Latest Movie Features
‘Expendables 4’ Director Scott Waugh Talks Doubling Rufio in ‘Hook’ and Learning a Hard Lesson on ‘Last Action Hero’
Before John Wick ushered in a new era of stuntmen turned directors, Expend4bles director Scott Waugh was one of the few exceptions to pull off the feat. Following in the footsteps of his older brother Ric Roman Waugh, the younger Waugh made his own luck by funding 2012’s Act of Valor and co-directing the action […]
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‘Fair Play’ Composer on Capturing the “Ticking Time Bomb” Behind the Film’s Central Relationship With Track “One Crest”
In Chloe Domont’s upcoming erotic thriller Fair Play, the relationship between two competitive stock traders — Phoebe Dynevor’s Emily and Alden Ehrenreich’s Luke — goes from fairy tale-esque to a ticking time bomb. It’s a rather fitting dynamic for the soon-to-be-wed couple who both work at the same company in an industry driven by the thrum and […]
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‘No One Will Save You’ Filmmaker Brian Duffield on the Long Road to His Alien Home Invasion Thriller
No One Will Save You filmmaker Brian Duffield has experienced many twists and turns throughout his 13-year career. After making the Black List in 2010, he pulled off the same feat in 2011 with his Jane Got a Gun spec script, which went on to endure one of the most dramatic journeys to the big […]
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Why TIFF and Venice Dealmaking Felt Like Business-as-Usual Amid the Strikes
Crisis? What crisis? If the independent film industry went into this year’s fall festival season with a sense of impending doom — the double strike raising fears of a production slowdown and confusion over SAG-AFTRA’s interim agreements, worrying buyers and sellers alike — the initial signs coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival and […]
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‘The Retirement Plan’ Director Tim Brown on Turning Nicolas Cage Into a Beach Bum Assassin and Grandfather
The Retirement Plan filmmaker Tim Brown makes his own luck. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring, the Canadian writer-director has created his own opportunities to helm his written material, and The Retirement Plan, Brown’s new action-comedy starring Nicolas Cage, is the fifth time he’s done just that. Brown already had an usual path […]
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Culture Shift: A Recent Wave of Biopics Puts Latino Achievement Front and Center
As the ongoing battles in state legislatures over classroom curricula indicate, history – or at least the curation of which stories to teach, and from which perspectives – is subjective. So too is Hollywood’s rich tradition of biopics, which imply to audiences whose lives are worthy of immortalizing on film. Whether in textbooks or onscreen, […]
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With ‘Cassandro,’ Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams Leaps Into a New Ring
Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams is known for capturing moments of intimacy and awe in documentaries like God Loves Uganda and the Oscar-nominated Life, Animated. With Cassandro, a portrait of gay lucha libre wrestling star Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal), Williams has brought that sense of warmth and showmanship to his first scripted feature. The film, […]
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‘Outlaw Johnny Black’ Star-Director Michael Jai White on Why He Didn’t Make a Direct Sequel to ‘Black Dynamite’
In January 2009, during a midnight screening at Sundance, Michael Jai White knew he had something special in Black Dynamite. Nine months later, the Blaxploitation spoof’s limited theatrical release and minimal box office gross didn’t stop its immediate fate as a cult classic. Demand for a sequel soon followed, and so White, as co-writer of […]
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Hildur Gudnadóttir Talks ‘A Haunting in Venice’ Score, the Influence of ‘Sicario’ and ‘Joker 2’
In just five years, A Haunting in Venice’s Hildur Gudnadóttir has become one of the industry’s most in-demand composers. In 2018, the Icelandic musician and classically trained cellist scored her first American film, Stefano Sollima’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado, and now, she’s a Tony award away from EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) status thanks […]
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Toronto: Ladj Ly Returns to the Paris Suburbs to Tackle Injustice in ‘Les Indesirables’
French filmmaker Ladj Ly could scarcely have hoped for greater success with his 2019 feature-length directorial debut, Les Misérables. Born and raised in Paris’ immigrant suburbs — known as the banlieues — Ly, now 43, had been documenting the everyday hardships and injustices faced by his community since he was a teenager. Les Misérables shone […]
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Saudi Arabia’s Film AlUla Looks to Become a “Beacon for Creativity and Film”
There must be few, if any, places in the world right now that extend quite so far back archaeologically, and, simultaneously, quite so far into the future. Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, AlUla, describes itself as “a living museum … that holds 200,000 years of largely unexplored human history,” while the country’s now […]
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Toronto: Doc ‘Sorry/Not Sorry’ Asks If Louis C.K. Was Ever Really Canceled
In 2017, like a lot of Louis?C.K. fans, filmmaker Caroline Suh wasn’t sure what to make of the allegations of sexual misconduct against the comedian that were detailed in a New York Times story. The report included female comics’ accounts of C.K. exposing himself to them, which he admitted to, and led FX, Netflix and […]
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‘Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’ Director on Her 7-Year Journey With the Film: “The Most Pure, Personal Experience of My Life”
[This story contains spoilers from Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.] For Aitch Alberto, bringing Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s beloved 2012 queer coming-of-age novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe to the big screen was an expansive experience. Serving as both its writer and director, adapting the story for the […]
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Hollywood Flashback: ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ Shattered Plates and Expectations
As Hollywood fairy tales go, few are as enchanting as that of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, whose second sequel — My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 — opens Sept. 8. It all began in the summer of 1997, with a one-woman show written and performed by Winnipeg-born Nia Vardalos (a former member of Chicago’s […]
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Toronto: Pedro Almodovar on Gay Westerns, Diversity in Casting and (Surprise!) How He’s “Not a Big Fan of Superhero Movies”
Pedro Almodóvar, the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker since Luis Bu?uel, will be the toast of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. There, his latest film — Strange Way of Life, a short Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal and set to be distributed by Sony Classics — will have its North American premiere; he’ll […]
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TIFF Critic’s Picks: 10 Must-See Movies in Toronto
The Hollywood Reporter arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye shares her list of the 10 must-see films at this month’s Toronto Film Festival. The Boy and the Heron How lucky for us that Hayao Miyazaki, the animation master with a gift for enchanting world-building, didn’t stay retired? The prolific Japanese filmmaker makes an exciting return […]
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