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Liam Neeson is officially stepping into the shoes of Frank Drebin Jr., and early reactions to The Naked Gun reboot are glowing. Critics and fans who’ve caught the movie before most of us are finding it hilarious and brilliantly stupid. Neeson, who’s associated with more serious roles, is being applauded for his deadpan delivery.

Akiva Schaffer’s directorial, The Naked Gun, revives the beloved slapstick spoof franchise with Neeson in the lead, and the cast includes other talented actors like Pamela Anderson, Kevin Durand, and Paul Walter Hauser. So, let’s look at the hype train, which is fueled by the trailer alone, and what Neeson brings to the movie.

Liam Neeson’s Hilarious Crime Parody Gets Promising First Reactions Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun | Credits: Fuzzy Door Productions

If you watch the trailer of The Naked Gun, you can tell that it takes almost zero time to set the tone.

The Akiva Schaffer-directed reboot of Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, has been shown off to the public for the first time, and the question is: did the film successfully put the laughter into manslaughter? The immediate reaction is that the film has hit the heights expected of the iconic comedy franchise. Initial responses from those who saw the film earlier this week heaped praise on Neeson's committed and dry performance, while the sheer ratio of jokes has been a huge success.

The cast also includes the likes of Cody Rhodes, Liza Kozhy, Cch Pounder, Busta Rhymes, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, and Danny Huston. The Naked Gun is directed by Akiva Schaffer(Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping); he also co-wrote the script with Dan Gregor (Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers)and Doug Mand (How I Met Your Mother). It is produced by Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins,...

The Naked Gun reboot is receiving rave reactions weeks before its release. After the late Leslie Nielsen starred as the bumbling police detective Frank Drebin in the original Naked Gun trilogy from 1988 to 1994, Liam Neeson is taking over the lead role in the upcoming Naked Gun reboot, playing his son, Frank Drebin Jr.

The cast also includes Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser as Capt. Ed Hocken Jr., Cch Pounder, Kevin Durand, Cody Rhodes, Liza Koshy, Eddy Yu, and Danny Huston. The reboot was directed by Akiva Schaffer, who co-wrote the script with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand.

Now, weeks before its release, The Naked Gun reboot is receiving rave reactions on social media from those who have seen early screenings. Overall, the first reactions are praising the reboot as hilariously nostalgic, smartly silly, and laugh-out-loud funny, with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson perfectly cast. Check out a few of the...

Hype has been nothing but strong for the upcoming fourth movie in The Naked Gun series. And now that embargos have lifted following a screening this week, we now know that the comedy is just as arresting as we hoped. Check out some of the first reactions to The Naked Gun below!

But first, let’s start with our own JimmyO, who caught The Naked Gun screening and had, in part, this to say in his initial reaction: “Holy hell, The Naked Gun is the funniest flick I’ve seen for a while. Liam Neeson is so freaking perfect as Frank Drebin Jr. and the comedic chemistry he shares the Pamela Anderson is absolutely wonderful. Ms. Anderson is an exceptionally funny comic actress! One sequence in particular had me in tears, laughing so hard. You can see part of it in the trailer. But the compact 85 minute runtime makes this...

If you haven't seen the original Naked Gun, you'll probably be a little confused as to why Paramount's reboot/legacy sequel's collectible popcorn bucket is a beaver, but the design is a callback to one of the comedy classic's bawdiest gags.

In the 1988 movie, Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) follows Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley) as she walks up a flight of attic stairs, and wryly utters the immortal line, "nice beaver," as Jane thanks him before sending home the punchline by handing him down an actual stuffed beaver. 

We're not sure if the new movie will feature another beaver gag (maybe it'll be recreated by Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson), but the jokes from the trailers that have been released do seem to have gone over pretty well with fans.

"The environment that we're living in, I think, certainly helps," producer Seth McFarlane said of the positive reception to...

If you haven't seen the original Naked Gun, you'll probably be a little confused as to why Paramount's reboot/legacy sequel's collectible popcorn bucket is a beaver, but the design is a callback to one of the comedy classic's bawdiest gags.

In the 1988 movie, Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) follows Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley) as she walks up a flight of attic stairs, and wryly utters the immortal line, "nice beaver," as Jane thanks him before sending home the punchline by handing him down an actual stuffed beaver. 

We're not sure if the new movie will feature another beaver gag, but the jokes from the trailers that have been released do seem to have gone over pretty well with fans.

"The environment that we're living in, I think, certainly helps," producer Seth McFarlane said of the positive reception to the first trailer in a recent interview with EW. "It's...

IndieWire took home four of the top prizes at the 2025 Southern California Journalism Awards, including Best Website, News Organization Exclusive to the Internet, which honored the entire staff, and three awards for individual writers. IndieWire received a grand total of 11 nominations at this year’s awards, which marks the most it has earned in a single year. The winners were announced by the Los Angeles Press Club at a gala on the evening of Sunday, June 22.

IndieWire TV Critic Ben Travers won the Criticism of TV award, with the judges offering the following praise for his review of “Somebody Somewhere” Season 3: “What is the best thing a review can deliver? If it’s a favorable review, and the reader has not experienced the production, it inspires the reader to immediately seek out the piece and experience it. This review fills that bill admirably — and as a bonus offers accessible...

Stars: Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Jane Kaczmarek, George Martin, David Clennon, Dianne Wiest, Frances Conroy | Written by Michael Cristofer | Directed by Ulu Grosbard

Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro are wonderful Hollywood actors who, together, have won 5 Academy Awards: 2 for De Niro and 3 for Streep. They have acted on screen together several times in their careers. Including their first on-screen film, 1979’s The Deer Hunter, followed by Marvin’s Room (1996) and The Good House (2013).

In between these films, in 1984, right at the height of De Niro’s popularity, he was cast alongside the lovely Streep for a romantic drama entitled Falling in Love. Now this film just celebrated its 40th anniversary. So, what better time for a Blu-ray debut?

Sometimes magic is the only thing that’s real. Falling in Love is a shining example of the magic that’s created when two of Hollywood’s biggest and...

IndieWire received 11 nominations for the 2025 Southern California Journalism Awards, including a nomination for Website, News Organization Exclusive to the Internet honoring the entire staff and 10 acknowledgements for staff members in individual categories. The 11 nominations are the most IndieWire has received in a single year, breaking a previous record of nine.

IndieWire’s Chief Film Critic and Reviews Editor David Ehrlich and TV Critic Ben Travers are nominated in the Criticism of Film and Criticism of TV categories, respectively, which encompass their entire bodies of work from the previous year.

IndieWire Digital Director Christian Blauvelt is nominated for Obituary/In Appreciation, TV/Film Personalities for his story The Late Quincy Jones Reinvented Film Music, Defined ‘Fusion,’ and Did Something Extremely Rare at a Post-Screening Q&a.

IndieWire Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio received a nomination in the Film Feature, Profiles of Creatives category for Sean Baker Breaks Down the Emotional Last Scene...

Emmy season is ramping up, and now’s the time to dive deeper into the creation of some of your favorite shows. Join Universal Studio Group and IndieWire for “Usg University: Consider This, an evening celebrating the art of TV storytelling through craft on May 22.

IndieWire will also be partnering with Usg for its tentpole FYC campaign, Usg University, which encompasses a slate of virtual panels with producers, actors, and artisans from shows such as “The Four Seasons,” “The Americas,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Hacks,” “Happy’s Place,” and more. The first virtual panel will launch on IndieWire on May 19, with two a week rolling out in the weeks after that.

Request an invite to attend the May 22 event here. (Open to TV Academy and guild members.)

This partnership aligns perfectly with IndieWire’s in-depth, sharp awards coverage as well as Future of Filmmaking, our new content vertical and newsletter designed to...

Emmy season is ramping up, and now’s the time to dive deeper into the creation of some of your favorite shows. Join Usg University and IndieWire for an evening celebrating the art of TV storytelling through craft on May 22.

IndieWire will also be partnering with Usg University for an entire season of virtual panels with producers, actors, and artisans from shows such as “The Four Seasons,” “The Americas,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Hacks,” “Happy’s Place,” and more. The first will launch on IndieWire on May 19 with two a week rolling out in the weeks after that.

Request an invite to attend the May 22 event here. (Open to TV Academy and guild members.)

IndieWire is thrilled to partner with Universal Studio Group on this fantastic event and virtual panel series aimed at students as well at TV Academy and guild members,” says SVP and IndieWire Publisher James Israel. “This partnership aligns perfectly with our in-depth,...

A summer with strikes in the rearview and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” poised to keep kicking ass at the box office and sticking in IMAX theaters? We’re here for it.

Starting this month, the summer movie season is upon us, with indies and blockbusters and some freshly burnished I.P. rolling out in theaters and on streamers. Plus, the Cannes Film Festival kicks off May 13, so we’re about to get some much-welcome vigor restored in the moviegoing conversation. But people vote with their dollars — and, these days, their Letterboxd accounts — not their mouths, after all.

So which summer movies are likely to hit big?

While IndieWire always roots for originals, there are, of course, some familiar properties coming back to theaters this summer to guarantee cash flow. This is Hollywood after all, where rinse-and-repeat is hopefully less rote with (we hope) invigorating updates on titles and characters we...

The breadth and depth of music on television were on full display on April 15 at IndieWire and Disney’s Pass the Remote panel, where some of the best composers and music supervisors in the business gathered in front of a packed theater at Vidiots Foundation in Los Angeles to discuss their work.

Music supervisors Tiffany Anders (“Good American Family”) and Jen Ross (“English Teacher”) joined composers the Newton Brothers (“Daredevil: Born Again”), Siddhartha Khosla, Ariel Marx (“Dying for Sex”), and Michael Paraskevas (“Agatha All Along”) for a lively panel on the pleasures and challenges of creating great soundtracks.

One common thread throughout the discussion was the impulse to use music as an expression of character. For Anders, the needle drops on “Good American Family” — which include everything from 1970s ballads like “Sometimes When We Touch” and “Romeo’s Tune” to later radio hits from Jimmy Eats World, Meat Loaf, and...

“Sinners” is about to take a bite out of the spring film calendar in 2025.

Ryan Coogler’s ambitious big swing “Sinners” marks the “Black Panther” director’s first original project, out from under the weight of I.P., since his 2013 Sundance sensation “Fruitvale Station” put him on the map. The 38-year-old mega talent has had an impressive run directing both “Black Panther” movies along with the Rocky spinoff “Creed” (2015), while also producing that film’s two sequels — all major box office coups. But he wrote the Warner Bros. supernatural horror epic “Sinners,” out April 18, from his own idea, and first reactions are already praising a vision that welds classic vampire mythology to the metastasizing racism underlying the mid-century American South.

“Black Panther” and “Creed” star Michael B. Jordan plays dual roles as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, each representing their own side of a coin of good and corrupt. They...

The early reactions to Ryan Coogler’s new supernatural thriller “Sinners” are rolling in, and the consensus is that the vampire-laced movie has all the ingredients for a springtime hit. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown — only to be faced with an evil force.

Hailee Steinfeld, newcomer Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell and Wunmi Mosaku co-star in the period film set in the Jim Crow-era 1930s south.

Critics, attendees at the New York premiere and others who saw advance screenings of the new film from the “Black Panther” director are praising the project for being smart, sexy and spooky.

Slashfilm writer Bj Colangelo wrote on X, “Ryan Coogler has solidified his place as one of the greats (more than he already has) with #Sinners. As good as you think it’s going to be, it’s better. Scary, Sexy, and social commentary with a hell of a bite.

Earning his first ASC award for “Maria” last month, it seems cinematographer Ed Lachman now feels emboldened to bemoan current trends in film imagery. Though most movies no longer shoot on traditional film stock, many still seek out the grainy appeal in the final edit, a fact Lachman has come to detest. Still prone to work with film, as he did on Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” he also knows the challenges of processing that film by digital means.

Speaking with fellow Dp Roger Deakins during a recent episode of the “Team Deakins” podcast, Lachman explained how he prefers to use “color temperature and gels” in-camera to replicate film when working with digital, but most others only manipulate the image in post.

“This whole idea of shooting wide open, with no depth of field, so everything’s mush in the front or the back, they think that gives them the film look,...

[Editor’s Note: This list was originally published in February 2024. It has been updated to add new winners, including “Anora.”]

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hosted their first annual Academy Awards on May 16, 1929 — a short, 15-minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with tickets that cost the equivalent of $90 today — there were two top awards that night (and an honorary trophy for groundbreaking talkie “The Jazz Singer.”) The first was “Best Unique and Artistic Picture,” honoring boldly experimental art films pushing the medium forward: “Sunrise,” F. W. Murnau’s lyrical masterpiece of a romantic drama, received that prize. Then there was “Outstanding Picture,” given to more commercial fare made within the Hollywood system: That award was given out to “Wings,” a very good and extremely popular World War I action romance starring Clara Bow.

When AMPAS mounted a second ceremony a year later, they retroactively decided that Outstanding Picture was the real highest honor they gave out and discontinued Artistic Picture forever. And, as Oscar ceremonies...

From creating the “Saw” franchise alongside James Wan to revitalizing the monster-movie genre with his critical and financial hit “The Invisible Man,” Leigh Whannell has been tapping into our fears for over two decades, and his latest star, Julia Garner, believes he’s done it again with “Wolf Man.” Not only that, but that he’s gone further than ever before.

In a recent interview with ScreenRant, Garner shared that Whannell’s “Wolf Man” sources more terror than previous iterations by making the transformation from man to wolf part of the journey. In the film, Garner’s character is forced watch in alarm as her husband (Christopher Abbott) starts to become a beast, both physically and emotionally — like a disease slowly taking hold.

“It’s more scary when it is a slower transition because I still recognized little elements of Chris,” said Garner. “His skin and his hair was changing,...

So 2024 isn’t quite in the rearview, as we still have awards season chores to get through, after all. But as the churn of ceremonies from the Golden Globes to the Oscars (March 2) remains underway in honoring the same handful of 2024 movies for the next two months, it’s refreshing to at least survey what’s new and upcoming in 2025.

In other words, the movies no one’s talking about yet but sure will be soon enough.

Inevitably, at least a few of IndieWire’s 50 most anticipated films of this year will end up in the same awards conversation this time next year. From 2024 festival holdovers to strike-halted or repeatedly rescheduled originals and buzzy franchise entries, these are the movies we’re most looking forward to this year.

Granted, we’ve already gotten started on the Best Films of 2025 we’ve already seen (and you can expect some...

In many ways, an ending can make or break a movie. Think about a film like 2000’s “Pay it Forward,” a schmaltzy, sentimental drama about a child who inspires others to put good deeds out into the world with no expectation of anything coming back their way. In the hands of director Mimi Leder and led by strong performances from Haley Joel Osmont and Helen Hunt, the film manages to serve its purpose and tell a compelling story about being of service to others, all of which is undercut in its conclusion when Osmont’s 12 year-old character is stabbed to death at school. It’s a horrible, traumatic wrap-up for a film that otherwise preaches goodness, like having George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” fall into a manhole as he was running through Bedford Falls to reunite with his family.

For some films, their entire structure is built around the ending,...

When it comes to film scores, 2024 showed us just how many modes there are to how music can complement stories. The scores we’ve chosen guide us seamlessly through some truly wild premises and fraught emotional tangles. Whether the music is leaning on big orchestra swells, mashing together weird, re-purposed bits of metal, or engineering electronic pathos, a great soundtrack can make the moments that seem most disconnected from our day-to-day lives sound like the most relatable emotional experiences.

Our favorite scores of the year add momentum and pathos to key sequences, spike dramatic moments with a bit of musical humor, and tell emotional truths the characters in their films are trying to keep hidden or do not yet understand themselves. Some scores had to do extremely heavy lifting to provide atmosphere and immersion, while some only offered the lightest of touches. But none of them, in the words of Immortan Joe,...

2024 was a good year for television scores. We had a lot of returning series that expanded both their confidence and their musical language. We also had some new series with great new themes, new entries into wider TV canons (with five new animated and live-action “Star Wars” series alone), and devastating limited runs that left it all out on the field.

What’s so heartening about the year, though, is the experimentation and diversity you can find in our list of the best TV scores of 2024. There are plenty of television scores that aim to sound as classically symphonic as anything composed by John Williams, and we love them. But there are also a lot of scores that play with dissonance and atonality, scores that maximize their minimalism and make small variations in theme feel as loud as a cymbal slam, and scores that reach for specific times and places...

TV cancellations aren’t close to America’s most pressing problem headed into 2025 — but in an uncertain year for the entertainment industry, premature endings in creative workplaces pack as big a punch as ever.

Major guild strikes ended last year and the streaming bubble burst from 2022 has given platforms at least some time to recover since. Still, the countless impacts of Hollywood’s faltering business model could be felt throughout episodic and feature productions as dwindling work continued to move away from traditional opportunity hubs in Los Angeles. As film scenes in other U.S. states and Canada benefited from decline in Southern California, the swan song of peak television experienced an ongoing decrease in new series getting greenlit and an uptick in single-season cancellations.

From network staples ending this year to streaming favorites wrapping it up soon, the titles not returning say as much about the state of the...

It appears Ridley Scott may be on the, uh, outs with his longtime Dp John Mathieson. The two collaborated on six films, including “Gladiator,” “Matchstick Men,” “Kingdom of Heaven,” and most recently “Gladiator II,” but in a recent interview on “The DocFix Documentary Storytelling Podcast,” Mathieson voiced his concerns over the director’s use of multiple cameras and CGI and how his process neglects the nuances of cinematography.

“It’s really lazy,” said Mathieson. “It’s the CG [computer graphic] elements now of tidying-up, leaving things in shot, cameras in shot, microphones in shot, bits of set hanging down, shadows from booms. And they just said [on Gladiator II], ‘Well, clean it up.’”

Scott now favors using multiple cameras, a fact Mathieson puts on Scott being “quite impatient” and caring more about performance than look.

“It’s not very good for cinematography,” he said, adding later, “Look at his older films and getting...

When you’re one of Hollywood’s few remaining movie stars, it’s not surprising for your name to be floated for every leading man role popping up around town. Such is the life for Timothée Chalamet, whose slate this year included the release of “Dune II,” shooting “A Complete Unknown,” leading into what is gearing up to be an awards campaign for Best Actor, and starting production on Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme.” As if this weren’t enough, Ridley Scott shared in a recent piece for The Hollywood Reporter that, for a time, Chalamet was considered for the part of Lucius, a role which ultimately went to Paul Mescal after the director saw his performance in “Normal People.”

“Any studio would always prefer to have a known star,” said Scott’s producer, Doug Wick, to THR. Having only starred in indie features like “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers...

An enterprising surveyor of genre and tone, Ridley Scott has earned the admiration of audiences and critics alike with a seemingly unending interest in exploring the outermost limits of his art form. The British director broke onto the scene in 1977 with “The Duellists,” a French period drama starring Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine set during the Napoleonic Wars. He returns to the early 19th century with Joaquin Phoenix as its namesake historical figure with the epic “Napoleon,” in theaters November 22.

“I first became aware of Ridley Scott with his film ‘The Duellists,'” Francis Ford Coppola recently said of Scott’s debut in an Instagram post. “I was impressed, and realizing he was my contemporary began following his work, which was prodigious to say the least. One after the other, different styles, themes — all ambitious and never stopping, absolutely great films like ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Thelma & Louise,’ ‘Alien,’ and ‘Black Hawk Down....

Kevin Costner’s gotten a lot of attention for his projects this year — including his unseen exit from “Yellowstone” when it returned for the rest of its fifth season — and now the Motion Picture Sound Editors (Mpse) is singling him out for his attention to sound.

The premier organization of entertainment sound editing professionals announced November 20 that Costner will receive the 2025 Mpse Filmmaker Award, bestowed annually to a filmmaker of distinction, during the 72nd Annual Mpse Golden Reel Awards on Sunday, February 23, 2025, in Los Angeles. The Filmmaker Award goes to someone outside the sound community who demonstrates a strong appreciation and understanding of the impact sound editing has on a project.

Additionally, the organization announced that supervising sound editor Greg Hedgepath will receive the Career Achievement Award during the gala at the Ebell Theatre. That award goes to a person whose career has created a significant impact on the sound community.

For those without a clear understanding of the type of architecture explored in Brady Corbet’s Silver Lion-winning “The Brutalist,” a main feature of brutalism is a balance of maximalist and minimalist features. While many brutalist buildings carry an expressionistic beauty, they are often constructed using exposed, raw materials like concrete and brick, hence the barbarous nomenclature. In assembling this film, co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold, composer Daniel Blumberg, Dp Lol Crawley, and production designer Judy Becker all believed that juxtaposing these two opposing ideas held within brutalism was key to communicating the story put forth in “The Brutalist.”

Speaking with IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill following a screening on Sunday at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Los Angeles, the team went into detail about how they approached their specific responsibilities to the project with a unified vision. For Blumberg’s part in composing the score, his biggest challenge was finding the right...

Physical media culture is alive and thriving thanks to the home video tastemakers hailing everywhere from The Criterion Collection to Kino Lorber and the Warner Archive Collection. Each month, IndieWire highlights the best recent and upcoming Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K releases for cinephiles to own now — and to bring ballast and permanence to your moviegoing at a time when streaming windows on classic movies close just as soon as they open.

New in November are cult classics getting a proper home video life for the first time, including Christina Hornisher’s 1974 exploitation classic “Hollywood 90028,” about a cinematographer whose Tinseltown alienation leads him to commit a murder. Our Jim Hemphill deemed it “one of the greatest films ever made about how truly brutal Hollywood’s dream factory can be on those whose dreams don’t come true.”

Meanwhile, and we’re cheating a bit, a Vinegar Syndrome 4K Uhd of...

Welcome to the dark side of the American dream.

The best film noir movies of all time are visions of a universally known truth not always spoken out loud: It can be really hard to live in America, and if you don’t have money, you have nothing. If Westerns are about “manifest destiny,” film noir is about what comes after. If you do finally get the swimming pool, you might end up face-down dead in it, like poor William Holden’s struggling screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard.” Or you may have entered a miserable marriage to get your gilded palace. In film noir, you might have that gilded palace all to yourself if you’re willing to murder for it. Take a look at “Double Indemnity.” This genre is all about recognizing that some success in America might not be attainable through legal means, and so working outside the law becomes a tantalizing temptation,...

The LA Press Club has released the nominees for the 17th National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards, and IndieWire has received a site-record 14 nominations, including for Best Entertainment Website. This recognition occurs after IndieWire received seven notices in the final Naej awards in 2023, including a third-pace finish last year for Best Entertainment Website, out of our nine nominations that year.

In addition to the Best Entertainment Website nomination, which recognizes the entire IndieWire staff, 13 individual IndieWire staffers received specific recognition.

”The IndieWire team created a lot of terrific work this year and we’re honored to see so many of our submissions receive recognition,” said Dana Harris-Bridson, IndieWire’s senior VP and Editor-in-Chief. “Many thanks to the LA Press Club for giving us a site record for nominations.”

IndieWire’s Ben Travers received two nominations: One for Best TV Critic, recognizing his entire body of work for the year, and one in the Obituary,...

Burbank, CA – Today, Director Fede Alvarez announced at a special Beyond Fest partnered screening at the Aero Theater in Los Angeles that 20th Century Studios will release the terrifying sci-fi horror thriller Alien: Romulus on limited edition VHS December 3. An ultimate movie collector’s dream, the fully functioning VHS tape was created to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the legendary Alien franchise; the box features artwork by renowned artist Matt Ferguson.

Talent In Attendance: David Jonsson, Isabela Merced, Shane Mahan, Matt Ferguson, and Lee Gilmore. The Q&a was moderated by Jim Hemphill at Indiewire.

Director Fede Alvarez takes the phenomenally successful Alien franchise back to its iconic roots in the next jaw-dropping installment heralded by critics as “sheer terror” and “utterly breathtaking”. Alien: Romulus is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and has already thrilled audiences at the box office, becoming the second-highest-grossing film in the Alien franchise globally.

Alien: Romulus...

In Wes Craven’s “Scream” — not quite the definitive horror movie but certainly the definitive account of horror fandom — final girl Sidney famously responds to the question of whether she likes scary movies with a resounding no. “What’s the point? They’re all the same,” she says through the phone to the movie’s slasher. “Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door.”

Her complaint acts as a clever joke about the stale state of the mainstream slasher genre that Craven was riffing on (and unintentionally revived) through his tongue-in-cheek meta spin. But it’s also a nod toward the less-than-flattering viewpoint that gatekeepers and non-horror aficionados have toward the genre, as a playground for cheap and easy B-movies and formulaic jump scares.

Anyone who dives into the history of...

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock caused a bit of a stir during the production of their iconic 1994 action film “Speed” — and it wasn’t because of their shared star power.

During a Beyond Fest 2024 panel moderated by IndieWire editor Jim Hemphill, both actors reflected on how maneuvering one of the buses used in the film led to real car accidents. Jan de Bont’s blockbuster recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.

“Don’t you remember that day on the bus, though?” Reeves asked Bullock onstage. “When we were crashing through all the cars on the street? I remember we were a little under-informed. We were all on the bus and then we were driving down by San Diego or something. We were set by the ocean, and all of a sudden, we’re actually hitting cars. Boom! Boom!”

Reeves continued, “Everyone on their bus lost their mind. People were screaming.”

Co-star...

Beyond Fest hit overdrive Tuesday night with an electric anniversary screening of Jan de Bont’s iconic blockbuster Speed followed by an epic 50-minute Q&a with the filmmaker and his stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in a reunion 30 years in the making.

It was clear long before showtime that the event — part of the American Cinematheque at Egyptian Theatre series — would be special. Reeves, Bullock and de Bont had never previously shared the same stage to discuss their work on the 1994 film, which became a surprise hit after it grossed north of $350 million worldwide on a $30 million budget. It’s been more than a decade since Reeves and Bullock had a public outing together though they often have nice things to say about one another on talk shows or in magazines.

It was also a rare night out for Bullock who has kept a low profile since the...

Today marks the long-awaited arrival of “Megalopolis,” legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in 13 years. But the process of getting the experimental epic, about a dreamlike version of New York City where an architect develops the ability to stop time, has been a project over forty years in the making, after Coppola dreamed up the initial idea towards the end of production on “Apocalypse Now” in 1977. Spending years directing work-for-hire films like “Jack” and “The Rainmaker” to fund the ambitious project, a fusion of science fiction with operatic grandeur, Coppola planned to make the movie in 2001, shooting hours of test footage before production halted at least partly due to 9/11.

The day before Coppola’s 80th birthday in 2019, the director announced that the project had been reborn. But without any companies willing to spend the money to finance and distribute the epic, Coppola was forced to take it on himself,...

Dame Maggie Smith was many things. Hilarious and tragic. Elegant and aloof. Enchanting and deadly serious. Most will attribute their appreciation of her multiple-generation spanning career to roles in the “Harry Potter” or “Sister Act” franchises or perhaps “Downton Abbey,” which elevated her fame to a level she often spoke disdainfully of. For Smith was not an actress who was in it for the red carpets or accolades — though she received many, including two Oscars, five Baftas, four Emmys, and a Tony — but rather treated acting as a sturdy profession, one that required of her the utmost presence while on set or stage.

Beginning her career in the early 1950s, she played Viola in William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” at The Oxford Playhouse, followed later by roles in “As You Like It” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at London’s famed Old Vic theater. She rose to prominence on...

The 2024 Beyond Fest lineup has officially been unveiled, and fans are ready for a spooky good festival.

The genre film festival will open with the highly-anticipated reimagining of Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot.” The novel was originally brought to the screen in 1979 with a two-part miniseries and a 2004 film.

Now, director Gary Dauberman is giving the horror classic his own twist, with Lewis Pullman starring. The feature had a delayed debut as Warner Bros. pushed its slated September 2022 until Spring 2023 before pulling the film from a U.S. theatrical release all together. “Salem’s Lot” will debut on Max October 3, and will have its world premiere on the big screen for Beyond Fest.

The festival will take place from September 25 to October 9.

Beyond Fest will close with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud.” Kurosawa will be in-person to launch a 7-film retrospective with the festival. A Guy Maddin retrospective will also take place...

[Editor’s note: this list was originally published in April 2024. It has since been updated with new performances from Kidman.]

Nicole Kidman is the rare actress in the 21st century who, like the stars of Hollywood’s golden years, doesn’t disappear into roles so much as elevate films by her mere presence.

She’s certainly swung big at mainstream blockbusters (think: the “Aquaman” films) that might feel out of her step with her character-driven work elsewhere (like most of the films on the list that follows). But that’s because the Australian icon is unafraid of any role, whether stripping down her post-Oscar, A-lister veneer to film Lars von Trier’s Brechtian “Dogville” in Sweden, slipping into a bathtub with the 10-year-old possible reincarnation of her dead husband in Jonathan Glazer’s “Birth,” or, yes, donning a fake nose to play a suicidal Virginia Woolf for her Oscar-winning turn in “The Hours.”

On April 27 in Los Angeles, Nicole Kidman received the 49th AFI Life Achievement Award, joining the ranks of Jane Fonda,...

The advent of the fall festival season is always one of the biggest events of the year for cinephiles, but movie lovers from around the world have additional reasons to underline the dates on their calendars this year. The SAG-AFTRA strike turned last year’s Venice, Toronto, Telluride, and New York film festivals into shells of their former selves as films were forced to debut with star-less red carpets or, in some cases, pull out of festivals altogether. While many pointed out that the increased attention on smaller films wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, this year’s return to star-studded festival glory is long overdue.

While the asterisk still hasn’t fully been removed due to the impact that last year’s production slowdowns had on this year’s releases, festival attendees will still be able to enjoy a diverse feast of cinematic offerings. Who could possibly complain...

Fall doesn’t technically start in our hemisphere until September 22, but north of the film industry equator, autumn truly kicks off at the end of August. New releases unseen until now, past festival films finally getting their due, and fall festival premieres with distribution abound. Who said the fall movie season was dead this year because of last year’s strikes?

Well, whoever did was dead wrong, because there’s a firehose of sparkling new movies coming to theaters through the rest of the year. We’ve got Ridley Scott and Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington and his sons Malcolm and John David, Pedro Almodóvar with high priestesses of cinema Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Saoirse Ronan in not one but two Oscar contenders, Amy Adams back on the big screen, real pains, different men, and complete unknowns. Plus, horror readies for spooky season (and after a great horror summer) with a gluttony of gross-outs,...

James Cameron has no time to defend the 4K transfers of his films like “Aliens” and “True Lies.”

The auteur told The Hollywood Reporter that fans who criticize the quality of restorations should “get a life.” Cameron seems to be echoing the sentiment that Ridley Scott doled out for the historical accuracy of his own features like “Napoleon.” Basically, let the directors direct, the restorers restore, and be content as cinephiles, according to Cameron.

“When people start reviewing your grain structure, they need to move out of mom’s basement and meet somebody. Right? I’m serious,” Cameron said. “I mean, are you fucking kidding me? I’ve got a great team that does the transfers. I do all the color and density work. I look at every shot, every frame, and then the final transfer is done by a guy who has been with me [for years]. All the ‘Avatar’ films are done that way.

Wassup and welcome to IndieWire’s 2000’s Week, our annual summer-time celebration of whichever decade we’re thinking on most fondly this particular season. As we’ve previously done with both the ’80s (rad) and the ’90s (the shiznit), we’re spending this stretch of the dog days of summer looking back on some recent history. Some very recent history, in this case.

Like those previous iterations, this celebration of the best of the early aughts’ cinematic output will kick off with our ranked mega-list of the decade’s 100 greatest films, which we will then follow with interviews with the people who made them, essays about the impact these contemporary classics had on the world at large, close listens of the scores and needle-drops that still reverberate in our ears, and so very much more.

As we’re fond of saying around these parts, if you’re worried about the...

A while back, Arrow Video gave a Blu-ray release to the most popular sequel in the Exorcist franchise, The Exorcist III, in the UK. Now, the company has announced that they’ll be upgrading The Exorcist III with a 4K release on October 7th – and on that same day, they’ll also be releasing a Blu-ray of the least popular film in the franchise, Exorcist II: The Heretic. The Exorcist III can be pre-ordered on 4K at This Link. The Exorcist II: The Heretic Blu-ray is available at This Link, but keep in mind, this is a UK release, so you might need a region free player to watch the Blu-ray in other areas. If you’d prefer to get The Exorcist III on 4K with its original artwork, Arrow Video has you covered at This Link.

Here’s the info on Exorcist II: The Heretic: From John Boorman,...

The internet loves to dissect things, from how a major star ended up getting a Dwi to how exactly Kim Cattrall came to record her scat singing video. But one thing that people still can’t confirm is how “The Sopranos” ended up turning to slo-mo and a wipe cut in a Season 5 episode.

It’s not for lack of trying.

For years, Reddit users have obsessed over the Episode 10 (“Cold Cuts”) moment in which Carmela blurts out to an ex-lover that she’s returning to her estranged husband, Tony, fueled partly because of massive pandemic watches. The episode’s director, Mike Figgis, briefly mentioned the wipe transition in his commentary on the series’ DVD set. And the question came up again during the interview process for Alan Seppinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz’s definitive making-of book, “The Sopranos Sessions.”

But the question still tickled people’s fancies, so Seitz...

After receiving a record nine nominations this year at the 2024 Southern California Journalism Awards, it was announced last night at an awards dinner gala at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles that IndieWire’s Senior Social Media Manager, Veronica Flores, and Senior Social and Cultural Editor, Vincent Perella, had won Best Use of Social Media to Enhance and/or Cover a Story by a Group for their work on “How Barbie Became Real.” Judges for the category commented, “Well put together, clean editing, snappy and just right for social media. Great job!”

In addition to this win, IndieWire’s Deputy TV Editor and TV Critic Ben Travers, who won an award last year for Criticism of TV, received third place in the same category for a number of his reviews, including his piece, “‘I Think You Should Leave’ Season 3 Is the Song of the Summer.”

IndieWire’s Features Writer,...

The late-spring festival season rolls on with the 2024 edition of Tribeca Festival, bringing fresh films, new TV, cutting-edge tech and gaming, and starry talks to New York City. Now in its 23rd year, the festival founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff is a platform for emerging voices and promising works on the hunt for distribution, along with world and North American premieres of titles with more established bona fides that nonetheless share a special connection to New York.

Running June 5-16, Tribeca kicks off with the world premiere of Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Trish Dalton’s fashion documentary “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” about the life and career of the Belgian-born sartorial icon and mogul. The opening night film sets the tone for a festival teeming with nonfiction titles, from other celebrity portraits like “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” and “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,...

IndieWire launched our “Pass the Remote” FYC TV screening series, produced in partnership with Disney, with a dynamic casting directors panel April 25, two Disney Storytellers panels April 29, and a panel about “Abbott Elementary” May 20.

Next up? A “Jim Henson Idea Man” panel on May 24 celebrating the documentary about the Muppets creator, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Like all events in the “Pass the Remote” screening series, it will take place at the Vidiots Foundation in Los Angeles’s Eagle Rock neighborhood.

Legendary director Ron Howard will be in attendance on the panel, as will composer David Fleming and editor Paul Crowder. Howard is a two-time Oscar winner. In recent vintage, he’s become a more prolific documentary director, with films such as “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week” (2016), “Pavarotti” (2019), “Rebuilding Paradise” (2020), and 2022’s profile of Jose Andres and the World Central Kitchen, “We Feed People.”

“Jim Henson...

The 2024 Cannes Film Festival may be lighter on glitz and glamour than in years past, but that means arthouse and international fare from emerging and established filmmakers will get a chance to shine. Still, at least two American auteurs, Francis Ford Coppola (“Megalopolis”) and Paul Schrader, have films in the main competition for the first time in decades. David Cronenberg (“The Shrouds”) and Yorgos Lanthimos (“Kinds of Kindness”) are also back at the festival, with both making personal stories in their own way: Cronenberg, here, reckons with grief over the death of his wife seven years ago, while Lanthimos appears to retreat back into “Dogtooth” territory in a film that’s almost a rebuke of the global success he’s acquired with “Poor Things” and “The Favourite.”

Sean Baker, Andrea Arnold, Ali Abbasi, Jia Zhangke, Karim Aïnouz, and Paolo Sorrentino are also back at Cannes this year with new films in the competition.

This year’s nominees for the 66th Southern California Journalism Awards were released today by the Los Angeles Press Club and IndieWire received a site-record nine nominations. Coming on the heels of our wins last year for Criticism of TV and Entertainment Reporting and following our 2022 win for Best Website, Traditional News Organization, the entire IndieWire staff has been nominated for Best Website, News Organization Exclusive to the Internet. IndieWire writers also earned nominations for individual accolades in eight categories.

“The nominated work illustrates the scope, insight, and unparalleled quality of our team,” said Dana Harris-Bridson, Senior VP and Editor-in-Chief at IndieWire. “We are thrilled and sincerely appreciate the Los Angeles Press Club for the Southern California Journalism Award nods.”

After winning the award for Best Criticism of TV last year, IndieWire’s Deputy TV Editor and TV Critic Ben Travers is a finalist in the category again for a number of his reviews,...