Sean Baker used to be the indie world’s best-kept secret, until 2017’s The Florida Project—a study of a struggling single mom in the shadow of Disney World—took the director first to Cannes and later to the Oscars, after Willem Dafoe was nominated for his role as a kind-hearted motel janitor. The career boost was short-lived; […]
Don Wilson, whose twangy guitar sounds helped create a distinct genre of music with his band, The Ventures, has died at age 88. He died of natural causes on Saturday in Tacoma, Washington, according to his son. Wilson was the last surviving founder and guitarist of The Ventures. “Don was an inspiration and mentor. He […]
Peloton is not having a good winter. Fresh off its And Just Like That…commercial with suddenly controversial Chris Noth, an ad which showed him recovering from a TV death caused by his heart attack after a workout, comes a second product placement that’s not going to enhance Peloton’s allure. Already reeling from its announcement last […]
National Geographic Documentary Films acquired rights to the docu The Territory for low seven-figures. It’s their second deal, following a big one for Fire of Love. Nat Geo announced The Territory deal this morning. Screening in the World Cinema Documentary competition, The Territory focuses on the tireless fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people against the […]
Refresh for latest…: With an amazing $1.69B worldwide cume through Sunday, Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home has become the No. 6 film ever globally, passing Jurassic World ($1.67B) and The Lion King ($1.662B) to get there. This includes a running $970.1M from the international box office, which should portend an eventual $1B overseas gross — and without a China bump. Domestic is at […]
UPDATE: That didn’t take long. The deal for Fire of Love is now closed, Deadline has confirmed. Release is below our acquisitions scoop. EXCLUSIVE: National Geographic Documentary Films is closing a mid-seven-figure worldwide rights deal for Fire of Love, the Sara Dosa-directed documentary that opened the festival and created a stampede of bidders in what […]
I wish all these unhinged movies would quit coming true. Escape From New York. Escape From L.A. Being There. I Am Legend. You name it. Somebody shoots a whacko/dystopian/dysfunctional fantasy. Eventually, we all end up living it. At the moment, I’m living Brazil—bureaucratic dysfunction. My wife and I bought out a lease car. The leasing […]
NBC Sports this week made the not-too-surprising announcement that much of its Beijing Olympics team would be covering next month’s Winter Games from afar, in Stamford, CT, as the Covid pandemic once again disrupts the event. But the international outcry over human rights abuses in China, leading to a U.S. diplomatic boycott, has put extra […]
While Will Forte was fully expected to reprise one of his best known Saturday Night Live characters, MacGruber, in his return to the late-night show as host, he also brought back a lesser-known skit from his time on the program. Forte, joined by Kristen Wiig — his former SNL colleague and current co-star on the […]
As former Saturday Night Live cast member Will Forte said in his opening monologue tonight, it took getting his MacGruber the series to launch on Peacock for him to finally be invited to host the late-night sketch program 12 years after he’d left. In the monologue, Forte announced a Season 2 renewal for MacGruber, sort of. […]
As tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live wound down, the show paid tribute to its former writer John Bowman, who died suddenly at home in California on New Year’s Eve, aged 64. Bowman wrote on the series from1988-1989 and won an Emmy for his efforts across 20 episodes, sharing the honor with Mike Myers, Al Franken, […]
On tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update took shots at a wide range of targets, from Jon Voight, Dwayne Johnson and the new Lord of the Rings series to Update‘s own Colin Jost and SNL cast member Pete Davidson. Anchor Michael Che noted that Voight recently released a video claiming that Abraham Lincoln’s […]
Apparently it is the season to celebrate the iconic marriage and professional relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed a penetrating, funny, revealing, and ultimately moving film, Being The Ricardos which covers a lot of ground in the Lucy/Desi world using dramatic license to place several real events in their lives all […]
Terrence Malick meets Robert Eggers in You Won’t Be Alone, a bloody—and bloody good—vampire tale that squeezes quite a few new twists out of fundamentally familiar material. Rapturously beautiful and sufficiently different from its bloodsucking brethren to engage fresh interest in aspects of the undead, Australian director Goran Stolevski’s very confident debut feature goes places […]
Tonight on Saturday Night Live, longtime cast member Will Forte got his first opportunity to host, speaking in his opening monologue to his excitement about finally getting his moment in the spotlight. “I was in the cast 12 years ago with Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Jason Sudeikis and Fred Armisen, so it was […]
As with almost every role she plays on Saturday Night Live, Kate McKinnon does a wicked version of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. Listing off rising inflation, rocking gas prices, and the flaws of the Green M&M girl, McKinnon’s wonky-eyed Ingraham went right after the first year of Joe Biden’s “disaster” of a presidency in the […]
Resurrection is a tedious, one-note paranoiac thriller that never shifts gears to get out of its rut. With classy production values and a tony cast led by Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth, writer-director Andrew Semans’ first feature in a decade, since the similarly plotted Nancy, Please, grinds on trying to build suspense but doesn’t have […]
Lena Dunham hasn’t made a feature film since Tiny Furniture 12 years ago, but she has some plausible excuses—running Girls for six seasons, conceiving another series, writing two books, acting here and there. It took the pandemic to get her behind the camera again and, low and behold, the resulting film is about people living […]
I might be tempted to call writer-director James Ponsoldt’s new coming-of-age film about four young girls who discover the dead body of a man on the last summer days before starting middle school Stand By She. Okay I will. Its actual title is Summering and it is a sweet and sincere attempt to give young […]
The influence of the Greek “weird wave,” and to a lesser extent the moral mazes of Austria’s Michael Haneke, have been seeping into U.S. indie cinema for quite a while now, and Riley Stearns’ third feature, Dual, comfortably fits into the Sundance slot taken last year by Pascual Sisto’s bizarre dysfunctional family satire John And […]
EXCLUSIVE: This will come as a shocker for fans of the FBI franchise. Julian McMahon, star of FBI: Most Wanted, is exiting the CBS crime drama after almost three seasons. His final episode is slated to shoot next week and will air March 8. The show is expected to introduce a new character later this […]
Even in its truncated virtual Covid-afflicted form last year, the Sundance Film Festival was remarkably able to debut several movies that a year later we are still talking about in the Oscar conversation including CODA, Jockey, Passing, Flee, and Mass. Maybe this success was due to the fact they all had one word titles, but more realistically it was […]
On Saturday, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 72 new deaths from Covid-19, along with 39,117 new positive cases. The number of deaths and confirmed cases reported today may reflect delays in weekend reporting. But today’s tallies bring the County to a total of 28,417 deaths and 2,467,797 positive cases. There have […]
Rarely has a filmmaker kept his central character at such a distance as writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose does in The Cathedral. This is clearly an autobiographical work in some very important ways, and no doubt a purging of some demons as well. And yet the kid here, whose life the film follows from birth to his […]
EXCLUSIVE: Cooper Raiff can’t seem to catch a break from Covid. A hyphenate who comes into Sundance with one of the buzziest acquisitions titles in Cha Cha Real Smooth, Raiff is coming off the debut Shithouse — it’s more thoughtful than it sounds — that won the Grand Jury Prize at 2020 SXSW. Unfortunately, it […]
