News

An Honest Life’s ending was centered around a final confrontation between Charles’ bandits and Simon. Simon was a law student at Lund University who got mixed up with the wrong crowd the day he set foot in the city. He fell in love with a girl called Max, who introduced him to the anarchist named Charles and the team of thieves that worked for him—Robin, Dinah, and Gustaf. Since Simon wasn’t all that interested in becoming a lawyer, he gravitated towards this modern version of the Merry Men and began fraternizing with them on a regular basis. He officially became a part of the team when he played an integral role in the burglary of a showroom for expensive watches. The next step involved partaking in a robbery at the house of his wealthy roommate, Ludvig, but things went sideways and almost led to the death of the housekeeper,...

Imogen Poots takes the lead in Stewart’s choppy but compelling adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of abuse and sexual uncertainty

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, adapted by her from the 2011 abuse memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, is running a very high temperature, though never exactly collapsing into outright feverishness or torpor. It’s a poetry-slam of pain and autobiographical outrage, recounting a writer’s journey towards recovering the raw material of experience to be sifted and recycled into literary success.

The present day catastrophes of failed relationships, drink and drugs are counterpointed with Super-8 memories and epiphanies of childhood with extreme closeups on remembered details and wry, murmuring voiceovers. It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Lidia herself, well played by Imogen Poots, is a young woman who was abused in her teenage years by her clenched and furious architect father (Michael Epp...

As an actor, Kristen Stewart brings a restlessly kinetic energy to every role she plays; even when still, she still seems to be vibrating with her own intensity. As a director, she infuses The Chronology of Water – an adaptation of an impressionistic memoir by cult writer Lidia Yuknavitch, screening in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section – with that same personal electricity, blasting what could be a conventionally sequential biopic into splinters, shards and ripples that can be pieced together as we go. Or not, of course: those bits of memory can simply be embraced in all their vivid, meticulously planned disarray. If it is a biopic, it’s not like any you’ve seen before.

Imogen Poots plays Lidia from her first scenes as a schoolgirl swimming champion to her eventual emergence as a writer with a settled life: home, partner, child and a desk with a view over water.

The rape-revenge genre in cinema holds a paradoxical landscape within the cinematic language, provoking discomfiting thoughts, heated discussions, and a raw and visceral emotional response in the audience. Inherently feminist in outlook, this genre has often been revered as the expression of feminist rage and fury. However, this controversial and notorious subgenre of horror has been reviled as exploitative, with accusations of voyeurism and complacency. Caught in a tug-of-war between being celebrated and dismissed, these films offer a rare dichotomy of trauma and catharsis, and justice and spectacle. This motif has made its presence in arthouse classics as well as in the excesses of grindhouse cinema and has evolved, unfolding across shadowy city alleys, sun-scorched rural backdrops, tense courtrooms, and surreal, neon-lit dreamscapes.

The genre comprises two major plot points: the sexually abused survivor (usually female) and retributive violence. The story follows a familiar trajectory—a woman is raped, brutally,...

Although great novels do not always translate perfectly to the screen, using a profound piece of literature as inspiration is rarely a mistake. Many of the hardest aspects of storytelling are crafting characters with interiority, developing a world that feels like it could exist beyond the confines of the specific narrative, and detailing a time and era that informs the context of the situation. As a novel, “On Swift Horses” may have been pitched as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the “Great American Epic,” as there are innumerable comparisons to be made with the work of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerlad. As a film, Daniel Minhan’s directorial debut is absorbing and understated, even if it often feels overexerted in trying to bring to life every detail from the page.

Set in the midst of the Korean War, “On Swift Horses” explores the lives of...

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin American literature’s modern greats, died April 13 in Lima, Peru. He was 89.

He died surrounded by his family and “at peace,” his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa announced in a social post.

“He enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,” they added.

That body of work is huge. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa was also with once close friend Gabriel García Márquez, the towering star of the Latin American Boom, which brought to global attention the works of young Latin American writers – Peru’s Vargas Llosa, Colombia García Márquez, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar and Cuba’s Guillermo Cabrera Infante – which were among the first Latin American novelists to be published in Europe.

Combining a large influence of European modernism, William Faulkner, experiment and word play,...

American author William Faulkner once said that “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” This quote resonated with George R. R. Martin, who made sure to always make character drama and human struggles the focus of his stories, as seen in his A Song of Ice and Fire novels and the television adaptation, Game of Thrones. While the world might be one of magic, dragons, and undead armies, the main focus is on the various schemes, plots, alliances, and backstabbing done by the people of Westeros as they try to gain more power for themselves or fight to protect their families.

Game of Thrones was the most influential TV show of the 2010s, and the most influential scene may have been the Red Wedding, which came near the end of season 3, in the episode "The Rains of Castamere." In this episode, King in the North Robb Stark traveled with his mother Catelyn, his wife Talisa, and his uncle Edmure to meet Lord Walder Frey at the Twins. Robb was originally supposed to marry one of Lord Walder's daughters, but fell in love with Talisa. Trying to make peace with this important ally, Edmure offers to marry one of Lord Walder's daughters in Robb's place.

At first, Walder Frey seems to accept this substitution, but he's not a man to forget a slight. During the wedding, his men murder the Stark army, stab Talisa in her pregnant belly, stab Robb in the heart, and slit Catelyn's throat. Game of Thrones already killed...

Widely considered one of the most important and prolific film critics in America, Jonathan Rosenbaum began his career in the 1970s writing film criticism for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and the Village Voice before becoming chief critic of the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. At the Reader, he published over 5,000 reviews and columns; now, Jonathan runs his own website where he publishes old and new capsules. He is known, among other things, for being a champion of independent and international auteurs and for writing about them in a highly accessible yet personal, erudite style. Jean-Luc Godard once likened him to André Bazin and James Agee.

He has written multiple books on film. The latest, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader, was published by Hat & Beard Press in June of last year, and can be considered the definitive culmination of Jonathan’s writing (to date!). An autobiographical and chronological journey,...

Claude Jarman Jr., who received a Juvenile Academy Award for his heart-tugging performance as the boy who adopts an orphaned fawn in the 1946 MGM classic The Yearling, died Sunday. He was 90.

Jarman died in his sleep of natural causes at his Marin County home in Kentfield, California, his wife of 38 years, Katie, told THR’s Scott Feinberg.

In films released in 1949, Jarman starred with Jeanette MacDonald in the Lassie movie The Sun Comes Up, played the brother of a rancher on the run (Robert Sterling) in Roughshod and reteamed with Yearling director Clarence Brown to portray a youngster out to prove the innocence of a Black man in Intruder in the Dust, based on the William Faulkner novel and filmed in Oxford, Mississippi.

A year later, he played the son of a cavalry officer (John Wayne) in John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950).

Born on Sept. 27, 1934, Jarman was the 10-year-old son...

Copyright laws vary from country to country, but in the US, the copyright of a film expires 95 years after release. Thus, every year, a crop of old movies (and other works of art) enters the public domain, and 2025's haul is better than average, both in terms of film and literature. Novels like Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury entered the public domain on January 1st, as did beloved characters like Popeye and Tintin. The short film The Karnival Kid, Mickey Mouse's first talking appearance, also lost its copyright on that date.

The genius behind Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin dropped a take that might flip your fandom brain. He thinks Game of Thrones and Star Wars are basically two sides of the same coin.

George R. R. Martin | Credits: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Power struggles, family drama, and messy betrayals. It’s got us wondering if the Iron Throne is just the medieval cousin of the Death Star. Martin’s logic will make you see both universes in a way you never expected.

Why George R.R. Martin thinks dragons and Death Stars are just two flavors of the same storytelling magic George R.R. Martin in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert | Credits: The Late Show (@YouTube)

George R.R. Martin thinks Game of Thrones and Star Wars share the same storytelling magic. On HBO’s Official Game of Thrones Podcast, Martin dropped some serious wisdom.

It’s become an annual ritual: Every Jan. 1, more classic works of art or characters enter the public domain, and exploitation filmmakers with a tiny budget and a big taste for grisliness are scouring the list, looking for suddenly free intellectual property to turn into horror fare. Hence the slasher films that have already been created or are in the works turning beloved characters into homicidal maniacs, like the infamous “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.”

But these Pd-sploitation filmmakers are really picking low-hanging fruit and not digging nearly deep enough into the lists for ideas. So we’ve identified some films, novels and even memoirs and pop songs that are brand new to the public domain, as of the beginning of 2025, just begging to be bloodied up. Yes, including Popeye, the seeming innocent who arguably always had a bit of the glint of a serial killer in his eye — but also...

The new year has begun, and several major characters have officially become part of the public domain. Among them is a certain cartoon sailor with a taste for canned spinach.

Per CBS, Popeye is one of many properties that became public domain as of Jan. 1, 2025. Popeye's very first appearance was in the King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on Jan. 17, 1929. The character was an instant hit with fans, taking over as the strip's central character and eventually causing it to be renamed as Popeye. Depicted as a sailor with abnormally large forearms who gained superhuman strength after consuming spinach, the Popeye character would later be further popularized in animation. Notably, Robin Williams once played a live-action incarnation of the character the 1980 movie Popeye.

Related Disney & Gundam Collide With Bandai's Most Unexpected New Crossover Collectible

An upcoming Mickey Mouse figure from Bandai sees the iconic Disney character transforming into a giant...

The first iteration of Popeye the Sailor, literary classics by Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, and songs like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” are among the copyrighted works that will enter the public domain on Jan. 1.

As the calendar turns on New Year’s Day, thousands of copyrighted works across literature, film, and music from 1929 become open to fair use. This year’s slate also includes the French comic icon Tintin, Disney’s still-iconic The Skeleton Dance short (38 million views on YouTube!

Get ready, nerds: a whole host of iconic works of art — from film, music, animation, books, and more—are coming into the public domain in 2025. Last year's Public Domain Day was a big deal because it included the first-ever iteration of Disney's brand-defining Mickey Mouse. This year sees dozens of more Mickey animations entering the fold, alongside a host of other notable titles and characters, like Tintin, Popeye, "The Skeleton Dance" from Disney's SIlly Symphonies, alongside books like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Oh, and did we mention we're also getting the Marx Brothers' first feature film, as well as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford's first sound films?

Needless to say, that sound you hear is a million writers running to adapt Popeye and Tintin into the next great/bad horror film,...

Kill your darlings” is a phrase attributed to William Faulkner, advising writers to resist overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. This is true for any writing, wherein emotional proximity to the work might manifest into myopic creations in the grander scheme of things. However canonized this belief is, the hypothesis falls apart for Nicolas Winding Refn.

Armed with a style that has only grown more distinctive with every new film, Refn explores fundamental themes and deploys the camera to shift between fluidity and limbo. With sensibilities similar to a master architect, Refn uses frames to create moments that let the viewer internalize, and experience on a physio-psychological level, a creation that does not confine itself to a two-dimensional rectangle, but reminds you of what was felt while watching it. This is the moment the Nicolas Winding Refn effect kicks in, and this is when cinema affects one on a deeply personal level.

For his Oscar-contending documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, filmmaker Benjamin Ree drew inspiration from literary sources as much or more than cinematic ones.

“One of my main interests is dramaturgy… and structure,” he says over a breakfast of an omelet and waffles in Amsterdam. “I’m obsessed with that, and I’ve been studying that my whole life.”

In his Netflix film, Ree explores the journey of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a terminal condition that causes progressive weakening of the heart and skeletal structure. Despite the physical limitations caused by the disorder, Mats lived a rich life in the online World of Warcraft game – where his avatar was the powerfully built, able-bodied Ibelin. In that setting, Mats made many friends and impacted people far and wide, but his parents had no idea of their son’s vibrant virtual experiences until after his passing...

Plot: When a plague of unprecedented virulence sweeps the globe, the human race is all but wiped out. In the aftermath, as the great machine of civilization slowly and inexorably breaks down, only a few shattered survivors remain to struggle against the slide into extinction. The series is based on George R. Stewart’s classic sci-fi novel of the same name.

Review: Most post-apocalyptic stories tend to skew towards horrific and dystopian narratives. From The Walking Dead to Mad Max, the future usually looks pretty grim after the fall of civilization. Zombies, plagues, aliens, or even nuclear war have served to pave the way for cautionary tales brimming with violence through a microcosm of society seen through the survivors. Post-covid, these stories have continued to thrive even as we have experienced a real pandemic. Still, it has also afforded refreshed opportunities to tell hopeful and aspirational tales of the world to come.

If it had been released just two years ago, “Bonhoeffer” might have come across as simply the latest in a long line of respectable but predictable period dramas about brave Germans who dared to stand up to the Nazi regime. Today, however, the movie feels more like an uncomfortably timely cautionary tale with unsettling echoes of current events.

Not just because it reminds us that, in the late 1930s, Hitler’s sympathizers distributed a Nazified version of the Bible that depicted Jesus as a pure-bred Aryan — and demanded loyalty to Der Fuhrer in one of two extra commandments added to the original text. (Sales were huge.) Written and directed by Todd Komarnicki, a filmmaker arguably known best as the scripter for “Sully” from Clint Eastwood (who gets a special thanks shout-out in the closing credits hwew), “Bonhoeffer” illustrates the relative ease with which Hitler gained the acceptance and eventual fealty...

In this episode, we discuss some of the most important aesthetic issues in film and contemporary art.Alejandra Moffat is a Chilean dramaturge and writer. She has co-written relevan recent films from her country such as 1976, by Manuela Martelli; La casa lobo and Los hiperbóreos, by Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, and Cuando las nubes esconden la sombra, by José Luis Torres Leiva, films presented in screens such as the Cannes Filmmakers Fortnight, the Berlinale, Jeonju and San Sebastián.She has written experimental films, documentaries, and animation projects, where the script is developed parallel to the production. In 2022, she published her first novel, Mambo.On the other hand, Juan Cardenas is a Colombian writer, author of seven novels and two books of short stories such as Los estratos, Zumbido, Ornamento and Elástico de sombra. In 2018, he was selected as part of Bogotá 39, of the Hay Festival, and in 2019 he won...

This article contains discussions of sexual assault.

If there's one thing Stephen King knows pretty well, it's villains. The prolific horror author has been writing basically nonstop since he released "Carrie," his debut novel, back in 1974, and his work has been endlessly adapted for both the big and small screen. In 2009, he even compiled a list of his favorite villains that he didn't create, and it's a pretty solid rundown — which certainly isn't surprising.

From literary icons to on-screen favorites to a villain with a confusingly familiar name — I'll clarify that whole thing when we arrive at that point — here are Stephen King's top ten villains of all time, whom he ranked for Entertainment Weekly at the close of the aughts. King ranked his top 10 from "least villainous" to "most villainous," apparently, so we've preserved that order here.

Read more: The 50 Scariest Horror Movie Monsters Ranked

Max Cady From Cape Fear...

Being two of comedy’s most famous talents, Seth Rogen and James Franco had an enduring friendship, which included a long history of riffing off one another and collaborating. Beginning their collaboration with the 1999 show Freaks and Geeks, Rogen and Franco had a friendship spanning over two decades until the duo fell apart in 2018.

James Franco and Seth Rogen in The Interview | image: Columbia Pictures

Despite working together in hit comedies and sharing an unbreakable bond, Seth Rogen and James Franco sparked a rift, after the latter was accused of s*xually inappropriate behavior in an L.A. Times article. After Franco’s s*xual misconduct lawsuit was settled, the allegations seemingly caused him and Rogen to drift apart. Since then, their friendship has never been repaired.

The Beginning of James Franco and Seth Rogen’s Friendship

James Franco and Seth Rogen were both young and newcomers in the industry when...

San Sebastian — Barcelona-based Filmax has acquired international sales rights to “Time of Silence and Destruction,” a bio-doc feature about Luis Martín-Santos who, along with great friend Juan Benet, revolutionized the Spanish novel, as James Joyce and William Faulkner had achieved decades before outside Spain.

Martin-Santos’ “Tiempo de Silencio” (1962) and Benet’s “Volverás a Región” (1967) not only broke with conventional social realism but dragged the Spanish novel into the 20th century using stream of consciousness and shifting narrators and were hugely influential on younger writers active down to this day, shifting novel’s focus from chronicle to a high-style and language.

Led by Martín-Santos’ daughter Rocío and son Luis, who were just children the the writer died tragically in a car accident in 1964, “Time of Silence and Destruction” sees them open boxes of Martín-Santos’ unpublished papers as they talk to the few surviving friends and colleagues, situating Martín-Santos in his context,...

In the world of George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" books, one colloquialism is that "words are wind." This is the Westeros equivalent of "actions speak louder." Martin has proven the emptiness of promises correct by having failed to deliver the sixth book, fittingly titled "The Winds Of Winter."

With no new story to discuss, one pastime in "Asoiaf" fan circles is debating why Martin is taking so long, and if he even intends to finish at all. One theory, which notes the hiatus coincided with the premiere of television adaptation "Game of Thrones," is that Martin lost interest in telling the story as prose. Remember, he spent the '80s and '90s as a TV writer after his third novel, "The Armageddon Rag," flopped. He pivoted back to novels with "A Song of Ice and Fire" because his screenplays weren't being made. With...

Jeopardy! recently shared a compilation of all of Ken Jennings’ greatest reactions to wrong answers on the game show. As host, Ken Jennings has heard his fair share of crazy answers, but he never lets one go by without delivering a zinger. The Instagram mashup of his best comebacks has fans calling him the funniest man on television. Keep reading to see if you agree.

Ken Jennings Claps Back At Wrong Answers On Jeopardy!

The compilation of the Jeopardy! host’s reactions to contestants’ answers were shared while fans were watching summer reruns. It was captioned, “So wrong it’s right.”

Ken Jennings frequently adds his own quips when things aren’t going quite right on Jeopardy! It is something that reminds viewers of the late Alex Trebek, who hosted the game show for decades before his death in 2020.

Jeopardy: Ken Jennings

The official Instagram page for Jeopardy! shared...

Conan O'Brien didn't go to school for comedy, but he was always a writer. In high school, he wrote for his school newspaper, the Sagamore. He would go on to major in history and literature at Harvard and wrote his college thesis on the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. He also contributed to the notorious Harvard Lampoon. He always had a sense of humor, but was more of a book nerd and lit-facing intellectual than a standup comedy enthusiast. It was at some point in college that O'Brien was bitten by the showbiz bug, and he moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s to pursue a career in writing. He got gigs with "Not Necessarily the News," and would be hired by "Saturday Night Live" in 1988.

Shortly after O'Brien left "SNL," citing burnout, he was offered a job writing for the hit animated sitcom "The Simpsons." Already...

Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days suggests a kind of spring cleaning for the German filmmaker. The elaborate concepts and charged iconographies of The American Friend, Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire are nowhere to be seen here. Wenders aims for simplicity with Perfect Days, following a middle-aged man, Hirayama (Yakusho Kôji), as he goes about his day cleaning Tokyo’s toilets, taking pictures of trees, listening to classic rock and pop, reading classic literature, and savoring the humble sources of day-to-day affirmation that we tend to take for granted.

Hirayama’s humility is the gauntlet that Wenders has thrown down for himself. Perfect Days wants to be an invitingly human movie that homes in intensely on the little moments of a man’s life so as to unearth universal truths. There’s a bit of Vittorio de Sica’s micro-texture-minded sensibility swimming around in it, and the impression that Wenders...

Isabella Rossellini in La Chimera (Neon), on the red carpet (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images), in Blue Velvet (De Laurentis Entertainment Group/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis)The actor: Isabella Rossellini has carved out a unique career path by marching to the beat of her own drum, even though her family is...

Isabella Rossellini inLa Chimera(Neon), on the red carpet (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images), inBlue Velvet(De Laurentis Entertainment Group/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis)Graphic: Jimmy Hasse

Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what...

The generational chasm between our parents’ lives and the memories we preserve of them — sure, in turn, to warp and fade when passed to our children — is elegantly explored in “Little Girl Blue,” Mona Achache’s pained, poignant docudrama cry to her female elders. In an effort to process her mother Carole’s death by suicide in 2016, the filmmaker collates an assortment of archival materials to trace the arc of a turbulent and care-starved life, leading inevitably to the time-blurred figure of Achache’s grandmother, writer and editor Monique Lange. But it’s in the gaps between tangible records that the film gets most interesting, as Marion Cotillard steps in to inhabit the Carole of her memories, the ones Achache can’t quite find on paper.

This is hardly a novel technique, given the evolving hybridization of the documentary form, as filmmakers chase larger audiences with the narrative and aesthetic comforts of fiction.

Gargoyles comics are being reprinted by Dynamite Comics and creator Greg Weisman is involved in the project. Gargoyles: Quest is the latest addition, with its debut issue releasing in March, and a Kickstarter campaign has successfully funded the reprinting of three previous comics. Greg Weisman reveals that Demona remains a prominent and interesting villain in the series, and emphasizes the importance of reader support to continue the Gargoyles Universe.

It's a good time to be a fan of Gargoyles, now that the hit Disney animated series is enjoying a triumphant return, courtesy of Dynamite Comics. Screen Rant had the opportunity to speak with creator Greg Weisman about the Disney Afternoon series' new comic life, after its initial run from 1994 to 1997.

Dynamite Comics has been working with Greg Weisman, George Kambadais, Drew Moss, Pasquale Qualano, Jeff Eckleberry, Bonesso Diego, and Nicolo Laporini to bring fans new Gargoyles comics. Recent titles have...

In Wim Wenders‘ meditative, Perfect Days (2023), viewers are transported to a world where the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary with smooth and continuous strokes of cinematic poetry. The simplicity of daily routines takes on a profound significance, serving as a canvas for existential contemplation. Guided by the protagonist, Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), the film unfolds with mesmerizing cadence, offering a unique exploration of the human condition. Wenders delicately captures the essence of existence through the lens of existential contemplation, creating a quiet rebellion against the noisy chaos of modern life in the metropolitan. The narrative whispers through the viewer’s mind, unveiling the beauty and blessedness in simple acts like waking up and going to work, turning them into moments of celebration. It challenges the audience to reconsider their own lives, prompting reflection on whether the pursuit of comfort and luxury is a means to an end or an end in itself.

Those who fought in World War II are considered the Greatest Generation. And executive producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman paid homage to these young men who risked life and limb during the global conflict in their award-winning 2001 HBO series “Band of Brothers” and 2010’s “The Pacific.” And now they’ve taken to the not-so-friendly skies in their latest World War II series, Apple TV +’s “Masters of the Air.”

Created by John Shiban and John Orloff, “Masters of the Air” is based on the 2007 book: “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the War Against Nazi Germany,” the series starring Austin Butler focuses on the 8th Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group stationed in England. It was known as the “Bloody Hundredth” because of the high causalty rate.

Watching the series, one can’t help but remember the numerous bombardier films produced by Hollywood...

Following through on a warning earlier this month, Authentic Brands Group has revoked Sports Illustrated‘s license to publish due to a missed payment.

As a result of the move, the entire staff of the 70-year-old print and online publication was notified on Friday that their jobs were being eliminated.

“We appreciate the work and efforts of everyone who has contributed to the Si brand and business,” Si operator The Arena Group wrote in a memo to employees that prompted outrage and lamentation on social media.

Related: 2024’s Best Red Carpet & Party Photos

In a statement, Sports Illustrated Union and The NewsGuild of New York vowed to “fight for every one of our colleagues.”

The Arena Group, which has operated the venerable brand under a license agreement since 2019, said in an SEC filing this month that it did not make a quarterly payment of about $3.75 million.

Authentic “issued the company...

It’s that time of year where critics, film buffs, and awards prognosticators come together and search for a consensus on what were “the best films” from the previous year. It’s already begun with the Golden Globes this past weekend and the Critics Choice Awards coming in the next. Perhaps more than most years, the frontrunners for “the best picture” prizes are obvious too.

That is all well and good, but sometimes attempting to find a consensus (or at least a horse race winner) deprives us from acknowledging our true favorites; films that you or I might have loved and are convinced no one else in the world has seen. These are the pictures that may not be “the best,” but they are favorites for our staff, and we’d like you to consider giving them a chance. Also feel free to shout out your own choices in the comments section below.

The movie To Have and Have Not is a classic Hollywood romance set during World War II, known for its strong onscreen chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The movie is an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's book, but it deviates significantly from the original story, focusing more on the romance between the main characters instead of the political themes. The movie was born out of a bet between Hemingway and director Howard Hawks, who believed he could make a good film out of Hemingway's worst book. The bet turned into a rich and promising collaboration, resulting in a beloved film.

The books of legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway gave rise to amazing Hollywood productions, such as the many versions of The Killers and A Farewell to Arms, as well as foreign, independent productions, such as the Russian animated adaptation of the classic The Old Man and the Sea.

Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days suggests a kind of cinematic spring cleaning for the filmmaker. Gone are the elaborate concepts and freighted iconography of The American Friend and Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, not to mention of the vastly less impactful fictional films that he’s released in the intervening years. Wenders aims for simplicity here, following a middle-aged man, Hirayama (Yakusho Kôji), as he goes about his day cleaning Tokyo’s toilets, taking pictures of trees, listening to American rock, reading classic literature, and savoring the humble sources of day-to-day affirmation that we tend to take for granted.

Hirayama’s humility is the gauntlet that Wenders has thrown down for himself. Perfect Days wants to be an invitingly human movie that homes in intensely on the little moments of a man’s life so as to unearth universal truths. There’s a bit of Vittorio de Sica’s...

Toledo, Spain — Carmen Machi, one of the foremost performers of her generation in Spain, is attached to play legendary Barcelona agent Carmen Balcells, prime architect of the Latin American Boom and a key figure in the break out of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to worldwide renown.

Chile’s Invercine, producer of “News of a Kidnapping” which swept April’s Platino Awards, is teaming with Spain’s Abacus, Pausoka and Grupo Lavinia to develop and produce “Boom Agency” (“La Agencia del Boom”) which turns on Balcells extraordinary life, achievement and personality. The deal was confirmed to Variety at Conecta Fiction.

The series also turns on Balcells’ worst nightmare, the rupture of the deep friendship between her star writers, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García-Marquez, whose rift broke the back of the Boom.

Spain’s Oscar Pedraza, co-director of HBO España’s “Patria,” is attached to direct. Colombians Verónica Triana...

You are reading an exclusive WrapPRO article for free. Want to level up your entertainment career? Subscribe to WrapPRO.

“All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born,” William Faulkner wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” As we’ve seen with the WGA strike, Hollywood’s past issues with labor often seem like a familiar tangle. An ongoing exhibit at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles about the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s is making those attending since the writers’ strike began see the dispute in a new — and yet familiar — light.

The writers’ battle with studios is primarily economic, while the blacklist dealt with Cold War politics. But Skirball Center curator Cate Thurston, who put together the current exhibition “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare,” sees similarities between then and now — chiefly in the idea that studios and writers are pitted against each other by external forces...

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the desert Southwest in such novels as “The Road,” “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died Tuesday. He was 89.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced that McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. “Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.”

McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his expansive, Old Testament style and rural settings.

Before you ask, yes, Lou Reed’s rock standard “Perfect Day” does indeed make an appearance in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days”: on the protagonist’s stereo as suitably ideal sunlight pours into his small, neat Tokyo apartment, before swarming the soundtrack as we head out into the city on a calm weekend afternoon. If that sounds a little obvious, basic even, said protagonist Hirayama — a mellow, soft-spoken toilet cleaner beautifully played by Kōji Yakusho — would probably agree with a shrug. He’s into simple pleasures, not deep cuts. His solitary life is built around the things that make him happy and the work that keeps him solvent. He’s not inclined to wonder what other people make of it. Wenders’ film, in turn, is sincere and unassuming, and owns its sentimentality with good humor.

“Perfect Days” finds its maker in bracing, uncomplicated form: It hasn’t the ecstatic spiritualist...

Senegalese and French director Ramata-Toulaye Sy is only the second Black woman to make it into Competition in Cannes. Her debut feature, Banel & Adama, which had its debut Saturday, follows in the footsteps of Mati Diop’s 2019 Atlantics.

Sy draws on her roots in the Fulani, or Peul, culture of the Futa region in northern Senegal for her magic-realist film about a young couple whose passion brings chaos to their remote rural community. “The people of Futa have the reputation of being very dignified and sticking to their community,” says Sy, who was born and grew up in France. “I was raised in the Fulani tradition at home and French culture outside.”

Inspiration for Banel & Adama came from a desire to create a tragic African heroine on par with Pierre Corneille’s Médée or Jean Racine’s Phèdre. “We don’t really have these mythical, tragic characters, or we do,...

When Joel and Ethan Coen released Barton Fink in 1991, it turned a lot of heads.

The film, set in 1941, follows naive and principled New York City playwright Barton Fink (impressively realized by John Turturro), who moves to Los Angeles after accepting a job to write a wrestling picture for Capital Pictures. Fink sets up shop in the dilapidated and eerie Hotel Earle to begin work on the script, but quickly hits a mental impasse given the unfamiliar subject (one that Fink also views as beneath him). As his writer’s block gets worse, Fink rapidly descends into a waking Kafkaesque nightmare.

Barton Fink is both ambiguous yet impressively layered; a surreal and twisted pitch-black comedy that is brimming with symbolism and metaphors. The film also bears a lot of similarities to the Coen Brothers’ own creative struggles. Here’s how writer’s block inspired Barton Fink, arguably the most underrated film in the filmmakers’ cannon.

On January 1, 2022, A.A. Milne's 1926 children's novel "Winnie-the-Pooh" lapsed into the public domain. Filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield immediately took the opportunity to turn the notoriously gentle fable about a talking stuffed bear into a brutal, gory, low-budget horror movie. In his film, the young Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) has returned to his childhood home in the 100-Acre Wood after growing up. Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet (Chris Cordell), in his absence, were forced to eat Eeyore and grew into human-hating, murderous behemoths. The two creatures spend the bulk of the movie stalking around a remote vacation home murdering its tenants. 

The film is just as stupid as it sounds, but its premise was wild enough that crowds gathered out of curiosity. Made for a mere $100,000, "Blood and Honey" grossed $5.2 million worldwide. Not too shabby for a cheap, crude horror flick. In its opening weekend, the film garnered just enough excitement...

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is perhaps David Fincher's strangest film (if you don't count that time he summoned a cursed CGI Orville Redenbacher). Strange not because of disturbing CGI resurrections of beloved cultural figures, but because it doesn't feel like any other Fincher movie. It was well-received upon its 2008 release, but some derided its sentimentality, which according to Peter Bradshaw made for a "twee and pointless" movie. But the sentimentality is what makes "Benjamin Button" such a fascinating entry in its director's filmography, which is otherwise characterized by a coldly cynical tone. This might be the only time in Fincher's career that he was accused of being "twee" in any sense of the word.

There was definitely a sense that in the post-9/11, post-2008 financial crash world, people had more pressing concerns than watching Brad Pitt age in reverse. But that didn't stop the movie from making...

In "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Brad Pitt's Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett's Daisy Fuller come together and drift apart throughout, mimicking the ebb and flow of life's emotional journey. As director David Fincher explained to Emanuel Levy, "The universe conspires to make them who they are at exactly the right moment [...] And you kind of breathe a sigh of relief when they get together because now it can happen, exactly as it is supposed to." Which is strangely applicable to how "Benjamin Button" finally came to be made.

The project had been in development for decades. According to Reuters, as far back as the 1940s, William Faulkner tried his hand at adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story about a man who ages in reverse, only for the project to be shelved by Jack Warner. In the '80s, former agent Ray Stark snapped up the...

Fritz Lang’s trailblazing sci-fi epic Metropolis, the final Sherlock Holmes stories (and the detective character himself), and musical compositions like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “My Blue Heaven” are entering the public domain today, Jan. 1.

According to the Public Domain Day site, most works copyrighted in 1927 had their rights expire, as U.S. copyright law only remains intact for 95 years. Alfred Hitchcock’s early thriller The Lodger, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, musical compositions (but not the actual recorded songs) by Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Irving Berlin and the Gershwin brothers,...

A lot of life is boring. Well, maybe not boring, but pedestrian. Rote and pedestrian. We wash ourselves, earn money, run errands, buy stuff, and prepare our sustenance. So-called “slow cinema” can capture this connective tissue of our lives and there is no more relevant example than Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the film that just topped Sight and Sound’s decennial “greatest film” poll.

Up from 36th place in 2012, is Jeanne Dielman really the greatest film of all time? No, of course not. Neither was Vertigo. Citizen Kane had a stronger case, but isn’t the whole notion of a “greatest” film futile? I couldn’t possibly reduce cinema to a single title and I wouldn’t want to. Not even a top 10 would be a worthwhile endeavour.

Anyway, hype aside, what is Jeanne Dielman all about? This question has seen Chantal Akerman’s film leapfrog some 12,000 places...

Hello, and welcome back for a brand new Let’s Scare Bryan to Death! After a short hiatus to accommodate our Hellraiser fundraiser in September, I’m ready to get back in the saddle trying to catch up little by little with my horror blind spots.

I’m very excited this month as I’m joined by Annie Rose Malamet of Girls, Guts, & Giallo, a “podcast and live screening series about subversive, controversial film.” Malamet brings a wealth of knowledge on queer history and kink to give her analysis a unique perspective, and you may have caught her on the PBS show The Historian’s Take and more recently on Shudder’s Queer for Fear documentary.

Admittedly, I’ve never been well-versed in the sapphic vampire films from the ’70s, so I was hoping the self-proclaimed “Only lesbian vampire expert” would bring one to the table. She did not disappoint with Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 film,...