely fact-based comedy (“Some of these things did happen,” an opening title card assures us) delves irreverently into the allegedly iffy backroom dealings that made Mexico the first two-time World Cup host 40 years ago. In the process, it prompts us to idly wonder…