Author: Hollyood rep

What can I say about Sundance this year that hasn’t already been said? Yes, the line-up lacked commercial offerings, and was filled with small films from first time directors. Yes, the festival felt subdued with less star power than years past. Yes, there was still inexplicably an hour-and-a-half wait for the most subpar avocado toast you have ever had in your life. And, yes, it still cost you $40, even though your boss warned you to keep expenses down. As compared to years past, this year’s Sundance felt like a turning point, with a collective acceptance that the festival’s time…

All five of this year’s best director Oscar nominees — Emilia Pérez’s Jacques Audiard, Anora’s Sean Baker, The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, The Substance’s Coralie Fargeat and A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold — will attend and be feted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Directors of the Year ceremony, The Hollywood Reporter can report. The gathering, which will take place at Santa Barbara’s historic Arlington Theatre at 8 p.m. PT on Monday, Feb. 10 — and will be the only time the quintet will congregate together prior to the 97th Academy Awards on March 2 — will feature interviews with the directors individually,…

Will Smith is getting to play Neo nearly three decades after he famously rejected the lead role in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix. In the music video “Beautiful Scars” (below), Smith teams with rapper Big Sean and Obanga for a Matrix-themed video which has Smith doing his own version of several iconic scenes from the movie – including taking the red pill, the “bullet time” stunt and fighting in the kung fu simulator. While it might “only” be a music video, it does give fans the chance to see what Smith might have looked like in the film. Five years…

Amid the devastating wildfires ravaging through Los Angeles, many on social media called for the cancelation of the upcoming Oscars ceremony. A U.K.-based tabloid newspaper even went so far as to erroneously report that Academy Award committee members were seriously considering canceling the show (The Hollywood Reporter then reported that no such plan is being contemplated and no such advisory committee exists). But speaking to various nominees following the Oscar nominations last week, it’s clear that the show must go on — with some adjustments to honor the victims of the devastation. The Academy agrees. Last week, the Academy of…

Karla Sofía Gascón Best Actress (Emilia Pérez) Karla Sofía Gascón Amy Sussman/Getty Images “I was in a room at the airport in Brazil waiting for the nominations. It was completely crazy, I didn’t sleep all night. What an illusion, what an honor, what love. I feel fulfilled. It is the culmination of nine months of promotion and two years of work on a historic work in acting and cinematography. I am immensely happy. It is an honor for me that the Film Academy and its members have nominated me as best actress. “It is something cinematographically historic because playing two…

Is it just me, or is the premise of the new DreamWorks Animation film kind of creepy? The central character of Dog Man, based on the best-selling children’s graphic novel series by Dav Pilkey, is a creature with a man’s body and a dog’s head. After Officer Knight and his canine companion Greg are injured together on the job and wind up in an emergency room together, a nurse, surveying the damage to the former’s head and the latter’s body, helpfully suggests, “What if we sew the dog’s head onto the man’s body?” Thus Dog Man is born, just as…

Adeline Rudolph (Mortal Kombat 2) and Arden Cho (Partner Track, Avatar: The Last Airbender) have been cast as the leads in Perfect Girl, a psychological thriller from director Hong Won-ki and Badlands, the genre label set up last year by John Wick producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee’s Thunder Road and longtime Screen Gems executive Scott Strauss. Based on the 2023 Black List script Unnie by Lynn Q. Yu, Perfect Girl is set in the high-stakes world of K-pop. Described as Scream meets Black Swan, the story follows a group of trainees competing for four coveted spots in a new…

The World Will Tremble, a historical drama about an escape from a Nazi death camp, has been acquired for worldwide distribution by Vertical. Tremble is the second feature-length release by Israeli-American writer-director Lior Geller, whose 2008 short, Roads, holds the Guinness World Record for most awards won by a short student film. “We are proud to release Lior’s feature about the incredible true story of this heroic escape that alerted the world to the events of the Holocaust,” says Vertical’s senior vice president of acquisitions Tony Piantedosi. The film is slated to open March 14. The announcement comes on International Holocaust…

Over its multi-year run as part of NBC’s Dateline franchise, To Catch a Predator wasn’t impervious to criticism or lawsuits, but it was surely insulated. Sure, you might say, every episode was a carefully orchestrated piece of entrapment in which the relationship between journalists and law enforcement became blurred in a way that the relationship between journalists and law enforcement should never become blurred. Predators The Bottom Line A complicated examination of a crowd-pleasing hit. Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)Director: David Osit 1 hour 36 minutes “What, are you in favor of sexual predators?” fans of the show…

Writer-director Alireza Khatami is known for a pair of semi-experimental dramas — 2017’s Oblivion Verses and 2023’s Terrestrial Verses (co-directed with Ali Asgari) — where he constantly toys with storytelling techniques, inserting flashes of surreal imagery without warning, or relying on a mysteriously oblique viewpoint to narrate the action. If the content of his films skews towards the dark side, their form tends to be a bit more playful, undercutting some of the heaviness of what’s being depicted. In The Things You Kill, the brooding tale of a college professor facing major upheavals on two home fronts gets belied by…