Author: Hollyood rep

Spike Lee and Denzel Washington helped make Cannes mo’ better Monday night with the gala premiere of Highest 2 Lowest. Washington, currently playing Othello in a 15-week run on Broadway, flew to France for the evening premiere, his first collaboration with Lee since 2006’s Inside Man. It was a short visit. Washington will be back on stage in New York on Tuesday. He was joined on the Cannes red carpet by Highest 2 Lowest co-stars Ilfenesh Hadera, Wendell Pierce, Jeffrey Wright, Aubrey Joseph and rapper A$AP Rocky. The premiere also brought out A-listers not associated with the film, with Jason…

An inspired streak of absurdism runs through The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) connected to an urban legend about a “hairy leg” that moves autonomously, causing trouble in the northeastern Brazilian capital of Recife in 1977, when the country remained under military dictatorship. The leg turns up or is mentioned various times — being pulled from the messy guts of a large shark carcass; stolen from the morgue and disposed of by evidence-tampering police; tagged as the culprit in sensational tabloid crime stories; and literally kicking asses in a gay cruising ground, where men are getting it on under trees…

While Ozploitation dates back to 1970, the predecessor Dangerous Animals calls to mind more than anything is 2005’s Wolf Creek. Only this time, the mayhem happens in open water. Both these sadistic Australian B-movies revolve around a psychotic serial killer preying on travelers and both serve up blood, guts and torture porn, which should provide gnarly amusement for genre fans. Director Sean Byrne doesn’t lean hard enough into the trashy pleasures for maximum fun, unlike some of the more preposterous recent shark movies. (Give me The Shallows, Under Paris, The Meg.) But he dishes up plenty of lurid chum and…

Did we all go completely nuts during those unsettlingly strange first months of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when cities became ghost towns and people thrust into isolation started gambling with their mental health by living online and buying whatever the social media echo chamber coughed up? That’s the assessment in Ari Aster’s Eddington, which views that collective national trauma through the microcosm of a fictitious New Mexico small town. Essentially a modern Western marbled with a vein of dark comedy, the movie is neither suspenseful nor funny enough to work as either. Mostly, it’s a distancing slog. After the diabolically…

Nate Bargatze has lined up a comedy powerhouse for his feature acting debut. Will Forte, Colin Jost and Kumail Nanjiani have joined the cast of The Breadwinner, a comedy feature that Eric Appel is directing for TriStar Pictures. Zach Cherry, Kate Berlant and Martin Herlihy have also boarded the feature, which begins production next week in Atlanta. The story sees the life of Bargatze’s character turned upside down when his supermom wife lands a deal on Shark Tank. The lifelong breadwinner of the family becomes a stay-at-home dad, and quickly realizes he’s in way over his head. Mandy Moore is already on board…

Was Avengers: Endgame snubbed at the 2020 Oscars? Scarlett Johansson thinks so. In the June cover story for Vanity Fair, published on Wednesday, the Eleanor the Great director reflected on her time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically one of her last stints with the franchise in 2019’s Endgame. The film saw the death of her character, Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow, and she still believes the Academy snubbed the movie.  “How did this film not get nominated for an Oscar?” the Black Widow star questioned of Endgame not receiving a nom in the best picture category. “It was an…

Kesha’s résumé just got even more impressive.  During a Tuesday appearance on the Jennifer Hudson Show, the Dreamgirls star started the segment off by noting how “nice” it was to meet the “Die Young” singer after hearing “that we almost crossed paths one time.” “I was an extra on Dreamgirls,” Kesha admitted, which stunned Hudson. “Serious, Bible. For like $120, for 16 hours, I sat there with my hair teased to the Gods.” The two-time Grammy Award nominee admitted that she “hated” the experience and recalled filming a scene in Downtown Los Angeles for the 2006 Oscar-winning film.  “No offense,…

Neon has picked up rights for North America, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand for Fjord, the English-language debut of Palme d’Or-winning Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. Neon plans to release the film theatrically in the U.S.. The re-teaming of Stan and Reinsve, who co-starred in A Different Man, is a family drama focused on the Gheorghiu family, made up of a Romanian father (Stan) and a Norwegian mother (Reinsve), who relocate to a remote village in the mother’s homeland. They quickly form a close bond with the…

Tom Cruise is still speaking highly of ex-wife Nicole Kidman, even nearly 25 years after their divorce. During a recent interview with Sight and Sound (via The Independent), the actor looked back at his 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut, and how he recommended Kidman be cast as Alice Harford in the Stanley Kubrick-directed erotic thriller, opposite his Dr. Bill Harford. “I flew out to his house, and I landed in his backyard. I read the script the day before and we spent the day talking about it. I knew all of his films,” he recalled. “Then it was basically he…

Greg Cannom, the masterful prosthetics and makeup specialist who received Oscars for his work on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Vice, has died. He was 73. Cannom worked often with makeup maestro Rick Baker early in his career, and Baker on Friday reported his death in an Instagram post. “His work will be remembered long after his passing,” he wrote. No details were immediately available. In March 2023, a GoFundMe page was set up to help Cannom with expenses as he battled diabetes and a staph infection that led to one of his…