LOS ANGELES (AP) “Disclaimer” pulls the rug out from the audience before they’ve had the chance to get settled. There’s no building of empathy for its central character, Cate Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft. There’s no luxuriating in her banal every day, at work or in her plush London home with her snobbish husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and directionless, resentful Read More 

TORONTO (AP) When Pharrell Williams and Morgan Neville decided to embark on a movie about Williams’ life but animated in Lego pieces, they knew there would be culture shocks. But making “Piece by Piece” still led to some places that neither Williams, Neville or Lego could foresee. “We did have extensive conversations about how wide a back Read More 

TORONTO (AP) Although “The Room Next Door” is Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, Tilda Swinton notes that he’s never written in a language that anyone else truly speaks. “He writes in Pedro language, and here he is making another film in another version of Pedro language, which just happens to sound a little bit like English,” Swinton Read More 

NEW YORK (AP) Even in an election year, most seem to agree on one aspect about Ali Abbasi’s much-debated Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan is a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is chillingly riveting as the New York power broker Roy Cohn. One reviewer recently wrote that Strong’s portrayal of Cohn is “uncanny in its Read More 

TORONTO (AP) In “We Live in Time,” Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield act an entire life of a relationship — a gamut of dating, falling in love, having a child and reckoning with cancer. So when Garfield recently went on a six-day retreat in the woods without his phone, one of his first texts was to his Read More 

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) The weapons supervisor in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust” pleaded guilty Monday to a separate criminal charge of carrying a gun into a licensed liquor establishment. Movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed agreed to change her plea to guilty on the charge in exchange for Read More 

LOS ANGELES The American Film Institute (AFI) has unveiled the full lineup for this year’s AFI Fest, taking place in Los Angeles from October 23-27. Rounding out the slate of already announced titles are such highlights as September 5 directed by Tim Fehlbaum, All We Imagine As Light directed by Payal Kapadia, The Luckiest Man in America Read More 

NEW YORK DOC NYC–the documentary festival celebrating its 15th anniversary in-person November 13-21 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre and Village East by Angelika, and continuing online through December 1–has unveiled its main slate lineup. The 2024 festival presents more than 110 feature-length documentaries (including yet-to-be-announced Short List and Winner’s Circle titles) among over 200 films and dozens Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) Nicholas Alexander Chavez has had a “very surreal” few weeks promoting and premiering his first roles in primetime, in a pair of shows debuting within one week of each other. Chavez, 25, plays Lyle Menendez in Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” and Father Charlie, a true-crime obsessed priest in FX’s “Grotesquerie.” Both Read More 

LOS ANGELES FilmLA, partner film office for the City and County of Los Angeles and other local jurisdictions, has updated its three-year analysis of U.S.-produced, first-run, English-language scripted projects. And the findings include a significant decline in production with competition on the rise from other states and countries that are offering substantive incentives. This in turn has Read More 

NEW YORK Nikki Maizel has been hired as president of Publicis New York. She reports to Carla Serrano, global chief strategy officer of Publicis Groupe and CEO of Publicis New York. Maizel brings more than two decades of leadership experience to her new role. Most recently, she served as the head of business leadership and managing partner Read More 

LOS ANGELES Danish director Stefan Pflug has signed for exclusive U.S. spot representation with bicoastal Cultivate.Media, the commercial and content production company overseen by managing director/executive producer Mark Thomas and executive producer Stuart Wilson. Cultivate.Media is the first U.S. spot roost for Pflug, who is represented in France by Frenzy Paris, Le Berg Berlin in Germany, Holy Read More 

LONDON Nexus Studios has signed director and animator Hannah Lau-Walker for worldwide representation spanning commercials, branded content and music videos. With over 15 years of industry experience, Lau-Walker had been freelancing prior to joining Nexus Studios. Known for infusing charm, humor and warmth into her work, Lau-Walker has exhibited such talents as strong art direction, animation Read More 

LONDON & MUMBAI Global creative agency Ralph has entered into a partnership with Tulsea, a strategic talent and content management company based in India, that will bring together expertise across talent, brands and content. Expanding on Ralph’s mission to make content people love and share, the new partnership with Tulsea and its deep roster of talent brings this Read More 

AMSTERDAM Director Michael Middelkoop is joining Amsterdam-based 100% (formerly HALAL) for commercial representation worldwide. The signing comes after Middelkoop’s upcoming film Dit Is Geen Kerstfilm (This is not a Christmas movie) won big at this year’s Nederlands Film Festival, garnering three “Golden Calves” (the Dutch equivalent of the Academy Awards)–for Best Director, Best Screenplay (Lotte Tabbers) Read More 

BROOKLYN, NY NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, in collaboration with Lux Machina and AbelCine, announced the much-anticipated launch of The Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center at Industry City in Brooklyn. The fully functional Virtual Production stage will serve as a training platform for post-graduate NYU students and a cutting-edge commercial Virtual Production studio for the film Read More 

LOS ANGELES & AUCKLAND, NZ The Gardening.club., the sister company to production house The Sweetshop, has assembled a lineup of eight new artificial intelligence (AI) artists. The ensemble of talent looks to redefine storytelling by fusing cutting-edge AI with human creativity. The Gardening.club.’s guiding rule is that AI is never just a substitute; it must enhance and expand creative vision. Read More 

MIAMI, Okla. (AP) Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes grew up playing video games, including “probably hundreds of hours” colonizing a distant planet in the 1999 title Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. So when that same game studio, Firaxis, approached the tribal nation a quarter-century later with a proposal to make a playable character out of their famous leader Tecumseh Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) It’s not hard to spend a few hours watching Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield fall and be in love. In “We Live In Time,” filmmaker John Crowley puts the audience up close and personal with this photogenic British couple through the highs and lows of a relationships in their 30s. Everyone starts to think about Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) A movie documentary that uses only Lego pieces might seem an unconventional choice. When that documentary is about renowned musician-producer Pharrell Williams, it’s actually sort of on-brand. “Piece by Piece” is a bright, clever song-filled biopic that pretends it’s a behind-the-scenes documentary using small plastic bricks, angles and curves to celebrate an artist known for Read More 

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) Decades before he hosted “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump was … an apprentice. His mentor: Roy Cohn, the ruthless attorney who was a prominent New York power broker in the ’70s and ’80s after famously serving as a top aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The Trump-Cohn connection is well known. But in “The Apprentice,” his provocative Read More 

NEW YORK (AP) A May 5 trial date was set Thursday in Sean “Diddy” Combs’sex trafficking case, and a prosecutor argued that the jailed hip-hop mogul’s lawyers were trying to exclude a “damning piece of evidence” by claiming it was leaked by the government. Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson struck back against the defense’s claims during Combs’ first Read More 

LOS ANGELES The Visual Effects Society (VES) has announced the Society’s newest VES Fellows, who will be celebrated with the other honorees at a special VES Honors event later this month. This year’s venerated VES Fellows who will be bestowed with the post-nominal letters “VES” are: Matt Aitken, Girish Balakrishnan, Randall Balsmeyer, Michael Conte, Lisa Cooke, Bryan Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) “Joker: Folie à Deux” is the No. 1 movie at the box office, but it might not be destined for a happy ending. In a turn of events that only Arthur Fleck would find funny, the follow-up to Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story about the Batman villain opened in theaters nationwide this weekend to a Read More 

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