Author: Deadline

South Korean director Na Hong-jin has returned to Cannes for the fourth time with his long-awaited sci-spectacular Hope in which a remote hunting community, situated on the edge of the untouched forests of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, is terrorized by the arrival of aliens. With its tone taking inspiration from Hollywood hits such as Jaws, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, the picture is two-hours and forty minutes of near non-stop action. South Korean mega-star Hwang Jung-Min leads the cast as hapless police chief Boem Seok, opposite Squid Games breakout Hoyeon, as a steely younger officer, and Zo In-Sung in role…

Asia Argento returns to the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight psychological thriller Death Has No Master. In the movie from Venezuelan filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand, Argento plays an immigrant heiress to a colonial cacao plantation in Venezuela. She ventures to the country to claim her inheritance, but she’s forced to confront the land’s current occupants as well as its dark, violent legacy. The role was no walk in the park for the Italian multihyphenate, who purged herself of her darkest emotions. “When we were shooting, I was feeling this threat,” she tells Deadline, “My character was very fragile.” “I…

Jenna Ortega has been announced as the star of Leos Carax‘s upcoming seventh feature film Lily May B ahead of its shoot next spring. The official synopsis reads: “Once upon a time, there was a little girl, a young woman and a young boy. They each held a secret too heavy to bear. They met in an ‘end-of-the-world’ world, and together rode a big motorcycle (through empty cities, deserted freeways, immemorial forests). On their journey, they encountered many dangers, but kept going. In search of who they were; in search of a place to B, maybe?” “Once upon a time, this…

Nine years since his last film, several of them spent slowly recovering in Germany from a bout of Covid that all but extinguished his lungs, Andrey Zvyagintsev, the greatest of all the living Russian directors, is back in Cannes with a chronicle of crime and — for the rich, the influential and the crafty – the conspicuous absence of any punishment. Zvyagintsev has never cast himself as a dissident; his dense stories of corrupt authority and moral turpitude could arguably be told anywhere. Indeed, Minotaur, in Cannes’ competition, is actually based on a French film, Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife,…

EXCLUSIVE: 20TH Century Studios won a heated auction for Persona, a novella by Marc Guggenheim, co-creator and EP of Arrow and one of the architects of the Arrow-verse franchise. Paul Feig, the Bridesmaids helmer who is coming off the hit The Housemaid, will direct. Deal is 7-figures. Studio is keeping the concept under wraps, but Deadline hears this is a Fatal Attraction-style thriller with a very modern twist. Guggenheim lands his second 7-figure deal in the past half year; he co-wrote and is EP on An Innocent Girl, a movie filming now and starring Keri Washington, James Marsden, Chloe East…

At a Cannes where some have grumbled about a paucity of studio movies (and thus stars), the absence of Scarlett Johansson at last night’s premiere of Paper Tiger was notable. During the movie’s rousing 10-minute standing ovation director James Gray tried to make a call to the actress, according to reports and social media videos. The call wouldn’t connect or he couldn’t get through. At least one report had the actress missing the premiere because she was filming Universal’s radical redo of The Exorcist, her involvement in which was first reported by Deadline. Today at a press conference, Gray took a moment…

Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky has revealed he is pushing on with American Revolution-themed AI project On This Day… 1776, the first part of which was widely panned on its release in January. The director told the AI for Talent Summit in Cannes on Saturday that the spirit of the project, made under the banner of his AI-based studio Primordial Soup, was purely experimental. He explained he had hit on the idea of the project in November 2025 in the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. “I…

After a somewhat quiet few days, the Cannes Film Festival is heating up with two big audience responses to buzzy films. The first, earlier this afternoon was Jordan Firstman’s out-of-competition Club Kid, which got a lot of laughs and a 7-minute standing ovation. Just minutes later came director Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden, which saw an effusive 11-minute cascade of applause punctuated by screams of “bravo” from the enthusiastic crowd. And that’s after sitting through the 3-hour-and-16-minute film, which is the longest in the competition this year. Related Stories During the acknowledgment, Hamaguchi grabbed the hands of his cast…

EXCLUSIVE: Britt Lower (Severance), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), and Selton Mello (I’m Still Here) are set to star in Michael Almereyda’s upcoming feature Zero K, joining previously announced cast members Caleb Landry Jones and Peter Sarsgaard. Based on Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name, Zero K centers on a tech billionaire (Sarsgaard) preparing his dying wife (Lilleaas) for cryonic preservation in an advanced medical facility while his estranged son (Jones) searches for stability with a woman raising a young son (Lower). The dramatic sci-fi premise shows them toggling between worlds — weighing faith in the present against the…

Mattel is banking on Gen X to pass the torch and give the Masters of the Universe movie and toys a multi-generational boost. The MGM and Mattel Masters of the Universe big-screen adaptation hits movie theaters in the U.S. on June 5. Describing He-Man as a niche fan-favorite IP, Jess Kirkman, Global Head of Brand Creative at Mattel, broke down how it hopes the original Masters of the Universe fans will open up that world for a new generation. “There’s a specific audience that knows the He-Man era, and it’s a lot from the ’80s, the Gen X’ers, mostly. These…