Less than a week ago, President Trump called for 100% tariffs on movies made outside the U.S., a move meant to bring productions home that most people in the industry believe would have devastating consequences for the entertainment business.
Then industry trade publication Deadline published the “Make Hollywood Great” proposal from actor Jon Voight, one of Trump’s so-called Hollywood ambassadors, that he recently presented to the president.
It has all led to confusion and disagreement from those in the industry about how to make the most of the current spotlight on a crucial issue — maintaining production and jobs in the U.S. — but in a way that will actually benefit the entertainment business.
“Any financial help we can give to filmmakers is going to keep filmmakers at home,” said George Huang, professor of screenwriting at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. “Ideally, legislators will try to be creative and try to support what I think is one of our most highly sought-after industries here in the United States.”
On Friday, the Motion Picture Assn. trade group convened a meeting with movie studio chiefs to discuss how to respond to the Trump administration’s plan and how to advocate for measures they think would actually help boost domestic filming.
As other Hollywood unions and organization put out statements about the federal issues, the MPA was conspicuously silent publicly.
Representatives from the MPA and the studios declined to comment Friday.
The MPA — the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying organization for the major studios — has historically faced a difficult task getting its members to agree to anything, and that has only increased since the group expanded to include streaming services Netflix and Amazon, according to people familiar with the organization. The companies all have different priorities and, in some cases, completely different business models.
Some studio executives are hoping Voight’s list of ideas to rebuild Hollywood becomes a rough blueprint for a more realistic alternative to tariffs.
Studio chiefs say it’s often too expensive to make movies and TV shows in the U.S., even with the generous incentives offered by various states. Movies are a low-margin business, and shooting abroad can offset production costs by as much as 30%.
On Wednesday, studio executives from Sony, HBO and Amazon discussed the issue at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. They highlighted the limits of incentives — even if the U.S. offered tax credits, sometimes projects have to be shot overseas because of the story.
“We’re going overseas because we have a show set in London,” said “The Diplomat” creator Debora Cahn. “We want castles and palaces, and we don’t have enough of them here.”
What’s clear is that most of Hollywood — as well as current and former civic leaders — do not favor the use of tariffs to bring production back to the U.S.
“It’s going to kill us,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told The Times. “That’s not going to help us. It’s going to hurt us.”
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), too, was skeptical of Trump’s tariff announcement.
“This is the absolute worst way to go about supporting an industry so critical to not just L.A. and the state but the country,” she said. “Filmed entertainment is one of the best products we are able to produce.”
It’s why Voight’s plan is being looked at with interest.
The centerpiece is a “new federal American Production incentive,” which would allow a 20% tax credit — or an added 10% on top of a state’s film incentive.
Projects that qualify would have to meet a minimum threshold American “cultural test,” similar to what Britain requires for film incentives. The incentive would apply to traditional broadcasters and streaming services, including Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and digital platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.
The plan also calls for Section 181 of the federal tax code to be renewed for another five years. It recommends raising the caps on film production to $20 million (or $40 million if the project was shot in a rural area). The proposal recognizes film budgets have increased since 2004.
The group also suggested extending Section 181 to cover movie theater owners for facility improvements and equipment updates to their movie houses.
“Families going to the movies is one of the great American past times that must be preserved,” the draft plan noted.
The plan did raise the specter of tariffs, saying that if a U.S.-based production “could have been produced in the U.S.” but moved to a foreign country to take advantage of a tax incentive, then “a tariff will be placed on that production equal to 120% of the value of the foreign incentive received.”
“This is not meant as a penalty, but a necessary step to ‘level the playing field,’ while not creating a never-ending cycle of chasing the highest incentive,” according to the draft.
After publication, Voight’s manager, Steven Paul, one of the authors, said the document was “crafted solely for the purpose of discussion.”
A group of Hollywood unions and industry trade groups — including the Motion Picture Assn. and guilds representing screenwriters, directors and actors, as well as the Producers United coalition — recently backed the idea of a domestic production incentive.
“We are really advocating right now to make sure that, yes, we bring back American jobs, but we do it in a way that is actually going to provide the lifeblood into this system that will actually sustain it,” said Jonathan Wang, a producer on the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and a member of Producers United. “So we are asking that we are in the room when these decisions are being made, and that we can provide our voice.”
For Producers United, a federal tax incentive would make the U.S. more competitive with other countries, though the group does not support the “cultural test” suggested in Voight’s plan, which they worry could essentially become a form of censorship.
“It’s important that we work hard to not get put into a position where we finally are tempted with the carrot of an incentive and then faced with censorship,” said Cathy Schulman, a producer on the best picture Oscar winner “Crash” and the Amazon Anne Hathaway drama “The Idea of You,” who is part of the Producers United group. “It’s really important that the two conversations go hand-in-hand that we need this financial support for uncensored art.”
Times staff writers Wendy Lee, Meg James, Ryan Faughnder and Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
Taylor Swift’s voice may make a cameo in “It Ends With Us” — the 2024 film now embroiled in legal drama — but a representative for the pop star says that’s where her involvement in the movie ends.
The legal saga erupted late last year when Lively accused Baldoni, along with his team, of orchestrating a smear campaign against her after she reported on-set sexual harassment. Baldoni filed a countersuit alleging that Lively’s accusations are baseless and have caused serious harm to his career, reputation and personal life, further escalating the high-interest legal brawl.
In a statement to The Times on Friday, a spokesperson for Swift denied that the singer had any level of involvement in the film beyond agreeing to license her song “My Tears Ricochet” to be used in the trailer and a scene.
“Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film, she did not even see ‘It Ends With Us’ until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history,” the spokesperson said, alluding to her record-breaking Eras Tour.
“Given that her involvement was licensing a song for the film, which 19 other artists also did, this document subpoena is designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case,” the statement continued.
Swift’s name became a part of the conversation when documents Baldoni’s team published online alluded to a “a famous, and famously close, friend of Reynolds and Lively.” Lively and Swift have been friends for more than a decade and have collaborated professionally in addition to making high-profile social appearances together, like at last year’s Super Bowl.
Baldoni’s team alleges that Reynolds and the unnamed “megacelebrity friend” “pressured” him to accept changes Lively made to the script.
Lively, according to the documents published online, allegedly sent a message to Baldoni referring to herself as the character “Khaleesi” from “Game of Thrones,” and Swift and Reynolds as her “dragons.”
“My dragons also protect those I fight for,” Lively allegedly texted Baldoni. “So really we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. You will too, I can promise you.”
Throughout its career in the 1990s, the band Pavement remained poised for a wider commercial success that it never quite found. As leaders of the lo-fi indie rock sound, the musicians remained something of a secret passed among fans, their air of willful inscrutability, ambivalence toward conventional success and general irreverence inspiring a dedicated faithful that has only grown over the years.
The new film “Pavements” is a fittingly unconventional one for this most unconventional of bands, combining documentary footage from a wildly successful 2022 reunion tour along with scenes from the production of an improbable jukebox stage musical, an exhaustive art gallery dedicated to the group’s ephemera and a parody of a prestige Oscar-baiting biopic — all of it created especially for the movie.
For director Alex Ross Perry, it boiled down to the admittedly unanswerable question of whether the band in its time could have been bigger than it was. Then he had a lightning bolt of inspiration.
“I wanted to make a movie from the perspective of Pavement [being] — as we say onscreen in the film — the world’s most important and influential band, because that is literally true to 100,000 white Gen-X nerds,” says Perry on a recent Zoom call from his home in upstate New York.
“So what if the movie takes that not as a premise but as a fact?” asks Perry. “And builds a fictional world where this music has inspired these other things people build as shrines to their favorite musicians — a museum, a Broadway show, a crappy biopic? Let’s just do that and presume that is the cultural footprint of Pavement.”
In an unexpected stroke of luck, during the years it took Perry to see his ambitious project through, a 1999 B-side called “Harness Your Hopes” became the band’s biggest hit ever, thanks to social media algorithms. Suddenly the success that had always eluded Pavement was happening at a level never seen before.
Fred Hechinger, left, Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman in the movie “Pavements.”
(Utopia)
The initial impulse behind the film came from Pavement’s longtime record label. Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records, recalls first pitching Perry’s idea to Stephen Malkmus, the band’s notoriously laconic chief songwriter, singer, guitarist and nominal leader.
“The idea was to make it confusing and weird,” says Lombardi in a phone interview from Los Angeles, about explaining the concept to Malkmus. “He was laughing about it and was like, ‘If it sucks, the songs are pretty bulletproof.’”
Perry, 40, is best known for seriocomic indie films such as “Listen Up Philip” and “Her Smell.” He also recently co-directed “Rite Here Rite Now,” a concert film for the Swedish metal band Ghost that also blended fictionalized elements.
The invented stage show, “Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical,” included arrangements of the group’s music by Keegan DeWitt and Dabney Morris and starred Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones and Kathryn Gallagher. It was mounted for a few nights in New York City. The museum show in NYC’s Tribeca, “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum,” mixed genuine memorabilia from the band’s history with made-up awards, gold and platinum records the band did not actually earn, advertisements it was not really a part of and ephemera such as a toenail clipping supposedly from Gary Young, the group’s original drummer.
For the Hollywood biopic portion of the project, titled “Range Life: A Pavement Story,” after one of the band’s most ruefully wistful songs, Perry wrote nearly 50 pages of a traditional script covering 1995 and the making of the group’s third album, “Wowee Zowee,” a sprawling, three-sided record (the fourth was left blank) that confounded many at the time but is now widely lauded and beloved.
“If we’re going to do a crappy, cliché, awards-chasing biopic, ‘Wowee Zowee’ is the moment,” says Perry. “That is the meat — that’s the best part of the biopic. That’s when they slam the brakes on their own success. It’s when they make an album that many now consider to be their masterpiece but was not seen as such at the time.
“It’s the moment in every movie where something crazy happens at this big concert: It’s Live Aid, it’s Newport, it’s whatever, we’ve all seen it,” Perry says, noting how the band was pelted with mud by the crowd at a stop on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. “So I only wrote the ‘Wowee Zowee’ part of ‘Range Life.’ I kept saying to people, ‘Page 1 of my script would be Page 70 of ‘Range Life.’”
Kathryn Gallagher, left, Michael Esper and Zoe Lister-Jones in the movie “Pavements”
(Utopia)
To play the band, Perry put together a cast of actors who might all credibly appear in a more conventional drama, including “Stranger Things” breakout Joe Keery as Malkmus, Nat Wolff as guitarist and songwriter Scott Kannberg, Fred Hechinger (“Thelma”) as percussionist Bob Nastanovich, Jason Schwartzman as Lombardi and Tim Heidecker as Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy.
Due to time and budget constraints, only about 15 or 20 pages of “Range Life” were actually filmed, capturing such pivotal moments as an awkward band meeting in which label executives confront the group over the uncommercial approach of its latest album and another in which Malkmus blithely declines an offer to appear on an episode of “Saturday Night Live” hosted by Quentin Tarantino. (Neither incident actually occurred.)
“Chris Lombardi said, ‘You know, Malkmus said no to everything. I could almost see him having turned down something as big as ‘SNL,’” Perry says. “And I said, ‘All right, well that’s going in the movie.’ Whether he turned down ‘SNL’ in 1995 or not, he’s turning it down now.”
Not that the band was ever above a little self-mythologizing in its day. Lombardi remembers how the label helped spread a rumor the band had turned down an offer to be on the TV show “Beverly Hills, 90210” though it had never actually been asked to appear.
“We did a lot of TV,” says Nastanovich (the real one), the de facto internal historian of Pavement because he remembers the stories the best. “Obviously the ‘Leno’ show we did was unusually poor, thankfully to the point of being so bad it was good. We clicked that button a handful of times. With the exception of ‘Letterman’ and ‘Saturday Night Live,’ we did a whole hell of a lot of TV. MTV, of course, was big at the time. We humiliated ourselves on all of those channels.”
Weaving between the fiction and contradictions of the band’s history led Perry to discover a more active, free-flowing process he has come to describe as “four-dimensional filmmaking.”
“I’m not holding a script in my pocket and saying, ‘Guys, we don’t have these lines yet.’” Perry says. “What we have is a public-facing film set where we had 3,000 people come through the museum in the four days it was open. Thousands of people came through a film set not knowing it’s a film set. And they’re being filmed and what’s happening is exactly the dramatic structure I’ve conceived.”
Malkmus himself played along at the museum, responding on camera to some of the most preposterously fake pieces in the exhibition such as an Absolut vodka ad (“Absolut Pavement”) as if they were real, providing Perry with footage he wouldn’t see until later. (Multiple cinematographers roamed at the event.)
Stephen Malkmus at the museum show in “Pavements.”
(Utopia)
“I didn’t know how amused he would be by it,” Perry says of Malkmus’ visit to the museum. “The answer was extremely, which was delightful to see because I think he got the humor in that, because the humor was only derived from the way he’s presented himself for 30 years, the way he’s written lyrics, the distanced ‘I’m playing the game, but I’m letting you know that I don’t want to play the game.’ That sort of dichotomy within him — the museum was created in that spirit.”
Eventually, the band attended a staged premiere of the movie-within-the-movie. With all the trappings of an actual film premiere — red carpet photos and a postshow Q&A in front of an actual audience — “Range Life” consisted of about 60 minutes of footage, assembled specifically for the event by the film’s editor, Robert Greene, a frequent Perry collaborator and himself a director of doc-fiction hybrids such as 2016’s “Kate Plays Christine.”
The event took place at a movie theater in Brooklyn. Everyone agrees the band was freaked out by what it saw.
“When you write something to not be good and to play every cliché note on the piano and you film it poorly where it’s just the most traditional coverage — surprise, surprise, it’s really tough to watch,” says Perry.
As Lombardi recalls of the band’s dismayed response, “I told my girlfriend, ‘I think I just killed Pavement.’”
“You certainly don’t want to be misrepresented in a negative way,” says Nastanovich. “And so that was my biggest concern walking out of there.”
Joe Keery, left, Scott Kannberg, Bob Nastanovich, Steve West, Nat Wolff, Mark Ibold and Stephen Malkmus in the movie “Pavements.”
(Utopia)
Lombardi adds, “It’s hard to see yourself up there depicted by other actors. And to see it onscreen, somebody talking about something about your life that didn’t actually happen, is really kind of a mindf—. What is going on here? Is this funny? Or is this making me feel sick? I think it was a real process to bring it all around.”
Perry completely understands why the band members were confounded by the work-in-progress that they saw.
“Imagine you’re so cool that you’ve actually never watched a Hollywood biopic,” he says. “Now imagine that you’re seeing all of those clichés play out for the first time in your life and they’re all about you. It would be extremely confusing. Nobody understood the tone because they’d never seen it before.
“Suddenly they were, ‘This can’t be the movie,’ says Perry. “And we were like, ‘It’s not. It’s empirically not the movie.’”
Yet even in the small snippets of “Range Life” that appear in the final “Pavements” film, Keery’s performance as Malkmus is unexpectedly affecting. Behind-the-scenes footage of him diligently prepping for the part becomes something of a satire of Method acting intensity and the actor’s loss of self. While working with a vocal coach, he uproariously obtains a supposed photo of the inside of Malkmus’ mouth.
Keery is currently on tour with his own band, Djo, and was unavailable for comment. But Perry acknowledges the challenge the project presented to him and the other actors.
“What he said yes to — and what he did when he showed up every day — is so risky,” says Perry. “It’s such a huge risk on the part of any actor to step in front of a camera, use your own name, make fun of yourself a little bit. Make fun of your profession, make fun of your peers, definitely make fun of your publicists and also capture all of that and not seem like an a—hole.
“This has never been done before,” he continues. “If you’re the first person to do something, you might be the first pancake and you just kind of have to throw it away. And that’s entirely on the table here. There was no indication that what we were doing was going to work.”
“There’s no other band where you have that 30 years of legacy and meaning and value but 0.0% of the protectiveness of that legacy that every other band has,” says Perry of Pavement, a group he now celebrates in “Pavements.” Perry, photographed at Film Forum in New York City.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
Perry appreciates the band for entrusting him with its story and capturing what has turned into a whole new chapter in the band’s history.
“There’s no other band where you have that 30 years of legacy and meaning and value but 0.0% of the protectiveness of that legacy that every other band has, that would stymie any attempt to do anything interesting,” says Perry. “Any other band with that much value behind them would just want to make something that is a piece of marketing so they can make money to be that band.”
The film premiered last fall at the Venice Film Festival before playing the New York Film Festival, where all five members of the band appeared onstage after the screening.
“Essentially two things happened that night,” says Perry. “We took this band from humble beginnings — underground clubs, college radio — and we put them onstage at Lincoln Center, which is a phenomenal career arc,” says Perry. “Three days earlier it had been Elton John presenting his Disney+ documentary. So that is not the company Pavement have ever been in.
“The other thing that happened is that I was proven right, which I really like,” he adds. “I had been saying for four years: Trust me, this is going to be very cool. This is going to be unique. No one’s ever done this before. I’m not saying it’s going to be perfect. I’m not saying it’s going to be without conflict or bumps along the way. I am promising if people see this movie for what it is, they will say, ‘This is an absolutely one-of-a-kind achievement that truly captures who this band was, is and will always be.’ And we pulled that off.”
The unorthodox methods of “Pavements” uniquely capture the elusive spirit of the band in ways a more traditional approach would not, even as it maintains a sense of mystique.
“They embody a spirit of a time of fanzines and putting out your own records and playing small shows and doing it because you wanted to do it,” says Lombardi of the band. “And not looking to capitalize in a capital-C kind of way. Trying to just make great songs for your friends, play with people you like to play with, hang out at places that were fun to hang out at and do your own thing.”
Of Perry’s film, Lombardi seems impressed. “It’s a hard thing to tell,” he says of the band’s vibe. “They did understand where those guys are coming from and that’s just not really an easy thing to convey. They did it and I’m really happy where we landed.”
“If it confuses people, then I’m pretty easy to contact,” says Nastanovich. “I can tell them what’s real and not real.”
Since Sunday night, Hollywood has been trying to make heads or tails of President Trump’s bombshell proposal to levy 100% tariffs on films made outside of the U.S.
Ostensibly, the Trump tariff plan is part of an effort to bring Hollywood productions back home, after decades of runaway production.
Remarkably few movies are made entirely in the U.S. — let alone Los Angeles — because studios have been lured abroad to countries including Canada, Britain, Australia, Hungary and Bulgaria by generous government incentives. Special effects are often outsourced overseas.
This has contributed to what leaders in California now call a crisis for the state’s production economy. The Los Angeles area also faces stiff competition from other states, including Georgia and New York.
So Trump has clearly identified a real problem, though the solution he offered is questionable, to say the least. Filmmakers say they want to shoot in the States but need help to make it financially feasible. Tariffs won’t help with that. In fact, they’ll make it worse.
“It’s great that the president is starting to pay attention,” said Jeffrey Greenstein, who has produced movies shot in multiple countries. “So let’s have a real conversation about it and figure out the best way to start bringing movies back.”
The chaotic and vague way Trump’s plan was announced sent studio executives scrambling to figure out what it all meant. The notion seemed ill-thought-out and knee-jerk, many producers said.
How do you even put a tariff on movies, which are distributed digitally? Why tariffs, rather than a robust national tax credit program, which many in the industry have advocated for?
“Nobody knows and I don’t suspect we will for awhile,” said one executive who was not authorized to comment. “Is [the tariff] on domestically funded foreign productions? Is it on foreign funded ones? Is the tariff on film revenues or film costs on those projects or both, etc., etc., etc. What constitutes a feature? Who knows.”
Who knows, indeed.
Before Sunday’s announcement, actor Jon Voight, one of Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, traveled to Florida with his manager Steven Paul for a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to present a plan for the film industry. Ideas addressed included federal tax incentives, job training and “tariffs in certain limited circumstances,” according to a statement from Paul’s production company.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has now called on Trump to create a $7.5-billion federal film tax credit program. The governor’s office reached out to the White House Monday evening to encourage Trump to work with California to create a federal credit modeled after the state’s program.
Some executives and producers said the tariff idea would hasten Hollywood’s demise rather than save it, because of the increased costs for studios that are already under financial pressure. Reciprocal tariffs from other territories could follow. China is already getting more restrictive for American movies thanks to Trump trade policies.
Already, there are signs that the administration might be walking the proposal back, leaving entertainment business analysts to doubt that the idea will actually go into effect.
Nonetheless, the turmoil could cast a pall over the Cannes Film Festival this month, where a lot of indie movie deals happen.
“It still creates a headache for the film business and particularly indie film if there is yet more uncertainty in an already fragile marketplace, particularly among the banks and investors,” said Stuart Ford, head of Los Angeles-based film and TV company AGC Studios.
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IFC’s new look at 25 years old
Indie movie stalwart IFC Films has seen dramatic changes in the specialty film market since it launched 25 years ago.
The challenges are real, as streaming changes moviegoer habits and the box office continues to creep back from the pandemic doldrums. Meanwhile, newer entrants — including A24, Neon and Angel Studios — have reshaped the business by establishing themselves as fresh brands that mean something to their target audiences.
The types of movies that draw independent film fans to theaters have also shifted radically, especially compared to the early 2000s when IFC released “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” by far its biggest hit. Even 2014, the year the company put out Richard Linklater’s best picture Oscar nominee “Boyhood,” seems a lifetime away.
The market now is younger and hungrier for horror movies, thrillers and edgy genre mashups. At the same time, the major Hollywood studios have, with few exceptions, turned their attention to broad-based tentpole movies, which gives companies like IFC an opportunity to make a bigger mark.
“The audience for what I would call specialty now is very different than it was a few years ago,” said IFC Entertainment Group head Scott Shooman. “It’s not just older-skewing dramas anymore.”
With all that in mind, New York-based IFC on Tuesday unveiled a brand refresh, changing its name to Independent Film Co. As part of the rebranding effort, the company unveiled a new logo and a “customized audio logo” created by Adam “Adrock” Horovitz of the Beastie Boys.
Independent Film Company’s new logo.
The change is part of a broader rejiggering of film assets within parent company AMC Networks. Independent Film Co. will exist under the newly named IFC Entertainment Group, an umbrella that also includes the IFC Center movie theater, fellow distribution arm RLJE and the horror streaming service Shudder, which turns a decade old this year.
“As the consumer becomes more familiar with brands and who’s purveying the movies, it becomes important for us to refresh the brand,” Shooman said. “It’s gonna take the movies to fill it out, but that’s something that we look forward to doing.”
As the independent space has evolved, so has IFC’s strategy.
The company is aiming to release fewer films while taking bigger swings with more commercial-leaning movies and heftier budgets. Currently, the group releases about 50 movies a year, which according to Shooman is getting closer to the ideal number. About 30 of those releases are through the Shudder arm, a handful of which also go into theaters.
For the rest, 12 are from Independent Film Co. and eight are under the RLJE banner, and all of those are released theatrically. As the company refines its strategy, it’s moving further away from the foreign films and documentaries that helped define the brand years ago, though it will still do one or two of those a year, Shooman said.
“We’re gonna be sniper oriented on those and really make sure that they are the needle-moving films in that space,” he said.
IFC is coming off a strong couple of years, fielding commercial successes including Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ “Late Night With the Devil” and Chris Nash’s “In a Violent Nature,” along with prestigious titles such as “The Taste of Things” and the Academy Award-nominated stop-motion animated feature “Memoir of a Snail.”
Upcoming releases include Eli Craig’s “Clown in a Cornfield”; Sean Byrne’s thriller “Dangerous Animals,” which debuts at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight; and Jay Duplass’ “The Baltimorons.”
Essential to the larger IFC strategy is Shudder, which over the last 10 years has established itself as a destination for horror fans with its mix of new titles and handpicked library selections.
Shudder was, for example, the home of Coralie Fargeat’s first feature, “Revenge,” before she went on to make “The Substance.” It was also behind the 2022 experimental and divisive microbudget film “Skinamarink” from Kyle Edward Ball. Last year, it released “Oddity,” its second time working with Irish director Damian McCarthy.
“As we’re able to grow as a company, we’ve become synonymous with taste, with quality and with author-driven impactful horror,” said Emily Gotto, Shudder’s head of acquisitions and production.
Shudder prides itself on the way it curates its platform with a human touch, not by algorithm.
Some of Shudder’s best gets have been older, little-seen titles with which the company can make a splash. The best example perhaps was when the company secured the rights to the 1981 body horror classic “Possession,” which hadn’t been widely available through streaming or video on-demand.
That coup was a prime example of how the company can make “subscriber events” out of releasing older titles, said Shudder’s programming and acquisitions head Sam Zimmerman, who is in charge of curating the streamer’s offering.
Zimmerman said the company succeeds when “we follow our taste and our passion and release and make movies that take someone a foot further than they thought they were going to go that day.”
“Having that instinct confirmed is both surprising but exciting to me,” he said, “because I think that’s what people want out of horror.”
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Listen: The blues great Buddy Guy is in the news because of “Sinners,” so why not?
Hollywood executives scrambled Monday to interpret President Trump’s call for stiff tariffs on movies produced outside the U.S. — a bombshell proposal that would upend how movies have been made for years.
Trump on Sunday night announced that he was authorizing a 100% tariff on movies “coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” The proposal, like many other Trump-imposed tariffs, is aimed at bringing a key industry back home.
Studios shoot many of their feature films in Canada, Britain, Bulgaria, New Zealand and Australia. Such countries offer incentives to attract high-paying jobs and get their landmarks featured on the big screen.
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated.”
Studio executives were caught off guard.
Many filmmakers would like to work in the U.S. but would rather see the government institute its own national tax credit. Tariffs, many argue, would hasten the film industry’s demise rather than preventing it, because they would increase costs. Plus, it’s unclear how a tariff on movies would actually work.
“Nobody knows, and I don’t suspect we will for awhile,” said one high-level film industry executive who was not authorized to comment. “Is it on domestically funded foreign productions? Is it on foreign funded ones? Is the tariff on film revenues or film costs on those projects, or both?”
Foreign production incentives have hobbled Los Angeles’ production economy, which has been ailing after COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, labor strikes and a retrenchment by traditional entertainment companies after losing billions of dollars on streaming services to compete with Netflix. The January wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena dealt another setback.
Major entertainment companies declined to comment. The president’s announcement sparked a frenzy of questions, including whether U.S.-based companies, such as Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon and Netflix, would be subject to the tariffs simply for shooting a movie outside the U.S.
According to data from the Motion Picture Assn., the U.S. runs a $15.3-billion trade surplus with its exports of entertainment.
“This creates an incredible uncertainty in the industry,” said Nick Vyas, founding executive director of the Randall R. Kendrick Global Supply Chain Institute at USC. “This is the one industry where we have created a huge advantage.”
Key details must be worked out, the White House cautioned Monday. White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement that “no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made.”
Some crew leaders applauded Trump’s instinct to protect American jobs.
“Studios chase cheap production costs overseas while gutting the American workforce that built the film and TV industry,“ said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien and Motion Picture Division Director Lindsay Dougherty in a statement.
But a movie tariff would be complicated in practice.
Similar to Detroit’s auto industry, different phases of production often occur outside the U.S., such as adding special effects.
Tariffs are typically imposed when a product arrives at a port of entry, at which time the importer of record must pay the tax before the item is released. That wouldn’t be feasible for films, which are distributed digitally.
Digital products are also not part of the normal tariff regime, which would make it difficult to determine its valuation, said Tony Gulotta, principal and national tax practice leader at Ryan, a global business tax-focused firm.
Adding to the obstacles, the World Trade Organization also has a moratorium on taxation of digital trade that runs through March 2026, he said.
Administration officials are expected to meet with studio executives and the MPA to seek clarity about whether tariffs will be based on a film’s budget, its revenue, theater ticket prices or streaming service subscriber fees.
Another question: Would television shows, many of which are filmed in Canada and the U.K., be included?
“This is no small thing,” Frank Albarella, a media and telecommunications executive at consulting firm KPMG. “It could be really disruptive to the industry.”
The call to enhance U.S. production comes after Trump tapped a trio of actors — Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson — to be his “special ambassadors” to Hollywood.
Voight and his manager, Steven Paul, traveled to Florida to present a plan to Trump during an in-person meeting this past weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
The plan was developed after meeting with Hollywood unions, studios and streamers, and addressed multiple potential ways to help the U.S. film business. Those included federal tax incentives, co-production treaties with other countries, infrastructure subsidies, job training and “tariffs in certain limited circumstances,” according to a statement from Paul’s production company.
“The American film industry, and Hollywood, is a beacon for teaching the American Dream to the world and is an engine for job growth and career opportunity,” Paul said in the statement.
But it was Trump himself who came up with the tariff plan, a White House official said.
Congressional leaders warned that tariffs were not the best way to boost the American film industry.
“If President Trump is serious about maintaining a dominant U.S. film industry and keeping production jobs in the United States,” said Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), a former film producer, “I invite him to join me in fighting for a national film tax credit that levels the playing field with overseas incentives.”
Runaway production is a decades-old trend, but leaders say its impact on California has reached a crisis point.
Such programs as Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” and movies including Universal’s “Wicked” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” Warner Bros. “The Conjuring: Last Rites” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” from Disney’s Marvel were shot in the U.K.
In addition to lower labor costs, studios have moved overseas to give productions local flavor for audiences in those continents. Films often collect as much as 60% of their revenue from international audiences.
Some experts warned that imposing stiff tariffs could invite reciprocal levies from other territories.
The news could also dampen dealmaking at the Cannes Film Festival in France next week due to the uncertainty of the proposed policy.
Senior debt lenders have expressed concern about how this will affect distribution, said Peter Marshall, managing principal of media insurance services at Epic Insurance Brokers & Consultants.
“If you wanted to time a bombshell statement to frustrate the independent film sector, you would say it now, right before the largest market in the world,” Marshall said. “This will, I think, almost certainly cast a huge pall over that.”
Times staff writers Michael Wilner, Stacy Perman and Wendy Lee contributed to this report.
John and the Hole is a 2021 horror-drama that is currently available to watch on the streaming platform for free and a clip of the movie has recently resurfaced online
Fans have given the film a negative review(Image: Amazon/Youtube)
Amazon Prime subscribers are up in arms over a 2021 thriller that’s sparked outrage after a clip resurfaced online.
The film, John and the Hole, is a horror-drama from 2021 that’s currently free to stream on Amazon Prime. Starring Michael C. Hall, the perplexing movie follows 13-year-old John (played by Charlie Shotwell), who feels alienated from his well-to-do family and stumbles upon an incomplete bunker in the woods near his house.
In a disturbing twist, he drugs his parents (played by Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and older sister (Taissa Farmiga), trapping them in the bunker as he takes over the household.
The story probes into John’s intricate mind, exploring his emotional detachment and the eerie family dynamics that emerge as they struggle with their unexpected imprisonment, reports Surrey Live.
The film first stirred up excitement online
However, the film’s slow burn, ambiguous storytelling, and irritating characters have led to a barrage of criticism from viewers.
Despite a recent surge in interest following clips shared on social media platforms like X and Instagram, those who left reviews on Google were overwhelmingly disappointed.
One exasperated viewer implored: “Please don’t watch this, I beg u. It’s time you’ll never get back. Two hrs of my life were just stolen from me. You’d be more productive going in ur backyard and staring at the grass, maybe you’ll see an ant or bug , maybe u won’t. Regardless, it would be better than this movie.”
The film left many viewers confused
Another viewer vented their frustration, saying: “I never write movie reviews, largely because I see it as a complete waste of time. However, this movie was so terrible that it’s worth it to warn others. DO NOT WATCH. It was SO SO SO SLOW AND NOTHING HAPPENS. I found myself so agitated by how many empty scenes there were, and I had to get up every few minutes to skip through it.”
Meanwhile, another commenter shared their letdown: “This was literally THE WORST MOVIE I have ever watched. From what the description said, I thought there would be some tale of the family trying to escape after being locked in this ‘hole’ by the 13-year-old boy. There was nothing. They were locked there and literally nothing happened. Nothing at all.”
On the flip side, some viewers appreciated the film, with a fan expressing enthusiasm: “I love the movie! I don’t know why people give it a one star!”
John and the Hole is available to watch on Amazon Prime
They may not be the Avengers, but the motley crew of Marvel Studios’ “Thunderbolts” punched their way to the top of the box office this weekend, continuing a strong season for theaters as Hollywood’s summer movie season gets underway.
The movie, which stars Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan as part of an antihero ensemble, opened in the U.S. and Canada to $76 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates. Globally, “Thunderbolts” debuted with $162 million, including $86 million from outside the U.S. and Canada.
Before its release, “Thunderbolts” was expected to bring in about $70 million in its opening weekend, though some projections had pegged $80 million as the high end of its earning potential, according to analyst estimates.
The film’s reported budget is $180 million.
The opening weekend performance for “Thunderbolts” is in line with Marvel films such as 2021’s “Eternals,” which brought in $71 million, and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” which made $75 million. The most recent Marvel film, “Captain America: Brave New World,” hauled in $89 million in its opening weekend in February.
Marvel’s past box office success raised the bar for the franchise, which has been difficult for every film to meet, especially given the pandemic and the dual writers and actors strikes in 2023, said Shawn Robbins, founder of film business analysis site Box Office Theory and director of analytics at Fandango.
After the 2019 blockbuster “Avengers: Endgame,” Walt Disney Co.-owned Marvel often seemed to struggle to find its footing, losing its consistency at the box office and with critics. “The Marvels” was a misfire, and movies including “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” appeared to signal a drop-off in quality.
But the largely positive reviews for “Thunderbolts” could provide momentum for Marvel’s summer release,”The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”
“In any franchise, the next film performs as well as the previous film was treated by audiences,” Robbins said.
“Sinners” came in second at the box office this weekend with $33 million domestically, down just 28% from the prior week. The acclaimed original period vampire movie has collected $180 million domestically so far, in a much-needed win for movie studio Warner Bros.
Video game-based blockbuster “A Minecraft Movie,” Ben Affleck’s “The Accountant 2” and Sony’s horror movie “Until Dawn” rounded out the top five.
The U.S.-Canada box office is now up 16% compared with the same time in 2024, a substantial improvement from earlier in the year when Hollywood fielded a number of flops.
This season’s diverse lineup, which includes family movies, R-rated horror films and now, a PG-13 superhero flick, gives audiences more reason to flock to theaters, Robbins said.
“It feels a little bit like the before times,” he said. “The fact that it’s been happening in April is a really encouraging sign going into the summer.”
In the first episode of the Apple TV+ show “The Studio,” Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese sells his script to the fictional Continental Studios, only to be told later by a studio chief played by Seth Rogen that the project, about Jonestown, has been killed.
Instead, the company is fast-tracking a soulless brand-based cash grab: a Kool-Aid movie.
“Just give me back my movie and let me go sell it to f— Apple, the way I should have done it in the first place,” a despairing Scorsese says.
The line could practically be an ad for how Apple TV+, the Cupertino tech giant’s streaming service, has positioned itself as a creative haven for filmmakers trying to sell bold, original ideas.
The service, which was introduced in 2019 with a splashy event featuring Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, found success with comedy shows like “Ted Lasso” and 2022 best picture Academy Award winner “CODA.”
But the question hanging over the company was, just how serious was it about its Hollywood ambitions? Would it be the next big power player? Or would it become just another deep-pocketed short-timer? For years after they joined the company, Apple TV+ leaders Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg were dogged by rumors that their jobs were in jeopardy.
Lately though, its efforts have come more into focus. It’s been on a run of critical success with shows such as “Severance,” “The Studio” and “Your Friends & Neighbors.” Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in a call with investors on Thursday that Apple TV+ “has become a must-see destination” and posted record viewership in the quarter.
Some have compared it to HBO — before Warner Bros. Discovery began making cuts — developing a reputation for being willing to pay big for A-list stars and creatives.
“It’s been brilliant at defining its niche … and the quality of what it does is simply superb,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “The question is, is the niche big enough to justify the expense?”
Apple TV+’s subscriber base remains small compared to competitors, including Netflix. It lacks the deep, established libraries of Walt Disney Co. or Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, which helps keep customers paying every month and not switching to another service. While it has good shows and movies, critics say, it lacks the volume and breadth of its competitors.
And the quality over quantity approach has its doubters. Wedbush Securities managing director Daniel Ives estimates Apple TV+ has 57 million subscribers, which he called “disappointing.” Wall Street had hoped to see 100 million or more subscribers by now, he said.
Apple has “built a mansion [and] they don’t have enough furniture, and that’s a problem from a content perspective with Apple TV+,” Ives said.
Further, tech and business news site the Information reported that Apple TV+ is losing $1 billion a year. The company’s strategy has left some rivals scratching their heads.
“I don’t understand it beyond a marketing play, but they’re really smart people,” said Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos in a March interview with Variety. “Maybe they see something we don’t.”
Apple declined to comment.
Observers noted that it can take a long time for streaming services to become profitable. NBCUniversal’s Peacock is still losing money, for example.
In recent years, subscription streaming services have been under pressure by investors to produce more profit. In an industry where there’s a lot of competition and Netflix has been declared the winner, there’s anxiety about how many platforms can survive on their own.
But Apple thinks differently about entertainment compared to its more traditional studio rivals, people familiar with the company say.
Apple TV+ is just one part of the company’s larger strategy to grow its subscription services business under Eddy Cue, which includes Apple Music, iCloud storage and Apple News, among other options.
The services category represented 25% of Apple’s overall sales of $391 billion in its last fiscal year. The company’s largest money maker remains the iPhone, which represented 51% of Apple’s total revenues in its last fiscal year.
In its most recent quarter, services reached a revenue record of $26.6 billion, up 12% from a year ago, the company said.
Apple TV+ is “a small piece of all the services that you provide,” said Alejandro Rojas, vice president of applied analytics with Parrot Analytics. “You want this to add to the overall brand experience, but without also crossing a massive gap in resources and investments.”
Apple TV+’s programming strategy has taken a talent-friendly approach, tending to favor projects with big-name stars.
One of its early major bets was “The Morning Show” with Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell. Drama “Your Friends & Neighbors” stars Jon Hamm from “Mad Men.” Its February survival drama film “The Gorge” stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.
One of Apple’s biggest movie releases will happen this summer with Formula 1 film “F1” (featuring Brad Pitt), which hits theaters in June, including on Imax screens. Warner Bros. is handling the theatrical release for the big-budget movie, directed by Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”).
Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, hopes “F1” will play like “Top Gun: Maverick” on a racetrack. Some of Apple’s previous filmmaker-driven, star-studded movies struggled at theaters, including “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Argylle.”
“This is a huge movie for Apple,” Dergarabedian said. “I think they picked a perfect project to really amplify their filmmaking acumen and their filmmaker relationships.”
The way Apple treats talent has a personalized touch, said creatives who have worked with the company.
Tomorrow Studios president Becky Clements said she was “forever grateful” that Apple took a shot on “Physical,” an original series starring Rose Byrne about a 1980s housewife who struggles with an eating disorder and finds strength through aerobics.
“It’s an original piece, which is often a difficult thing to pull off in the marketplace,” Clements said.
Clements credited Apple with supporting the filmmakers and not micromanaging the show, which delved into difficult material.
Ben Silverman, an executive producer on upcoming Apple TV+ series “Stick” (starring Owen Wilson), said the show’s budget allowed for traveling to North Carolina for filming, where prominent golf commentators Trevor Immelman and Jim Nantz were located during the PGA Tour.
“I think a lot of platforms are supportive of their creators right now, but they may not have the bandwidth to go as deep as Apple can on individual projects because they’re just not doing as many,” said Silverman, chairman and co-CEO of L.A.-based Propagate Content.
Not all creatives have been happy with Apple.
It threw observers for a loop when it did a short and limited theatrical release for last year’s Brad Pitt and George Clooney action-comedy movie “Wolfs,” instead of a more traditional wide release.
Director Jon Watts told Deadline he backed out of a sequel because he was surprised by Apple’s “last minute” shift and that Apple ignored his request to not reveal that he was working on a follow-up. Apple has not addressed the controversy publicly.
Like other streamers, over time, Apple TV+ has made changes to help generate more revenue, cut costs and increase customers. Last month, Apple cut the price of its streaming service temporarily to $2.99 a month. Its base monthly fee is $9.99. Last year, Apple TV+ reached a deal to sell subscriptions through Amazon.
In February, Apple TV+ captured 30% of its sign-ups via Amazon Channels, said Brendan Brady, director of strategy at research firm Antenna. High-profile releases including the new “Severance” season and “The Gorge” drove sign-ups, he added.
“It’s a combination of content driving their acquisition, and also that opening up of their distribution attracting a new audience,” Brady said.
Government officials have warned that tariffs on smartphones made in China are coming — which would harm Apple’s iPhone because many are made in the country. Increased costs to Apple’s overall business could eventually squeeze other areas of the company including Apple TV+, analysts said.
Some people who work with Apple said it’s too early to judge Apple’s success based on its estimated subscriber counts so far, and they’re placing chips on the venture succeeding in the long run.
“It’s about investing early and long-term,” Silverman said. “I’m always an entrepreneurial spirit who wants to lean in early to these platforms and partnerships, hoping that I can build a beachfront relationship.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Tim Grierson paid a visit to the Criterion Mobile Closet last weekend, as the cinephile totem made its first ever stop in Los Angeles, parked in front of Vidiots. Fans began lining up at 5 a.m. and the line was cut off at 9:30 a.m., before things had even opened. Folks waited in the rain for hours, with the closet staying open an extra hour to accommodate everyone.
What were they all waiting for? A chance to spend three minutes surrounded by every available title from the venerable home video label, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. (Attendees could choose three discs to purchase at a discount.) Videos of celebrities stopping by the supply closet of the company’s New York offices — Ben Affleck recently dropped in — have become an online phenomenon. The Mobile Closet extends that enthusiasm to everyday fans.
The Criterion Mobile Closet in Los Angeles last Saturday.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
“For the 40th anniversary, we’ve been talking about, ‘What could we do that truly engages all the people that love film?’” Nur El Shami, Criterion’s chief marketing officer, explained about the Mobile Closet’s origins. “Somebody said, almost as a joke, ‘What if we put the Closet in a truck?’ We were like, ‘You know what? Maybe that’s exactly what we should do.’”
The truck will be at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica on May 6 and 7. Plan to arrive early.
50 years of ‘Nashville’ and the movies of 1975
Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in the movie “Nashville.”
On Monday there will be a 35mm screening of Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” which won the first Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. award for best picture (shared with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a tie). The screening will be introduced by LAFCA member Peter Rainer.
Werner Herzog will be present for a screening of “The Enigma of Kasper Hauser,” which won the grand jury prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. A screening of “Cooley High” will welcome director Michael Schultz and actors Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs for a Q&A moderated by Robert Townsend.
A Tuesday screening of Robert Altman’s “Nashville” will be introduced by Keith Caradine, who won an Oscar for his original song “I’m Easy.” Ronee Blakley, who plays country music queen Barbara Jean and also wrote several songs for the film, will be there for a Q&A after the screening moderated by critic and programmer David Ansen.
In true Altmanesque fashion, “Nashville” features 24 main characters woven together over five days leading up to a benefit concert for an outsider presidential candidate, all intersecting off one another across the city. The cast includes Lily Tomlin, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Timothy Brown, Gwen Welles, Shelly Duvall, Michael Murphy, Geraldine Chaplin, Keenan Wynn, Scott Glenn and Henry Gibson. In many ways the crown jewel of Altman’s sprawling, prodigious filmography, “Nashville” is a biting satire, by turns rollicking and disturbing, with a still-relevant perspective on the intersection of politics, celebrity and entertainment.
From the moment the film first came out, there has been a debate as to whether it is a cynical put-down of Nashville as an institution and a place, or a celebration of all its gaudy glory. Either way, the film is clearly intended as a broader metaphor for America at a moment when the country was racked by turmoil and transition.
“I think it could be all those things, depending on your viewpoint,” said Blakley in a phone interview this week. “But at the time, I stuck with what I considered it to be — a tribute. I didn’t consider it sarcasm. I thought it was profound and in some ways very deeply respectful of Nashville.”
As for what made the film so special and why its legacy has lasted for 50 years, Blakley said, “I think it’s the concurrence of a bunch of gifted people at that time and place. Nixon was resigning. Altman, I think might be called a genius. It was just a bunch of talent put together by a bunch of great people. And I don’t think you could put your finger on any one thing. You would have to say [cinematographer] Paul Lohmann did beautiful photography. The editing was superb. The performances were just beyond. And the political message, such as it was, is resonant even today.”
Other films in the series include Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” Hal Ashby’s “Shampoo,” Joan Micklin Silver’s “Hester Street,” Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” and Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”
‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’ at 20
Steve Carell in the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin.”
(Suzanne Hanover / Universal Pictures)
The Academy Museum will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Judd Apatow’s “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” with a 35mm screening tonight with Apatow and star and co-writer Steve Carell in-person. Apatow’s debut feature as a director, the film was a key title in the 2000s comedy boom. Carell stars as a grown man who is, indeed, still a virgin and is desperate to find someone not only to be physically intimate with, but also to forge a romantic and emotional connection with. The cast, which features Jane Lynch, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Nancy Walls, Jonah Hill, Mindy Kaling, Leslie Mann, Catherine Keener and others, is truly stacked, and the film’s finale is so riotously joyful and unexpected that it alone is worth the price of admission.
I actually spent two days on the set of the film, seeing the shooting of a nightclub scene and the now famous poker scene. (I nearly ruined a take by laughing out loud.) “The Office” had only just started to air and Carell’s star was obviously ascendant. As Carell described the film at the time, “The name is misleading to a degree. … Just based on the title, you think it’s going to be this extremely bawdy, over-the-top summer comedy. There are elements of that — really funny set pieces and craziness — but we really wanted something that was grounded in a sense of reality.”
Carell added, “I’ve certainly played a few characters that have been rather broad. With this, I didn’t want to do that. We’ll see. I hope it plays.”
In a review of the film, Carina Chocano confirmed Carell’s hopes, writing, “Not to scare away the kids or anything, but what’s best about ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’ isn’t the business with a plastic medical model of a vagina, the projectile vomit or even the onanistic interlude set to the strains of an old Lionel Richie hit (though that constitutes one of the movie’s most enjoyable moments). What’s best about it — aside from the fact that it’s very funny — is that, for a movie in which the most sophisticated jokes are variations on ‘you’re so gay,” it’s refreshingly grounded in reality and (dare I suggest?) emotionally mature.”
Points of interest
‘Kingdom of Heaven’ director’s cut in 4K
A scene from the movie “Kingdom of Heaven.”
(20th Century Fox)
Tonight the Egyptian Theatre will host the world-premiere screening of a new 4K restoration of the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s 2005 adventure epic “Kingdom of Heaven,” co-presented by the American Cinematheque and Beyond Fest. As with the extended cut of Scott’s “The Counselor,” the director’s cut of “Kingdom of Heaven” brings a clarity of focus to the film and is vastly preferred to the theatrical version.
Set in the 1100s, the story follows a French blacksmith, Balian (Orlando Bloom), as he joins up with the Crusades and travels to Jerusalem. The cast includes Liam Neeson, Edward Norton, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson and Marton Csokas.
In his 2005 review of the original theatrical cut, Kenneth Turan wrote, “‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is not one of those cheerful combat movies that believe bloodletting is the answer to everything. It is a violent movie that laments a peace that didn’t last, a downbeat but compelling epic that looks to have lost faith in the value of cinematic savagery for its own sake. If you combine this film with Scott’s [2001] ‘Black Hawk Down,’ you find the director in a place where he is no longer exulting in his ability simply to put violence on screen; he wants you to feel its searing effects as well.”
“Kingdom” screenwriter William Monahan also wrote the script for Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” which happens to be playing at the New Beverly on Saturday and Sunday.
‘M. Butterfly’ in 35mm
John Lone, left, and Jeremy Irons in the movie “M. Butterfly.”
(Geffen Pictures)
On Sunday there will be a 35mm showing of David Cronenberg’s 1993 adaptation of “M.Butterfly” — presented by Hollywood Entertainment and Skylight Books — to celebrate the release of Violet Lucca’s book “David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials.” Lucca will be there to introduce the film and sign books. Screenwriter David Henry Hwang will send in a video introduction. This is said to be the film’s first L.A. showing since 2022.
Hwang, who also wrote the libretto for the opera “Ainadamar” currently at the L.A. Opera, adapted his own play. In the film Jeremy Irons plays a French diplomat in 1960s China who begins an ongoing affair with an opera performer (John Lone) who he believes to be a woman and, it turns out, is also a spy for the Chinese government.
In her book, Luca describes the film as “frequently overlooked in Cronenberg’s filmography” while adding, “it also stands out as the director’s most overtly political work.” Lucca continues, “This tension is perfectly suited to the inexplicable nature of love and sex, the messiness that exists between the spark of desire and its carnal expression. It shatters the illusion that we really do know a partner, or even ourselves — a difficult lesson learned every every day, quietly and loudly, by all sorts of people under far more quotidian circumstances.”
Ideally, we like to watch movies in a state of willful ignorance regarding their making, even if the whole machinery of selling and promoting a movie seems to defy that. But taking in the western “Rust” is a different matter. It’s the film on which up-and-coming cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was accidentally killed by a live round in a prop gun meant to hold blanks, discharged during a rehearsal by its star, Alec Baldwin. Writer-director Josh Souza was also wounded by the bullet.
That terrible and avoidable incident is a context that no movie should have to bear, even if the thematic matter of “Rust” — violence’s aftermath, atonement’s hard road and, yes, loaded guns in the wrong hands — makes this cursed production’s release, three and a half years after Hutchins’ death, feel more like a solemn performance at a wake than a work to be accepted on its own terms.
Anybody who might have assumed that “Rust” was some fly-by-night exploitation flick should know that its bones are very much that of a moody indie with a heart and a conscience. Death and tragedy are through lines meant to haunt a viewer. Justice is sought after, but is also portrayed as inadequate and hardly the last word. Guns are plentiful but for the most part, their unholstering and firing carries proper weight. In fact, Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece of reckoning “Unforgiven” feels like a tonal lodestar to “Rust,” itself far from a glib, flashy shoot-em-up.
Before Baldwin even appears as a grizzled outlaw with a mission of mercy, “Rust” sets itself up — uncannily, it must be said — as a woeful story about an unintended shooting death. When trying to scare off a wolf, orphaned Wyoming farm boy Lucas (Patrick Scott McDermott) mistakenly kills a local rancher with his family’s prized Henry rifle, a weapon we can tell he’s been reluctant to use. He’s arrested, thrown in jail, then sentenced to the gallows.
Bloody escape comes in the form of murdering thief Harland Rust (Baldwin), the grandfather Lucas never knew he had. Their destination is Mexico, but they’ve got pursuers in the form of a posse led by a steadfast, morosely philosophical U.S. Marshal played by a solid Josh Hopkins and, separately, a creepy Bible-quoting bounty hunter (Travis Fimmel, a tad overcooked).
Frontier characters with colorful language come and go in spurts of saloon musing and fireside dialogue. “Rust” talks a good game about the brutality and despair that are readily called up when living is hard. But the central relationship between Baldwin’s veteran killer and McDermott’s scarred innocent never quite gels into meaningful cross-generational intimacy, and the chase around them feels meandering. In its well-worn trail of hunter and hunted, damned and doomed, “Rust” struggles to warrant its two-hours-plus running time. (If only the storytelling economy of Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher were other genre inspirations.)
“A man makes his choices,” Baldwin’s crusty, guilt-ridden drifter says to his grandkid at one point. It bears mentioning that “Rust,” a movie director Souza went on to agonizingly complete at Hutchins’ family’s request, stands as a lasting testament to her obvious talent. (Bianca Cline completed the cinematography when the production resumed filming, and the film is dedicated to Hutchins.)
There’s an elegant severity to the natural elements that share the frame with the movie’s characters, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfalls, shafts of light in dark interiors and crisp air filled with smoke and dust. A testament to lives cut short, “Rust” is beautifully filmed and all the sadder for it.
‘Rust’
Not rated
Running time: 2 hours, 19 minutes
Playing: Laemmle Monica Film Center, Laemmle Town Center, Encino
The combination of adolescence’s slippery hedonism and the French Riviera’s languid air spurred the explosive popularity of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel “Bonjour Tristesse,” written when the author was herself a teenager. Otto Preminger’s 1958 adaptation, pairing the then-scandalous story with a luminous Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr and David Niven — plus an experimental use of both Technicolor and monochrome — only burnished its appeal, inspiring the French New Wave to boot. Jean Luc-Godard once said he could have dissolved from that movie’s final shot to the opening of his “Breathless” with a simple transitional text: “Three years later.”
Six decades on, though, can a new movie from Sagan’s summer tale capture that same breezy intrigue? In the case of Canadian writer-director Durga Chew-Bose’s confidently composed debut feature, the answer is both yes and not quite. Some backdrops and scenarios are sturdy enough to keep their hot-and-cool appeal and this “Bonjour Tristesse,” with its dreamy seaside luxuriance and attractive cast, makes good use of that familiarity as it mixes vintage glamour with modern details.
But in Chew-Bose’s passion to dig deeper into the circumstances underpinning a young girl’s life-altering cruelty, there’s an over-intellectualization of motive, a need to continually crack the sleek surface of Sagan’s bourgeois characters with self-reflection. It ultimately undercuts a narrative whose strongest suit has always been its briskness.
Under the bluest sky and against shimmering waters, Cécile (Lily McInerny) is having a golden summer, spending quality time with her charming, handsome dad, Raymond (Claes Bang), and his cool, younger dancer girlfriend Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune) at their secluded villa, while enjoying a fling with attentive, good-looking local boy Cyril (Aliocha Schneider).
That dynamic shifts with the unexpected arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a brittle fashion designer and dear friend of Cécile’s deceased mother. With her pulled-back hair, buttoned-up shirts and long skirts, and a tone with Cécile that’s friendly yet auntie-ish, Anne brings to the frolicsome vibe a cooling maturity, a kind of watchfulness. But also, in the rekindling of a dormant closeness between Anne and Raymond, there’s an imminent future that Cécile isn’t ready for. Could she prevent that from happening and keep her brat summer going?
The novel and Preminger’s film relied on the device that its protagonist was looking back on monumental events from the perspective of that title sadness, so Chew-Bose’s defiantly in-the-moment telling, kissed by Maximilian Pittner’s sun-drenched imagery, feels like a bonus at first. The director also leans nicely into interstitial shots that orient us without attitude, while her choice of music, led by Lesley Barber’s lilting score, is a real mood-setter of romance and melancholy.
But when Chew-Bose reaches for interiority with hyperaware dialogue (democratically applied to every character), something is lost. “She’s imagining what she looks like to us,” Elsa comments to Raymond early on as they observe his daughter like a specimen. Later on, Cécile says to her dad, “Your silence is different — I’m not in on it.” These aren’t lines, they sound like an actor’s notes on how to play something wordlessly.
It’s as if everyone’s a budding essayist on psychology, which makes a situation that trades on recklessness and delusion harder to swallow. Everyone sounds too smart to be prone to error, although Sevigny comes closest, embodying someone in a precarious state of emotional susceptibility, whose obvious intelligence hides unspoken wounds.
There are ways of exposing the vulnerabilities of the wise and/or precocious when navigating matters of the heart. (Éric Rohmer has many fine examples.) But Chew-Bose’s approach eventually feels more clinical than revelatory. One can appreciate the effort behind this well-made “Bonjour Tristesse” without necessarily feeling its turmoil.
