As Mayela got off the bus, she saw Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raiding the pupusería she worked at in Los Angeles. The undocumented transgender Salvadoran woman watched from behind a car as her co-workers — including another trans Central American woman — were handcuffed and taken away in broad daylight.
“I had so much hope when I arrived to this country,” Mayela, played by Fernanda Celarie, says in her prayers later on. “Now that I’ve begun to feel comfortable living here, this is a nightmare. Why so much pain and suffering?”
“Trans Los Angeles” director Kase Peña wrote that scene into her feature film well before the ongoing ICE raids and subsequent protests in L.A., but the harsh reality of fear for the many undocumented people of the city was something she knew she needed to include.
“When I wrote it in 2021, ICE was a hot subject, and then it died down,” Peña told said ahead of her film’s premiere at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival on May 30. “My film was always relevant and needed. The fact that who we have in the White House right now makes my film even more relevant, more needed now that he’s brought the ICE thing back. That part [of the movie] is not going to look old. It’s unfortunate, but that’s going on.”
This is what Peña set out to do with her feature-length movie, which is composed of three non-overlapping vignettes sharing a wide-ranging set of experiences that Angelenos face daily.
Born and raised in New York, the Dominican American director moved to L.A. nearly a decade ago and was inspired to make her film after noticing a lack of representation for trans stories that reflected the realities of her community.
“When I started hanging with my trans community here in Los Angeles, my intentions were not to tell those stories,” Peña said. “It was something that I felt like there’s a void here, and I’m the right person to tell it because I’m both a filmmaker and a trans person.”
While the storylines of “Trans Los Angeles” drew inspiration from Peña’s personal experiences and fellow members of the trans community‘s stories, the film’s format was influenced by global cinema.
The director pulled from the seminal Soviet/Cuban political work “Soy Cuba” to land on the vignette structure of her film. She had originally wanted to mirror the 1964 movie’s four episodes but was unable to secure funding — a common dilemma faced by truly independent filmmakers — for her fourth snippet, which centered on a transmasculine character.
“A lot of people ask you questions like, ‘Why don’t the stories intertwine?’ It’s because it makes my life more difficult as an independent filmmaker,” she noted. “If you give me a million dollars, I can make the stories intertwined, but I was only getting enough money to shoot one segment at a time. I didn’t have money to shoot all three segments.”
These restraints forced “Trans Los Angeles” to be filmed over the course of several years. The first vignette, “Period,” was shot in March 2021; “Feliz Cumpleaños” was filmed soon after in June; “Trans Day of Remembrance” had to be pushed due to finances and was eventually recorded in November 2023 on Peña’s iPhone. That last segment was shot using “stolen locations” for exterior scene — the crew showed up to a spot and recorded without having film permits or insurance.
“That’s one reason why I decided to shoot it with my iPhone,” she said of the guerrilla filmmaking strategy. “If somebody would have came to me and said, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing over there?’ [We’d say] we’re just shooting something for Instagram on my iPhone. They’d be like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
The vignette “Period” centers on Vergara, a formerly incarcerated trans Latinx woman played by actor and model Carmen Carrera. The character lands a job as a nanny to a preteen girl while doing sex work on the side.
Carrera says she was drawn to the project because Peña’s script allowed her to portray a three-dimensional character.
“That is valuable because oftentimes us trans people are told that we’re not valuable, or that we’re wrong for existing, or that we shouldn’t be around kids, or we shouldn’t have responsibility or be people who are a contributing factor to society,” Carrera told said. . “It’s a reflection of my own life too. I am an active girlfriend, I am an active daughter, I’m an active sister. The trans experience is just a small part of my life. It’s not the totality of my human experience. I was just happy I felt more related to Vergara because it’s how I have always felt as well. In my own life, people judge me all the time.”
Another aspect of “Period” that connected Carrera to Vergara was the character’s relationship with her mother.
“I think as a first-generation American, you have that extra layer of [thinking], ‘My parents came to this country and sacrificed so much, and if I don’t make them proud it’s gonna be a waste,’ ” she said.
Central to the plot of “Period” was the community that Vergara was able to tap into thanks to the TransLatin@ Coalition, a real-life advocacy group based out of L.A. that seeks to create safe spaces for transgender, gender expansive and intersex immigrant women in the city.
“The reason the TransLatin@ Coalition is in the film is because that came from me,” Peña said. “I in real life have gone to TransLatin@ to seek the services that they provide for trans people of color. Because I’m a writer and I go there, I see this place and I’m like, ‘I can tell the story and include them.’ ”
The second segment of the feature, “Trans Day of Remembrance,” is named after the annual day of observance on Nov. 20 of those whose lives were lost due to transphobia.
The story follows Phoebe (Austria Wang), a Taiwanese American transgender woman, as she maneuvers her romantic life and processes the death of one of her fellow trans friends. For this vignette, Peña intentionally cast transmasculine actor Jordan Gonzalez to play Phoebe’s cis boyfriend, Sam. .
“We’ve had cisgender people play trans roles, and it’s the first time [Gonzalez has played a cisgender role]. It was something that they’ve been wanting to do for a while, but this industry doesn’t see them as that, because they only see them as trans,” Peña said. “It was something that they yearned for and perhaps now, because they’ve done it, other people would consider casting them that way too.”
The final segment, “Feliz Cumpleaños,” portrays an ICE raid on a Salvadoran business while telling the story of Mayela’s hopes and aspirations for her life as she prepares for her baptism at an LGBTQ+ friendly church.
As an outsider to the Salvadoran experience, Peña leaned on actual members of the Central American country to adjust and approve of her script.
“I want to acknowledge that I’m not from El Salvador. As a person of color, as a Dominican filmmaker, as a transgender filmmaker, I have often seen filmmakers from other communities come and tell my story, and they don’t check in,” Peña explained. “They think they can just write it. They don’t get it right sometimes, and then they go win major awards. I didn’t want to disrespect the community like that.”
Peña emphasizes that the movie tells stories that get to the heart of the struggle and beauty of being human in L.A.
But ultimately her film is only a slice of the overall trans experience, she says, a unique series of stories informed by a writer whose ethos can be encapsulated in her own views on her own trans identity.
“For me, being transgender is not about passing. Being transgender is about having the freedom to be who you are,” Peña said. “I’m not trying to look like a woman. This is me. That’s it, whatever that means.”
Universal Pictures’ “How To Train Your Dragon” soared over the competition this weekend, as family-friendly films continued their dominance at the box office.
The live-action adaptation of the animated franchise from DreamWorks Animation grossed $83.7 million in its opening weekend in the U.S. and Canada, according to studio estimates.
It beat out fellow live-action remake “Lilo & Stitch” from Walt Disney Co., which hauled in $15 million over the weekend for a cumulative total of $366 million so far after 24 days. A24’s “Materialists,” Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” and Lionsgate’s “Ballerina” rounded out the top five.
Expectations were high for the Universal film, which revives a profitable franchise for the studio.
The original animated movie was released in 2010 and grossed nearly $495 million in global box office revenue. A sequel soon followed in 2014 and brought in more than $621 million worldwide. The most recent film in the trilogy, “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” came out in 2019 and made almost $540 million globally.
“How to Train Your Dragon” comes at an opportune time for family films. After a lackluster first quarter at the box office, theater attendance has been turbocharged, at least in part by the success of kid-friendly movies such as Warner Bros. Pictures “A Minecraft Movie” and Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch.”
Though family audiences were initially slow to return after the pandemic, movies that appeal to those theatergoers have turned out to be box office juggernauts.
Last summer, Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” and Universal and Illumination Entertainment’s “Despicable Me 4” drove theater revenues at a time when the industry was collectively wringing its hands after a slow Memorial Day weekend.
This summer, “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Lilo & Stitch” are demonstrating the power of the hybrid film, which combines live actors with computer-animated creatures — a strategy that has proved valuable, said David A. Gross, who writes movie industry newsletter FranchiseRe.
The trend began back in 1988 with Robert Zemeckis’ “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” but has seen recent success with films like Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” franchise and StudioCanal’s “Paddington” movies.
“It’s just a logical step in computer filmmaking,” Gross said. “It’s a very powerful storytelling tool.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Among this week’s new releases is “Materialists,” a romantic dramedy starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal, written and directed by Celine Song, whose debut, “Past Lives,” was nominated for two Oscars, including best picture. Johnson’s beguiling screen presence, her languidly charged charisma, is put to full use as a professional matchmaker in NYC who finds her own cold calculations challenged when she finds herself struggling to decide between a wealthy, perfect-on-paper finance guy (Pascal) and a perpetually struggling actor ex-boyfriend (Evans).
I interviewed Song and Johnson together recently, talking to them about how the film is both a sleek and glossy modern take on the rom-com and also an interrogation of the form and what people want from romance.
“We’re not just showing up here to be in love and beautiful and get to be in a rom-com,” says Song. “We’re also going to take this opportunity to talk about something. Because that’s the power of the genre. Our favorite rom-coms are the ones where we get to start a conversation about something.”
Dakota Johnson, left, and “Materialists” director Celine Song at the London Hotel in West Hollywood.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
For her part, Johnson has turned down many rom-com roles in the past, but found something different in Song’s screenplay.
“The complexities of all of the characters,” Johnson said of what made the project stand out. “The paradox. Everyone being confused about what the f— they’re supposed to do with their hearts. And what’s the right move? I found that very honest and I found it just so relatable.”
Amy Nicholson opens her review by focusing on the film’s lead, writing, “Dakota Johnson is my favorite seductress, a femme fatale of a flavor that didn’t exist until she invented it. … Onscreen, she excels at playing skeptics who are privately amused by the shenanigans of attaching yourself to another person. She shrugs to conquer. Which makes Johnson the perfect avatar for a time when it’s hard to commit or keep swiping right.”
‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ in 4K
Jack Nicholson, center, in 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
On Friday the Academy Museum will present the North American premiere of a new 4K restoration of Milos Forman’s 1975 “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film won five Oscars, including best picture, director and actor, and the screening will include a conversation with editors Richard Chew and Lynzee Klingman, speaking with Larry Karaszewski.
Based on the novel by Ken Kesey, the film tells the story of Randle McMurphy (Nicholson), who is committed to a mental institution instead of serving a prison sentence. McMurphy’s rebellious, anti-authoritarian spirit upends the strict order of the facility maintained by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher, who also won an Oscar for her performance), as he comes to connect with some of the other inmates, many of whom are there voluntarily.
The Times’ original review at the time said that the film “is calculated to restore your faith in the discipline and the emotional effectiveness of inspired fine moviemaking.”
A February 1976 profile of Forman by Fiona Lewis found the filmmaker, already a two-time Academy Award nominee for his films made in Czechoslovakia, in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills anxiously awaiting the impending Oscar nominations.
“All these events, like film festivals and Oscars — it’s foolish to compare if this film is better than that film,” Forman said. “But on the other hand, why not? It’s like my child is the most beautiful in the world and the girl I love the best.”
Roberto Minervini retospective
Roberto Minervini’s 2024 film “The Damned” will screen Friday night at the Acropolis Cinema to kick off a series retrospective on the director.
(Grasshopper Film)
The Acropolis Cinema screening series begins a retrospective of the Italian-born, U.S.-based filmmaker Roberto Minervini Friday night with the Los Angeles premiere of his 2024 film “The Damned” at 2220 Arts + Archives. The filmmaker will be there for a Q&A moderated by “Eephus” director Carson Lund.
Minervini won the directing prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival for the movie, which follows a company of volunteer U.S. soldiers in the Civil War as they are sent to patrol a remote borderland. “The Damned” will also open at the Laemmle Royal on the June 20.
Minervini will be present for a screening at Brain Dead Studios on Saturday for the world premiere of a new restoration of his 2011 debut feature “The Passage.” Critic Peter Debruge will moderate the Q&A.
Then on Sunday, Minervini will be present for a Q&A moderated by critic Tim Grierson following a 10th anniversary screening of “The Other Side” at 2220 Arts + Archive. On June 23, there will also be a screening of Minervini’s 2018 film “What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?” back at Brain Dead Studios.
Points of interest
‘Bring It On’ 25th anniversary in 35mm
Kirsten Dunst, left, and Eliza Dushku in the movie “Bring It On.”
(Ken Jacques / Universal Studios)
Following the recent screening of Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides,” the Academy Museum will present another pivotal film in the career of Kirsten Dunst: a 25th anniversary 35mm screening of Peyton Reed’s “Bring It On.” Actors Jesse Bradford and Brandi Williams will be present for the event as well.
Displaying Dunst’s range, she stars as Torrance Shipman, the new captain of the cheerleading squad at her affluent suburban California high school. Torrance discovers that their championship routines have been stolen from the squad of a less privileged all-Black school. Reed, who went on to direct “Down With Love,” “The Break-Up” and Marvel’s “Ant-Man” movies, deftly balances teen comedy, emotional nuance and social satire with a spirited energy.
After calling it “a smart and sassy high school movie that’s fun for all ages” in his original review, Kevin Thomas noted how the film “has a light satirical touch, works up lots of laughter, but is not heavy-handed about Torrance and her squad taking cheerleading so seriously. Rather than lament how winning a cheerleading trophy seems vastly more important to the squad members than getting the grades that will get them into college, [screenwriter Jessica] Bendinger and Reed instead show us the likable Torrance and her pals receiving some unexpected life lessons.”
‘Christiane F.’ 4K restoration
The American Cinematheque will launch a limited run of the new 4K restoration of “Christiane F.” (1981), starring Natja Brunckhorst.
(Janus Films)
On Friday, the American Cinematheque will launch a limited run of the new 4K restoration of Uli Edel’s 1981 “Christiane F.” Based on a nonfiction book, the story depicts a teenage girl, Christiane (Natja Brunkhorst), in West Berlin who falls in with a crowd of kids who introduce her to using hard drugs and she soon becomes a heroin addict, living a hardscrabble life on the streets. Featuring music by David Bowie, the film also includes a live performance by Bowie of the song “Station to Station.”
In a February 1982 review, Kevin Thomas wrote, “The makers of ‘Christiane F.’ apparently feel that it is sufficient to dramatize this hellish odyssey with the utmost realism, sparing us nothing, not the sickness, the brutality, the pain or the sheer sleaziness of their existence. But it isn’t, because they don’t reveal anything that many adults and teens don’t know well. … [The filmmakers] go for an unremitting grittiness so as not to seem unduly sensational or exploitative in the telling of Christiane’s story.”
‘Cobra Woman’ in 35mm
The original poster for “Cobra Woman,” featuring Maria Montez. The movie screens Saturday at the Los Feliz 3.
(LMPC via Getty Images)
On Saturday afternoon at the Los Feliz 3, the American Cinematheque will present a 35mm screening of Robert Siodmak’s 1944 beloved cult object “Cobra Woman,” starring Maria Montez, Jon Hall and Sabu in a tale of twin sisters, kidnapping and a remote island paradise. Author Alonso Duralde will be on hand to introduce the film and do a signing for his new book “Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film.”
In a program note for the screening, Duralde noted Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Notes on Camp,” adding “for a look at ‘pure camp,’ there’s no better place to start than the 1944 Maria Montez vehicle ‘Cobra Woman,’ a deliciously over-the-top exercise in exotica, colonial fetishization and general absurdity. (The trailer calls it ‘A Pagan Sensation!’) Montez stars as twin princesses — one good, one evil, both in love with strapping Jon Hall — in a tale that incorporates volcanoes, blowguns, Sabu, a forbidden dance of the snakes and a valuable stone that Montez memorably calls the ‘Cobra jool.’” The film was also said to be the favorite of filmmaker Kenneth Anger.
A February 1944 Los Angeles Times column by Hedda Hopper explored how Montez pursued stardom with shrewdly calculated verve, writing, “Outstanding among today’s feminine stars who have projected their personalities — and persons — to fullest advantage is Maria Montez. Two years ago this Latin-American bundle of nerve and determination struck Hollywood like a one-woman avalanche, announcing to Universal that she would be satisfied with nothing short of top-flight stardom and swamping the studio’s production office with demands for starring roles.”
‘Naked Lunch’ with Peter Weller
Actor Peter Weller, left, and author William Burroughs, right, on the set of David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch.” The movie will screen Monday at Vidiots.
(Jean-Louis Atlan / Sygma via Getty Images)
On Monday, Vidiots will show David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” in 4K with star Peter Weller in attendance to sign his new book “Leon Battista Alberti in Exile.”
Rather than strictly adapt the book itself, Cronenberg used fragments and shards of its story and Burroughs’ own biography to craft a phantasmagorical take on the novel’s own creation: An exterminator, Bill Lee (Weller), flees New York for the Interzone after he accidentally shoots his wife (Judy Davis) and sets himself to writing.
In a review from December 1991, Peter Rainer wrote, “There are enough references to the novel, enough episodes and characters, to provide a glancing resemblance to the original. But mostly, Cronenberg jacks up his own career-long obsessions with glop and grunge and decay to fever pitch. It’s a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg’s mulchy fixations — and probably for no one else. … The ambi-sexual atmosphere carries a demonic charge that approximates Burroughs but, for the most part, Cronenberg was a lot closer to the Burroughs ethos in a film like ‘Videodrome’ than he is here.”
In a June 1992 profile of Cronenberg by Gene Seymour, the filmmaker, then 47, spoke about how he approached adapting a book many assumed to be unadaptable.
“I do think it’s paradoxical but true that, in order to be faithful to the book, you have to throw the book away,” said Cronenberg. “You have to betray it in order to re-create it for the screen. All the attempts I’ve seen of trying to be literally faithful to the book have been dismal failures and the reason is only that the two media are totally, totally different. Maybe it’s because I’m really ruthless. And totally arrogant.”
In a statement, Burroughs himself said, “I felt, and still feel, that David’s script is very true to his own Muse as a filmmaker, very consistent with the high level of artistry for which he is known.”
“Spaceballs 2” is incoming, director Mel Brooks confirmed Thursday on social media, 38 years after the original “Spaceballs” crashed onto the space-opera scene.
Hey, what’s a few decades between friends, amirite?
Given that three-quarters of the current moviegoing audience was not even born 38 years ago, a person might wonder why they should care about a “Spaceballs” sequel. Well! We. Have. Answers.
‘Spaceballs 2’ will have a director
The sequel will have a director and that director is not Brooks, perhaps because Brooks is 98 years old. Plus the jokester hasn’t directed a movie since 1995’s “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.” But Brooks was, indeed, the auteur behind “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” so he might make it in Hollywood someday. Tell the folks at CAA: “Spaceballs 2” could be the boost his resume needs.
The news so far, according to Variety, is this: Brooks will be back as Yogurt — just plain Yogurt — and Josh Gad will star. Perhaps he’ll star as Outerspace Olaf, a mercenary snowman who likes warm hugs and thinks a space princess is a person worth melting for. Gad, Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez are writing the script, and Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Starr Go to Vista Del Mar”) will direct.
Everybody loves Bill Pullman
Please don’t argue. It’s a known fact that Everybody loves Bill Pullman.
The “Spaceballs 2” team loves Bill Pullman so much that, according to Variety, in addition to inviting him to reprise his character from the original comedy, they have also cast his son Lewis Pullman in a role to be named later. Let’s hope the elder Pullman’s Lone Starr has eased into retirement and Pullman the Younger gets to play a younger version of the Luke Skywalker-scented hero.
‘Spaceballs’ was good, but not that good
Exactly! There’s still room to improve!
“‘Spaceballs’ might have been much funnier and more inventive on a much smaller budget,” The Times said in its 1987 review of the movie. “Occasionally the expense pays off, as in the wonderful opening shot of an insanely elaborate starship that sweeps over us against inky infinity, going on and on … and on and on! But sometimes the elaborate jokes just clang and clunk, as when Lone Starr jams the Spaceballs radar with real jam — and no peanut butter.”
That sounds like an argument for half the budget, double the jokes and a variety of Uncrustables at the craft services table.
‘Spaceballs 2’ is slated for release in 2027
For the record:
6:42 p.m. June 13, 2025An earlier version of this article said 2027 will be the 40th anniversary of “Star Wars.” It will be the 50th anniversary.
The year 2027 is so close, yet sounds so far, far away. It also will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of the original “Star Wars” movie, which was once known simply as “Star Wars,” not “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.”
As the glorious celebrations of Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Obi-Wan and the gang ring out in Hollywood in 2027, “Spaceballs 2” should land next to them with a resounding fart. A resounding fart joke, at least. Maybe two.
Jar Jar Binks didn’t exist in 1987
Sure, Rick Moranis will be back for “Spaceballs 2,” per Deadline, reprising the role of Dark Helmet, the villain whose voice resonates and booms when his helmet is down and turns squeaky and annoying when the mask is raised. And Keke Palmer, who was born in 1993, will reportedly have a part as well, though no clues have been given as to who or what she’ll play.
That said, you know there just has to be a Jar Jar Binks gag or two in “Spaceballs 2.” Read aloud with me now: Mesa no tink so, you say? Ex-squeeze me, but yousa be wrong. Terrible tings goen happen if Jar Jar remains nothing more than the most annoying and unnecessary CGI characterever to please George Lucas. Give the Gungan some gas to go with that pidgin English and anything could happen.
Times have changed — or have they?
In our post-#MeToo landscape, rife with “you can’t say that” sensibilities, some “Spaceballs”-style gags might fall flat. Then again, as The Times said in its 1987 review of the original film, “This is a multimillion-dollar extravaganza satirizing other multimillion-dollar extravaganzas — which begins to seem a bit like attacking a President by hitting him over the head with another President.”
Given that in the occasionally dystopian 2020s, hitting presidents over the head with other presidents is no big deal, the new film might make perfect sense, even if it doesn’t improve one bit. Then again, will Yiddish gags play to the keffiyeh-clad youngs? Or will the jokes simply bomb?
Whether soaring through the sky or sharing a playful moment with his human bestie Hiccup, Toothless, the dark-hued dragon with a friendly face and an injured tail, disarms you with his endearing nature.
It’s no surprise that he’s become the emblem of the “How to Train Your Dragon” animated movies, the first of which arrived in 2010. (There have since been two sequels, three separate TV series and five shorts.) A fan favorite among Gen-Z viewers, Toothless now returns to the big screen in a new hyper-realist iteration for the live-action remake, now in theaters.
And in an unprecedented move, Dean DeBlois, who directed all three “Dragon” animated films — as well as 2002’s original “Lilo & Stitch,” along with Chris Sanders — was asked to helm the live-action reimagining. It was his priority to preserve Toothless’ essence.
“He is our most recognizable dragon within the entire assortment,” DeBlois says on the phone. “And he has a lot of sentience and personality that comes through. And so much of it is expressed in this face that’s quite Stitch-like with the big eyes, the ear plates and the broad mouth.”
In fact, the entire live-action endeavor hinged on whether Toothless could be properly translated as a photorealistic dragon among human actors and physical sets, while retaining the charm of the animated movies.
An image from the original 2010 animated “How to Train Your Dragon.”
(DreamWorks Animation LLC)
According to Christian Manz, the new film’s visual effects supervisor, when Peter Cramer, president of Universal Pictures, initially considered the project back in 2022, he wasn’t convinced Toothless would work. His touchstone for a fantastical creature that successfully achieved believability was the Hippogriff, a winged four-legged creature seen in 2004’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
To test the viability of a new Toothless, DreamWorks enlisted British visual effects and computer animation outfit Framestore to spend three months trying to create a “realistic” version of Toothless. Framestore has had some popular successes to its name: Paddington Bear in the film series, Dobby from the “Harry Potter” universe and Groot and Rocket Raccoon from the Marvel movies.
“We always knew that we weren’t aiming for a real dragon, as in a ‘Game of Thrones’ dragon,” says Manz, via video call from the U.K.
Toothless’ design, particularly his facial features, presented a challenge for Manz and the team at Framestore. If they made his eyes or his mouth too small or if they tried to drastically reshape his head with more naturalism in mind, he quickly lost his personality.
“His big, expressive face with eyes that are larger than any animal in the animal kingdom, including the blue whale, had to remain because, without them, we felt like we were going to be delivering a lesser version of Toothless,” says DeBlois.
A stage show based on the first film called “How to Train Your Dragon: Live Spectacular,” which toured Australia and New Zealand in 2012, radically changed the design — to a mixed response. “Toothless was too creature-like and it just wasn’t as appealing and as charming,” says Simon Otto, head of character animation for all three animated movies, via Zoom.
While they may be too subtle for an untrained viewer to notice, certain design changes have been made that differentiate the live-action Toothless from his animated counterpart.
“He’s now bigger, his head’s smaller, his eyes are actually smaller,” says Manz. The nuanced reshaping of his head and his body was intentional: an effort to make him blend into a photorealistic world.
“The interesting thing is that when people see the live-action movie, they say, ‘Oh, it’s Toothless, like he stepped out of the animated movie,’” says DeBlois. “But in truth, if you put them side by side, you’ll see quite a few differences.”
The texture of Toothless’ body needed to be more intricate for the live-action version, so he would feel more convincingly integrated within the environments.
“In the animation, he’s quite smooth,” says Manz. “We tried very snake-like skin, but it just made him look very unfriendly. You wouldn’t want to put your hand on his forehead.”
Mason Thames in “How to Train Your Dragon.”
(Universal Pictures)
Both on-screen versions of Toothless were crafted using essentially the same digital technique: computer animation. The difference here is that the one meant to share space with a flesh-and-blood world, with distinct aesthetic concerns. Even if seeking realism in creatures that only exist in our imagination might seem counterintuitive, the goal is to make them feel palpable within their made-up realm.
“One of the things I don’t like about live-action remakes is they seem to try to want to replace the animated source, and I find myself very protective of it,” says DeBlois with refreshing candor. “We tried to create a version that lives alongside it. It follows the beats of that original story, but brings new depths and expanded mythology and more immersive action moments and flying. But it’s never trying to replace the animated movie because I’m very proud of that film.”
Toothless as we now know him originated expressly for the screen. The Toothless in Cressida Cowell’s originating book series is tiny and green (a design that can be seen in the first animated movie in the form of a minuscule dragon known as Terrible Terror).
But when DeBlois and Sanders came aboard, 15 months before the 2010 release, replacing the previous directors, their first major change was to make Toothless a dragon that could be ridden.
It was the screensaver of a black panther that first inspired the look of Toothless in the animated films. Otto, one of the designers who knows Toothless best (he drew the original back in 2008), recalls his real-world animal references.
“He is a mix between a bird of prey, like a peregrine falcon, with extremely streamlined shapes — of course a feline but also a Mexican salamander called an axolotl,” Otto says. Sanders’ design for Disney superstar Stitch, namely his large almond-shaped eyes, ears and pronounced mouth, also influenced the design.
“There’s a little bit of a design influence from Stitch in Toothless’ face that makes them feel like they’re distant cousins,” says DeBlois.
He believes that making Toothless more closely resemble a mammal, rather than a reptile, and giving him pet-like qualities were the keys for him becoming so memorable.
“[We] spent a lot of time on YouTube looking at videos of dogs and cats doing funny things,” he says. “And we would try to incorporate a lot of that behavior into Toothless with the hopes that when people watched the movie, they would say, ‘That’s just like my cat’ or ‘My dog does that.’ We wanted him to feel like a big pet. Ferocious and dangerous at first, but then a big cuddly cat after.”
Mason Thames interacts on set with the puppet version of Toothless.
(Helen Sloan)
On the set of the live-action movie, Toothless and the other dragons existed as large puppets with simple functions, operated by a team of master puppeteers led by Tom Wilton, a performer who had worked on the “War Horse” stage play.
Using puppets was meant to provide the actors, especially Mason Thames, who plays Hiccup, a real-world scene partner. The Toothless foam puppet had an articulated jaw and articulated ear plates that allowed for a subtle, interactive performance.
“There’s a performance that Dean can direct and that Mason and the other actors could act against, so that the interaction is utterly believable,” says Manz. “[The puppets] are obviously removed from the frame in the end, but it just means you believe that connection.”
As for the impressive flight sequences, in which Hiccup rides Toothless, the production created an animatronic dragon placed on a giant gimbal that moved on six different axes to simulate the physics of flying.
“If the dragon was diving or ascending or banking and rolling, Mason would be thrown around in the saddle, like a jockey on a racehorse,” says DeBlois. “And it married him to the animal in a way that felt really authentic.”
Mason Thames rides the flying Toothless on an animatronic model.
(Helen Sloan)
For all his success in the animated realm, DeBlois has never directed a live-action film until now.
“I do commend Universal for taking a risk on me knowing that I had not made a live-action film, but also recognizing that I knew where the heart and the wonder was, and I was determined to bring it to the screen,” he says.
Otto, the designer who trained Toothless before anybody else, candidly says he would have “peed his pants” if he knew the drawings he did back in 2008 would spawn a franchise and a theme-park attraction (a re-creation of the films’ Isle of Berk opened at Universal Studios Florida earlier this year).
“The most critical choice they made for the live-action was making sure the audience falls in love with Toothless,” he adds. “And that you understand that if you have a creature like that as your friend, you wouldn’t give up on it.”
“Hacks” won the comedy series Emmy last year on the strength of a campaign that proclaimed: Vote for us! We’re actually a comedy (unlike, you know, “The Bear”).
So what happens this year when the show stopped being funny?
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. There’s not much to laugh about these days, so let’s pick our spots and consider the TV series vying for television’s top award.
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‘Hacks’ Season 4 leaves room for a new winner
Let me just say at the outset that I enjoy “Hacks.” And like everyone else on the planet, I adore Jean Smart and appreciate that Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky created a role worthy of her talents. Comparing notes with Smart on the best sad sing-along songs is a memory I’ll always treasure, and even inspired me for a time to dip back into listening to “love songs on the Coast.”
At its essence, “Hacks” is a love story between Smart’s stand-up legend Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), the young writer who helped Deborah reinvent her career. They come from different generations and possess distinct comic sensibilities. They fight, hurt each other, separate and ultimately reunite after realizing that they’re better together. They get each other. Or at least, Ava gets Deborah. And that’s enough because Deborah is the star and she doesn’t really need to bother understanding Ava’s Gen Z peculiarities. She can just roll her eyes.
Their mutual dependence is believable enough. They both live for work. So much so that at the end of “Hacks’” third season, Ava has blackmailed Deborah, an act that lands her the head writer job that Deborah had promised to give her on her late-night talk show. Ava was but the learner, now she’s the master. Well played, Dark Lady of the Sith.
It was, as our old friend Jeff Probst would say, an epic blindside, and you can understand why this current season would begin with bitter acrimony between the two women, a situation so toxic that the network brought in a human resources rep to keep them from harming each other.
The animosity wasn’t fun to watch. The tone was shrill and off-putting. Was there a joke that landed in the season’s first half? I don’t remember one, but maybe that’s because I was curled up in a fetal position watching the plot unfold.
At least amid the drama of “The Bear,” I could get some some inspiration for a good set of kitchen knives.
Julianne Nicholson’s “Dance Mom” was a bright spot of “Hacks” Season 4.
(Max)
Of course, Deborah and Ava got back together, which was a relief because that HR lady was annoying. The season’s penultimate episode was ridiculous, but in all the best ways, surprising and emotionally satisfying. Helen Hunt finally scored a big moment. And Julianne Nicholson showed some moves as Dance Mom that I never imagined her possessing. Get that character to rehab and into Season 5.
Yes, “Hacks” can still entertain. Even the anticlimactic final episode gave Smart the opportunity to play boozy and bored, showcasing her depth as a dramatic actor. One would think that after what transpired, Deborah would have more opportunities, even with a noncompete clause, to parlay her ethical stance into something more meaningful than a sad casino gig in Singapore. But the finale set up one final comeback — final because “Hacks” was pitched with a five-season arc. And we’re on the doorstep.
At least they won’t have to contrive to separate Ava and Deborah again.
So, by all means, nominate “Hacks” for comedy series again. I’d rather rewatch it than nod off during the tepid “Four Seasons.” And maybe since the show’s creators have known (since 2015) what the final scene will be, we’ll have a persuasive fifth season possessing the energy of a great Deborah Vance comeback.
In the meantime, keep last year’s mandate going and give the Emmy to a show that was consistently funny.
Strumming a black acoustic guitar to match his black tuxedo pants and jacket, Hugh Jackman strolled onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl and let the audience know precisely what it was in for.
“Little bit of Neil Diamond,” he said as the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra revved up the go-go self-improvement jive of “Crunchy Granola Suite.”
A dedicated student of showbiz history, the Australian singer and actor was starting his concert Saturday night just as Diamond did half a century ago at the Greek Theatre gig famously captured on his classic “Hot August Night” LP.
Yet Diamond was just one of the flamboyant showmen Jackman aspired to emulate as he headlined the opening night of the Bowl’s 2025 season. Later in the concert, the 56-year-old sang a medley of tunes by Peter Allen, the Australian songwriter and Manhattan bon vivant whom Jackman portrayed on Broadway in 2003 in “The Boy From Oz.” And then there was P.T. Barnum, whose career as a maker of spectacle inspired the 2017 blockbuster “The Greatest Showman,” which starred Jackman as Barnum and spawned a surprise-hit soundtrack that went quadruple-platinum.
“There’s 17,000 of you, and if any of you did not see ‘The Greatest Showman,’ you might be thinking right now: This guy is super-confident,” Jackman told the crowd, panting ever so slightly after he sang the movie’s title song, which has more than 625 million streams on Spotify.
The success of “Showman” notwithstanding, Jackman’s brand of stage-and-screen razzle-dazzle feels fairly rare in pop music these days among male performers. (The theater-kid moment that helped make “Wicked” a phenomenon was almost exclusively engineered — and has almost exclusively benefited — women such as Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Chappell Roan and Laufey.) What makes Jackman’s jazz-handing even more remarkable is that to many he’s best known as the extravagantly mutton-chopped Wolverine character from the Marvel movies.
Before Jackman’s performance on Saturday, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins, played a brief set of orchestral music that included selections from John Ottman’s score for “X2: X-Men United.”
The ascent of Benson Boone, with his mustache and his backflips, suggests that Jackman may yet find inheritors to carry on the tradition he himself was bequeathed by Diamond and the rest. But of course that assumes that Jackman is looking to pass the baton, which was not at all the impression you got from his spirited and athletic 90-minute show at the Bowl.
In addition to stuff from “The Greatest Showman” and a swinging tribute to Frank Sinatra, he did a second Diamond tune — “Sweet Caroline,” naturally, which he said figures into an upcoming movie in which he plays a Diamond impersonator — and a couple of Jean Valjean’s numbers from “Les Misérables,” which Jackman sang in the 2012 movie adaptation that earned him an Academy Award nomination for lead actor. (With an Emmy, a Grammy and two Tonys to his name, he’s an Oscar win away from EGOT status.)
Hugh Jackman with members of the L.A. Phil’s Youth Orchestra Los Angeles on Saturday night.
(Timothy Norris)
For “You Will Be Found,” from “Dear Evan Hansen,” he sat down behind a grand piano and accompanied himself for a bit; for the motor-mouthed “Ya Got Trouble,” from “The Music Man” — the first show he ever did as a high school kid, he pointed out — he came out into the crowd, weaving among the Bowl’s boxes and interacting with audience members as he sang.
“I just saw a lot of friends as I went through,” he said when he returned to the stage. “Hello, Melissa Etheridge and Linda. Hello, Jess Platt. Hi, Steph, hi, David, hi, Sophia, hi, Orlando — so many friends. Very difficult to say hello to friends and still do that dialogue.” He was panting again, this time more showily. “It’s like 53 degrees and I’m sweating.”
The show’s comedic centerpiece was a version of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” that Jackman remade to celebrate his roots as an “Aussie boy.” There were good-natured jokes about shark attacks and koalas and Margot Robbie, as well as a few pointed political gibes, one about how “our leaders aren’t 100 years old” — “I’m moving on from that joke fast,” he added — and another that rhymed “Life down under is really quite fun” with “I never have to worry: Does that guy have a gun?”
The emotional centerpiece, meanwhile, was “Showman’s” “A Million Dreams,” for which the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was joined by 18 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. The song itself is pretty cringe, with a lyric bogged down by cliches and a melody you’ve heard a zillion times before. But Jackman sold its corny idealism with a huckster’s sincerity you couldn’t help but buy.
For more than a quarter century, director Kevin Smith has tried to resurrect “Dogma,” his religious satire about two fallen angels looking to get back into heaven. Recently, his prayers for the 1999 comedy were finally answered.
On Thursday, the movie got a theatrical re-release across 1,500 AMC Theatres screens in honor of its 25th anniversary. Technically, the milestone was last year. But the second coming of a movie that brought us one of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s best on-screen collaborations and an A-list comedic ensemble — including George Carlin, Chris Rock, Janeane Garofalo and Alan Rickman — not to mention the meme-worthy, winking “Buddy Christ,” warrants a long-awaited hallelujah.
“It’s got a good legacy to it,” Smith said of the film. “It’s become the ‘umbrella film’ for me. The umbrella film is the movie that no matter what you do, even if you make s— that people don’t like, they won’t crucify you — pun intended — because you made a movie that they like.”
“To me, it plays like a kid really trying to celebrate his faith after having grown up in a church where every Sunday, everyone seemed to be mourning it. … It’s a love letter to spirituality,” Kevin Smith said about “Dogma.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Though the sparkling period of Smith’s career is largely defined by 1994’s “Clerks” and 1997’s “Chasing Amy,” his fourth film, “Dogma,” steeped in irreverence and hilarity centered around his former Catholic faith, is still considered one of his classics. The movie debuted at Cannes in 1999. He returned to the renowned film festival last month, when the comedy played in the Cannes Classics section, just days before sitting down with The Times on camera to discuss “Dogma’s” whirlwind re-release. In the interview, the director, writer and actor recounts how the movie was saved by filmmaker and actor Alessandra Williams, who raised money to buy the film from Miramax earlier this year, decades after it was acquired and shelved by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein sold Smith’s film, along with a trove of others, to Williams to help pay for his legal defense, Smith said.
In collaboration with Iconic Events, the film has since been remastered in 4K for its screening tour and is being shown in select AMC theaters. Smith is well-seasoned when it comes to touring his old films, pairing the screenings with Q&As and stand-up performances throughout the live presentations. It took little time for him to book a sold-out, 20-city tour aimed at getting fans fired up to come see “Dogma” once again under much different (and safer) circumstances.
“Even with getting people aware of the movie this time around, it’s not as fraught with peril as it was back in the day,” Smith said, referring to the death threats, protests and 400,000 pieces of hate mail he said the movie garnered from Christian extremists who denounced what they believed to be the film’s mockery of their faith.
“You Jews better take that money you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets,” Smith said while closing his eyes and reciting one of the letters from memory. “We’re coming because we’re coming in there with shotguns. Signed, Your Brothers in Christ.”
Though the controversy of the film has definitely waned, the inspiration behind the film remains steadfast, Smith said. “To me, it plays like a kid really trying to celebrate his faith after having grown up in a church where every Sunday, everyone seemed to be mourning it. So I think [people hopefully see it] for what it is. It’s a love letter to spirituality.”
Saturday afternoon out west and evening back east, as citizens faced off against ICE agents in the streets of Los Angeles, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s 2005 dramatic film tribute to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, became a Major Television Event, broadcast live from Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theater, by CNN and Max. That it was made available free to anyone with an internet connection, via the CNN website, was a nice gesture to theater fans, Clooney stans and anyone interested to see how a movie about television translates into a play about television.
The broadcast is being ballyhooed as historic, the first time a play has been aired live from Broadway. And while there is no arguing with that fact, performances of plays have been recorded onstage before, and are being so now. It’s a great practice; I wish it were done more often. At the moment, PBS.org is streaming recent productions of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate!,” the Bob Dylan-scored “Girl From the North Country,” David Henry Hwang‘s “Yellow Face” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning mental health rock musical “Next to Normal.” Britain’s National Theater at Home subscription service offers a wealth of classical and modern plays, including Andrew Scott’s one-man “Vanya,” as hot a ticket in New York this spring as Clooney’s play. And the archives run deep; that a trip to YouTube can deliver you Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” or “Sunday in the Park With George” with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters is a gift not to be overlooked.
Clooney, with co-star Anthony Edwards, had earlier been behind a live broadcast of “Ambush,” the fourth season opener of “ER” as a throwback to the particular seat-of-your-pants, walking-on-a-wire energy of 1950s television. (It was performed twice, once for the East and once for the West Coast.) That it earned an audience of 42.71 million, breaking a couple of records in the bargain, suggests that, from a commercial perspective, it was not at all a bad idea. (Reviews were mixed, but critics don’t know everything.)
Like that episode, the “live” element of Saturday’s broadcast was essentially a stunt, though one that ensured, at least, that no post-production editing has been applied, and that if anyone blew a line, or the house was invaded by heckling MAGA hats, or simply disrupted by audience members who regarded the enormous price they paid for a ticket as a license to chatter through the show, it would presumably have been part of the broadcast. None of that happened — but, it could have! (Clooney did stumble over “simple,” but that’s all I caught.) And, it offered the groundlings at home the chance to see a much-discussed, well-reviewed production only a relatively few were able to see in person — which I applaud on principal and enjoyed in practice — and which will very probably not come again, not counting the next day’s final performance.
Glenn Fleshler, left, plays Fred Friendly in the stage production, a role that George Clooney performed in the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
(Emilio Madrid)
The film, directed by Clooney and co-written with Grant Heslov (who co-wrote the stage version as well), featured the actor as producer and ally Fred W. Friendly to David Strathairn’s memorable Murrow. Here, a more aggressive Clooney takes the Murrow role, while Glenn Fleshler plays Friendly. Released during the second term of the Bush administration, the movie was a meditation on the state of things through the prism of 1954 (and a famous framing speech from 1958 about the possibilities and potential failures of television), the fear-fueled demagoguery of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Murrow’s determination to take him on. (The 1954 “See It Now” episode, “A Report on Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” helped bring about his end.) As in the film, McCarthy is represented entirely through projected film clips, echoing the way that Murrow impeached the senator with his own words.
It’s a combination of political and backstage drama — with a soupcon of office romance, represented by the secretly married Wershbas (Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson) — even more hermetically set within the confines of CBS News than was the film. It felt relevant in 2005, before the influence of network news was dissolved in the acid of the internet and an administration began assaulting the legitimate press with threats and lawsuits; but the play’s discussions of habeas corpus, due process, self-censoring media and the both-sides-ism that seems increasingly to afflict modern media feel queasily contemporary. “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument,” says Clooney’s Murrow to his boss, William F. Paley (an excellent Paul Gross, from the great “Slings & Arrows”). As was shown here, Murrow offered McCarthy equal time on “See It Now” — which he hosted alongside the celebrity-focused “Person to Person,” represented by an interview with Liberace — but it proved largely a rope for the senator to hang himself.
Though modern stage productions, with their computer-controlled modular parts, can replicate the rhythms and scene changes of a film, there are obvious differences between a movie, where camera angles and editing drive the story. It’s an illusion of life, stitched together from bits and pieces. A stage play proceeds in real time and offers a single view (differing, of course, depending on where one sits), within which you direct your attention as you will. What illusions it offers are, as it were, stage magic. It’s choreographed, like a dance, which actors must repeat night after night, putting feeling into lines they may speak to one another, but send out to the farthest corners of the theater.
Clooney, whose furrowed brow is a good match for Murrow’s, did not attempt to imitate him, or perhaps did within the limits of theatrical delivery; he was serious and effective in the role if not achieving the quiet perfection of Strathairn’s performance. Scott Pask‘s set was an ingenious moving modular arrangement of office spaces, backed by a control room, highlighted or darkened as needs be; a raised platform stage left supported the jazz group and vocalist, which, as in the movie, performed songs whose lyrics at times commented slyly on the action. Though television squashed the production into two dimensions, the broadcast nevertheless felt real and exciting; director David Comer let the camera play on the players, rather than trying for a cinematic effect through an excess of close-ups and cutaways.
While the play generally followed the lines of the film, there was some rearrangement of scenes, reassignment of dialogue — it was a streamlined cast — and interpolations to make a point, or more directly pitch to 2025. New York news anchor Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg, very moving in the only role with an emotional arc) described feeling “hijacked … as if all the reasonable people went to Europe and left us behind,” getting a big reaction. One character wondered about opening “the door to news with a dash of commentary — what happens when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?” A rapid montage of clips tracking the decay of TV news and politics — including Obama’s tan suit kerfuffle and the barring of AP for not bowing to Trump’s Gulf of America edit and ending with Elon Musk’s notorious straight-arm gesture, looking like nothing so much as a Nazi salute — was flown into Clooney’s final speech.
Last but not least, there is the audience, your stand-ins at the Winter Garden Theatre, which laughed at the jokes and applauded the big speeches, transcribed from Murrow’s own. And then, the curtain call, to remind you that whatever came before, the actors are fine, drinking in your appreciation and sending you out happy and exhilarated and perhaps full of hope.
A CNN roundtable followed to bring you back to Earth.
Sean Byrne knows how to show an audience a bad time. Sixteen years ago, the Australian filmmaker launched onto the scene with “The Loved Ones,” his proudly grisly debut about a misfit teenager who gets gruesome revenge on the boy who refused to go to prom with her. Part expert torture porn, part exploration of adolescent romantic anxieties, the film was an instant midnight-madness cult item that took Byrne six years to follow up.
When he did, he went in a different tonal direction with “The Devil’s Candy,” a surprisingly emotional psychological thriller about a heavy-metal-loving painter who moves his family to a beautifully rustic home, only to lose his mind. Working in recognizable horror subgenres, Byrne entices you with a familiar premise and then slowly teases apart the tropes, leaving you unsettled but also invigorated by his inventiveness.
It has now been a decade since that distinctive riff on “The Shining,” and for Byrne’s third feature, he once again pillages from indelible sources. “Dangerous Animals” draws from both the serial-killer thriller and Hollywood’s penchant for survival stories about hungry sharks feasting on human flesh. But unlike in the past, Byrne’s new movie never waylays you with a surprise narrative wrinkle or unexpected thematic depth. He hasn’t lost his knack for generating bad vibes, but this time he hasn’t brought anything else to the party.
The movie stars Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, a solitary surfer who explains in on-the-nose dialogue that she prefers the danger of open water to the unhappiness of life on land. An American in Australia who grew up in foster homes and who lives in a beat-up old van, Zephyr encounters Moses (Josh Heuston), a straitlaced nice guy whom she hooks up with. Not that she wants him developing feelings for her: She takes off in the middle of the night so she can catch some waves. Unfortunately, Zephyr is the one who gets caught — by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a deceptively gregarious boat captain who kidnaps her. Next thing she knows, she’s chained up inside his vessel out at sea, alongside another female victim, Heather (Ella Newton).
Like many a movie serial killer, Tucker isn’t just interested in murdering his prey — he wants to make something artistic out of his butchery. And so he ties Heather to a crane and dangles her in the water like a giant lure, pulling out a camcorder to record her final moments as sharks devour her. Watching his victims struggle to stay alive is cinema to this twisted soul and Zephyr will be his next unwitting protagonist.
Working from a script by visual artist Nick Lepard, Byrne (who wrote his two previous features) digs into the story’s B-movie appeal. Tucker may use old-fashioned technology to record his kills, but “Dangerous Animals” is set in the present, even if its trashy, drive-in essence would have made it better suited to come out 50 years ago as counterprogramming to “Jaws.” With Zephyr’s tough-girl demeanor and Tucker’s creepy vibe, Byrne knowingly plays into genre clichés, setting up the inevitable showdown between the beauty and the beast.
But despite that juicy setup, “Dangerous Animals” is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped. There are still subversive ideas — for one thing, this is a shark film with precious few sharks — but Byrne’s sneaky smarts have largely abandoned him. Rather than transcending expectations, “Dangerous Animals” surrenders to them.
One can’t fault Harrison, whose Zephyr spends much of the movie in a battle of wills with her captor. Because “Dangerous Animals” limits the amount of sharks we see, digitally inserting footage of the deadly creatures into scenes, the story’s central tension comes from Zephyr trying to free herself or get help before Tucker prepares his next nautical snuff film. Harrison projects a ferocious determination that’s paired with an intense loathing for this condescending, demented misogynist. It’s bad enough that Tucker wants to murder her — beforehand, he wants to bore her with shark trivia, dully advocating for these misunderstood animals. It’s an underdeveloped joke: “Dangerous Animals” is a nightmare about meeting the mansplainer from hell.
Alas, Courtney’s conception of the film’s true dangerous animal is where the story truly runs aground. The actor’s handsome, vaguely blank countenance is meant to suggest a burly, hunky everyman — the sort of person you’d never suspect or look twice at, which makes Tucker well-positioned to leave a trail of corpses in his path. But neither Byrne nor Courtney entirely gets their arms around this conventionally unhinged horror villain. “Dangerous Animals” overly underlines its point that we shouldn’t be afraid of sharks — it’s the Tuckers who ought to keep us up at night — but Courtney never captures the unfathomable malice beneath the facial scruff. We root for Zephyr to escape Tucker’s clutches not because he’s evil but because he’s a bit of a stiff.
Even with those deficiencies, the film boasts a level of craft that keeps the story fleet, with Byrne relying on the dependable tension of a victim trapped at sea with her pursuer, sharks waiting in the waters surrounding her. Michael Yezerski’s winkingly emphatic score juices every scare as the gore keeps ratcheting up — particularly during a moment when Zephyr finds an unexpected way to break out of handcuffs.
But Byrne can’t redeem the script’s boneheaded plot twists, nor can he elevate the most potentially intriguing idea at its core. As Tucker peers into his viewfinder, getting off on his victims’ screams as sharks sink their jaws into them, “Dangerous Animals” hints at the fixation horror directors such as Byrne have for presenting us with unspeakable terrors, insisting we love the bloodshed as much as they do. Tucker tries to convince Zephyr that they’re not all that different — they’re both sharks, you see — but in truth, Byrne may be suggesting an uncomfortable kinship with his serial killer. But instead of provocatively pursuing that unholy bond, the director only finds chum.
‘Dangerous Animals’
Rated: R, for strong bloody violent content/grisly images, sexuality, language and brief drug use
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
We are pleased to exclusively announce that the Egyptian Theatre will host the U.S. premiere of the new 4K restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” on June 26, the 100th anniversary of the film’s premiere at that same venue in 1925.
The restoration premiered as part of the Cannes Classics section at the recent Cannes Film Festival. On June 26, the restoration will screen in more than 70 countries, with the Egyptian being the exclusive engagement in the U.S. Film historian Jeffrey Vance, author of the 2003 book “Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema,” will introduce the screening. Reproductions of the original film program will be available for 25 cents, the same price that it cost in 1925.
An image from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush.”
(Roy Export Company Ltd.)
“The Gold Rush” features Chaplin in his iconic Little Tramp character, searching for his fortune prospecting for gold, and features some of his most famous moments on-screen. The restoration, carried out by Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata, draws from materials sourced from archives all around the world, including the BFI Archive, George Eastman Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
Stacey Dash, left, and Alicia Silverstone in the movie “Clueless.”
(Paramount Pictures)
On Saturday the Academy Museum will present a 30th anniversary screening of “Clueless” in 35mm, with director Amy Heckerling, actors Alicia Silverstone, Elisa Donovan and Breckin Meyer, costume designer Mona May and casting director Marcia Ross all scheduled to attend for a Q&A.
Written by Heckerling, the film is a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma” relocated to affluent 1990s Beverly Hills. Cher Horowitz (Silverstone), a popular and fashionable teenager, sets about playing matchmaker for a new classmate, Tai (Brittany Murphy), enlisting her best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) to help. Paul Rudd, in his feature debut, plays Cher’s stepbrother.
In his original review, Kenneth Turan called the film “a wickedly funny teen-age farce from writer-director Amy Heckerling that, like its heroine, turns out to have more to it than anyone could anticipate. … Put together with verve and style, ‘Clueless’ is a sweet-natured satire of L.A.’s over-pampered youth that gets more fun out of high school than most people had attending it.”
Director Amy Heckerling, second from left, on the set of “Clueless.”
(Paramount Pictures)
In the summer of 2020, Justin Chang interviewed Heckerling, who spoke about writing Cher’s voice-over narration and getting into the mind of the character by saying, “Once you get into her head, then it just goes. It’s not the voice of God. It’s the voice of that person. And you get into it, and it’s not necessarily what the writer needs — it’s what the writer wants you to think that person is thinking. And that’s a lot of fun to do. It’s like, as a writer, you’re also playing a character.”
The “Clueless” screening opens a series on teen movies that will run through July 10. Other titles include “Bring It On,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Adventures in Babysitting,” and “Saved!” all in 35mm, along with “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Dope,” “Love, Simon” and “10 Things I Hate About You.”
‘The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love’
Nicole Parker, left, and Laurel Holloman in the movie “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love,” directed by Maria Maggenti.
(Alyson Levy / Fine Line Features)
Also on Saturday will be another 35mm 30th anniversary screening, with the UCLA Film & Television Archive showing writer-director Maria Maggenti’s “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.” A charming example of ’90s indie filmmaking, the movie follows the burgeoning relationship between Evie (Nicole Parker) and Randy (Laurel Hollomon), two girls from opposite sides of the tracks who shouldn’t particularly even be friends, let alone romantically drawn to each other.
In his original review of the film, Peter Rainer wrote, “The experience of first love is a movie perennial but rarely is it believably rendered. The best thing going for ‘The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love’ — an amateurish, sweet, little piddle of a movie — is that it captures a bit of the freshness, and the awkwardness, of the moment. … They seem like real people, and so their budding romance strikes a few remembered chords.”
In a June 1995 profile of Maggenti by Chris Riemenschneider, the filmmaker talked about her inspirations in making the film.
“I didn’t make a niche-market film,” Maggenti said. “It wasn’t about ‘Let’s make a lesbian film, and a bunch of lesbians will go see it.’ I wanted to make a film that people would enjoy, a film about an authentic human experience, and it happens to be with someone of the same sex.”
Points of interest
‘Death Becomes Her’ in 35mm
Goldie Hawn, left, and Meryl Streep in the movie “Death Becomes Her.”
(Deana Newcomb / Universal Pictures)
On Sunday the Academy Museum will host a 35mm screening of Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 “Death Becomes Her,” starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Isabella Rossellini and Bruce Willis. Made with still-dazzling special effects work that should look spectacular in the Academy’s David Geffen Theater, the film is about two women who go to great lengths to maintain their youthful appearance, including competing for the romantic affections of a top plastic surgeon.
In his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “‘Death’ gets progressively darker and darker, forgetting all about humor in its attempts to push the more mordant limits of its story. The three principals are game enough about all this, soldiering on until the end, but their characters, not having much to do that they haven’t done before, tend to sound the same single notes they have since Frame One.
“There is something regrettable in all this, because by industry standards this picture does take a few risks, and few enough pictures in today’s Hollywood take any at all. But even though ‘Death Becomes Her’ has no fear of being out on the edge, brazenness alone is no guarantee of success.”
The film is screening as part of a “Summer of Camp” series, that will also include “Valley of the Dolls,” “Sleepaway Camp,” “Flash Gordon,” “The Birdcage,” “Lifeforce,” “Serial Mom,” “Disco Godfather,” “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” “Showgirls” and “Drop Dead Gorgeous” all in 35mm prints, plus “Batman & Robin,” “But I’m a Cheerleader” and more. There will also be triple features of the “Austin Powers” movies and titles starring Joan Crawford and Elizabeth Taylor.
Shock-A-Go-Go Film Festival
A poster for the Shock-A-Go-Go Film Festival.
(Shock-A-Go-Go Film Festival)
The Shock-A-Go-Go Film Festival will settle into the Lumiere Cinema at the Music Hall on Saturday and Sunday. The highlight of this year’s program will be the Saturday screenings of 1978’s “Piranha” and 1981’s “The Howling,” with director Joe Dante and star Belinda Balaski present for both. Dante is a masterful storyteller and unflinching in his recollections. Any opportunity to hear him talk is worth taking.
Among the finest examples of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking (rooted in low-budget genre filmmaking but reaching unexpected heights), both “Piranha” and “The Howling” were written by John Sayles, who would go on to a notable career as a filmmaker in his own right.
Also on Saturday will be will be a screening of “Hellbound: Hellraiser II” with writer Peter Atkins and director Tony Randel present, as well as “Return of the Living Dead 3” with director Brian Yuzna in person. Yuzna’s 1989 cult classic “Society” will also show.
‘Personal Best’ and ‘Star 80’
Mariel Hemingway in January 1982.
(Lennox McLendon / Associated Press)
The New Beverly is featuring a double-bill of movies starring Mariel Hemingway on Monday and Tuesday: Robert Towne’s 1982 “Personal Best” and Bob Fosse’s “Star 80” from 1983.
“Personal Best” was the directorial debut for the Oscar-winning “Chinatown” screenwriter Robert Towne, who died in July of last year. The film stars Hemingway as a rising track star who falls in love with an older athlete, played by real-life Olympic track and field athlete Patrice Donnelly. Both are training for the 1980 Olympics. The film was noteworthy at the time for its frank depiction of a lesbian relationship, as well as its focus on the athletes at work.
A January 1982 profile of Towne by Dale Pollack found him in a suite at the Westwood Marquis Hotel (now the W) “filled with typewriters, phones, vodka bottles and stacks of yellowing newspapers.”
In a sign of the moment (and mindset) in which he was making it, Towne took some objection to classifying “Personal Best” as a gay-themed film, saying, “I don’t think in any way this is a lesbian or homosexual movie. What I’m interested in is how you deal with a society that encourages competition, and still care about other people. These two women are in love with each other. In order to place emphasis on who they’re making love to, you have to show it. But there are only two minutes of sex in the film; there are two hours of competition.”
I know I’ve talked about Bob Fosse and “Star 80” around these parts a number of times before, but for me it always rates a mention. Thinking of the film specifically in relation to “Personal Best” is worthwhile, as both films meditate on the use and meaning of women’s bodies.
Few films are as unsparing and dispiriting in their depiction of the star machinery of Hollywood as “Star 80.” Hemingway plays Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy Playmate turned actor who was brutally murdered by her ex-husband and manager, played with psychotic commitment by Eric Roberts.
In her original review of the film, Sheila Benson called it “creepy” and added, “Worst of all, there is a feeling of complicity that is not far from voyeurism that you get as part of ‘Star 80’s’ audience, sitting through the increasingly morbid tightening of the story.”
In other news
People gather outside the Gardena Cinema in 2023.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Two local theaters are finding unique ways to support their communities this summer. Vidiots is launching Movie Den, a program of tween and teen-centric matinees focused on engaging a new generation of film lovers. Underwritten by Mubi and Golden Globe Foundation, screenings will take place in the venue’s microcinema. Tickets are $2 and popcorn is free. Titles in the program include “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Rear Window,” “La Bamba,” “Hairspray,” “The Half of It,” “Hot Rod” and more.
In a statement, Maggie Mackay, executive director of Vidiots Foundation, said, “As a mom to teens and a member of a community that has been through so much this year, it was important to me and our team that we try to make what we know will be a hard summer for so many a little easier, by expanding programming with an intention to get us out of the house, off devices and reconnected.”
The Gardena Cinema, the last family-run independent single-screen indoor movie theater in South Los Angeles, will have free screenings this weekend as part of Pluto TV’s Free Movie Weekend at indie movie theaters across the country. Oscar-winning filmmaker Sean Baker — who did a Times interview from the Gardena last year and appeared there again just last weekend — has partnered with Pluto TV to support their program.
Screening for free at the Gardena this weekend will be “Grease,” “Saturday Night Fever” and 1984’s “Ghostbusters.”
It’s easy to forget sometimes that, alongside everything else that’s crowding your news brain right now, deforestation in the Amazon is still a massive crisis for the planet, one that is fast reaching a point of no return regarding our ability to curtail its terrible impact.
Movies love superheroes that take on their villains with big-stage swagger. But documentaries thrive on underdogs and when it comes to standing up to the illegal logging and mining that’s flattening South America’s leafy canopy, Indigenous people have more than shown their mettle against buzzing chainsaws or buzzy politicians. The energetic dispatch “We Are Guardians” from directors Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman, is the latest advocacy feature to bring cameras into the Amazon to juxtapose beauty and devastation — as well as a David vs. Goliath battle as it’s experienced on the ground.
We meet soft-spoken family man Marҫal, from the Indigenous territory of Arariboia, whose decades-old group of organized, unpaid, weapons-trained and face-painted “forest guardians” take the fight directly to loggers, wherever they can sneak up on them, at great risk to their lives. (Their foes are armed too.) Though Marçal speaks eloquently of his holistic view of their mission — he’s protecting the water, the trees and the region’s wildlife — he also shows concern that the Amazon’s uncontacted peoples stay free of interference too.
Meanwhile, activist Puyr Tembé from the Alto Rio Guama territory is working hard to get more Indigenous women into politics and in seats of power — a tall order at a time (filming mostly took place between 2019 and 2022) when rapaciously pro-agribusiness Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro openly treated the rights of Indigenous peoples as dismissable and a nuisance. As Tembé articulates, it takes a reforesting of the mind and heart to catalyze progress.
These dedicated warriors certainly earn our admiration in the good/evil binary of the conflict, but complications help give the documentary shape, as in the attention given a crusty logger named Valdir, who agreed to be featured on camera. A logger for over 50 years since he was 8, he knows exactly what’s wrong with his job, but is trapped in the maw of an industry as a means of survival for his family. Even a wealthy landowner can come off like a victim here, as is the case with Tadeu, a businessman who in the 1990s started an ecological sanctuary on his 28,000 hectares, and whose complaints to the Brazilian government about illegal encroachment on his land fall on deaf ears.
There’s a comprehensiveness to how “We Are Guardians” lays out a big, knotty problem of environment, politics, geography and business — internationalized yet hyper-local — while spotlighting the Indigenous push-back efforts. But the movie’s verité style of thumbnail portraiture doesn’t always dovetail neatly with the other elements: the unloading of facts, getting those drone shots in and projecting a thriller-like atmosphere. Coming on the heels of the aesthetically sharp and immersive “The Territory” from a couple years ago (which covers some of the same ground), “We Are Guardians” feels more like a highlighting of issues than a documentary journey that takes you somewhere.
But sometimes, it’s whatever gets out the message, right? When it comes to climate change, our media diet is starved. So if you need that refresher course in the importance of saving the Amazon, “We Are Guardians,” like a well-made pamphlet, does the job with plenty of efficiency and heat.
The Emmys’ limited series/TV movie acting categories have come to represent some of the best and most-talked-about shows on television, and this year’s crop of contenders is no exception.
The seven actors who joined the 2025 Envelope Roundtable were Javier Bardem, who plays father, victim and alleged molester Jose Menendez in Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”; Renée Zellweger, who reprises her role as the British romantic heroine in “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”; Stephen Graham, who co-created and stars in “Adolescence” as the father of a teenage boy who commits a heinous murder; Jenny Slate, who plays the best friend of a terminally ill woman in FX’s “Dying for Sex”; Brian Tyree Henry, who portrays a man posing as a federal agent in order to rip off drug dealers in Apple TV+’s “Dope Thief”; Elizabeth Banks, who takes on the role of an estranged sibling and recovering alcoholic in Prime Video’s “The Better Sister”; and Sacha Baron Cohen, who appears as the deceived husband of a successful filmmaker in Apple TV+’s “Disclaimer.”
The Times’ news and culture critic Lorraine Ali spoke to the group about the emotional fallout of a heavy scene, the art of defying expectations and more. Read highlights from their conversation below and watch video of the roundtable above.
The 2025 Limited Series / TV Movie Roundtable: Elizabeth Banks, left, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jenny Slate, Javier Bardem, Brian Tyree Henry, Renée Zellweger and Stephen Graham.
Many of you move between drama and comedy. People often think, “Drama’s very serious and difficult, comedy’s light and easy.” Is that true?
Banks: I think the degree of difficulty with comedy is much higher. It’s really hard to sustainably make people laugh over time, whereas [with] drama, everyone relates to loss and pining for love that’s unrequited. Not everybody has great timing or is funny or gets satire.
Henry: There’s something fun about how closely intertwined they are. In my series, I’m playing a heroin addict running for my life, and I have this codependency with this friend … There’s a scene where I’ve been looking for him, and I’m high out of my mind, and I find him in my attic, and all he’s talking about is how he has to take a s—. And I’m like, “But they’re trying to kill us.” You just see him wincing and going through all these [groans]. It is so funny, but at the same time, you’re just terrified for both. There’s always humor somewhere in the drama.
Banks: There’s a reason why the theater [symbol] is a happy face/sad face. They’re very intertwined.
Renée Zellweger of “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.”
Renée, with Bridget Jones — how has she changed over the last 25 years and where is she now with “Mad About the Boy”?
Zellweger: Nobody’s the same from one moment to the next, one chapter to the next and certainly not from one year to the next. It’s been a really interesting sort of experiment to revisit a character in the different phases of her life.
What I’m really grateful for is that the timing runs in parallel to the sort of experiences that you have in your early 20s, 30s and so on. With each iteration, I don’t have to pretend that I’m less than I am, because I don’t want to be the character that I was, or played, when she was 29, 35. I don’t want to do that, and I certainly don’t want to do that now.
So it was really nice to meet her again in this place of what she’s experiencing in the moment, which is bereavement and the loss of her great love, and being a mom, and trying to be responsible, and reevaluating what she values, and how she comports herself, and what’s important and all of that, because, of course, I relate to that in this moment.
There’s a certain level of sociopathy.
— Brian Tyree Henry, “Dope Thief,” on the lengths actors will go to get the shot
Stephen, “Adolescence” follows a family dealing with the fallout of their 13-year-old son being accused of a brutal murder. You direct and star in the series. What was it like being immersed in such heavy subject matter? Did it come home with you?
Graham: We did that first episode, the end of it was quite heavy and quite emotional. When we said, “Cut,” all of us older actors and the crew were very emotional. There were hugs and a bit of applause.
And then everyone would be like, “Where’s Owen?” [Cooper, the teenage actor who plays Graham’s character’s son]. “Is Owen OK? Is he with his child psychologist?” No, Owen’s upstairs playing swing ball with his tutor. It was like OK, that’s the way to do this — not to take myself too seriously when we say, “Cut,” but when I am there, immerse myself in it.
Let’s be honest, we can all be slightly self-obsessed. My missus, she’s the best for me because I’d phone her and say, “I had a really tough day. I had to cry all day. My wife’s died of cancer, and it was a really tough one.” She goes, “The dog s— all over the living room. I had to go shopping and the f— bag split when I got to Tesco. There was a flat tire. They’ve let the kids out of school early because there’s been a flood. And you’ve had a hard day pretending to be sad?”
Bardem: I totally agree with what Stephen says. You have a life with your family and your children that you have to really pay attention to. This is a job, and you just do the job as good as you can with your own limitations. You put everything into it when they say, “Action,” and when you’re out, you just leave it behind. Otherwise, it’s too much.
Certain scenes, certain moments stay with you because we work with what we are. But I think it doesn’t make you a better actor to really stay in character, as they say, for 24 hours. That doesn’t work for me. It actually makes me feel very confused if I do that.
On the show “Monsters” I tried to protect Cooper [Koch] and Nicholas [Alexander Chavez], the actors who play the children, because they were carrying the heavy weight on the show every day. I was trying to make them feel protected and loved and accompanied by us, the adults, and let them know that we are there for them and that this is fiction. Because they were going really deep into it, and they did an amazing job.
Elizabeth Banks of “The Better Sister.”
Elizabeth, in “The Better Sister,” you portray Nicky, a sister estranged from her sibling who’s been through quite a bit of her own trauma.
Banks: I play a drunk who’s lost her child and her husband, basically, to her little sister, played by Jessica Biel. She is grappling with trauma from her childhood, which she’s trying not to bring forward. She’s been working [with] Alcoholics Anonymous, an incredible program, to get through her stuff. But she’s also a fish out of water when she visits her sister, who [lives in a] very rarefied New York, literary, fancy rich world. My character basically lives in a trailer park in Ohio. There’s a lot going on. And there’s a murder mystery.
I loved the complication … but it brought up all of those things for me. I do think you absolutely leave most of that [heaviness] on set. You are mining it all for the character work, so you’ve got to find it, but I don’t need to then infect my own children with it.
Sacha Baron Cohen of “Disclaimer.”
Sacha, you have played and created these really gregarious characters like Ali G or Borat. Your character in “Disclaimer,” he’s not a character you created, but he is very understated. Was that a challenge?
Cohen: It took me a long time to work out who the character was. I said to [director] Alfonso [Cuarón], “I don’t understand why this guy goes on that journey from where we see him in Act 1.” For me it was, how do you make this person unique?
We worked a lot through the specificity of what words he uses and what he actually says to explain and give hints for me as an actor. A lot of that was Alfonso Cuarón saying, “Take it down.” And there was a lot of rewriting and loads of drafts before I even understood how this guy reacts to the news and information that he believes about his wife.
Jenny Slate of “Dying for Sex.”
Jenny, “Dying for Sex” is based on a true story about two friends. One has terminal cancer, and the other — your character — supports her right up until the end. Talk about what it was like to play that role in a series that alternates between biting humor and deep grief.
Slate: Michelle Williams, who does a brilliant job in this show, her energy is extending outward and [her character] is trying to experiment before she does the greatest experiment of all, which is to cross over into the other side. My character is really out there, not out there willy-nilly, but she will yell at people if they are being rude, wasteful or if she feels it’s unjust. [And she’s] going from blasting to taking all that energy and making it this tight laser, and pointing it right into care, and knowing more about herself at the end.
I am a peppy person, and I felt so excited to have the job that a lot of my day started with calming myself down. I’m at work with Michelle Williams and Sissy Spacek and Liz Meriwether and Shannon Murphy and being, like, “Siri, set a meditation timer for 10 minutes,” and making myself do alternate nostril breathing [exercises].
Brian Tyree Henry of “Dope Thief.”
Brian, many people came to know you from your role as Paper Boi in “Atlanta.” The series was groundbreaking and like nothing else on television. What was it like moving out of that world and onto other projects?
Henry: People really thought that I was this rapper that they pulled off the street from Atlanta. To me, that’s the greatest compliment … When I did “Bullet Train,” I was shocked at how many people thought I was British. I was like, “Oh, right. Now I’ve twisted your mind this way.” I was [the voice of] Megatron at one point, and now I’ve twisted your mind that way. My path in is always going to be stretching people’s imaginations, because they get so attached to characters that I’ve played that they really believe that I’m that person.
People feel like they have an ownership of who you are. I love the challenge of having to force the imaginations of the viewers and myself to see me in a departure [from] what they saw me [as] previously. Because I realize that when I walk in a room, before I even open my mouth, there’s 90 different things that are put on me or taken away from me because of how I look and how I carry myself.
Javier Bardem of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.”
Javier, since doing the series are you now frequently asked about your own opinions on the Menendez case? The brothers claim their father molested them, and that is in part what led to them murdering their parents.
Bardem: I don’t think anybody knows. That’s the point. That was the great thing about playing that character, is you have to play it in a way that it’s not obvious that he did those things that he was accused of, because nobody knows, but at the same time you have to make people believe that he was capable.
I did say to Ryan [Murphy] that I can’t do a scene with a kid. Because in the beginning, they do drafts, and there were certain moments where I said, “I can’t. It’s not needed.” The only moment that I had a hard time was when [Jose] has to face [his] young kid. It was only a moment where Jose was mean to him. That’s not in my nature.
Henry: I discovered, while doing my series, “My body doesn’t know this isn’t real.” There’s an episode where I’m shot in the leg, and I’m bleeding out and I’m on all this different morphine and drugs and all this stuff, and I’m literally lying on this ground, take after take, having to mime this. To go through the delusion of this pain … in the middle of the takes, it was just so crazy. I would literally look at the crew and say, “Somebody hug me! Somebody!”
Stephen, that scene where you confront the boys in the parking lot with the bike, I was just like, “Oh, my God, how many times did he have to do that?” This kid gets in your face, and I was like, “Punch the kid!” My heart went out to you, man, not just as the character but as you being in there.
Graham: Because we did it all in one take, we had that unique quality. You’re using the best of two mediums. You’ve got that beauty and that spontaneity and that reality of the theater, and then you have the naturalism and the truth that we have with film and television. So by the time I get to that final bit, we’ve been through all those emotions. When I open the door and go into [Jamie’s] room, everything’s shaken. But it’s not you. It’s an out-of-body experience and just comes from somewhere else.
Bardem: Listen, we don’t do brain surgery, but let’s give ourselves some credit. We are generous in what we do because we are putting our bodies into an experience. We are doing this for something bigger than us, and that is the story that we’re telling.
What have been some of the more challenging or difficult moments for you, either in your career or your recent series?
Zellweger: Trying not to do what you’re feeling in the moment sometimes, because it’s not appropriate to what you’re telling. That happens in most shows, most things that you do. I think everybody experiences it where you’re bringing something from home and it doesn’t belong on the set. It’s impossible to leave it behind when you walk in because it’s bigger than you are in that moment.
Banks: I would say that the thing that I worked on the most for “The Better Sister” was [understanding] sobriety. I’m not sober. I love a bubbly rosé. So it really did bring up how much I think about drinking and how social it is and what that ritual is for me, and how this character is thinking about it every day and deciding every day to stay sober or not. I am also a huge fan of AA and sobriety programs. I think they’re incredible tools for everybody who works those programs. I was grateful for the access to all of that as I was making the series. But that’s what you get to do in TV. You get to explore episode by episode. You get to play out a lot more than just three acts.
Stephen Graham of “Adolescence.”
Stephen, about the continuous single shot. It seems like it’s an incredibly difficult and complex way to shoot a series. Why do it?
Graham: It’s exceptionally difficult, I’m not going to lie. It’s like a swan glides across the water beautifully, but the legs are going rapidly underneath. A lot of it is done in preparation. We spend a whole week learning the script, and then the second week is just with the camera crew and the rest of the crew. It’s a choreography that you work out, getting an idea of where they want the camera to go, and the opportunity to embody the space ourselves.
Cohen: That reminds me of a bit of doing the undercover movies that I do because you have one take. … I did a scene where I’m wearing a bulletproof vest. There were a lot of the people in the audience who’d gone to this rally, a lot of them had machine guns. We knew they were going to get angry, but you’ve got to do the scene. You’ve got one time to get the scene right. But you also go, “OK, those guys have got guns. They’re trying to storm the stage. I haven’t quite finished the scene. When do I leave?” But you’ve got to get the scene. I could get shot, but that’s not important.
Henry: There’s a certain level of sociopathy.
Slate: I feel like I’m never on my mark, and it was always a very kind camera operator being like, “Hey, Jenny, you weren’t in the shot shoulder-wise.” I feel like such an idiot. Part of it is working through lifelong, longstanding feelings of “I’m a fool and my foolishness is going to make people incredibly angry with me.” And then really still wanting to participate and having no real certainty that I’m going to be able to do anything but just make all of my fears real. Part of the thing that I love about performance is I just want to experience the version of myself that does not collapse into useless fragments when I face the thing that scares me the most. I do that, and then I feel the appetite for performance again.
Do you see yourself in roles when you’re watching other people’s films or TV show?
Graham: At the end of the day, we’re all big fans of acting. That’s why we do it. Because when we were young, we were inspired by people on the screen, or we were inspired by places where we could put ourselves and lose our imaginations.
We have a lot of t— in this industry. But I think if we fight hard enough, we can come through. Do you know what I mean? It’s people that are here for the right reasons. It’s a collective. Acting is not a game of golf. It’s a team. It’s in front and it’s behind the camera. I think it’s important that we nourish that.
Henry: And remember that none of us are t—.
Bardem: What is a t—? I may be one of them and I don’t know it.
If a movie inspires you to get up in the middle of a Koreatown steakhouse and do the robot with your waiter, isn’t that worthy of some kind of award, even if it’s not an Oscar?
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Let’s talk about “The Life of Chuck,” the latest Stephen King adaptation, a film possessing the pedigree of an Oscar best picture contender.
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Can ‘Chuck’ extend Toronto’s Oscar streak?
The last 12 movies to win the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award have gone on to earn an Oscar nomination for best picture. It’s a list that includes eventual Oscar winners like “12 Years a Slave,” “Green Book” and “Nomadland.” Two years ago, Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” premiered at Toronto and parlayed the momentum from its People’s Choice prize into an adapted screenplay victory for Jefferson.
Suffice it to say, it’s a prime precursor.
Which makes the arrival of “The Life of Chuck,” last year’s People’s Choice winner, all the more of a curiosity. Neon, the indie studio behind best picture winners “Anora” and “Parasite,” bought the film out of Toronto after it won the award, voted on by festivalgoers. With not enough time to craft a marketing or awards season campaign, the studio slotted the movie for the summer of 2025. It opens in limited release today — you can find it in five theaters in the Los Angeles area — and will expand nationwide next week.
“The Life of Chuck,” adapted from a 50-page Stephen King story published in 2020, is feel-good tale about the end of the world. It is indeed about the life of Chuck, a prototypical King everyman, an ordinary accountant we don’t meet until the the second part of the movie’s backward-moving triptych. But we know about him because in the film’s opening section, the one with the world ending and California tumbling into the sea (Steely Dan was right!), Earth’s inhabitants are inundated with baffling billboards and ads featuring a picture of Chuck, thanking him for 39 great years.
Tom Hiddleston, star of “The Life of Chuck,” at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
We eventually learn that Chuck, played as an adult by Tom Hiddleston, is a remarkable dancer and has lived a life filled with loss. In between the tragedies, there were moments of pure, unadulterated joy. The movie, faithfully adapted and competently directed by Mike Flanagan (the man behind Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” and other horror tales), wants to leave you with the message that such moments are enough. And also to remind you that when these occasions come, we should recognize them and store them away as found gold.
It’s an original story arriving in a summer movie landscape dominated by sequels and retreads. Call it counterprogramming. Critics have been split, which isn’t surprising. You either suspend disbelief and settle into this movie’s vibe or you find yourself unmoved and checking the time, thinking that, in the momentary pleasure department, a root beer float would go down easier. I liked it well enough, but given the choice, I’d probably opt for the ice cream.
For “The Life of Chuck” to be an awards season play, moviegoers will need to fall for it as hard as audiences did at Toronto. That feels like a long shot, though maybe the film’s sweetness and optimism will resonate in the current moment. Times film critic Amy Nicholson was mixed on the movie and yet, as I mentioned at the outset, it did make her “make magic out of the mundane” and boogie with a waiter. She sent me the video. Don’t let her tell you otherwise … she’s a dancing machine.
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When: Saturday, June 7 at 2 p.m. Where: The Culver Theater
Since I’m being a little wistful here, let me call your attention to a recent column I wrote about the late, great Linda Lavin, a singular talent who never won an Emmy.
That may surprise you, particularly if you were around when Lavin headlined the long-running CBS sitcom “Alice,” in which she played a widowed mom working as a waitress while pursuing her dream of singing. The series ran from 1976 to 1985, piling up more than 200 episodes, a spinoff for Polly Holliday (Flo, the “kiss my grits” sass-flinger) and a lasting reputation for presenting an early, understated feminist role model. Alice wasn’t nearly as brash as Bea Arthur’s Maude or quite as lovable as Jean Stapleton’s Edith Bunker, but like her contemporary Mary Tyler Moore, she could turn the world on with her smile.
Lavin, who died in December at 87, did earn two Golden Globes for the role and, after “Alice” ended, she won a Tony Award in 1987 for lead actress in a play for her turn as a Jewish mother navigating a changing world in Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”
“It was one of the greatest stage performances I have ever seen, and I told her that the first day I met her,” says Nathan Lane, who had the opportunity to share his enthusiasm with Lavin when they worked together on the Hulu sitcom “Mid-Century Modern.” Lane recalls watching the play and choking up when Lavin absent-mindedly wiped off a phone receiver — her character was always cleaning — right after a wrenching phone call.
“She could do anything and make it look effortless,” Lane says. “Working with her was the happiest experience I’ve ever had in television.”
(Photo illustration by Susana Sanchez / Los Angeles Times; Getty Images / CBS Photo Archive)
In Emmy history, 33 actors — 22 men and 11 women — have been posthumously nominated. Most recently, Treat Williams earned a nod last year for his supporting turn in the FX limited series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.” Ray Liotta was nominated in 2023 in the same category for “Black Bird.” And in 1978, Will Geer received three posthumous nominations, including his last season on “The Waltons.” (He lost all three.)
Lavin has a legitimate case. She elevates “Mid-Century Modern” every time she’s onscreen with her vitality and comic timing. In April, she picked up a comedy supporting actress nod from the Gotham Television Awards.
You can read the entire column, which includes some terrific stories from “Mid-Century Modern” showrunners Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, here.
Have a great weekend. Hope you find a moment to dance.
When Debbie Allen opened the doors to her dance academy in 2000 inside of a revamped Marie Callender’s restaurant in Culver City, there was no other place in town like it that catered to disenfranchised Black and Latino communities.
The school became a haven for dancers of all backgrounds wanting to learn from the multifaceted performer, who chasséd into the Hollywood scene with her career-defining performance as Lydia Grant in the 1980 musical “Fame.” Allen went onto become an award-winning director and producer for shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” (which she also stars in), “How to Get Away With Murder,” “A Different World,” “Jane the Virgin” and “Everybody Hates Chris.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Fast forward 25 years, the Debbie Allen Dance Academy now resides in a 25,000-square-foot “arts” palace in Mid City at the Rhimes Performing Arts Center (named after Allen’s longtime friend and colleague Shonda Rhimes). It’s more active than ever with a newly accredited middle school, a summer intensive program, a tap festival and annual “Hot Chocolate Nutcracker” holiday show. Next up, Allen is hosting her third free community block party on June 8 on Washington Boulevard, featuring dance classes with world-renowned choreographers like Marguerite Derricks and a breakdancing competition with Silverback Bboy Events. And on June 22, Allen will host Dancing in the Light: Healing with the Arts, a bimonthly event that features free dance lessons for those impacted by the wildfires. The event will take place at the Wallis in Beverly Hills and will feature classes taught by choreographers Lyrik Cruz (salsa), Angela Jordan (African) and Anthony Berry (hip-hop).
“It’s been wonderful that this community has been able to see each other and have a bit of joy,” Allen said during a Zoom call from Atlanta, where she was working on a new TV pilot.
We caught up with Allen, who’s lived in L.A. for nearly 40 years, to learn about how she’d spend her perfect Sunday in the city. Much like when she was a child growing up in Houston, Sundays are centered around family and spending time with her four grandchildren who “own” her weekends, she said. On the call sheet is getting breakfast in Santa Monica, hosting a free dance class and catching a movie at Westfield Century City.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
7 a.m.: Wake up the grandbabies
On a typical Sunday, I would wake up at 7 a.m. My [eldest] grandchildren spend the night with us every Saturday. I have four grandkids who are 6, 4, and two who are 6 months old. The little ones are just now getting to where their parents might let us keep them overnight. My room has turned into a nursery.
First, we deal with our dog CoCo. We have a beautiful black German shepherd who is amazing. She’s such a good family dog and incredible guard dog. She just glistens, just pure black, and she’s wonderful with the kids. So we have to let her out and she wants to play. Then we get ready to go to breakfast.
9 a.m..: Time for breakfast
We always go out somewhere for breakfast. We either go to a nearby hotel or we go to Marmalade in Santa Monica. They have very fresh croissants, little biscuits with currants and scones. They also have really good omelets and turkey bacon. Then the neighborhood people are there, so we see people that we’ve met and have gotten to know over the years. There’s one man in particular who is always reading books and we can always get a new idea of a book to read.
11 a.m.: Host a free dance class
Then we’d come back and on any given Sunday, I might be on my way to Dancing in the Light: Healing with the Arts, where I’ve been doing these dance classes for all the people who have been impacted by the fires. We’ve been doing this for months and it’s been amazing. We’ve had tremendous support from Wallis Annenberg, United Way, Shonda Rhimes, Berry Gordy, just so many individuals who have supported. We do classes all over, which start at 11 a.m. But if we’re not doing the Dancing in the Light event, sometimes we like to go to the California Science Center, which the kids love. It’s great because there’s so much going on there now.
2:30 p.m.: Tennis time
I’ll head back home to catch the kids having their tennis lesson. They are starting to play at this young age and it’s so cute.
5 p.m.: Early dinner and a movie
We’d either start preparing family dinner because I have a son who has his 6-month-old and my daughter, Vivian, who has her three kids. Or we’d go out to dinner. We love to go to Ivy at the Shore because it’s very family-friendly and they have a lot of options. We also like going to Chinois. It’s a Wolfgang Puck spot. We’d have an early dinner around 5 p.m. If we don’t go out to eat, we might go to the movies. We love going to the movies. We’re really close to AMC Santa Monica, but sometimes we’ll go to [Westfield] Century City because they have a fantastic food court and the kids like to go up there and pick what they want to eat.
7:30 p.m.: Quality time with MaTurk
We’d come back home and spend time with my mom, who we call MaTurk. She’s 101 years old. We’d play her favorite music because she was a concert pianist. I did a beautiful piece for her at the Kennedy Center this year based on her book, “Hawk,” which we republished. It’s on sale now. But Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is her favorite. She played it for me when I was 4 years old, going to sleep on her lap. And my granddaughters are the cutest things with MaTurk. They like to pretend they are the caregivers and they want to brush her hair. They want to massage her legs. It’s a sweet thing.
8:30 p.m.: Catch up on our favorite shows
After that, it’s time to say goodbye to the grandkids. Then my husband and I will nestle in. We’re always reading books and watching various series. We’ve been watching Shonda Rhimes’ “The Residence” lately. We love it! And he also is addicted to “Power Book.” If I could pick, I’d be in bed by 9:30 p.m.
It turns out Zoe Saldaña was more than just emotionally drained after tearfully accepting her supporting actress Oscar for “Emilia Pérez” at this year’s Academy Awards — she was also worn out physically.
The 46-year-old actor explained Wednesday on the ABC talk show “Live With Kelly and Mark” how she had been fighting a cold and felt fully exhausted immediately following one of her career-defining moments.
“I collapsed right after. I lost my voice within an hour after I won the award,” she said. “I couldn’t stand on those heels that I had. All I wanted to do was crawl in bed and maybe cry. I don’t know why, I just needed to cry.”
The “Avatar” star noted that up until that point her body was running on all cylinders for months on end during awards season.
“Your body is running on pure adrenaline so you know that your immune system is in optimal condition, but once you tell your body that it’s over, then everything sort of collapses,” Saldaña said.
The Oscar victory capped an impressive awards season run for the “Guardians of the Galaxy” actor, having won the Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG and Critics’ Choice awards for her role as Mexico City attorney Rita Castro in “Emilia Pérez.”
While her performance was almost universally celebrated and well-regarded, the film as a whole was heavily criticized for its incomplete and offensive portrayals of transgender issues and the lack of consideration taken in depicting Mexico.
Although physically and emotionally exhausted, Saldaña managed to make some attention-grabbing statements in the Oscars press room after a Mexican journalist noted that the movie’s presentation of Mexico was “really hurtful for us Mexicans.”
“First of all, I’m very, very sorry that you and so many Mexicans felt offended,” Saldaña said in the defense of the film. “That was never our intention. We spoke and came from a place of love, and I will stand by that.”
She went on to further disagree with the Mexican journalist’s point of view regarding the centrality and importance of Mexico in the 13-time Oscar nominated movie.
“For me, the heart of this movie was not Mexico. We were making a film about friendship. We were making a film about four women,” Saldaña explained. “And these women are still very universal women that are struggling every day, but trying to survive systemic oppression and trying to find the most authentic voices.”
Outside of the issues within the film, much of the main cast and crew of the movie was bogged down by mostly self-inflicted negative press.
Actor Karla Sofía Gascón faced backlash in January after Canadian writer Sarah Hagi resurfaced tweets dating from 2016 to 2023 that spoke negatively of Muslims’ clothing, language and culture in her home country of Spain. Additionally, Gascón caught heat for resurfaced comments about the 2020 killing of George Floyd, the ensuing racial reckoning, the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19-era Academy Awards ceremony in 2021.
Gascón later apologized for her previous online remarks and deactivated her X account.
The film’s director Jacques Audiard spoke openly on record about how little he prepped to portray Mexico and denigrated the Spanish language during his press tour.
When asked by a Mexican journalist at a red carpet event about how much he had to study up on Mexico and Mexican culture to prepare for the movie, Audiard gave a telling answer.
“No, I didn’t study that much. What I needed to know, I already knew a little about,” the filmmaker said. “It was more about capturing the little details and we came a lot to Mexico to see actors, to see locations, to see the decorations and so on.”
Speaking with the French outlet Konbini, Audiard spoke down on the Spanish language, saying, “Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.”
Audiard later apologized for his comments after the movie received backlash from Mexican audiences.
Selena Gomez, who played a pivotal supporting role in the film, was criticized for her proficiency in Spanish. Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez was among those who called out Gomez’s performance and Spanish language ability.
Gomez has previously said her Spanish fluency waned after she started working in television at age 7. She responded to the criticism on social media, saying, “I did the best I could with the time I was given. Doesn’t take away from how much work and heart I put into this movie.” Derbez later apologized.
The PG rating has made a major comeback in Hollywood.
It’s strange to remember now, but during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — when studios were sending many of their family-friendly movies straight to streaming services — there were serious conversations in the movie business about whether youngsters and their parents would ever return to theaters in full force.
Streaming was just too convenient and affordable, compared with a Saturday outing of two parents and 2 1/2 kids, the logic went.
But in recent years, the family audience has proved to be a bulwark for the theatrical movie business.
Disney’s live-action “Lilo & Stitch” topped the domestic box office again over the weekend with $63 million in ticket sales, for a total of $280 million so far. It beat the latest “Mission: Impossible” and the new “Karate Kid: Legends,” both rated PG-13. As of Sunday, “Lilo & Stitch” had crossed $610 million globally.
Warner Bros. and Legendary’s “A Minecraft Movie,” also rated PG, has amassed $423 million in the U.S. and Canada, the best of the year so far. Adding international grosses, its global tally is $947 million.
Nine PG-rated movies have been released in more than 2,000 locations this year, up from six during the same period in 2024, according to industry estimates. Those movies have accounted for 41% of ticketing revenue in the U.S. and Canada this year, compared with 21% a year ago. (The Pixar megahit “Inside Out 2” was released in mid-June of 2024.)
Family films are a boon to studios and theaters at a time when other categories — such as comic book films and one-off dramas and comedies — have been less reliable than they were in the past.
And there’s more to come, including Universal’s “How to Train Your Dragon” remake, Pixar’s “Elio” and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Bad Guys 2.”
Importantly, many of these movies are coming one after the other, which is essential if the industry hopes to re-create the moviegoing habit for current and future generations, especially as social media, YouTube and video games claim more of young people’s attention.
“One of the things that I think the industry has struggled with over the last number of years is just having a regular cadence of movies in the theater,” said Michael O’Leary, head of the trade group Cinema United (formerly the National Assn. of Theatre Owners). “If you’re a young person, and there’s a six-month gap between movies, there’s a lot of things going on, and your attention wanes.”
The focus on PG-rated content stands in contrast with a few years ago, when the PG-13 rating was widely seen as the way to include a broad, “four-quadrant” audience: men, women, old and young. A PG rating tagged a new release as more of a kids movie. PG-13, the label for Marvel and DC movies, had more of a cool factor for teens and young adults.
O’Leary has a theory for why things have shifted, and it has to do with the media consumption habits of today’s very young, known as Generation Alpha, or those who came after Gen Z.
Kids now are more than just digitally native.
They’re aware of new movies and TV shows coming out, in part because of exposure to social media at an earlier age compared with past generations of children. Parents will naturally be more comfortable taking their 7- and 8-year-olds to something like “Minecraft,” because they’re less likely to be presented with objectionable content.
The Motion Picture Assn.’s rating system, though sometimes fraught and misunderstood, is meant as a guide for parents.
“Younger people are inundated with more and more content at an earlier age, and they’ve become, in some ways, more discriminating connoisseurs of what they want to see,” O’Leary said.
Surely there are some parents who take their kids to the movies less often now after the pandemic with the proliferation of at-home entertainment options. But overall, family movies are leading the industry. If the pandemic proved anything, it’s that if you’re a parent, you really can’t spend all your time in the house.
Gen Z — now anywhere from 13 to 28 years old — is clearly doing its part. According to a recent NRG survey, 37% of Gen Zers say they go to the movies more than six times a year, up from 29% who agreed with that statement in February 2023.
Adults, too, might be interested in seeing more PG content in theaters, particularly in the American heartland.
Angel Studios’ animated Jesus film “The King of Kings” performed well (though somewhat ironically, most of Angel’s live action movies are PG-13).
The post-pandemic recovery of the family audience hit a big milestone in 2023 with Illumination’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which grossed more than $1.36 billion worldwide. That was followed by the success of 2024 sequels such as “Inside Out 2,” “Moana 2,” “Despicable Me 4” and “Mufasa: The Lion King,” which all benefited from multigenerational appeal.
The blockbuster Broadway adaptation “Wicked” was also rated PG, which helped make it a family moviegoing event.
Now, the category is again on a hot streak. Industry analyst David A. Gross declared in a recent edition of his FranchiseRe newsletter, “the production pipeline is full and any loss of audience to streaming during the pandemic is over.”
What hasn’t come back as strongly? Most notably, superhero pictures — one of the pillars of moviegoing for the last couple decades. Before the pandemic, the industry averaged seven superhero movies a year, and those would drive billions of dollars in global revenue, Gross said. Lately, the genre has been significantly thinner and far less consistent.
R-rated horror movies are thriving (look at “Sinners” and “Final Destination Bloodlines”), but other adult-oriented movies are hit and miss.
Increasingly, when studios want to draw a mass audience, that means going younger.
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What’s the magic number that will allow Paramount’s $8-billion merger with Skydance to go through?
The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount was willing to part with $15 million to settle President Trump’s lawsuit against the company over edits to its pre-election “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.
No surprise, that’s apparently not enough. Trump’s team wants more, the Journal reported. The president wants $25 million and an apology from CBS News, a source told the paper.
Trump’s critics, journalists and 1st Amendment experts say the lawsuit is basically a shakedown. Some anti-Trump lawmakers say a settlement by Paramount could amount to an illegal bribe.
Paramount is awaiting merger approval from the FCC, which is tasked with reviewing the transfer of broadcast licenses. Sources have told my colleague Meg James that the FCC approval process has been bogged down.
The company stresses that it sees the legal dispute and the FCC review as separate issues. No one believes Trump sees them that way.
On Monday, Paramount said it would add three new board members.
Finally …
There’s been an unreal amount of good TV on lately. I’ve been catching up on Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal,” and often can’t believe what I’m seeing.
Also, Marc Maron is ending his podcast after 16 years. I’ve linked to various episodes in this newsletter. Here’s one I’m looking forward to catching up with.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. While we’re pondering the timeline to upload a human consciousness, let’s consider “Mountainhead” and its Emmy chances.
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Another year, another late-breaking HBO movie
Early on in “Mountainhead,” tech bro and Elon Musk stand-in Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith) uses film history to put the glitches of his company’s latest AI rollout into perspective.
“The first time people saw a movie, everybody ran screaming because they thought they were gonna get hit by a train,” Venis relates, shouting out the Lumiere brothers’ 1895 film, “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.” “The answer to that was not stop the movies. The answer was: Show more movies. We’re gonna show users as much s— as possible, until everyone realizes nothing’s that f— serious. Nothing means anything, and everything’s funny and cool.”
In the meantime, though, Venis’ social media platform has given users the tools to create deepfakes so realistic they can’t be identified as bogus. Immediately, people all over the world are uploading videos of their enemies committing atrocities, inflaming centuries-old animosities. Reality has collapsed and, with it, global stability.
But for “Mountainhead’s” quartet of tech magnates, played by Smith, Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman, everything is just fine. As venture capitalist Randall Garrett (Carell) notes, “We have plenty of calories stockpiled. Western countries have strategic commodity reserves, canola oil, lard, frozen orange juice.”
Later, Randall asks: “Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?”
“Mountainhead” is in many ways scarier than the zombie apocalypse of “The Last of Us” because it feels like its premise is lurking right around the corner. Armstrong came up with the idea for the two-hour movie in November, after immersing himself in podcasts and books about Silicon Valley. He shot it in March, edited it in April and delivered it in May. It captures the DOGE era, specifically in the casual cruelty expressed by its entitled characters.
“Do you believe in other people?” Venis asks Randall. “Eight billion people as real as us?”
Randall’s reply: “Well, obviously not.”
Cory Michael Smith, left, and Steve Carell in “Mountainhead.”
(Macall Polay / HBO)
“Mountainhead” aspires more directly to comedy, but because we don’t have a history with these four deplorable men, it’s often difficult to find the humor. “Like ‘Fountainhead’ Mountainhead?” Youssef jokes to Schwartzman about the estate’s title. “Was your interior decorator Ayn Bland?” There’s a procession of put-downs like that. When they’re not roasting each other, they’re trying to boost their own agendas — in the case of the cancer-stricken Randall, it’s the quest to live forever as a disembodied consciousness.
For all its Shakespearean drama, “Succession” was wildly entertaining, more of a comedy than, yes, “The Bear.” Kendall Roy performing the rap “L to the OG” at a party honoring his father’s half-century running Waystar Royco will be the funniest two minutes of television probably forever. But half the fun came from the characters’ reactions to this transcendent moment of cringe. We were deeply invested in this world.
For all their money and power, the “Mountainhead” moguls are, like the Roy children in “Succession,” not serious people. But beyond that, “Mountainhead” doesn’t have much of anything novel to say about its subjects. As good as Smith is at channeling Musk’s alien, empathy-deficient otherness, you can come away with the same level of insight — and entertainment — by spending a few minutes watching Mike Myers on “Saturday Night Live.” I don’t need to watch a movie to know that a guy sitting on a gold toilet isn’t prioritizing anyone’s interests but his own.
“Mountainhead,” as mentioned, arrives on the last day of 2024-25 Emmy eligibility, less by design than from necessity. The paint’s still wet on this film. But this does mark the third straight season that HBO has dropped a TV movie right before the deadline. Last year, it was “The Great Lillian Hall,” starring Jessica Lange as fading Broadway legend. Two years ago, it was the excellent whistleblower thriller “Reality,” featuring a star turn from Sydney Sweeney. Both movies were blanked at the Emmys, though Kathy Bates did manage a Screen Actors Guild Awards nod for “Lillian Hall.”
Did the movies land too late for enough people see them? Perhaps. The late arrival time should mean they’d be fresh in voters’ minds when they fill out their ballots. But you have to be aware of them for that to happen.
Awareness shouldn’t be an issue with “Mountainhead.” Enough people will want to watch the new offering from the creator of “Succession,” and there’s not much else on television vying for attention right now. “Mountainhead” should score a nomination for television movie, even with the category being stronger than usual this year with audience favorites “Rebel Ridge,” the latest “Bridget Jones” movie and Scott Derrickson’s enjoyable, genre-bending “The Gorge” competing.
But actors in these TV movies are at competitive disadvantage as the Emmys lump them together with their counterparts in limited series, performers who are onscreen for a much longer time. This decade, only two TV movie actors have been nominated — Hugh Jackman (“Bad Education”) and Daniel Radcliffe (“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”). The lead actress category, meanwhile, has been completely dominated by limited series.
Not that there are any women starring in “Mountainhead” because … tech bros. As for the men, Carell, Schwartzman, Smith and Youssef are very good at conveying delusional arrogance. I despised each and every one of their characters. If hate-voting were a thing, they’d all be nominated.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Following its recent premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, “The Phoenician Scheme,” the new film by Wes Anderson, opens in Los Angeles this weekend. Each new Anderson picture still feels like something of an event, simply because it is so fun to see what he is up to this time, what idiosyncratic subset of the world will he explore and make his own.
Personally, I have been taken with how densely packed his last few films have become. “The French Dispatch” and “Asteroid City” had a layered approach to storytelling that took some time to fully unpack. So it is likely “The Phoenician Scheme” has yet to reveal itself, in need of some extended unraveling of its energetic story of an ambitious 1950s international businessman, Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro, who we spoke to for our summer preview), and his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), on an a series of business deals. The cast, typical for Anderson, is packed, also including Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Richard Aoyade, Riz Ahmed, Charlotte Gainsbourg and many more. (Never fear, Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray are in there somewhere.)
Mia Threapleton and Benicio del Toro in the movie “The Phoenician Scheme.”
(TPS Productions / Focus Features)
In a review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote, “Lately, Anderson has been on a tear of using his perfectionist aesthetic to defend the act of ambition itself — to honor artisans who create masterpieces in a world of philistines. The only thing he loves more than a carved credenza (and here, they’re decorated with hieroglyphics) is the craftsperson who made it and the aesthete who bought it, instead of settling for something disposable. I was never a fan of Anderson’s until ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ clicked him into focus. It was hard to believe he knew what he was talking about when his earlier movies tried to sell us on love between human beings. But a hotelier’s love of his linens? That I’ll buy.”
Amy added, “It’s not that you have to believe that there is a force out there more powerful than Zsa-zsa, or heck, even money itself. But if that doesn’t move you, at least Anderson deserves reverence for negotiating how to get all these A-list talents to act in his movie for peanuts. He’s managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.”
‘Bleak Week’ goes worldwide
Thomas Jane in an image from the black-and-white director’s cut of Frank Darabont’s 2007 horror movie “The Mist,” coming to “Bleak Week.”
(MGM)
The fourth edition of the American Cinematheque’s “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair” program begins Sunday with screenings at all three of its local venues through Saturday, June 7. Having already expanded to the Paris Theatre in New York last year, “Bleak Week” is now spreading to several more cities and venues: the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Ore.; the Music Box Theatre in Chicago; the Texas Theatre in Dallas; Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis; Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston; and the Prince Charles Cinema in London.
“We look to expand our never-ending film festival whenever possible,” said Grant Moninger, artistic director of the American Cinematheque, via email, of the program’s ongoing expansion.
This year’s series will open with a 35mm screening of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 “Ikiru” at the Egyptian Theatre introduced by Bill Hader. French filmmaker Claire Denis will be present for screenings of a handful of her titles, including a 35mm presentation of 2001’s “Trouble Every Day” with a Q&A moderated by Barry Jenkins.
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold will be present for a tribute, including films they have made together and Corbet’s separate acting work. To be screened: Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” Fastvold’s “The World to Come” and Corbet’s “The Childhood of a Leader” and “Vox Lux.”
Other “Bleak Week” highlights include John Hillcoat’s 2005 “The Proposition” with a Q&A with the filmmaker and cast, Michael Curtiz’s 1950 “The Breaking Point” in 35mm and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 “Day of Wrath” screened from a nitrate print.
What may once have seemed a slightly cracked idea has grown into one of the Cinematheque’s signature programs. And there is no end in sight.
“After year one, which had 33 films, we had the worry that maybe we would have no titles left for next year — if there even was a second edition,” said Chris LeMaire, senior film programmer, via email. “But each time we start programming the next ‘Bleak Week,’ there seem to be endless possibilities.”
“Our lineup this year in L.A. has 55 films and we probably cut another 50 titles from our initial list,” added LeMaire. “Across all the venues, ‘Bleak Week’ includes over 100 titles this year, from all corners of the world and all eras of cinema history, from as early as 1919 to 2025. We’re never going to run out because many of the greatest films deal with the human condition, which naturally leads to some difficult truths.”
Brad Pitt in the movie “Moneyball.”
(Sony Pictures)
Alan Arkin’s 1971 “Little Murders” will screen in 35mm with a Q&A with star Elliott Gould moderated by screenwriter Larry Karaszewski. A screening of the black-and-white director’s cut of 2007’s “The Mist” will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Frank Darabont and actor Thomas Jane. Filmmaker Costa-Gavras and producer Michèle Ray-Gavras will be present for a double-bill of 1982’s “Missing” and 1970’s “The Confession.” Actor Gabriel Byrne will be at a 35th anniversary screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1990 “Miller’s Crossing.”
I will be moderating a Q&A with Gus Van Sant following a screening of “Last Days.” There will also be the U.S. premiere of a 4K restoration of “Christiane F.” and the West Coast premieres of 4K restorations of “Withnail and I,” “Forbidden Games,” “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Happiness.” (A Q&A for “Happiness” will feature performers Lara Flynn Boyle and Camryn Manheim, moderated by Vera Drew.)
Where downbeat entries like Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go,” Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station,” Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador’s “Who Can Kill A Child?” or Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” more obviously fall within the thematic concept of “Bleak Week,” titles such as Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” or Boaz Davidson’s “The Last American Virgin” do not make such an apparent fit.
“We work outside of academic and algorithmic models,” said Moninger. “This allows for an emotional reaction to films and a more expansive ‘Bleak Week’ program. The festival is a tapestry of bleak moments and feelings that can be presented in all types of cinema, including the occasional comedy. We are not measuring the hopelessness of each film but creating something by bonding together a wide variety of challenging, unpromising cinema, which I hope builds to something positive.”
Ivan Dixon and ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door’
An image from 1973’s “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” directed by Ivan Dixon.
(United Artists / Photofest / UCLA Film & Television Archive)
This weekend the UCLA Film & Television Archive will be hosting “‘Going My Own Way’ Celebrating Ivan Dixon,” a tribute to the actor and filmmaker, including the local premiere tonight of a new 35mm print of the restoration of his 1973 film, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.”
The film tells the story of the first Black CIA officer (Lawrence Cook), who leaves his token position at the organization to use what he learned there to train a Black guerrilla fighting force in Chicago. “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” which was added to the National Film Registry in 2012, had a truncated release with it first came out due to its revolutionary politics, with some accounts that the FBI became involved in suppressing it.
“It’s just one of the most powerful meditations on the meaning of freedom that I’ve ever seen,” said UCLA programmer Beandrea July. “It’s so nice to see a movie that really knows what it is and doesn’t apologize for it. It doesn’t equivocate, it’s not trying to explain itself to people who aren’t interested in really understanding. It’s so satisfying to watch because it’s like finally someone actually speaks to the thing with the same oomph that the thing demands.”
On Saturday, along with the second screening of the film, there will be a showing of Christine Acham and Clifford Ward’s 2011 documentary “Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door,’” which examines the long saga of the film, its reception and release.
Acham will be present at screenings throughout the weekend as will Nomathande Dixon, Ivan Dixon’s daughter, as well as Natiki Hope Pressley, daughter of Sam Greenlee, author of the book on which the film is based.
Dixon, who died in 2008 at age 76, was best known for his role as Sgt. James Kinchloe on TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes,” a part he left before the show had ended to move behind the camera and begin a prolific career directing for television.
Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in the movie “Nothing but a Man.”
(Criterion Collection)
Also screening will be the 1964 film “Nothing but a Man” starring Dixon and directed by Michael Roemer, who died just last week at age 97. The film tells the story of racial tension in a small town; Dixon considered the film his favorite of his performances. The film will be paired with a 1960 episode of “The Twilight Zone” starring Dixon and Kim Hamilton.
The series will conclude Sunday with two pieces Dixon directed for television, 1983’s “Frederick Douglass: Slave and Statesman,” starring “Blacula’s” William Marshall, and an adaptation of Philip Hayes Dean’s “The Sty of the Blind Pig” starring Mary Alice and Scatman Crothers.
The Dixon family lived for many years in Altadena. What was once their home was destroyed in the January fires, a circumstance that gives the weekend an even greater emotional resonance.
“It’s special for the family because his wishes were never to have a memorial,” said Nomathande Dixon. “And this is something that feels like a tribute to him in our hometown of L.A. So we’re very appreciative of that. And I think he would’ve been thrilled.”
Points of interest
‘Michael Clayton’ in 35mm
George Clooney, left, and Sydney Pollack in the movie “Michael Clayton.”
(Myles Aronowitz / Warner Bros. Pictures)
At Vidiots on Saturday will be a 35mm screening of 2007’s “Michael Clayton” with writer-director Tony Gilroy in person. The film marked the feature directing debut for Gilroy, who previously had a successful career as a screenwriter and has gone on to be showrunner of the recent series “Andor.”
George Clooney stars in the film as a fixer for a powerful New York City law firm. He finds himself drawn into an already complicated situation involving defending an agricultural conglomerate in a class-action lawsuit when one of the firm’s top lawyers (Tom Wilkinson) has a nervous breakdown.
The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, with Tilda Swinton winning for supporting actress for her role as the conglomerate’s chief counsel. In his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Watching this film makes you feel that Gilroy, best known for writing credits on all three ‘Bourne’ films, has poured the energy pent up during a decade and a half in Hollywood into this strong and confident directorial debut about desperate men searching for redemption in a cold and ruthless world. … As a director, Gilroy has an unmistakable instinct for the emotional jugular and a breakneck storytelling style that pulls you through his movie, no stragglers allowed.”
Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst with ‘The Virgin Suicides’
Leslie Hayman, left, Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook and Chelse Swain in “The Virgin Suicides.”
(Paramount Classics)
On Sunday afternoon, the Academy Museum will screen Sofia Coppola’s 1999 feature debut, “The Virgin Suicides” with the filmmaker and star Kirsten Dunst in person. (There will also be a signing for Coppola’s new book of Corinne Day’s on-set photos from the film.) The story of five sisters in 1970s Michigan who all die by suicide, the film set the stage for Coppola’s gently incisive explorations of female interiority and a recurring collaboration with Dunst.
In his original review of the film, Kevin Thomas wrote, “Sofia Coppola shows an impressive maturity and an assured skill in adapting Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel ‘The Virgin Suicides’ to the screen for her directorial debut. As the title suggests, it’s a challenging undertaking that requires a smooth passage from pitch-dark humor to a stark finish. The result is a highly affecting film unafraid to exact an emotional toll. … While subtle in the utmost, Coppola leaves us with an understanding of how things could turn out as they did.”
‘Frances Ha’ and ‘Girlfriends’
Greta Gerwig, left, and Mickey Sumner in the movie “Frances Ha.”
(Pine District Pictures)
The New Beverly will host a double feature of Noah Baumbach’s 2012 “Frances Ha” and Claudia Weil’s 1978 “Girlfriends,” two sharply insightful portraits of female friendship, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
“Frances Ha” was the first screenplay co-written by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, both who would (of course) go on to collaborate on the script for the mega-successful “Barbie,” directed by Gerwig. In “Frances Ha,” Gerwig plays a 20-something woman coming to grips with life as an adult while struggling to accept the end of a friendship by which she has long defined herself.
In his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan declared it “Effortless and effervescent, ‘Frances Ha’ is a small miracle of a movie, honest and funny with an aim that’s true.”
Of Gerwig and Bambach’s collaboration, he noted, “For the actress, a quicksilver presence with a fluid face who couldn’t be more natural on screen, ‘Frances’ is an opportunity to build a character of unexpected complexity. For the director, having a gifted collaborator able to be so completely present adds a lightness his films have not always had and has made possible an irresistible command of the moment.”
I spoke to Baumbach and Gerwig about the film when it was premiering at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto.
“The writing of it and the acting of it were separate for me,” Gerwig said at the time. “The writing of it was such a huge thing, but the acting of it was scary. I really was worried I wouldn’t be right for it…. It didn’t feel like, ‘I wrote this great part, and I’m perfect for it.’”
“I can say I totally had Greta in my head,” Baumbach said. “I always thought, ‘I can’t wait for Greta to play this part.’”
“Girlfriends” stars Melanie Mayron as Susan Weinblatt, a young photographer in New York City, who finds her life starting to unravel when her best friend (Anita Skinner) moves out of the apartment they share together. The supporting cast also includes Christopher Guest, Bob Balaban and Eli Wallach.
Selected for the National Film Registry in 2019, the film was praised by Stanley Kubrick when it was originally released; he declared it “one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe.” Lena Dunham likewise sparked to the film, once recalling of her first viewing, “It felt eerie, in the true sense of the word, how familiar this film was to me. … I almost thought, ‘Have I seen this and been gently ripping it off for the last five years?’”
After reading about these California beaches, can you blame me for thinking about the south of France right about now? And, you know, the movies at Cannes this year were pretty good too. In fact, we might have another best picture Oscar winner from the festival.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, which is back in your inbox after a springtime sabbatical. Today, I’m looking at the news out of the Cannes Film Festival, wondering if Neon’s publicity team will be getting any rest this coming awards season.
The Cannes-to-Oscars pipeline is flowing
Last year’s Cannes Film Festival gave us a Demi Moore comeback (“The Substance”), an overstuffed, ambitious movie musical that everyone loved until they didn’t (“Emilia Pérez”) and a freewheeling Cinderella story that became the actual Cinderella story of the 2024-25 awards season (“Anora”).
Sean Baker’s “Anora” became just the fourth film to take the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and then go on to win the Oscar for best picture. But it had been only five years since Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” pulled off that feat, so this would seem to be the direction that the academy is going. As the major Hollywood studios have doubled down on IP, indies like A24 and Neon have stepped up, delivering original, daring films that win the hearts of critics, awards voters and, sometimes, moviegoers.
Neon brought “Anora” to Cannes last year, confident that it would make an ideal launching pad. This year, the studio bought films at the festival — among them the taut, tart revenge thriller “It Was Just an Accident,” from dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, and the anarchic political thriller “The Secret Agent” from Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho.
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi holds the Palme d’Or after winning the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize for “It Was Just an Accident.”
(Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP/Getty Images)
“It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme, making it the sixth consecutive time Neon has won the award. Despite being one of the world’s most celebrated and influential filmmakers for movies like “No Bears” and “The White Balloon,” Panahi has never received any recognition at the Oscars. That will change this coming year.
Another movie that might deliver the goods is a title Neon announced at Cannes last year, “Sentimental Value,” an intense family drama that earned a 15-minute standing ovation.
Or was it 17? Or 19? The audience at the Grand Théâtre Lumière might still be standing and applauding; who knows with these Cannes festivalgoers. I’d be long gone, heading to the nearest wine bar. The point is: People love this movie. It won the Grand Prix, Cannes’ second-highest honor.
“Sentimental Value” is a dysfunctional family dramedy focusing on the relationship between a flawed father (the great Stellan Skarsgård) and his actor daughter (Renate Reinsve, extraordinary), two people who are better at their jobs than they are at grappling with their emotions. They’re both sad and lonely, and the film circles a reconciliation, one that’s only possible through their artistic endeavors.
Norwegian director Joachim Trier directed and co-wrote “Sentimental Value,” and it’s his third collaboration with Reinsve, following her debut in the 2011 historical drama “Oslo, August 31st” and the brilliant “The Worst Person in the World,” for which she won Cannes’ best actress prize in 2021. Reinsve somehow failed to make the cut at the Oscars that year, an oversight that will likely be corrected several months from now.
Jennifer Lawrence in Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love.”
(Festival de Cannes)
But it’s not just about the prix
Reinsve could well be joined in the category by a past Oscar winner, Jennifer Lawrence, who elicited rave reviews for her turn as a new mother coping with a raft of feelings after giving birth in Lynne Ramsay’s Cannes competition title “Die, My Love.” Critics have mostly been kind to the film, which Mubi bought at the festival for $24 million.
Just don’t label it a postpartum-depression drama, for which Ramsay pointedly chastised reviewers.
“This whole postpartum thing is just bull—,” she told film critic Elvis Mitchell. “It’s not about that. It’s about a relationship breaking down, it’s about love breaking down, and sex breaking down after having a baby. And it’s also about a creative block.”
However you want to read it, “Die, My Love” looks like a comeback for Lawrence, last seen onscreen two years ago, showing her comic chops in the sweetly raunchy “No Hard Feelings.” Lawrence won the lead actress Oscar for the 2012 film “Silver Linings Playbook” and has been nominated three other times — for “Winter’s Bone,” “American Hustle” and “Joy.”
With Ramsay’s movie, which co-stars Robert Pattinson as her husband, Lawrence may well have printed her return ticket to the ceremony, which would be welcome. The Oscars are always more fun when she’s in the room.
