Natasha Lyonne is set to make her feature directorial debut — with a big assist from artificial intelligence.

The “Poker Face” star is teaming up with Brit Marling and renowned computer scientist Jaron Lanier to create “Uncanny Valley,” a “hybrid film” that combines live action and AI. The new flick was announced on Tuesday by Asteria Studios, the self-described “ethical AI film and animation studio” that Lyonne co-founded alongside Bryn Mooser.

“Uncanny Valley,” per a release from Asteria, will be “powered by ‘Marey,’ the first clean foundational AI model developed by the engineers at Moonvalley, ensuring creative integrity and copyright transparency.”

Lyonne, in a statement shared with TheWrap, said it is “astounding” what can be created with AI when it is used “ethically and creatively.”

“Bringing something so bold to life feels radically expansive and exciting,” she said. “I’m immensely grateful for this opportunity from Asteria and to witness this...

Warner Bros.’ “A Minecraft Movie” continues its domination at the U.K. and Ireland box office, topping the chart for a fourth straight weekend with £2.4 million ($3.3 million), according to Comscore. The film has amassed $68.7 million to date, firmly establishing itself as one of the biggest hits of 2025.

Close behind, Warner Bros.’ “Sinners” maintained its momentum, earning $3.2 million in its second weekend for a $9.6 million total.

In third place, the reissue of “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge Of The Sith” from 20th Century Fox delivered a powerful showing earning $2.3 million over the weekend.

Another Warner Bros. title, “The Accountant 2,” opened in fourth with $1.2 million. The sequel to the 2016 action thriller, starring Ben Affleck, launched solidly ahead of the May blockbuster season.

Event cinema continued to prove popular, with “Pink Floyd at Pompeii – McMlxxii” from Trafalgar Releasing landing in fifth place with $905,671. The remastered concert film celebrates the legendary band...

“Top Gun: Maverick” filmmaker Joseph Kosinski is set to direct a “Miami Vice” remake for Universal Pictures.

Dan Gilroy is adapting the screenplay. Though plot details haven’t been revealed, the movie is based the 1980s TV series, starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as undercover detectives in South Florida. The neon-hued show ran on NBC for five seasons from 1984-1989. A film version was first attempted in 2006, with Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell leading the cast and Michael Mann (who produced the original series) behind the camera. Though it became a cult favorite over time, the “Miami Vice” movie flopped in its theatrical run, grossing $165 million against a reported $135 million budget.

Casting has yet to be announced. In addition to directing, Kosinski will produce through his company, Monolith. Dylan Clark, who worked with Kosinski on 2016’s post-apocalyptic action thriller “Oblivion” as well as the Matt Reeves-directed “Planet of the Apes” series,...

If you loved “chicken jockey” or enjoyed yelling “I am Steve” while watching “A Minecraft Movie,” then get ready because Warner Bros. Pictures is inviting fans to experience the blockbuster in a new way.

On May 2, showings of the movie will be showing across North America, and fans are being invited to get fully interactive. Audiences will have the opportunity to flex their voices by singing — or meme-ing — along with their favorite moments from the movie. According to Warner Bros. Pictures, “‘A Minecraft Movie: Block Party Edition!’ is made for those who yearn for the mines, so get ready to (re)enter the Overworld this weekend.”

“A Minecraft Movie” set a box office record when it opened around the world to $313 million, marking the highest debut yet for a video game movie adaptation. Starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers and Sebastian Hansen, the movie is based on...

Two-time Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne (The Holdovers, Sideways, Nebraska) will head up this year’s Venice Film Festival international jury, Venice unveiled on Monday.

Payne will oversee the jury of film professionals that picks the Golden Lion for best film at the 82nd Venice festival, which runs Aug. 27-Sept. 6.

“It’s an enormous honor and joy to serve on the jury at Venice,” Payne said in a statement. “Although I share a filmmaker’s ambivalence about comparing films against one another, I revere the Venice Film Festival’s nearly 100-year history of loudly celebrating film as an art form. I couldn’t be more excited.”

Venice Festival director Alberto Barbera said Payne “belongs to the small circle of filmmakers-cinephiles whose passion for cinema is fueled by knowledge of films of the past and curiosity about contemporary cinema, without boundaries or barriers of any kind. These qualities – along with his experience...

Oscar-winning Italian composer Nino Rota, who scored “La Dolce Vita,” “The Leopard” and “The Godfather” – among many other masterpiece movies – is set for “Nino” a high-profile documentary being directed by prominent editor, screenwriter and director Walter Fasano.

Fasano is known for his longtime creative collaboration with Luca Guadagnino mainly as an editor on films such as “I Am Love,” on which he served both as editor and co-writer; “A Bigger Splash”; “Call Me by Your Name”; and the doc “Bertolucci on Bertolucci” that Guadagnino and Fasano co-directed. Fasano more recently directed the doc “Pino” about Italian artist, sculptor, and set designer Pino Pascali.

Rota wrote the score for 16 films directed by Federico Fellini, including “La Strada,” “8 1/2,” “Juliet of the Spirits” and “Amarcord,” besides “La Dolce Vita.” He also composed music for Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” and the Sicilian-inspired theme for “The Godfather,” whose “Part II” score won him his only Oscar.

Exclusive: Paris-based Pyramide International has secured sales rights outside of Asia to Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho, a Japanese drama set to world premiere next month in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

Pyramide will also handle distribution in France while Tokyo-based Aniplex Inc. oversees sales for Asia. A release in Japan is set for June 6 through Toho.

The film centres on Kikuo, the son of a yakuza boss, who is taken under the wing of a renowned kabuki actor following the death of his father. The young man dedicates his life to the art of kabuki – a classical form of Japanese theatre...

Steve Buscemi and Daniel Brühl are set to attend Slano Film Days, which will focus on the work of actors this year. The festival, which was set up two years ago by former Sarajevo Film Festival chief Miro Purivatra, runs June 17-21 in Slano, Croatia. The actors will “share their insights and experiences with talented regional filmmakers,” the festival said.

Slano will screen Buscemi’s latest film, ”Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer,” which recently won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film’s director, Tolga Karaçelik, will also be among the festival’s guests. The film that brought Brühl international fame, ”Good Bye, Lenin!” will be screened in Slano in honor of the director Wolfgang Becker, who died recently.

Buscemi is currently working on a new film, “Wild Horse Nine,” directed by Martin McDonagh, for Searchlight Pictures.

Marlee Matlin accepted an Academy Award of Merit – an Oscar statuette – that was created to broadly recognize “all the individuals who have developed and supported captioning technology, whether open or closed, for film,” Tuesday evening at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ annual Scientific and Technical Awards, which were presented at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

Oscar-winning actress Matlin has long championed captioning, and on stage she shared her hope that the Oscar statuette, which will reside at the Academy Museum, will bring further awareness of captioning technology and serve as a reminder of the Academy’s “commitment to accessibility and inclusion.”

Calling the Academy the “deaf community’s biggest ally” in a conversation with Variety, Matlin saluted it for being at the forefront of new technologies in film, but suggested that there’s more work that can be done to advance captioning tech and have it used more broadly,...

This articles contains spoilers for the second arc of the second season of "Andor."

Senator Bail Organa from Alderaan has been a storied figure in the "Star Wars" mythos from the very first installment in 1977, when Princess Leia Organa sent her holomessage recording to Obi-Wan Kenobi in his exile on Tatooine. It was the galaxy's most desperate hour: Bail asked Leia to retrieve Obi-Wan Kenobi and invite him back into the fold of the Rebellion and bring the Death Star plans to the Rebel base. But Darth Vader captured Leia, and made an example out of Alderaan by using the Death Star to turn it into space dust. Bail Organa met his tragic end among the Alderaanian citizens during that explosion, and was never seen on screen in the 1977 film.

The Bail Organa character wasn't actually seen in the flesh until 2002's "Attack of the Clones," when he was played by actor Jimmy Smits.

This post contains spoilers for "Andor" season 2 and the wider "Star Wars" universe.

The latest season of "Andor" is as (if not more) deliberate and audacious as its predecessor. Episodes 4-6 constitute the second arc of the story, intensifying tensions across the galaxy -- from the anxiety-tinged events in Chandrila to the disastrous fate that is yet to befall Ghorman. Episode 5 primarily tackles Cassian Andor's (Diego Luna) involvement with the budding Ghorman Rebellion, underlining the amateurish unpreparedness of a rebel group that isn't fully cognizant of the risks that come with the cause. On the flip side, we have Saw Gerrera's (Forest Whitaker) paranoia-tinged hold over D'Qar, where a trapped Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier) is reluctantly aiding his schemes. Gerrera delivers a tragic revelation to Wilmon towards the end of the episode, reminiscing about his horrific struggles on Onderon while referring to the starship fuel Rhydonium as his "sister."

There are dense layers to the statement,...

"Andor" builds up the horrors of the Galactic Empire like no other part of "Star Wars," focusing on the atrocities they commit -- but not the obvious ones, like blowing up planets. Instead, the show is all about the quieter atrocities, the smaller instances of villainy that slowly made people used to the oppression of the Empire. It's like Alex Lawther's Nemik once said, "The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the Imperial Thought Machine. It's easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident." We don't need to see stormtroopers annihilating an entire people or Wookiees being enslaved en masse when things like increasing prison sentences for no reason already show the way the Empire oppresses people day-to-day.

Season 2, however, seems to be building up to more explicit atrocities. The first episode of the season already introduced us...

The staff of the Writers Guild of America West has won voluntary recognition for its new bargaining unit, after more than 81% signed cards in support.

The 110 employees of the WGA West will be represented in bargaining by the Pacific Northwest Staff Union. The leadership of the WGA West chose to recognize the union through a card-check process rather than forcing a vote.

“We have an agreement on our first demand, and we’re excited to take this important step towards having a voice in improving our workplace and organizing without fear of retaliation,” said Doug MacIsaac, a WGA operations coordinator, in a written statement. “We’re happy to be able to advocate for ourselves and look forward to negotiating our first collective bargaining agreement.”

The union will cover workers across the guild, including in departments handling residuals, contracts, communications, research and the WGA theater.

The Pacific Northwest Staff Union represents employees of the L.

Spoilers ahead for the second arc of "Andor" season 2.

During the dark times of the Empire, when the Alliance to Restore the Republic was nothing more than a dream of an idea, the rebels are little more than cockroaches scattered across hidden coverts in any nook and cranny they could find across the galaxy. Each disparate part finds a place to hide and sticks there as long as they can until they have to move on.

Sometimes, these groups bubble up on their homeworlds, like we saw in the first season of "Andor" with Ferrix. "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" showed us Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) building a base on the planet Onderon as his partisans transition from fighting against the Separatists to fighting the oppression of the Empire from their hiding spots. In the second season of "Andor," we see some of the rebel elements move to other locations.

Jack Black’s “Minecraft Movie” meme jam “Steve’s Lava Chicken” has become the shortest song to ever enter the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

“Steve’s Lava Chicken,’ which clocks in at a mere 34 seconds, debuted at No. 78 on the Hot 100. The song also reached No. 10 on the Hot Rock Songs chart. According to online data tracker Luminate (per Billboard), the tune has achieved 7 million total streams in the United States between April 18 and April 24.

Black, a member of the comedy rock duo Tenacious D, is not the only accomplished musician featured on the “Minecraft Movie” soundtrack. The top-billed track, “I Feel Alive,” features “Foo Fighters” lead singer Dave Grohl on drums, Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen on guitar and Jellyfish’s Roger Joseph Manning Jr. on keys.

“Steve’s Lava Chicken” took the record for the shortest song ever on the Hot 100 from Kid Cudi’s “Beautiful Trip,...

The TCM Classic Film Festival isn’t just high on vintage films — occasionally, at least, the festival also finds a way to make room for long-gone methods of projection and exhibition. This is, after all, the festival that brought back Smell-o-vision for a screening back in the 2010s. “We bring back in every format, eventually,” said TCM Festival director Genevieve McGillicuddy during a speech wrapping up the annual gathering on Sunday night.

In this case, she was referring to a presentation that happened during the 2025 festival that might have been even rarer or longer in coming back than showing movies with scents. On Saturday night at the TLC Chinese Theatre, the 1950s process known as VistaVision was celebrated with the screening of two motion pictures filmed in that format, “We’re No Angels” and “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” There was a big wrinkle that makes the showing of those movies...

Jenna Ortega is taking her talents to the director’s chair.

In a conversation with V Magazine, the “Wednesday” star said she’s been working on a script for “almost 10 years” and feels that now is the right time to bring it to life. She went on to say that she not only wants to star and produce the film but also direct it.

“I have a script that I’ve known that I was going to make for almost 10 years. It’s weird because it’s something that I thought of when I was younger and when I first started out in this field, and it’s only now that I’m actually starting to take the steps to get it made, which is really interesting,” Ortega said. “I’m just putting the puzzle pieces together in my head. So I think I needed a few years of that...

[Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2023, and has since been updated].

She only has three solo directorial efforts under her belt, but Greta Gerwig has quickly become one of the most highly respected filmmakers working today. Her 2017 coming-of-age drama “Lady Bird” was an instant teen classic upon release, and her 2019 adaptation of “Little Women” received similar rapturous acclaim, becoming the definitive film version of the classic book.

And in July 2023, after an agonizing four year wait and acting a lead role in partner Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise,” Gerwig came back to theaters as a director with the biggest film of the year. “Barbie” is a colorful studio comedy based on the classic dolls from Mattel, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the titular Barbie and her heartthrob Ken. (He’s just Ken!) And it smashed box office numbers to gross over $1 billion globally.

Gerwig perhaps wasn’t the obvious director to choose for bringing the thematically thorny Barbie universe to cinemas; before “Lady Bird,...

If there's anything that Marvel Studios has a vested interest in, it's team-up movies. All of the "Avengers" adventures were billed as events, complete with a who's who of names in starring roles as your favorite comic book characters. 2023's "The Marvels" attempted to recapture some of that magic to mixed results, while the deeply obnoxious "Deadpool & Wolverine" went on to become a massive earner and record breaker. But the biggest surprise to come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is "Guardians of the Galaxy" and how its scrappy band of space misfits were able to propel a trilogy of films that still stand among the studio's best.

Half of the fun of these movies was watching previously obscure Marvel characters get thrust into the spotlight and seeing how they played off one another. The Guardians were the underdogs who had to prove themselves among the studio's more popular roster of characters.

Horror is one of the richest genres to explore tension, mood, and emotion. For cinematographers, it’s a playground for visual experimentation: From the shadowy monster movies of the 1930s to the neon nightmares of modern indie horror, the genre offers endless opportunity to push style and technique.

For emerging cinematographers, understanding how the “X” trilogy, “I Saw the TV Glow,” and “Midsommar” adapted lighting, lenses, formats, and color science to evoke fear and beauty is essential. These DPs didn’t just point and shoot; they designed entire emotional systems.

Eliot Rocket and the ‘X’ Trilogy — 3 Worlds, One Series ‘X,’ Martin Henderson, director Ti West, Mia Goth, on set.Courtesy Everett Collection

Eliot Rockett, frequent collaborator of director Ti West, approached the “X” trilogy as three discrete visual challenges. For “X,” the goal was to evoke the texture of ‘70s grindhouse horror. They shot digitally, but Rockett leaned on era-accurate...

It's probably no secret to anyone who pays attention to movies even a little bit, particularly people who enjoy going to theaters to see movies, that it's been a rough handful of years for the industry. The box office never fully recovered from the pandemic shutdown five years ago, with some highs along the way but far more lows to complicate matters. Fortunately, things have looked up lately, with "A Minecraft Movie" delivering a global smash. And here's some more good news: This past weekend was, without a doubt, one of the most important and encouraging weekends at the box office in years.

The last weekend of April 2025 saw Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" make more than $45 million in its second weekend, a record-low drop for a wide release horror movie. It has now become an unexpectedly huge, original smash hit. What's special about it, looking beyond the number one movie on the charts,...

John Lindley has been elected national president of the International Cinematographers Guild (IATSE Local 600), returning to a role that he held from March 2020 to June 2022, during which time he led the Guild’s emphasis on set safety following the accidental death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust.”

In 2022, he announced that he would not to run for re-election. Lindley succeeds current national president Baird Benton Steptoe Sr.

According to the Guild, 35.6% of eligible voters cast a ballot in this election. The tentative vote tally results for the office of national president were John Lindley with 1482 votes; Dave Perkal, with 685; and Steptoe, who was running for re-election, with 591. The tentative election results are not final until the Local 600 election committee’s report is accepted by the outgoing national executive board at its June 21 meeting.

Jamie Silverstein, who ran unopposed, will serve as national vice president, based out of the Eastern region.

Get ready to scream: Netflix is bringing a collection of Alfred Hitchcock films to the streaming service this June — and, despite chief Ted Sarandos’ belief that the movie-theater biz is “outdated,” the company will showcase the legendary filmmaker’s work at its Paris Theater in New York City in a six-week series.

Starting June 1, a collection of classic Hitchcock films will be available to stream in the U.S. Those will include “Vertigo,” “Rear Window,” “Frenzy,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “Family Plot” and “The Birds.” Currently, U.S. customers can stream Hitchcock’s genre-defining masterpiece “Psycho,” now available on Netflix in the country.

In addition, Netflix’s Hitchcock collection will include films inspired by the British-born director, such as Jordan Peele’s “Us” and Zach Cregger’s “Barbarian,” as well as narrative feature “Hitchcock” directed by Sacha Gervasi.

Meanwhile, Netflix’s Paris Theater will present “Hitch! The Original Cinema Influencer,...

Sometimes, filmmaking can really be an excuse for nerds to research stuff. Writer and director Isaiah Saxon spent years developing “The Legend of Ochi” to be a fantasy adventure that looks and feels like it could take place in one last undiscovered corner of the world, one where the mysterious primate Ochi navigate living on the fringes of human civilization. This required a lot of preparation and planning, collaboration with artists and designers and puppeteers, but also a lot of Wikipedia diving.

“ I’ve become an amateur primatologist through the course of making [the film],” Saxon told IndieWire. “In the larger picture of writing towards these zoological elements, [I’m looking] at everything that’s on the Internet. I’m reading Wikipedia articles about the one venomous primate and how does that actually work? I’m reading about Tarsiers and lemurs and the sociological structures of Bonobos.”

All of that research eventually coalesced into the Ochi,...

Sundance didn’t have the plethora of late night bidding wars we used to see in the good old days of the festival, but a number of buzziest titles are actually closing deals late into the spring and into the early summer. Over 60 films came into this year’s Sundance looking for homes, and slowly but surely a number of those are finding homes. As we previously reported, the hope was that even more distributors could get creative.

Below we’ll update all the acquisitions following the festival as they arrive.

“Folktales”

Section: Premieres

Buyer: Magnolia

Director: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady

Buzz: It’s a reunion 20 years in the making after Magnolia also released Ewing and Grady’s Oscar-nominated “Jesus Camp.” “Folktales” is a verité documentary about a traditional folk high school in Arctic Norway and the kids relationships growing with a pack of sled dogs by their side, taking...

The year is 2025, and the hottest trend in television is ... reboots of old shows from the USA Network? Yes, you read that right. The "Suits" renaissance has had a longer tail than anyone could have predicted when, back in 2023, it became one of the top shows on Netflix years after leaving the airwaves. In the two years since then, streamers have scrambled for the rights to other similar procedural series with massive back catalogs of episodes. This trend hasn't stopped there, though.

The next natural step was proper reboots, with "Suits LA" premiering in February 2025 on NBC. Despite the fervor around its predecessor just a couple years ago, that show has struggled with both critics and viewers. (You likely didn't even realize it's been airing for the last two months.) Perhaps a better fate will befall the upcoming "White Collar" reboot, which is currently in the early stages of development.

“Twinless” has finalized a sale to Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate. The twisted comedic drama, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, will land in theaters on Sept. 5.

Roadside will release the film in the U.S. while Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions will distribute internationally.

Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney star in “Twinless,” which follows two friends who meet in a twin bereavement support group and form an unlikely bond. At Sundance, “Twinless” won the audience award and O’Brien was recognized for best performance for his leading dual role as twin brothers.

Sweeney wrote, directed and produced the movie, which co-stars Aisling Franciosi, Lauren Graham, Tasha Smith, Chris Perfetti, François Arnaud, Susan Park and Cree Cicchino.

“I’m delighted to pair up with Roadside and Lionsgate to bring our film into theaters nationwide,” said Sweeney. “I’m holding ample space for ‘Twinless’ and look forward to overthinking future press quotes.”

Roadside...

Good evening. We welcome you to Netflix and Chill with one of the all-time greats.

A collection of Alfred Hitchcock movies will be available for streaming on Netflix starting June 1, and Netflix is also staging a massive, six-week screening series at its Paris Theater in New York City that will cover many of the master of suspense’s classics.

Available for streaming on Netflix in the U.S. beginning on June 1 will be “Vertigo,” “Rear Window,” “Frenzy,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “Family Plot,” “The Birds,” and more. “Psycho” is already available on the streamer, as is the biopic “Hitchcock” as directed by Sacha Gervasi. All the films will be presented in a row of titles on Netflix, and they’ll also be accompanied by some other films that were inspired by Hitchcock, such as “Us” and “Barbarian,” which Netflix has also licensed.

Netflix in association with the New...

One of the most salient shortcomings of Netflix as a streaming service is that its film library at any given moment is frustratingly devoid of movies made before 1980. In the streamer's defense, their focus since 2013 (when they hit binge-viewing paydirt with "House of Cards") has been on generating a raft of original programming in order to cut back their need to license classic television shows and films they do not own. Additionally, the success of streaming services like The Criterion Channel and Tubi, which cater to cinephiles with an array of pre-1980 movies, suggests that this market has already voted with its dollars. This is somewhat understandable, but it also does a huge disservice to young film fans who, for example, might fall so hard for Mike Flannagan's "The Haunting of Hill House" that they desperately need to see Robert Wise's much-lauded 1963 take on Shirley Jackson's horror novel.

Understandably, Lee Child should have some say in the direction Jack Reacher is headed. He created him after all. However, with the help of Alan Ritchson and three massively successful seasons on Prime Video, "Reacher" has gotten the attention that even Tom Cruise's iteration struggled to attain. It's probably because of this that when it comes to the leading and massive man bringing the character to life on the small screen, Lee Child refuses to give Ritchson acting notes.

Speaking to The Express about the growing success of the show that began adapting his work in 2022, Child made it clear that it isn't his place to say how Ritchson handles Reacher: "I feel like I don't want to give him advice and I don't want him to ask for advice. What I'm hoping is that we cast him correctly and then it is up to him." Earning the part...

Post contains spoilers for "The Last of Us."

With cannibals, totalitarian regimes, and vicious killer mushrooms on the rampage, death could be found around every corner of "The Last of Us," and it was willing to strike at just about everyone and anyone in the world that worked as the base for these groundbreaking video games. This is what made Naughty Dog's terrifying franchise bleaker and more unforgiving than most, with a story that dared to tie audiences to characters and just as quickly cut them out of existence in simple yet shocking ways, often packing emotional punches in the process. From central to side characters sprinkled throughout this world, the loss of many of them left their mark, proving just how much potential this story had in terms of being adapted into a different format and reintroduced to a brand-new audience waiting to get their hearts broken.

Keeping some top-level tragedies in mind,...

An actor who decides to direct may inspire an eyeroll: Well, of course they can. After leading a hit show, what producer will say no?

A powerful actor who wants to direct has an advantage others won’t. At the same time, to become directors Tyler James Williams, Ayo Edebiri, Jason Bateman, and Rhea Seehorn had to be willing to step away from the comfort zone of their expertise and see themselves as beginners.

They also took advantage of a Hollywood truism: People work with people they know, and the only way to make yourself known is to be excellent around the people who can hire you to do the work. It’s the same logic that creates a script supervisor-director (Karyn Kusama), a Pa-producer (Kevin Feige), or an art coordinator-Oscar-winning production designer (Hannah Beachler).

Here’s what these actors say they learned while making the transition.

Tyler James Williams...

Pedro Almodóvar laid into US president Donald Trump at Film at Lincoln Center in New York on Monday, saying, “You will go down in history as the greatest mistake of our time.”

Accepting the 50th Chaplin Award in recognition of what Flc said was the Spanish auteur’s “spirited and bold storytelling with a distinctive and colorful visual style”, Almodóvar also spoke out in support of trans rights and Harvard University’s ongoing battle with the US administration.

He sent wishes to everyone in Spain and Portugal affected by Monday’s now-resolved blackout.

“I doubted if it was appropriate to...

The nominees for the second annual Gotham Television Awards have been revealed, and to no one’s surprise, Netflix’s “Adolescence” was at the top of the list. The critical and streaming hit landed four nominations, including Breakthrough Limited Series and acting nominations for Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, and Erin Doherty. Max’s “The Pitt” earned three nominations for Breakthrough Drama Series as well as acting nominations for Noah Wyle and Katherine Lanasa.

Continue reading ‘Adolescence,’ ‘The Pitt’ & ‘Dying For Sex’ Top 2025 Gotham Television Awards Nominations at The Playlist.

Kevin Smith will always be known best as the kid from New Jersey who made a little low-budget, black and white movie called "Clerks" that launched an unlikely career. Smith's filmography has its ups and downs over the years, but his 1999 religious comedy "Dogma" about an abortion clinic worker who is called upon to save humanity from two renegade angels has increasingly been looked upon as one of his better directorial efforts.

Smith is taking the movie out on tour as we speak at theaters across the country ahead of a full theatrical re-release this summer. For years, "Dogma" was unavailable to even rent or stream because the rights were tied up by former Miramax head and disgraced executive Harvey Weinstein. So, how did the rights to this film finally get sorted out? The story is pretty wild.

/Film's Ethan Anderton recently attended a screening of "Dogma" with a Q...

Since his directorial debut "Fruitvale Station" premiered in 2013, Ryan Coogler has been on a filmmaking journey. With five films under his belt, Coogler has showcased remarkable craftsmanship and storytelling on a scale that runs the gamut. Beginning with a character-driven drama based on a real-life tragedy, to transitioning into big studio filmmaking by expanding the canon and cinematic legacy of one of our most-celebrated film franchises, to bringing us one of the most culturally significant blockbusters of the century, to helming its sequel amidst the worst circumstances possible, and to now bring his original passion project with the biggest creative statement of his career, Coogler has proven himself as one of our most exciting filmmakers working today.

Throughout five films, with the electric movie star that is Michael B. Jordan by his side through what is shaping up to be the most important director/actor collaborative relationship since Martin Scorsese...

“Brokeback Mountain” will return to theaters very soon. Ang Lee’s iconic queer Western is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and Focus Features is bringing the beloved film back to the big screen.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star as two cowboys who have lived with a secret romance. Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams played their respective wives. The official synopsis reads: “The film follows Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal), two young men dispatched to work as on the majestic Brokeback Mountain in the summer of 1963. During their experience, Ennis and Jack are drawn into an unexpected lifelong relationship, filled with love and loss and unfolding against the raw beauty and splendor of the American West. The complications, joys, and heartbreak they experience provide a testament to the endurance and power of love.”

“Brokeback Mountain” won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Original Score, but lost Best Picture to Paul Haggis’ “Crash.

It's been a while since "Game of Thrones" finished its divisive final season, and even longer since the on-screen deaths of some of the show's most beloved characters. While the HBO franchise has continued with "House of the Dragon," a prequel series exploring the Targaryen dynasty, many of the show's stars have scattered across the worlds of film and TV, and even beyond. 

While some "Game of Thrones" alumni have made notable appearances in some of the biggest movies and TV shows of the past few years, others have done a lot less mainstream work in the years since the finale aired. For some, "Game of Thrones" may have just been the start of their careers, whilst others merely added the show to a long and storied filmography. There are even some supporting characters on "Game of Thrones" who had their turns as leading men and women in their most recent projects.

Nearly 12 years in the making, Lucie Faulknor and Dawn Logsdon’s Free for All: Inside the Public Library is a heartfelt journey into the history of an institution that went from a radical idea (the “Free Library Movement”), to an entity taken for granted, to a present-day site of ginned up controversy. It’s also a contemporary cross-country celebration of the (overwhelmingly female) librarians then and now who fought, and continue to fight, for the right to knowledge for all. A few weeks before the doc’s April 29th debut on PBS’s Independent Lens, Filmmaker reached out to the co-directors, both lifelong […]

The post “What’s Remarkable To Me About the Story of the American Public Library is How Much of It Cuts Across Political Lines”: Lucie Faulknor and Dawn Logsdon on Free for All: Inside the Public Library first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

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This may not come as a big surprise, but Disney and Marvel made an awful lot of money from last year's "Deadpool & Wolverine." Directed by Shawn Levy with Ryan Reynolds starring as Deadpool alongside Hugh Jackman returning as Wolverine, it was one of the biggest movies of 2024 and one of the biggest movies since the pandemic began. The Marvel Cinematic Universe's first R-rated entry paid off handsomely even beyond the box office to deliver massive profits to the Mouse House.

In a recent report from Deadline, it's revealed that Disney ultimately made around $400 million in profits from "Deadpool & Wolverine." Mind you, this is total profits to date from all revenue sources, not just ticket sales. The film made $1.33 billion at the box office, trailing only "Inside Out 2" ($1.69 billion) in 2024. According to this new report, $620 million of that...

Chef Jamie Oliver’s story, at least in terms of his rise to fame with “The Naked Chef,” is a story about filmmaking. He and the BBC Two documentary crew behind the series broke with the studio-based, locked down and orderly conventions of cooking shows to shoot Oliver a lot more in the style of a documentary — lots of handheld, verite footage and the sense, well before ring-lit YouTube tutorials and Twitch muckbangs, of cooking with a mate.

It’s a fitting detail to come up during Oliver’s episode of “Chef’s Table: Legends” because over the course of its 10 seasons, the Netflix series has itself reshaped the landscape of documentary food programming. “Chef’s Table” embraces a visual approach that owes more to narrative-style cinematography as it does to the conventions of documentary. The goal was to give every plate and the environment surrounding each subject the same visual intention...

Prolific Japanese genre filmmaker Takashi Miike is behind a new movie that will see British singer Charli xcx take a role alongside producing it as well via her production banner, Studio365.

Variety has revealed the singer and famed filmmaker are teaming up on an untitled project, which will mark her second big film role after partnering with A24 on “The Moment.” That other Charli xcx project comes from Scottish filmmaker Aidan Zamiri, who wrote the screenplay with Bertie Brandes.

Continue reading Charli Xcx To Star In New Mysterious Film From Prolific Japanese Director Takashi Miike at The Playlist.

Priscilla Pointer, who played the mother of her real-life daughter Amy Irving in “Carrie” and also appeared on “Dallas,” died Monday in Ridgefield, Conn. She was 100.

Pointer’s death was confirmed to Variety by her son, USC professor David K. Irving.

Pointer played Irving’s mom in “Carrie” and appeared with her daughter in six other movies. She also portrayed other famous mothers throughout the ’70s and ’80s, including Diane Keaton’s in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” Kyle MacLachlan’s in “Blue Velvet” and Sean Penn’s in “The Falcon and the Snowman.” Additionally, she starred in the CBS soap opera “Dallas” as the mother of Victoria Principal’s character.

Over the years, Pointer appeared in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” “Twilight Zone: The Movie,” “ER,” “Judging Amy,” “St. Elsewhere,” “McCoy,” “McCloud” and “N.Y.P.D.” Pointer also appeared in three films directed by her son, David Irving, including the 1987 musical adaptation of “Rumpelstiltskin,...

What if "Gossip Girl" or a "Real Housewives" franchise took place in Vatican City? Somehow, that question is answered by Edward Berger's 2024 film "Conclave," a political thriller about backstabbing cardinals and the election of a new pope that took home a few Academy Awards ... and is now available to stream with an Amazon Prime Video subscription. Not just that -- it's been number one on Prime Video's streaming charts in the United States for several days, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Led by a veritable murderer's row of actors that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and the inimitable Isabella Rossellini, "Conclave," which is based on Robert Harris' 2016 novel of the same name and was adapted for the screen by "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" writer Peter Straughan, meets a group of cardinals in Rome after the pope passes away. In the aftermath of the religious leader's death,...

In the middle of Jared Hess' new hit film "A Minecraft Movie," Steve (Jack Black) is introducing his new human friends to the fantasy realm called the Overworld. Everything in the Overworld is cubic, constructed of right angles, and the land is replete with mystical artifacts. The world of "Minecraft" operates by its own rules of surreal sorcery. In the Overworld, for instance, one can place a live chicken underneath a lava flow, and then magically extract a perfectly prepared rotisserie chicken dinner. Steve is happy to exhibit this process in action, displaying a fast-food stand called Steve's Lava Chicken. He even sings a 34-second commercial jingle for Steve's Lava Chicken, and it sounds very much like Jack Black made it up on the spot; it could easily have come from the set of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" 

The 34-second "Steve's Lava Chicken" song can, of course, be streamed...

Indian audiences indeed got to watch “Sinners” — just not the way the rest of the world did. And one scene especially irked moviegoers.

This hallucinatory sequence takes place at the midpoint inside Club Juke, when Sammie’s (Miles Caton) soul-stirring blues music becomes so transcendental that it conjures the spirits of the past and future. The guests rejoice, drinks in hand, while puffing on cigarettes. But in Indian cinemas, this immersive sequence gets interrupted — not by a vampire, but a certain disclaimer in an oversized font, stating, “Smoking and alcohol consumption are injurious to health.”

These health warnings are enforced by the Central Board of Film Certification (Cbfc), aka Censor Board, due to a government mandate. The statutory film certification body, under the Indian government, has the authority to suggest cuts and edits to movies before clearing a film for release. On scrutinizing the Cbfc certificate available in the public domain,...

We’ve been waiting to see what some true Hollywood mainstays can do with artificial intelligence in filmmaking, and announced today is a project that has the potential to break through into the mainstream in a big way.

“Poker Face” and “Russian Doll” star Natasha Lyonnne is set to make her feature directorial debut based on a script she co-wrote with “The Oa” and “Another Earth” writer Brit Marling. But what really sets the film apart is that it will be a live-action feature film that will blend with it generative AI animation. Lyonne is also teaming with Jaron Lanier, the futurist, author, VR pioneer, and visual effects artist, on the project to give the film a new look and show what they believe AI can really do.

The film too is about that very gulf between live-action and AI and why even as the technology has improved immensely, audiences...

Apparently, Max subscribers are looking for something steamy -- because this erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman is a top choice on HBO and Discovery's proprietary streaming platform.

According to FlixPatrol, the movie is crushing the Max charts — so, what is it about in the first place? For the uninitiated, "Babygirl" — which hit theaters in 2024 and is written and directed by Halina Reijn — centers around Romy Mathis (Kidman), a New York City CEO who has a "happy" home life with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and daughters Isabel and Nora (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly), except for one thing: she's deeply unfulfilled sexually. Enter Samuel, one of Romy's new interns, as played by Harris Dickinson (who's known for projects like "Triangle of Sadness" and "The Iron Claw"), with whom Romy starts an affair ... but when Samuel starts pushing boundaries by showing up at Romy's home and interacting with her...

Bradley Cooper is crediting Christian Bale for inspiring his “American Sniper” performance. Cooper, who co-starred with Bale in David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” said during the “Howard Stern Show” that he emulated Bale’s acting technique to portray real-life Texas-born Navy Seal Chris Kyle.

Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” was released in 2015, two years after Cooper witnessed Bale’s “American Hustle” approach for the 2013 film. Bale famously Method acts, and according to Cooper, it was revolutionary to see how Bale built his performance while staying in character.

“So Christian Bale, I’m doing ‘American Hustle.’ I meet Christian Bale, I’m a big fan. And we’re sitting there, we do the table read,” Cooper said. “He’s from England. He’s Welsh, I think. He’s got his own accent. He’s reading it. He breaks into this guy, Irving Rosenfeld, who’s this Jewish guy from Long Island or the Bronx.

You’ve seen this story before, the notion of a disparate group of irredeemable characters who discover a modicum of redemption through heroic acts they themselves didn’t expect to commit. Yet, this is also just classic archetypical storytelling, because what separates Marvel’s “Thunderbolts*” from many of these stories—James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” being the most superficially similar, but totally different—is its characters’ genuine, perceptible feelings of shame, regret, and self-loathing.

Continue reading ‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Marvel’s Shamed Misfits Defeat Self-Doubt & Find Their Heroic Purpose at The Playlist.