Amazon MGM StudiosBarry Keoghan gave the world one of last year’s most memed and memorable musical movie moments last year when he danced naked to “Murder on the Dancefloor” at the end of Saltburn. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he’s back at it in Andrea Arnold’s beguiling new film Bird.(Warning: Some light spoilers from the movie ahead.)Frankly, we should have expected this. Arnold is a filmmaker who loves to swing for the fences when it comes to her soundtracks. In her last narrative feature, American Honey, she orchestrated a grimy meet cute to Rihanna’s “We Found Love” in a Kmart. Here, she has a tattooed Keoghan singing Blur.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Christopher Polk/Getty ImagesCountry star Zach Bryan recently survived an ATV crash in Little Rock, Arkansas, that left him with a large gash on his arm, his girlfriend Brianna LaPaglia revealed on TikTok.The Barstool Sports commentator, who goes by the stage name Brianna Chickenfry, described being deeply shaken by the incident.“Two nights ago, Zach and I got into a traumatizing side-by-side car crash,” LaPaglia told her followers on Tuesday night. “It flipped a bunch of times, everything shattered, and thank God we had our seatbelts on. But there was a lot of blood, and we thought we were saying goodbye to each other.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox Business NetworkRep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) made a bizarre claim Thursday, insisting that he has “evidence” to support his allegation that President Joe Biden was “jacked up on something” during the State of the Union address. He even offered to show his so-called proof to Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo “offline.”The MAGA congressman’s wild accusation seemed to go too far for the pro-Trump conspiracy-loving Bartiromo, who once relied on “wackadoodle” claims made by a woman who thinks she’s a ghost to peddle 2020 election lies on Fox airwaves that eventually led the network to settle a massive defamation lawsuit.Appearing on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria, Murphy—a co-chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus— was asked to put his “doctor’s hat on” and give his take on the recently announced presidential debates between Biden and former President Donald Trump.Read more at The Daily Beast.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI; JIM WATSONU.S. President Joe Biden and power dozer Donald Trump agreed to debate at least twice before the November election. The first debate will be hosted by CNN on June 27 with three ground rules proposed by the Biden campaign and accepted by the Trump campaign: The debate will be staged in a TV studio, candidates’ mics will cut off when the time limit is reached, and only the candidates and moderators will be present.This is a fine start, but here are some additional ground rules that would make the debate even better.1. Candidates must agree to having a fact checker in the wings and if a candidate lies, a loud ahooga noise will sound.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Adam Gray/Getty ImagesNadine Menendez, a defendant in a sweeping corruption trial alongside her husband Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), has breast cancer and will be undergoing a mastectomy as treatment, her husband revealed on Thursday.The senator announced his wife’s cancer diagnosis in a statement from the courtroom where his trial on corruption and bribery charges began this week. Nadine Menendez’s trial had been delayed because of the previously undisclosed health conditions, which are now clear.“Nadine is suffering from Grade 3 breast cancer, which will require her to have mastectomy surgery. We are, of course, concerned about the seriousness and advanced stage of the disease. She will require follow up surgery and possibly radiation treatment,” Menendez said, asking for respect and privacy on behalf of his wife. “We hope and pray for the best results.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

CBS Broadcasting, IncIn Survivor, finding a hidden immunity idol used to be a good thing. It used to mean leverage in the game: Not only did it give a player the chance to save themselves at one tribal council, but the person who found the fateful beaded necklace could also use it to sway the rest of camp. “Don’t vote for me,” they’d warn. “I’ve got an idol. And I’m playing it tonight.” And then, because the rest of the camp knew that voting them out was a lost cause, the player would be safe for another week.But there’s an important facet of idols that the Season 46 cast of Survivor seems to have forgotten: You do, eventually, have to actually play the damn thing.(Warning: Spoilers for the penultimate episode of Survivor Season 46, “Mama Bear,” follow.)Read more at The Daily Beast.

Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Amid a flurry of changes in the Russian government this week as Vladimir Putin carries out his post-inaugural reshuffle, something strange and potentially dangerous happened in Chechnya: Ramzan Kadyrov’s longtime righthand man, Magomed Daudov, suddenly up and quit.“After a meeting with the head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov, I decided to resign as chairman of the parliament of the Chechen Republic,” Daudov was quoted as announcing on local television.He gave no further explanation for the move. Kadyrov, bizarrely, claimed that after nearly 10 years on the job, Daudov had simply decided it was time to “search for himself in other spheres.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyIn late October, a mysterious nonprofit registered with the state of Delaware. Within months, it was funneling millions of dollars to conservative causes.Last week, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the new group, Ardleigh Impact Corporation, bears the marks of a shell entity specifically created to pump big donors’ money into politics while masking their identities.The alleged setup, known as a “straw donor” scheme, would violate federal law, the complaint states.Read more at The Daily Beast.

John Armour / LionsgateBryan Bertino’s 2008 The Strangers is one of the millennium’s finest horror films, and a large part of its success stems from the fact that it doesn’t cheat by making its main characters morons. Faced with a home-intrusion nightmare carried out by three silent fiends, two wearing old-timey masks and the other boasting a burlap bag over his head, its protagonists (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) routinely assess their situation logically and react accordingly, thereby eliciting urgent, nail-biting engagement with their plight. It’s a small-scale masterclass in orchestrating suspense through diligent plotting and staging, not to mention memorable imagery, highlighted by the repeated sight of its villains materializing in the background, their motionless muteness casting them as inexplicable and unnerving harbingers of doom.The same, alas, cannot be said about the sequel to Bertino’s gem, 2018’s clumsier The Strangers: Prey at Night, and that goes, double, triple, quadruple for The Strangers: Chapter 1, which hits theaters May 17. The first entry in a planned trilogy whose subsequent installments will be released in the coming year, Renny Harlin’s thriller is a de facto remix of the franchise’s first outing, the primary difference being that whereas Bertino’s original was sleek, sinister, and deft, this do-over is noisy, dull, and dumb as a bag of rocks. Managing to do a disservice to virtually every plot element that it borrows, it’s proof positive that horror-cinema components are far less important than the artists tasked with piecing them together.The Strangers: Chapter 1 wastes no time establishing its reliance on inanity to conjure up scares. In a forest, a businessman flees unknown assailants, and despite having an enormous head start on his pursuers (after all, they’re nowhere in sight), he carelessly trips, falls and calamitously injures himself. Another male character will later exhibit similar clichéd inelegance and suffer an ankle injury that hinders his ability to fight back—one of many examples of Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland’s screenplay taking the easy way out to make its characters vulnerable. Read more at The Daily Beast.

XA Boeing 747-400 with 468 people aboard was forced to make an emergency landing in Indonesia on Wednesday after one of its engines caught fire and began shooting out flames during takeoff.The Garuda Indonesia flight was bound for Medina, Saudi Arabia, which is the entry point for many Muslims making their pilgrimage to Mecca. It left from Indonesia’s international airport in Makassar, where clips showed one of the plane’s four engines becoming engulfed in flames during takeoff on Wednesday evening.Videos of the engine fire were shared online by JACDEC, a plane crash data evaluation firm, which showed that the flames began just as the plane had lifted from the runway. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Win McNamee/Getty ImagesPresident Joe Biden has used executive privilege in an attempt to block Trump-aligned Republican House leaders from obtaining audio recordings of his interviews with special counsel Robert Hur over Biden’s handling of classified documents.The transcripts of those interviews, conducted over two days, have already been released. In the explosive 345-page report, Hur concluded Biden had done nothing criminal but characterized the president as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” an assertion Biden’s critics seized on and his advocates slammed as unprofessional on Hur’s part.Biden’s use of executive privilege to prevent House committees from receiving tapes of the interviews was revealed in a series of letters from officials in his administration.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Robin Alam/ISI Photos via Getty ImagesA petition calling for the Kansas City Chiefs to dismiss kicker Harrison Butker has racked up over 100,000 signatures as of Thursday morning amid a furious backlash to a controversial commencement address he delivered at a Catholic college over the weekend.The three-time Super Bowl champion spoke for around 20 minutes Saturday at Benedictine College, a conservative liberal arts school in Kansas, sharing his views on gender, COVID, abortion, and other topics. He reportedly received a standing ovation from his audience, but others, including the NFL, were much less enthusiastic about his comments.“The harmful remarks made by Harrison Butker, kicker of the Kansas City Chiefs, during his commencement address at Benedictine College were unacceptable,” reads the Change.org petition calling for the Chiefs to fire Butker. “His comments were sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist. These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Gordon Black / Facebook via ReutersAn American soldier currently detained in Russia has allegedly admitted his guilt over accusations of stealing from his girlfriend, state media reported Thursday.U.S. Staff Sergeant Gordon Black was placed in pre-trial detention after he was detained at a hotel in the city of Vladivostok on May 2. The Pentagon says Black, who was posted to South Korea, made his ill-fated trip to Russia without the authorization of the U.S. Army.He is now “cooperating” with the investigation after “he admitted” guilt, a representative of the local interior ministry told RIA Novosti. The press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Primorsky Territory separately told the Interfax news agency that Black had confessed and the “investigation into the criminal case continues.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesMarjorie Taylor Greene wasted no time in suggesting that the shooting of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico Wednesday could be linked to his position on COVID vaccines.The MAGA lawmaker shared a post on X Wednesday which contained a video with English subtitles in which Fico purportedly rails against the treatment of those who opposed vaccination and other government measures to manage the pandemic (The Daily Beast has not verified the translation provided in the clip). “This is great and courageous,” Greene wrote in her own tweet sharing the video. “No wonder they shot him.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP via GettyDonald Trump, whose failure to assert king-like immunity subjected him to criminal charges at his ongoing trial, brought in a new band of jesters on Thursday morning—all MAGA loyalists in Congress with colorful histories of proving their personal devotion to him.Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO)—a 2020 election denier—was given the best spot in the courtroom: aisle seat in the front pew just behind the former president, making her just barely visible behind him when the five news photographers got their 30 seconds to snap pictures for the day.Next to her was Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who once sought a presidential pardon from Trump while being under investigation for sex trafficking a teen girl—a saga that was ultimately dropped by law enforcement but is now under the microscope of a congressional ethics committee. As a sign of just how far he’s made it into the trusted inner circle, he sat next to the tycoon’s son Eric Trump.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Alexander Ryumin/Pool via ReutersRussian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping put on the performance of a lifetime in Beijing on Thursday, playing peacemakers in the “Ukraine crisis” over a menu of peking duck and Maotai vodka even as Russian troops launch a new offensive.In the Russian leader’s first overseas trip in his fifth term as president and one of his first trips abroad since the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest, Putin gushed about Moscow’s “limitless” bond with Beijing and lapped up the fanfare surrounding his arrival, saying: “I just feel right at home.”While he faces arrest if he were to set foot on the soil of many other countries, Putin was treated to a lavish ceremony at the Great Hall of the People that included a 21-gun salute, marching band, and an honor guard. Kremlin-controlled media was quick to seize on the optics of the ceremony for a flurry of reports apparently showing Putin still commands respect on the world stage.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Amir Cohen/ReutersThe Israeli military said Thursday that five of its soldiers were killed in Gaza when they were hit by Israeli tank shells in what is thought to be one of the deadliest instances of friendly fire since the outbreak of the war.Another seven troops were wounded—including three seriously—in the incident in the northern city of Jabalia on Wednesday evening. All of the deceased victims served in the 202nd Battalion of the Paratroopers Brigade and were between the ages of 20 and 22.“An initial investigation into the deaths of five IDF soldiers reveals that IDF tanks, located dozens of meters away, identified a weapon and fired shells at an IDF force nearby,” the Isreal Defense Forces said in a statement, according to NBC News.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Michael M. Santiago/AFP via Getty ImagesThe lawyers defending Donald Trump in his hush money trial will look to turn up the heat on Michael Cohen Thursday as the former president’s onetime attorney and personal fixer returns to the witness stand for what is likely to be a day of brutal cross-examination aiming to undermine his credibility.Cohen, who once said he’d take a bullet for his old boss, has already given hours of testimony earlier this week shooting down Trump’s denials in the case, alleging that Trump directed him to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels to stop her from speaking about claims of an affair in order to protect his 2016 presidential campaign.Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from the alleged attempt to hide reimbursements to Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment made to Daniels. Trump also denies ever having sex with the adult film star.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyOne would be forgiven for wondering what world Jerry Seinfeld is living in where the “extreme left,” as he claimed in a recent interview with The New Yorker, has purged American television of good comedy. For all the left’s mighty powers, it couldn’t quite manage to halt production of biting network comedies like Abbott Elementary, Superstore, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, or The Good Place. Nor did it manage to stave off dark, even transgressive cable fare like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Righteous Gemstones, Atlanta, or PEN15.The Democratic Socialists of America certainly didn’t stop Seinfeld’s erstwhile collaborators, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Larry David, from making Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm, respectively, the latter of which just ended a critically acclaimed final season.And as Seinfeld himself acknowledged, the left’s path of destruction has yet to temper the spread of deliberately offensive stand-up comedy, a field that includes many proud right-wingers who consider it their business to make comedy racist, sexist, and transphobic again. So what, exactly, is the creator and star of one of the greatest sitcoms of all time complaining about?Read more at The Daily Beast.

Animation by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyWhether or not his campaign admits it, President Joe Biden has a Sun Belt problem.Biden is holding up just fine in expectedly tight races with Donald Trump in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Yet in the Sun Belt—the stretch of states from North Carolina and Georgia to Nevada and Arizona—Trump is giving Biden a shellacking with hefty leads, particularly in those two key desert states, according to a new New York Times/Siena College/Philadelphia Inquirer poll.“I am fascinated by how quickly his base is abandoning him,” Dave Smith, chairman of Arizona’s Pima County GOP, said of Biden in an interview with The Daily Beast. On the ground, Smith said he’s seen a notable influx of volunteers and a boost in party registration, which he attributed to voter concerns about migrant border crossings, as well as the cost of housing.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/CBSSomebody, please give Annie Potts a job.And not just any role. Potts–the unflappable receptionist in Ghostbusters, one of the steel magnolias in Designing Women, and most recently the wise, albeit felonious grandma in Young Sheldon– deserves fabulous parts.She wants one, now.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesAttending the Met Gala now has a brutal consequence: You’ll be blocked by 100 strangers on the internet.The horror! Zendaya is quaking in fear over the fact that she’ll never be able to see a man she’s never met posting about his dog. Camila Cabello is crying over the fact that she lost a couple hundred followers on Instagram, bumping her 66 million followers down to… 66 million. Nicholas Galitzine is worried that The Idea of You will earn a few less streams, although the movie is already one of the biggest on streaming in the country.If you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic here. I find this new trend of creating celebrity block lists to be appalling. It’s a new movement happening on TikTok and other social media platforms. Everyday people are fed up with celebs staying silent about the state of the world, particularly the war in Gaza. So, following a tasteless night of opulence at the Met Gala last week, social media users around the world decided to start blocking handfuls of celebrities in an act of defiance against them, including Gigi Hadid, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish. These names, while seemingly picked out of a hat, mostly comprise Met Gala attendees—although any other big celebrities who have been silent on the matter will be added as well. The goal? They’ll be compelled to speak up.Read more at The Daily Beast.

John Armour/LionsgateMadelaine Petsch, star and producer of The Strangers: Chapter 1, is serious about horror.“I had a Blockbuster close to my parents’ house when I was a kid,” the Riverdale alum told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed during a recent interview. At around the age of 11 or 12, she recalled, she made it her mission to watch every horror film in said Blockbuster by the time she enrolled in high school. Through sheer determination, she succeeded.“I spent every weekend with my best friend watching probably, like, five movies a day for like three or four years,” Petsch said. “When I set a goal, I accomplish it at all costs.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Liam Daniel/NetflixSince the very beginning of Bridgerton, Nicola Coughlan’s outcast wallflower character Penelope Featherington has been the show’s beating, oh-so-vulnerable heart. Sure, she might midnight as the town gossip, Lady Whistledown, but at her core, all she wants is to find love and security—preferably, with her childhood friend and longtime crush, the clueless Bridgerton brother Colin (Luke Newton). For three seasons, we’ve watched Penelope cast furtive, longing looks in her would-be suitor’s direction, and his utter cluelessness has been absolute torture. Thank God that’s finally over.Bridgerton Season 3, which hit Netflix with its four-episode Part One on Thursday, repays our patience (or, in my case, deep lack thereof) by giving Penelope the show’s best romantic arc yet. And how could it not be so, after three years of build-up? But Colin’s not the only one who has Penelope’s attention: This season, a new suitor, the very rich, very eligible Lord Debling (Sam Phillips) enters the mix and captures Penelope’s interest. Lady Featherington (Polly Walker), might be dead set on getting one of Penelope’s dim-witted sisters pregnant so that they can inherit the family fortune, but as usual, she underestimates her shyest daughter at her own peril. (That said, Lady Featherington’s impromptu sex education session with her daughters might be the funniest moment of the season.)As usual, the romance tropes abound, starting with Colin offering Penelope secret one-on-one “lessons” that will supposedly teach her how to seduce other men. (Who does he think he is—Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful?) Coughlan and Newton have spent years developing their chemistry, and here, it’s practically combustible. Not since Bridgerton Season 1, which practically made a drinking game out of flashing Regé-Jean Page’s ass on screen, has this brilliant, smutty show been this sexy—although admittedly, these first four episodes are mostly about building up the libidinous anticipation via horny camerawork. The Penelope-Colin-Debling love triangle ups the drama, setting Colin’s jaw in a near-permanent clench as the competition heats up.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox NewsIt didn’t take long at all for some of Fox News’ most-watched hosts to frame next month’s debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which was announced Wednesday morning, as unfair to the presumptive GOP nominee.On The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime and Hannity, each host made a point to depict the moderators of the CNN debate, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, in a negative light.Laura Ingraham began by claiming the Biden campaign was in need of a “game changer,” and they “hope they will get it with the help of” Tapper and Bash, two hard news anchors whose approach to broadcasting differs entirely from the Fox News model.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Scouted/The Daily Beast/Retailers.Scouted selects products independently. If you purchase something from our posts, we may earn a small commission.With all the buzz around tweens and teens shopping for luxury and premium beauty products at Sephora, many of us millennials are wondering how today’s youth can afford its price points when we were collecting coins from lemonade sales to afford drugstore items. It’s hard to wrap our heads around the fact that Gen Alpha teens’ bathroom cabinets are chock full of prestige brands like Drunk Elephant, Glow Recipe, and Charlotte Tilbury, compared to their millennial counterparts, who (mostly) shopped drugstore—and maybe treated themselves to the occasional Clinique perfume or Lancome mascara if it was a good month for that after-school babysitting gig. Read more at The Daily Beast.

NBCOn Wednesday morning, President Joe Biden officially offered to debate Donald Trump, and the former president quickly accepted. The first of two presidential debates is scheduled for June 27, and Trump himself has seemed confident over his upcoming appearance. As he posted on Truth Social, “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced - He can’t put two sentences together!”But as Late Night host Seth Meyers argued in his latest “Closer Look” segment, Trump’s debate skills aren’t so hot either. Meyers played a montage of Trump’s rudest, most incoherent moments in the 2020 debates, remarking, “Trump thinks that made him look good… Even Mike Lindell saw that and was like, ‘whoa, you sound crazy.’”Meyers noted how Trump agreed to Biden’s debate conditions, which included no live audience. “I don’t need to tell you that Trump thrives when he’s screaming over a live audience,” Meyers said. “Biden getting Trump to agree to no audiences is like getting a vampire to agree to fight you at noon on the beach during the garlic festival.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox NewsDonald Trump—who dozed off on the first day of his criminal hush-money trial in New York last month and has since been closing his eyes often for extended periods of time during the proceedings—is actually not sleeping, but “meditating,” Fox News host Jesse Watters tried to argue Wednesday.In the latest instance of Watters defending the indicted former president, the co-host of The Five told his colleagues that Trump doesn’t really care about coming off as tired—even though his team lashed out at reports they claimed were false on the trial’s first day.“He’s meditating. He’s in a meditative state,” Watters insisted. “When you’re defensive about something, you avoid something. Trump’s not defensive of being old and tired. He can shut his eyes and not feel bad about it like Sleepy Joe.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe news that President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to two debates, one in just a few weeks’ time, in late June, and another in September, has naturally got the punditverse buzzing.Some commentators have focused on Biden’s sharp early morning announcement that he would welcome a debate with Trump. It was just the Egg McBiden the president’s fans—like the folks on “Morning Joe”—needed to start their day, served as it was with a side order of feistiness. Between the “Make my day, pal” opening and the “Let’s pick a date, Donald, I hear you’re free on Wednesdays” (a reference to his current court schedule) it got sharply to the point, did so with a humorous edge and obligated Trump to respond.Trump replied in character with his own statement, using his day off from his criminal election interference trial to offer an irony-deaf reference to Biden being “crooked” and to criticize the president’s debating skills. And of course there were some strangely capitalized words for emphasis.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox NewsWith two debates now scheduled between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump for June and September on CNN and ABC News, respectively, Fox News host Laura Ingraham had some advice for the former president.The Ingraham Angle host said Wednesday that Trump’s goal should really just be to “stay calm,” because the quadruply-indicted former president, who refused to concede his 2020 election loss, “easily appears presidential.”Ingraham also advised Trump, who spent much of his first debate with Biden in September 2020 interrupting his opponent and moderator Chris Wallace, to not lose his temper.Read more at The Daily Beast.