“Not to give away too much but, when you make a movie you’re not exactly sure the final shape it’s going to be and we, believe it or not, shot a few things that included other cast members,” Taylor said. “We had Edie come in and she dressed up as Carmela and we shot something with her and it wound up not being in the final movie but it was a great excuse to see her again....

“You know, what happened was I’ve turned down many versions of ‘The Exorcist 2.’ I’ve said no every time,” Burstyn said. “This time they offered me a whole bunch of money and I still said no. And then they surprised me and they came back and said, ‘We doubled the offer.’ I said, ‘OK, let me think about this.’ I thought, ‘That’s a lot of money. Let me think about it....

“The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing,” the company’s board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement. “The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders.” When Elon Musk initially announced his offer to take the company private, few expected that the deal had any real chance of materializing....

Doubt is a common villain, particularly in stories where faith plays an outsized role. One of the real joys of watching “Evil” come into its own over the course of Season 2 is watching it embrace such a fundamental idea. The Paramount+ series has its share of lore — what is Catholicism if not a few millennia of meticulously documented tradition? — but it’s also thrived in a dangerous grey zone between out-and-out procedural and season-long religious Big Bads, spinning something thrilling with each passing week....

Both studies — USC Annenberg Inclusion Initative’s “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair” report and the San Diego State Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s “Celluloid Ceiling” report — looked at the number of women who directed the top 100 films of the year. This year, just 10 women — Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”), Olivia Wilde (“Don’t Worry Darling”), Jessica M....

Now, the prodigious director of some 20 fiction films (“Aguirre, the Wrath of God”), 31 documentary features (“Grizzly Man”) and 18 operas (“The Magic Flute”), has fallen in sync with a collaborator on his explorations into the awe and mystery of science, Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer (“Eruptions That Shook the World”). The two men first met on an Antarctica volcano during filming on Herzog’s only Oscar-nominated film, “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), the filmmaker said during a recent video interview (below)....

This year’s selection has no obligatory entry from the official Cannes competition, which reflects the decision to remove festival head Thierry Fremaux from his influential spot on the committee after more than a decade of wielding influence there. Additionally, the one possible entry from a veteran French auteur was snubbed as Claire Denis’ romantic drama “Both Sides of the Blade,” which won Best Director at the Berlinale, did not make the cut....

Back home, my euphoria gave way to frustration and envy. Cannes rolled out the red carpet for auteurs and treated cinema as high art; even in New York, movies felt like a much smaller piece of the cultural equation. What gives? The answer, of course, comes down to money. It helps to have a government with formidable resources invested in the arts, as France does, and Cannes reflects its country’s equation of cinema as civic duty....

“When Ryan Murphy came to us with these two spinoffs and the stories for ‘American Sports Story’ and ‘American Love Story,’ we immediately jumped at the opportunity,” said FX Chairman John Landgraf in a statement. “What began with ‘American Horror Story’ has spawned some of the best and most indelible programs of our generation, most notably ‘American Crime Story’ which created a beautiful partnership between Ryan, Brad, Nina, and Brad....

Clooney recently reflected again on what a disaster the movie personally was for him during a new episode of “The Howard Stern Show” (via Deadline). Clooney sat down with Stern and his co-host Robin Quivers to discuss his new film “The Midnight Sky” on Netflix, among other wide-ranging topics. Though at the time of the release of “Batman & Robin” Clooney was hot off “ER,” which he starred in through 1999, the Batman film was meant to be his big break onto the big screen....

“‘Bridesman’ is tailor-made for the Grindr community — it’s smart, queer, campy, and features sharp commentary on gay dating, heteronormative standards, and Grindr itself,” said Grindr’s Alex Black. “We are so proud to be showcasing some of the finest talent in the queer community as we continue to find new and creative ways to connect our users.” LGBTQ mediaphiles are already well acquainted with Fowlie’s particular charms, whether from his collaborations with gay internet sensations Drew Droege and Brian Jordan Alvarez or from his 2014 web series “Go-Go Boy Interrupted,” which he starred in and wrote....

Such is a fitting entrance to a retelling of a beloved classic with Guillermo del Toro‘s stop-motion take on “Pinocchio,” which debuts on Netflix in December 2022. The teaser trailer introduces Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, the narrator of the fantastical tale after actually living “in the heart of the wooden boy,” Pinocchio, voiced by newcomer Gregory Mann. The all-star ensemble cast also includes David Bradley as Geppetto, and Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, Burn Gorman, Christoph Waltz, and Tilda Swinton in supporting roles....

The 30th anniversary of HIFF kicks off October 7 with five world-premiere screenings including locally shot “Who Invited Charlie?” directed by Xavier Manrique, screening as both a Spotlight selection and as part of the Signature Program Views from Long Island section, supported by Suffolk County Film Commission. Jordana Brewster, Adam Pally, and Reid Scott lead the film about a Hamptons-based family who are forced to come to terms with their past after a mysterious Charlie unexpectedly shows up....

Speaking to /Film ahead of the HBO Max streaming release of “Earwig and the Witch,” Hayao Miyazaki’s son and fellow filmmaker Goro Miyazkai said his father’s retirement got so aimless that Hayao “needed to create something in order to live, basically.” Studio Ghibli reopened its animation facility for production on “Earwig” and Hayao’s upcoming feature film “How Do You Live?,” the experience of which Goro touched upon. “I did ‘Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter,’ a TV series, with an outside studio....

But HBO has never tied its sterling reputation to a single series. After “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” came “True Blood” and “Boardwalk Empire,” “Girls” and “Veep,” “Band of Brothers” and “True Detective.” There’s always something exciting and new in the offing, and 2022 is no different. Besides George R.R. Martin’s latest, HBO is slated to release anticipated originals from “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, “Doctor Who” showrunner Steven Moffat, and “Veep” showrunner David Mandel, as well as indie film favorites Oliver Assayas, Amy Seimetz, and Ava DuVernay....

Swank said, two decades ago when the movie was released, “Trans people weren’t really walking around in the world saying, ‘Hey, I’m trans.’ Twenty-one years later, not only are trans people having their lives and living, thankfully, [although] we still have a long way to go in their safety and their inclusivity, but we now have a bunch of trans actors who would obviously be a lot more right for the role and have the opportunity to actually audition for the role....

Howard’s stock-in-trade studio drama is harder to come by these days. Always a canny Hollywood player (with his Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer), Howard pivoted over the past decade to more indie-minded projects such as “Rush” and documentaries like “Rebuilding Paradise.” Netflix backed “Hillbilly Elegy,” a resonant family story that will likely lure far more viewers than the movie might have generated in theaters, COVID or no. In fact, it’s likely that no studio would have backed this, even with two of the great overlooked Oscar-contenders in Hollywood history above the marquee, Amy Adams (six nominations) and Glenn Close (seven)....

Daring, non-English language cinema challenges even the bravest distributors. That was certainly the situation at Cannes last July, when more than one buyer told me they were having a hard time parsing the marketplace potential for several of the festival’s critical darlings. One of these was “Drive My Car,” which took 30 minutes to roll its opening credits and used a quiet, enigmatic approach to craft the world of a widowed theater director rediscovering his creative passion through a multilingual version of “Uncle Vanya....

“Mamma mia, it was a nightmare!” said costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini, recalling how one actress would routinely fall on the sludge left behind by the giant snail (Maria Pia Timo, inside a vast latex suit on wheels) as the blue Fairy (Alida Baldari Calabria) followed. “More than once, alas, the little girl slipped. The stains that were getting onto the costume of the fairy were, of course, very difficult to remove....

“One of the things that made ‘Wolfwalkers’ unique for us was that we leaned into more expressive styles,” Stewart said. “We were always inspired by graphic novels and comics, where they could use mark making [applying lines, patterns, and textures to the surface] and different artistic styles to describe the emotions of the characters and the atmosphere of the piece. They weren’t afraid to change styles from one page to the next, so we thought that maybe we could get away with that in animation, too....