April 2, 2019

No Image

Entertainment April 2, 2019

The Month in Movies: What’s in Theaters in April 2019

Shazam!

Are we already entering the summer movie season? April brings us the most anticipated theatrical release of the year, with Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, and there’s a very good chance it will remain the biggest movie through the end of 2019. But there are many other great titles coming out this month, including a new DC superhero movie and some major horror and documentary features.

Below is our guide to all the major titles coming to theaters in April and how to get your tickets now.

April 5:

Shazam!

Starring: Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Jack Dylan Grazer

The latest entry of the DC Extended Universe is also the franchise’s most standalone effort, following the Big-like adventures of a teenage boy (Asher Angel) who can magically turn into an adult-size superhero (Levy). It’s all fun and games and flying, though, until he must save his city from the evil Dr. Sivana (Strong).

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

Pet Sematary

Starring: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow

Based on Stephen King’s classic horror novel, this second adaptation of Pet Sematary centers around a burial ground from which the dead come back to life — yet now they’re evil. That includes pet cats or young children, both in the case of the oft-grieving Creed family, who have just moved into town from the big city.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

The Best of Enemies

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Sam Rockwell, Ann Heche

Oscar winner Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) plays another bigot in this drama based on the true story of Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis and his longtime rivalry turned partnership with civil rights activist Ann Atwater (Henson) in Durham, North Carolina, in the early 1970s over a matter of school desegregation.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

Amazing Grace

Starring: Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger, Rev. James Cleveland

Director Sydney Pollack (The Firm) originally helmed this concert film back in 1972, documenting the late Aretha Franklin’s performance with the choir of the New Bethel Baptist Church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Unfinished for more than 40 years, the movie is finally hitting theaters thanks to music producer Alan Elliott.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

April 12:

Hellboy

Starring: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane

Rebooting the devilish comic book movie franchise after two adaptations from Guillermo del Toro, this version of Hellboy aims to be darker and more R-rated. Harbour portrays the titular supernatural superhero as he and the rest of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense face a villainous Arthurian witch named Nimue, aka “the Queen of Blood” (Jovovich).

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

Missing Link

Starring (voices): Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, Zach Galifianakis

From Laika, the stop-motion animation studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, comes a comedic adventure about a Bigfoot (Galifianakis) who teams up with an investigator (Jackman) and a free spirit (Saldana) to travel the world in search of his long-lost Yeti relatives. Timothy Olyphant co-stars as the voice of an evil explorer.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

Little

Starring: Regina Hall, Issa Rae, Marsai Martin

In the second Big-inspired movie of the month, Hall plays a ruthlessly successful tech mogul who is magically transformed into her younger self. Martin, who plays the teenage version of the character, also came up with the comedic premise and serves as an executive producer on the movie, one of Hollywood’s youngest ever.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

After

Starring: Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Josephine Langford, Selma Blair

Based on the best-selling romance novel by Anna Todd, which began as One Direction fan fiction involving singer Harry Styles, this drama centers around the love story of a good-girl college student (Langford) with a boyfriend back home who enters a rocky relationship with a cruel bad boy (Fiennes Tiffin) with a dark secret.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

April 17:

Penguins

Starring (voice): Ed Helms

The latest real-life animal adventure from Disneynature takes us to Antarctica for a look at Adélie penguins. Helms narrates the movie, which focuses on the “coming-of-age story” of Steve, one in a million of these flightless birds, as he finds a mate and then cares for their child while avoiding threats, including killer whales and leopard seals.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

Breakthrough

Starring: Chrissy Metz, Josh Lucas, Topher Grace

Based on a true story, this faith-based drama follows the parents (Metz and Lucas) of a teenager who miraculously recovered after he seemingly drowned in an icy lake and then fell into a coma. Mike Colter co-stars as the first responder who saves the boy (Marcel Ruiz), while Grace portrays a local pastor at the family’s church.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

April 19:

The Curse of La Llorona

Starring: Linda Cardellini, Marisol Ramirez, Raymond Cruz

Produced by James Wan and tied to his Conjuring Universe franchise, The Curse of La Llorona is another horror movie inspired by supernatural folklore. Cardellini stars as a widowed mother of two who is haunted by the legendary ghost known as La Llorona, aka “the Weeping Woman,” in 1970s Los Angeles.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

Under the Silver Lake

Starring: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace

The latest movie from It Follows writer/director David Robert Mitchell, Under the Silver Lake is a comedic neo-noir thriller in which Garfield plays a man searching for the mysterious woman (Keough) who suddenly came into his life only to immediately go missing.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

April 26:

Avengers: Endgame

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Brie Larson, Paul Rudd, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, Karen Gillan, Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Letitia Wright

This is it, the 22nd installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and potentially the one that ends it all — or at least the franchise as we know it. The follow-up to the cliffhanging Avengers: Infinity War follows the surviving superheroes, led by Captain America, as they attempt to set right what went away when Thanos snapped his fingers. Joined by Captain Marvel, the Avengers might just be able to reverse the devastating genocide of half the MCU’s population.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

The White Crow

Starring: Oleg Ivenko, Ralph Fiennes, Louis Hoffman

Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes returns to the director’s chair for this biographical drama about Rudolph Nureyev (Ivenko), the brilliant Russian dancer and choreographer who famously defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 at the height of the Cold War. Fiennes also co-stars in the movie as ballet master Alexander Pushkin.

[embedded content]

Get Tickets

J.T. Leroy

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Courtney Love

The scandal that shook the publishing world is dramatized in this biopic from Justin Kelly (King Cobra) starring Oscar-nominated actress Laura Dern as author Laura Albert, who took on the alter ego “J.T. Leroy” and then had her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop (Kristen Stewart) portray the suddenly celebrated personality in public.

Get Tickets

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

No Image

Business April 2, 2019

Federal Judge Imposes New Probation Terms On PG&E To Reduce Wildfire Risk

PG&E crews work to restore power lines in Paradise, Calif., after the Camp Fire destroyed much of the Northern California town.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP


hide caption

toggle caption

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

A federal judge in San Francisco is barring utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric from reissuing dividends in favor of using the funds for reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires in Northern and Central California.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in a court hearing Tuesday, also said that he will closely monitor PG&E’s compliance with new wildfire prevention rules governing tree-trimming near power lines. Alsup is supervising the utility company’s felony probation stemming from its conviction in the case of a massive natural gas pipeline explosion in 2010.

“A lot of money went out in dividends that should have went into tree trimming,” Alsup said to PG&E acting chief executive John Simon as quoted by the Associated Press. “PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree budge whither. So a lot of trees should’ve been take down that were not.”

The judge’s order does not include the stringent condition requiring PG&E to inspect its entire power grid as he originally proposed.

Company spokesman James Noonan said in an email that “we share the court’s commitment to safety and understand that we must play a leading role in reducing the risk of wildfire throughout Northern and Central California.”

The court’s dividend plan was not a surprise. Last month in a court document, Alsup had signaled his intention to order the company not to issue dividends until it complied with “all applicable vegetation management requirements.”

PG&E initially had resisted the plan, arguing that it had already suspended dividends in 2017. The dividend payments may not resume without Alsup’s permission.

In February, PG&E said that it’s “probable” that it was responsible for the 2018 Camp Fire that killed at least 85 people and destroyed about 14,000 structures. The company, facing billions of dollars in possible liabilities filed for bankruptcy in January. Alsup is also presiding over that filing in separate proceedings.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

No Image

Health April 2, 2019

Congressional Panel: Consumers Shouldn’t Have To Solve Surprise Medical Bill Problem

Surprise bills happen when patients go to a hospital they think is in their insurance network but are seen by doctors or specialists who aren’t.

PeopleImages/Getty Images


hide caption

toggle caption

PeopleImages/Getty Images

One point drew clear agreement Tuesday during a House subcommittee hearing: When it comes to the problem of surprise medical bills, the solution must protect patients — not demand that they be great negotiators.

“It is the providers and insurers, not patients, who should bear the burden of settling on a fair payment,” said Frederick Isasi, the executive director of Families USA. He was one of the witnesses who testified before the House Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee of the Education & Labor Committee.

Surprise, or “balance,” bills happen when patients go to a hospital they think is in their insurance network, but are then seen by a doctor or specialist who isn’t. The patient is then on the hook for an often very high bill — sometimes exceeding thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

Stories in the Bill of the Month series by NPR and Kaiser Health News have drawn attention to the problem.

Surprise billing is one of the rare public policy problems that are both bipartisan and in need of a federal solution. Around 60 percent of people are covered by employer-sponsored insurance, which is regulated by the federal government, and aren’t protected by the nearly two dozen state laws governing balance billing.

“We have people on this committee that have done yeoman efforts to come up with solutions in their own states,” said Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., the panel’s ranking member. “I think we have a head start in understanding some of the pitfalls to stay away from and some of the benefits we can go directly toward.”

Several policy solutions have been introduced in Congress and discussed at the White House, but the witnesses testifying before the panel were firm that any answer needed to be worked out between key stakeholders — providers and insurers — instead of forcing consumers to file complaints and go through arbitration processes.

The problem, according to testimony, needs to be solved at the root. Instead of allowing a situation in which patients must negotiate a payment plan after receiving a surprise bill, hospitals and insurers need to remove the incentives for doctors to remain out of network.

Right now, if doctors opt out of an insurance network, they can charge prices that are “largely made up,” said Christen Linke Young, a fellow at USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy.

“We need to limit how much they can be paid in out-of-network scenarios to make it less attractive,” Young said.

Experts offered a few solutions, like capping how much providers can be paid if they are out of network. Ilyse Schuman, senior vice president of health policy at the American Benefits Council, suggested capping reimbursement for out-of-network emergency services at 125 percent of what the physician would get from Medicare.

Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., an obstetrician, expressed concerns that tying payments to Medicare would disadvantage rural communities like his, where Medicare reimburses doctors less.

“We pay our providers less and can keep less than 10 percent of nurses we train in the area because we can’t pay them,” Roe said.

Rep. Susan Wild, a Pennsylvania Democrat, acknowledged that surprise billing is one problem that both parties are motivated to solve, but she was skeptical that a path forward was on the horizon. “The solutions I’m hearing don’t sound workable in the context of our present medical system,” Wild said.

“Isn’t the real problem the fact that we’ve turned over our medical system to private market forces?” she asked.

While price transparency is often touted as the antidote to high medical bills, panelists were adamant that more information alone is not enough to stop balance bills.

Patients usually can’t shop around for an anesthesiologist, for instance, no matter how much information they have.

“Notice isn’t enough here; even if the consumer has perfect information, they can’t do anything with that information,” Young testified. “They can’t go across town to get their anesthesia and go back to the hospital.”

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service and editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. You can follow Rachel Bluth onTwitter: @RachelHBluth

Let’s block ads! (Why?)