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Paramount+ is ready with an entertainment-packed May this year. The upcoming month will see the premiere of the much-anticipated new season of Showtime’s The Chi and the return of Paramount+’s Criminal Minds. Just like every month, Paramount+ is ready to overload you with great content. So, we’re here to tell you about the 7 best movies and TV shows coming to Paramount+ in May 2025.

Titles with an * will only be available with the Paramount+ with Showtime plan.

Just Friends (May 1) Credit – New Line Cinema

Just Friends is a Christmas romantic dark comedy film directed by Roger Kumble from a screenplay by Adam ‘Tex’ Davis. The 2005 film follows Chris Brander, a formerly obese high schooler who goes through a transformation, and when he returns to his hometown, he tries to get back his former best friend and crush,...

There is no filmmaker alive who understands the mundanity and quiet grace of the human experience quite like Mike Leigh. Over a decades-spanning career he’s found poetry and pathos in the everyday business of being alive. From David Thewlis’ nihilistic Johnny in Naked to Sally Hawkins’ irrepressibly effervescent Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, his characters feel intensely real while also reflecting a subdued desperation at the heart of British society.

After taking on a larger canvas with Peterloo, Leigh makes a welcome return to intimate character studies with Hard Truths, shooting in a stripped-down style that echoes the television films that made his name. He reunites with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who he directed in the Palme d’Or-winning Secrets & Lies, and who here gives a truly astonishing performance as a woman who cannot articulate her abject misery.

An affecting portrait of a woman in crisis

Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) constantly lashes out at everyone around her,...

Now that the Golden Globes are over, the official Oscar race is set to begin! On January 23rd the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce this year’s nominees, with the 97th Oscars Ceremony scheduled to happen on March 2nd. So before the committee announces their list for the Best Picture category, let’s predict 5 films on the list.

A screengrab of the Oscars thumbnail | image: YouTube/Clanhold Cinema

While The Brutalist, The Substance, Anora, A Complete Unknown, Dune: Part Two, Wicked, and Emilia Pérez are already believed to be the Oscar front-runner for the Best Picture category, we’ve 5 films that took people by surprise with their potential to win an Oscar nod. So let’s check out the list below and wait to see if the films ultimately qualify as nominees.

5. Conclave

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini

Streaming: Peacock,...

Although the big family holiday celebrations are nearly a month in the past, there’s always a need for a new look at sibs, parents, and kids at the movies. This new release is set across the pond and concerns connected family units headed by two sisters who couldn’t be more different. It’s that whole “sweet and sour” dynamic at play here. It’s also funny, sad, and totally engaging thanks to the reunion of a celebration filmmaker and one of his greatest actresses/collaborators after nearly three decades. This time out they’re giving us an intimate look at a damaged soul who really needs to deal with some Hard Truths.

The film’s story begins on a quiet street in a London neighborhood. It’s early on a sunny Spring-like day as a young man on a bicycle meets up with his boss as the enter...

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com audio film review for the new film “Hard Truths,” written and directed by notable British filmmaker Mike Leigh (“Happy-Go-Lucky’), an urgent character study on how one woman’s angry depressive state affects her entire family. In select theaters since January 10th. See local listings

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is the mother in a family of three, including her husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Pansy is constantly angry or withdrawn, lashing out at her family and her loyal sister Chantelle (Michele Austin). Her anger is a poison in the well of her relationships, and as she slides further down the depressive rabbit hole … exacerbated by a visit to her dead mother’s grave … she risks all of her relationships.

”Hard Truths” is in select theaters since January 10th. See local listings. Featuring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Michele Austin and Jonathan Livingstone.

This review was originally published on September 9, 2024, as a part of our Toronto International Film Festival coverage.

In Hard Truths, Mike Leigh's beautifully humane drama, the writer-director takes us into the lives of an ordinary British Jamaican family with the easily bothered, miserable Pansy at the center. Starring a ferocious and convincing Marianne Jean-Baptiste in an Oscar-worthy performance, Pansy finds a way to quarrel with everyone. The film concentrates little on plot structure and instead slowly peels back the layers of its characters and challenges us to rethink what we know about our elders. Inherently, witnessing a woman propel insults at people is humorous, but sadness layers the script, making it deeply moving.

Hard Truths, released in 2025, is set in post-covid London and follows Pansy, a working-class Black woman dealing with the aftermath of global panic, navigating a fractured psyche amid ongoing personal and societal challenges.

Director Mike LeighRelease...

Everyone has a Pansy Deacon in their life, or has at least encountered someone a lot like her at their job, a get-together, or simply railing against something or someone in a public place. She’s the type of person to find a storm cloud behind every silver lining, to see every glass of water as half full yet also containing an abundance of flesh-eating bacteria. When she unleashes a tsunami of accusations and verbal abuse on whatever her target is — her family, a salesperson, an unlucky someone stuck behind...

Hard Truths is the latest movie by acclaimed filmmaker Mike Leigh, with options available for audiences to view it. Mike Leigh is an English writer and director who's been making original films since the 1980s, including critically acclaimed masterpieces like Naked and Secrets & Lies. Hard Truths premiered at 2024's Toronto International Film Festival, where Screen Rant's review praised its outstanding, Academy Award-worthy performances and hard-hitting, emotional script. With the Oscars coming up soon, Hard Truths is a movie to keep an eye out for.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste leads the cast of Hard Truths as Pansy, a woman suffering from mental health issues who takes her anger out on family and friends. Despite everything, her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), stands by her and supports her. Mike Leigh's new movie is about family and the shaky connections that bind human beings in the modern world. The film has been praised for...

2024 saw its fair share of ups and downs in cinema with several gems surfacing over the year. As the year winds down it is time to look back and reflect on 2024’s best movies and former US President Barack Obama is doing just that. Obama recently took to social media and shared a list of his favorite movies of the year.

Barack Obama recently named his favorite 2024 movies (Credit: CBS News).

Obama singled out the opulent Dune 2, a major commercial success, and the Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light as some of the best cinema the year had to offer. However, the former President missed out on some absolute masterpieces that impressed fans. Here are five 2024 films that you must also check out.

5. A Real Pain Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a masterful comedy (Credit: Searchlight Pictures).

A Real Pain is a buddy-comedy movie...

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is a study in contracts. At the center of the tale are two sisters, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantelle (Michele Austin), who are as dissimilar as possible. While Chantelle, a hairdresser and single mother of two adult daughters, has a cheerful outlook on life, Pansy is brash, gruff and downright mean toward everyone she encounters—from strangers in the grocery store and the local furniture shop to her detached husband Curtley (David Webber) and reclusive son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Over the course of 100 minutes, it’s easy to despise Pansy because of her shockingly short temper and […]

The post “We Discover What the Film Is When We Watch It”: Marianne Jean-Baptiste on Hard Truths first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is a study in contracts. At the center of the tale are two sisters, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantelle (Michele Austin), who are as dissimilar as possible. While Chantelle, a hairdresser and single mother of two adult daughters, has a cheerful outlook on life, Pansy is brash, gruff and downright mean toward everyone she encounters—from strangers in the grocery store and the local furniture shop to her detached husband Curtley (David Webber) and reclusive son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Over the course of 100 minutes, it’s easy to despise Pansy because of her shockingly short temper and […]

The post “We Discover What the Film Is When We Watch It”: Marianne Jean-Baptiste on Hard Truths first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

If Marianne Jean-Baptiste doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for “Hard Truths,” then what the hell are we even doing here?

Her performance as Pansy — a depressed, middle-aged Jamaican-born Londoner who spews the hate in her heart on all the world — is a tower of acting. It’s a crowded field for Best Actress contenders this year: Mikey Madison, Karla Sofía Gascón, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Angelina Jolie, Cynthia Erivo, and, of course, Jean-Baptiste, who did not score a Golden Globe nomination Monday for “Hard Truths.” It’s not a movie that feels very Golden Globes, which went more for flashier films and musicals over Leigh’s pared-down, five-character drama. The Globes are mostly journalists, after all, though the telecast is always good exposure for voters tuning in.

Whatever Jean-Baptiste’s awards fate, the actress who broke out with a Best Supporting Actress nomination in 1997 for Mike Leigh...

In 2008, filmmaker Mike Leigh released Happy-Go-Lucky, a bright and breezy comedy (as alluded to by its title) that still managed to have the occasional dramatic bite. Hard Truths provides the antithesis, a film about sisters that plays as an unsettling social drama full of tears, bitterness, and familial consternation, but...

Oscar nominee Angela Bassett and Oscar winner Sam Rockwell hosted a private screening for Mike Leigh‘s “Hard Truths” at the Linwood Dunn Theater in LA Tuesday night. The audience filled with Academy members, press, and other invited guests gave actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste a standing ovation as she sat down with film critic and podcaster Kate Walsh for a post-screening Q & A.

Reunited with Leigh for the first time since she earned an Oscar nomination for “Secrets & Lies,” Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. The film may sound dark, and there are plenty heavy moments, but there is also an abundance of laughter as the actress delivers one zinger after the next aimed at whoever stands in front of her.

The actress described that Leigh’s writing process is...

If there’s one overarching theme within all of Mike Leigh’s films, it is a sense of naturalism. Leigh is a patient filmmaker who lets scenes play out to their fullest extent and does not conform to traditional narrative structures that impede the authenticity of what he is capturing. This general style has allowed Leigh to approach radically different topics, such as a tortured anti-hero in “Naked,” the London Opera in “Topsy-Turvy,” or a legendary British painter in “Mr. Turner.” With his latest work “Hard Truths,” Leigh turns his sights on the epidemic of anger that has seemingly swept the world over the past decade.

The notion of a filmmaker of Leigh’s experience reflecting on the generational divide could have easily been misconstrued as an embittered, older artist lashing out at a world that he no longer recognizes. However, “Hard Truths” doesn’t condemn just one generation, cultural shift,...

Exclusive: Octogenerian Mike Leigh isn’t slowing down in terms of output. The acclaimed British filmmaker is currently enjoying strong notices for new film Hard Truths, which recently debuted at TIFF and is playing this week at the London Film Festival.

Leigh took part in a Deadline Contenders panel in London this morning during which he dismissed any talk of retirement and confirmed that he is planning to shoot another movie next year.

“We’re planning to make the next movie in 2025. We’re raising the money now.”

The seven-time Oscar nominee wouldn’t be drawn on the subject or creatives involved in the project but Leigh often works with a team including producer Georgina Lowe and DoP Dick Pope.

In a recent interview Leigh admitted that the filmmaking process has become more physically challenging: “It’s a challenge physically. My cinematographer, Dick Pope, who I’ve worked with ever since Life Is Sweet,...

We’ve all had those days when we feel like raging against the hand the world has dealt us and the people we’ve encountered. For Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) that’s every day - even if she doesn’t leave the neat and ultra-clean suburban home she shares with her husband Curtley (David Webber) and young adult son Moses (Tuwaine Bennett).

As the Sex Pistols sang, “anger is an energy”, and it’s the one thing Pansy can harness. She’s tired, she tells everyone - and wakes with a start every time she is resting - so her annoyance feels like her last defence against the world. Her state of mental health and attitude are in sharp contrast to that of her hairdresser sister Chantelle. The warmth of Chantele’s household with her daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown),...

Mike Leigh is moving slowly around the Toronto International Film Festival with a cane. His latest film, “Hard Truths” has earned raves and plays the New York Film Festival October 5. The 81-year-old British filmmaker, Oscar-nominated five times for writing and twice for directing has struggled to raise money for his projects since his $18-million period battle epic “Peterloo” (Amazon) flopped at the box office in 2018 ($2 million worldwide).

“Hard Truths” was delayed by the pandemic, but Bleecker Street and a group of European backers cobbled together a modest budget, Leigh’s lowest in some time, for the small-scale film focused on the astonishing character of Pansy (“Secrets & Lies” Oscar nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a woman of Jamaican heritage who is so miserable that her massive pain and anger leak out on anyone unlucky enough to be near her, from her hapless husband (David Webber) and son (Tuwaine Barrett) to people in...

Few filmmakers can electrify the mundane as convincingly as Mike Leigh, whose trademark style—broadly characterized by discreet pacing and stripped-back storylines—belies a meticulous narrative rigor. Born from a well-documented process of intense rehearsal and improvisation with a cadre of trusted actors, Leigh’s scripts are astonishingly precise in their character work, spinning knotty, elaborate webs of tension out of generally unremarkable scenarios, such as drinks with a co-worker, or a weekly driving lesson. Implicitly, the films demand close attention. Blink and you may miss someone baring their soul.

Hard Truths, then, arrives as something of a challenge. Its central character, Pansy, isn’t particularly easy to sit with. In fact, she may be the most hard-bitten lead in Leigh’s entire roster. Nary a moment passes without her loudly, viciously slinging insults at anyone who crosses her path, be it her aptly named husband, Curtley (David Webber), her soft-spoken son,...

Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste at the San Sebastian press conference Photo: Amber Wilkinson Veteran filmmaker Mike Leigh and the star of his latest film, Hard Truths, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, have been in San Sebastian this week, where the film - which focuses on a mum with mental health issues and her family - is screening in Competition. She plays Pansy, a harried middle-aged woman who is angry at the world, not to mention her 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and husband Curtley (David Webber). She’s also tired of it, as she repeatedly tells her hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who is a force of warmth against the fierce misanthropy of Pansy.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Hard Truths Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival It’s 28 years since the pair of them collaborated on Secrets & Lies and, at the press conference, I asked whether that might make...

The Toronto Film Festival kicked off September 5 with a multi-move opening night that included David Gordon Green’s family comedy Nutcrackers starring Ben Stiller. It kicked off a slate of world premieres and buzzy movies across 11 days for the 49th edition of one of North America’s biggest film festivals.

Other key titles making their debuts in Toronto included The Luckiest Man in America starring Paul Walter Hauser, the Amy Adams-starring Nightbitch, theater guru Marianne Elliott’s The Salt Path, DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot and Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, which won the coveted People’s Choice Award.

Documentaries that made a splash included Elton John: Never Too Late and Paul Anka: His Way.

Click below to read Deadline’s reviews from the ground in Toronto, where the festival wrappred September 15.

The Assessment ‘The Assessment’

Section: Special Presentations

Director: Fleur Fortune

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen,...

28 years after their Palme d'Or winning collaboration on the extraordinary Secrets & Lies, director Mike Leigh and actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste have reunited on Leigh's upcoming new slice of social realist drama, Hard Truths. A return to modern times for Leigh after a twofer of period pieces (Mr. Turner and Peterloo), the legendary British filmmaker's latest — which sees Jean-Baptiste star as Pansy, a woman ever on the verge of a scathing rant, a breakdown, or possibly both — looks like a darkly comic, emotionally resonant, fiercely human piece of cinema driven by an ensemble of acting powerhouses. Or, as we like to call it, a Mike Leigh film. Check out the trailer below to find out what's getting Pansy's goat in the new movie:

A supermarket bust-up, an ostrich-based insult, and an admonishment of "cheerful, grinning people" all within the trailer's first 30 seconds? Yeah, we're thinking Jean-Baptiste and Leigh are back. But...

“Hard Truths” star David Webber said working with costar Marianne Jean-Baptiste was a “very intense and beautiful process” that was also “painful.” The pair play husband and wife Curtley and Pansy in the new Mike Leigh-directed film, which follows various members of an extended Black family living in London.

“Mike and I worked, individually, until things got to a certain level. Then we started to work together and we discovered how they work together. And that was a very intense and beautiful process, and also a painful process in many ways as well,” Webber told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design.

Leigh originally intended the make the movie before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, but the director said that the first version of the film “disappeared with Covid.”

“This is the film’s we’ve actually made,” Leigh added.

It shouldn’t be hard for “Hard Truths” to get some Oscar love, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be.

British actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers an emotionally charged performance in Mike Leigh’s powerful drama. She portrays a woman on the verge of mental collapse, navigating her life with a volatile mix of vulnerability and rage. Whether interacting with a furniture store clerk, her sister, or her husband and child, Jean-Baptiste commands the screen for nearly every one of the film’s 97 minutes, taking the audience on a turbulent emotional ride. But that can be a lot for moviegoers to handle. Hopefully, the searing nature of the performance won’t prevent voters from nominating her for best lead actress at this year’s Academy Awards.

In order for that to happen, Bleecker Street, the film’s distributor, will need strong word-of-mouth to keep the drama Jean-Baptiste and “Hard Truths” in the awards conversation.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste says that she’s playing “the ultimate Karen” in Mike Leigh’s new film Hard Truths. The character’s name is, actually, Pansy. The horticulturalists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, just outside of London, describe the Pansy flower as a symbol for “humanism.”

That’s not a description Jean-Baptiste would recognize in the Pansy she plays in the movie.

She smiles as she relates how the character she and Leigh created after intense discussion and rehearsal “as a combination of five different women, all of whom had the milk of human kindness removed from them.”

That’s a perfect summation of Pansy, a fastidious woman, who keeps the North London house she shares with her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) as their unmotivated son, spotlessly clean.

She’s particularly fixated on polishing her leather couch.

Her family, including her sister Chantel, played by Michele Austin,...

Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Pamela Anderson, Chole Sevigny, Ben Stiller and more struck a pose at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design.

This year’s iteration of the Toronto International Film Festival is playing host to the premieres of the Stiller-fronted comedy “Nutcrackers,” Anderson’s Vegas showgirl drama “The Last Showgirl,” the adaptation “Bonjour Tristesse” and others, and the cast and filmmakers behind these films stopped by TheWrap’s studio for interviews and to post for portraits by photographer O’Shane Howard.

Peruse TheWrap’s TIFF Studio portrait gallery below and check back throughout the festival as we update with more portraits.

Photo by O’Shane Howard

Kiernan Shipka, “The Last Showgirl” at TheWrap TIFF 2024 Portrait Studio.

Photo by O’Shane Howard

Jamie Lee Curtis, “The Last Showgirl” at TheWrap TIFF 2024 Portrait Studio.

Photo by O’Shane Howard

Pamela Anderson, “The Last Showgirl” at TheWrap TIFF 2024 Portrait Studio.

Mike Leigh is nothing if not an expert at conceiving (in conjunction with talented actors) a certain kind of larger-than-life character. Well, larger-than-life within the context of a realist drama. Think of Johnny in Naked, the revolting and terminally ranting man, or Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, a young woman perpetually optimistic to the point of threatening her own safety. They are not necessarily the people you meet every day, but they articulate the very real worlds that Leigh creates, often as forms of social criticism.

Hard Truths introduces the newest character in this canon: Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptise). The mother figure in a working-class family that includes the stoic tradesman Curtley (David Webber) and layabout 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), her life seems a nonstop series of indignities both emotional and physical. Flying off the handle with zingers at every person she can––be it her family, service workers, or doctors simply...

It’s no secret that Toronto loves Mike Leigh and it would be a lie to say Hard Truths, the latest from the legendary British director, didn’t get a warm welcome at its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival Friday night.

Hard Truths bowed at TIFF’s Royal Alexandra Theatre with Leigh and star Marianne Jean-Baptiste in attendance. The last time the actress and director worked together was on Secrets & Lies, which premiered at Cannes in 1996, won the Palme d’Or, and launched Jean-Baptiste’s international career.

In the new feature, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman full of fury at fate and the world who lashes out, bitterly, brutally and often hilariously, at her family and anyone unlucky enough to cross her path. It is a riveting performance from the British actress, who has been a more frequent fixture on the small screen, having spent seven seasons...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Bleecker Street releases “Hard Truths” in theaters on Friday, December 6.

In 2008, Mike Leigh made a movie called “Happy-Go-Lucky,” in which Sally Hawkins played a school teacher named Poppy who was so irrepressibly buoyant and upbeat that her joy seemed like a taunting provocation to the misery of the world around her. Sixteen years later, the filmmaker returns to similar territory with “Hard Truths,” a searing but indivisibly empathetic drama about a British Jamaican woman so wretched that it might as well be called “Misery-Go-Fuck-Yourself.”

Pansy is to Poppy what Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Glass was to David Dunn — the existence of one implies the existence of the other. They will never cross paths, much as all of Leigh’s characters seem to occupy a shared universe that so honestly resembles our own, but if they...

Some people bring happiness and positivity into the world, uplifting the lives of all around them, and some make flowers wilt and milk curdle wherever they go. As Pansy, Marianne Jean-Baptiste embodies the latter sort in “Hard Truths,” coming away from her reunion with “Secrets & Lies” director Mike Leigh with her richest character yet — not economically speaking, of course, though we’d all be millionaires if we had a nickel for every blistering complaint that spills from Pansy’s lips.

“Hard Truths” arrives more than 50 years after Leigh’s first film, “Bleak Moments,” bookending a career of tough, tell-it-like-it-is looks at working-class British life. Frankly, that vague-sounding title seems better suited to a Criterion Collection boxed set of his work than to his latest feature. A return to intimate kitchen sink realism after the grand-scale ambition of several relatively expansive period pieces — “Topsy-Turvy,” “Vera Drake,” “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo...

Right at the end credits of Hard Truths it says “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” I am not sure that is so true. I know many people who are just as mad at the world for various reasons as Pansy, the main character in Mike Leigh’s latest depressing look at working class day-to-day existence in Great Britain. We’ve been here in this bleak zone many times with Leigh, and in fact this is the second time the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste has worked with him, the first being her Oscar-nominated performance in his 1996 classic Secrets and Lies. She was unforgettable then, and she remains unforgettable now, albeit playing a thoroughly unlikable character in Pansy, a woman who somewhere along the way lost any sense of joy, if indeed she ever had any.

Pansy is a real pip if ever there was one. Leigh workshops his scripts,...

In the pantheon of unpleasant screen heroines, Pansy Deacon more than holds her own. Played by a ferocious Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the perpetually harried and hostile protagonist of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths spews her venom on everyone she encounters — from family members to furniture store employees, and all manner of unlucky folks in between.

Stranding us with such a spectacularly disagreeable person for 97 minutes may seem like a cruel trick, and the movie will test the patience of viewers who prefer their main characters closer to the likable end of the spectrum. But fans of the British auteur will discern, in Leigh’s latest, his trademark generosity, alongside his willingness to show people at their wince-inducing worst. With this prickly, piercing new film, the writer-director presents an intriguing challenge, pushing the bounds of our empathy and asking us to look, really look, at someone from whom we’d surely avert...

Director Mike Leigh vividly remembers the 1997 Academy Awards, where Marianne Jean-Baptiste was nominated for best supporting actress for her role in his best picture nominee “Secrets & Lies.”

“She should have won,” Leigh said during an interview at the Variety Studio, sponsored by J Crew and SharkNinja, during the Toronto International Film Festival.

Jean-Baptiste lost the award to Juliette Binoche, who shockingly won for her performance in “The English Patient,” which also took home the best picture Oscar. However, neither Binoche nor Jean-Baptiste were favored to win. Instead, Lauren Bacall in “The Mirror Has Two Faces” won Golden Globe and SAG prizes for her work.

“The person who won that year walked backstage after the interviews, came straight over to Marianne and said, ‘You should have won this,’” Leigh recalled. “That has to be for the record.”

Nearly three decades later, Leigh and Jean-Baptiste are teaming up again for Leigh’s 15th feature film,...

"Why can't you enjoy life?!" "I don't know!" Bleecker Street has revealed the first official trailer for Hard Truths, the latest Mike Leigh film premiering at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival soon. It'll also screen at the New York & London Film Festivals as well, and the US release is now set for January 2025. Legendary director Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. An ongoing exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses. For the first time since their award-winning Secrets & Lies (from 1996), Leigh and Oscar-nominated actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste reunite for Hard Truths, a compassionate story about family and the thorny ties that bind us. Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as Pansy, and Michele Austin co-stars as her sister, a single mother with a life as different from Pansy's as can be.

Among the most-anticipated films on the fall festival circuit is the long-awaited return from Mike Leigh with Hard Truths. Marking a reunion with Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, it’s the British filmmaker’s first contemporary work in nearly fifteen years. Ahead of a TIFF world premiere this Friday, followed by a stop at NYFF and one-week qualifying run on December 6th, then nationwide release on January 10th from Bleecker Street, the first trailer and poster have arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way.

At long last, we now have at least one festival premiere set for one of our most-anticipated films of the year. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path, a remake of his superb, bad-vibes 1998 thriller that stars Damien Bonnard, Mathieu Amalric, Ko Shibasaki, and Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, is now set for a premiere as part of San Sebastián Film Festival’s Official Selection.

Taking place September 20-28, the lineup also features the latest from Edward Berger, Gia Coppola, Costa-Gavras, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, Diego Lerman, Joshua Oppenheimer, and François Ozon. While we could see Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path pop up at other fall fests, it’s exciting to know it’s finally seeing the light of day.

Check out the full lineup below.

Bound In Heaven

Xin Huo (China)

Country(ies) of production: China

Cast: Ni Ni, You Zhou

This film narrates the poignant tale of a...

The San Sebastián Film Festival has revealed a bumper Official Selection for its latest edition, which will unfold from September 20 — 28.

The festival, which is celebrating its 72nd edition, will screen new films from established filmmakers such as Edward Berger, Gia Coppola, Costa-Gavras, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, Diego Lerman, Joshua Oppenheimer, and François Ozon alongside works from new filmmakers including Laura Carreira and Xin Huo.

Coppola’s The Last Showgirl heads to San Sebastián following a debut in Toronto. The film stars Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Dave Bautista. The film’s plot follows a seasoned showgirl who must plan for her future when her show closes after a 30-year run. Also heading to Spain from The Six is Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin. The British-Spanish production is said to portray the everyday life of a London family, addressing such issues as family relations,...

Part one of the second season of The Lincoln Lawyer ended with the prosecution finding conclusive evidence to prove that Lisa Tramwell is the one who murdered business tycoon Mitchell Bondurant. The prosecution got hold of her garden gloves, which had traces of the victim’s blood. The fifth episode also included Mickey getting beaten up in the car parking area by a bunch of goons. This was done only to put Mickey on the back foot for the upcoming trial. The next five episodes will all be about Mickey giving his 100 percent to make sure Lisa does not get jail time for something she claims is innocent of. As her lawyer, he will have to believe the words of his client and prove the same to the court.

Spoilers Ahead

Mickey at the hospital

A battered Mickey has been shifted to the hospital thanks to Izzy. He happens to...

When a show has a split release format, it must always conform to the regular TV standards of crafting a cliffhanger or a mini cliffhanger to keep people excited so they might consider returning.

It happened on The Lincoln Lawyer Season 1 Episode 5 when unknown assailants attacked Mickey and beat him properly.

But a short while before the beating, a frustrated Mickey said some awful things to Lorna, making for an additional cliffhanger.

They should have been enough to explore for at least two episodes if both were important enough to mark the midseason.

Izzy found Mickey in time and had him rushed to the hospital, where he recovered from his injuries nicely.

But he didn't have the luxury of sitting around waiting on his body, not when his mind was sharp and he had a case to win.

The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2 Episode 6 found Mickey trying to figure out who stole the agreement,...

Unthinkable, a drama series project based on the Boom! Studios comic book series created and written by Mark Sable and drawn by Julian Totino Tedesco, has received a put pilot commitment by Fox as the network continues to be aggressive this buying season. Unthinkable hails from Homeland and 24 executive producer Howard Gordon and writer Ben Queen (Cars 2). Written by Queen, Unthinkable feels a little bit like Castle set at the FBI. It tells the story of the unlikely pairing of a by-the-book FBI agent and a washed-up screenwriter who team up to stop a plot to attack the U.S. that the screenwriter and others concocted in a government-sponsored think tank years earlier. 20th Century Fox TV and Gordon’s studio-based Teakwood Lane will produce, with Gordon and Teakwood’s Hugh Fitzpatrick executive producing alongside Queen and Boom! Studios founder and CEO Ross Richie and manager Peter A. Golden.

For their 9th annual edition, the Atlanta Underground Film Festival will be assaulting the south from its Goat Farm Arts Center screening center on Sep. 13-16 with four days and nights of independent feature films, shorts and documentaries.

Some of the feature films screening include Lisa Duva’s multi-dimensional Cat Scratch Fever, Jason Lapeyre’s thriller Cold Blooded and Brady Hall’s hilariously named Hello, My Name Is Dick Licker.

This year’s Auff is also packed to the gills with short films with multiple blocks of shorts screening per day. Some of the special ones to look out for are Neil Ira Needleman‘s A Few Words in Favor of God, Jim Haverkamp‘s When Walt Whitman Was a Little Girl and Mike Salva‘s award-winning animated short Pound Dogs.

The full film lineup is below, but please visit the official Atlanta Underground Film Festival website for more details and to buy advance tickets.

Are you a big fan of old-school horror? Do you think '80's splatter films deserve their own wing in the Louvre? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then the new offering from Camp Motion Pictures is right up your alley! The Basement is a new retro 'big box' VHS/DVD five-film collection available on September 13, 2011 from Camp Motion Pictures.

From the Press Release

Camp Motion Pictures, the home entertainment company, specializing in 80’s and 80’s-style Diy cinema, unleashes a terrifyingly cool micro-budget cinema collection of five feature films in an exclusive VHS Collector’s Package that Joe Ziemba of BleedingSkull.com calls “A brain-baking vortex of Diy gore, suburban angst, and trash-gore exuberance!”

Eye-catching authentically ‘80s VHS poster illustration by noted graphic artist Vince Evans and “Big Box” design contains the never-before-released 1989 feature, The Basement, on VHS and DVD along with Sov cult cinema favorites Video Violence 1&2, Captives,...

Fox is opening the door to "The Intruders," a single-camera comedy project from actor-writer Danny Comden.

The project, from Warner Bros. TV and studio-based Wonderland, centers on a wealthy country club father in Arizona who falls in love with a white-trash single mom and blindsides his kids by moving her and her family into their estate, where the debaucherous world of Lake Havasu collides with the manicured lawns of Scottsdale.

"I kept hearing the networks are looking for a family show, and I had a highly comical show staring directly in my face: the family I chose to marry into," Comden said.

The premise is based on Comden's wife's real-life experiences as a child in Arizona; her upper-middle-class dad brought in his white-trash girlfriend and her family to live with them.

"This is an examination of the conflicts and class differences of these two polar-opposite words trying to co-exist under the same roof,...

Ving Rhames and rapper-actor Ja Rule will star in the indie feature Back in the Day for writer-director James Hunter. The film is slated to start production next month in Puerto Rico. The project is about a man (Ja Rule) from the right side of the tracks who does a favor for an old friend (Rhames) who is in the gang life. After doing so, he gets caught up in a situation beyond his control. Joe Morton also stars as a minister whose death sets the rest of the events into motion. Harel Goldstein, Neil Davis and Peggy Fry are producing the project. DEJ Prods. is financing the production, which is budgeted at less than $15 million. The company's Peter Marshall is overseeing Day, with DEJ topper Andrew Reimer executive producing. Kip Konwiser is also producing in some capacity. Rhames, repped by ICM and Brillstein Grey Entertainment, is in production on Universal Pictures' Dawn of the Dead. Ja Rule, repped by UTA and Handprint Entertainment, also has been added to the cast of Miramax Films' Shall We Dance? opposite Jennifer Lopez. The duo have previously collaborated on such songs as "I'm Real" and "Ain't It Funny." His previous credits include Half Past Dead, The Fast and the Furious and Turn It Up. He next appears in Scary Movie 3. Hunter is repped by WMA, Mosaic Media Group and attorney David Webber.

Jon Arbuckle, the perpetually single owner of Garfield the cat in the long-running comic strip, is about to get a live-action face in Breckin Meyer. The actor is in negotiations to star as Arbuckle in 20th Century Fox's big-screen live-action/CGI adaptation of Garfield, with Jennifer Love Hewitt finalizing a deal to play his love interest. Peter Hewitt is directing the project, which John Davis is producing through his Davis Entertainment. A March start date is being planned. The comic strip centers on a rotund orange- and black-striped cat named Garfield, his dull-witted canine cohort Odie and owner Arbuckle. The 27-pound feline, first published in 1978, is known for his laziness, wry remarks and love of lasagna. The script, written by Toy Story scribes Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, focuses on the rivalry between Garfield and Odie. The feature is live-action, with a computer-generated Garfield. Meyer, repped by the Gersh Agency, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment and attorney David Webber, has numerous film and television credits to his name, including the features Kate & Leopold, Rat Race, Road Trip and Go. Jennifer Love Hewitt, repped by CAA, recently wrapped shooting Intermedia Films' If Only.

Jon Arbuckle, the perpetually single owner of Garfield the cat in the long-running comic strip, is about to get a live-action face in Breckin Meyer. The actor is in negotiations to star as Arbuckle in 20th Century Fox's big-screen live-action/CGI adaptation of Garfield, with Jennifer Love Hewitt finalizing a deal to play his love interest. Peter Hewitt is directing the project, which John Davis is producing through his Davis Entertainment. A March start date is being planned. The comic strip centers on a rotund orange- and black-striped cat named Garfield, his dull-witted canine cohort Odie and owner Arbuckle. The 27-pound feline, first published in 1978, is known for his laziness, wry remarks and love of lasagna. The script, written by Toy Story scribes Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, focuses on the rivalry between Garfield and Odie. The feature is live-action, with a computer-generated Garfield. Meyer, repped by the Gersh Agency, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment and attorney David Webber, has numerous film and television credits to his name, including the features Kate & Leopold, Rat Race, Road Trip and Go. Jennifer Love Hewitt, repped by CAA, recently wrapped shooting Intermedia Films' If Only.