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For “The Batman,” writer-director Matt Reeves hoped for a dramatic “emo” character reveal once Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) takes off his superhero costume. The key to such a stark contrast is, of course, eyeliner. “You can’t wear a cowl and not wear that,” Reeves told Esquire of the dark eye makeup Pattinson wears in the trailer. “All of the Batmen wear that.” The main distinction between Reeves’ take on his Kurt Cobain-inspired Bruce Wayne is that Batman won’t magically become clean-cut once his mask is removed....

The news marks a significant return to film for Shakman, who previously directed the 2014 thriller “Cut Bank.” Shakman has primarily directed television shows in recent years and has worked on several of the industry’s highest-profile titles, including “Succession,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Boys,” “Billions,” and “Fargo.” Shakman also directed all nine episodes of Disney+’s recently-released “WandaVision,” which is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “WandaVision” is considered to be a large viewership draw for Disney+ and the show received positive reviews from critics when it premiered on the streaming service in January....

While the event has long had the reputation of being the best place for Oscar hopefuls to mingle with influential voters, its first real post-COVID ceremony (last year’s was ravaged by Omicron) was packed to the brim with boldfaced names like Robert Downey Jr., Gabrielle Union, Adam Sandler, and Margot Robbie. At a certain point it became easier to keep track of contenders that were not there (i.e. “The Son” star Hugh Jackman and “Empire of Light” lead Olivia Colman)....

Jane Alsobrook, pioneering film executive, producer, mentor and breast cancer activist, died at her home in Sedona, Arizona, on Monday, December 13, 2021, mourned by her family, friends, and industry colleagues, who acknowledge her significant contributions to the independent film world. For Sundance, Jane was there at the beginning. Early in February, 1981, she met with Larry Jackson, Jeff Dowd, and several others for brunch in Los Angeles, the Advisory Committee tasked with planning a weekend conference, during the launch of the first Sundance Institute Filmmakers Lab....

Documentarian Brett Morgen has tangled with rock legends before, with “Cobain: Montage of Heck” and Rolling Stones doc “Crossfire Hurricane,” but when he landed the plum assignment of directing the first officially sanctioned David Bowie documentary feature, he had no idea what he was in for. Finishing the movie took five years of absorbing Bowie’s massive archive by himself, tracking down hi-res footage and music stems suitable for IMAX and Dolby Atmos showings, and editing all alone during a pandemic....

Here’s a synopsis from Variety: “‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ takes place at a boutique health-and-wellness resort that promises healing and transformation as nine stressed city dwellers try to get on a path to a better way of living. Watching over them during this ten-day retreat is the resort’s director Masha (Kidman), a woman on a mission to reinvigorate their tired minds and bodies. However, these nine ‘perfect’ strangers have no idea what is about to hit them....

Why? Well, Assayas saw the need to update the meta message of fame, mirrored celebrity, and even international filmmaking collaborations for the modern age. He felt the original film, starring his now ex-wife Maggie Cheung, has “nothing to do with the world.” “We are in a moment of very deep transformation of whatever we call cinema, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of financing, in terms of viewing,” Assayas explained to the Los Angeles Times....

The real-life besties continued their long-running prank, this time on O’Brien’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast. Rudd dropped by the podcast to tease a (faux) show he’s developing as a scripted narrative podcast for Audible. As Rudd listed the all-star cast that signed on to lend their voices to the series, including Adam Scott, Ken Marino, and Celia Watson, O’Brien listened as though it was fact. The series supposedly stars Rudd as a publicist who falls in love with a woman working in a craft store in New Orleans: Lifetime rom-com movie, much?...

As Peacock builds its growing slate of originals, its talk shows are one area where viewers are never quite sure what to expect. Speaking to the Television Critics Association virtual Winter Press Tour on Wednesday, a group of the platform’s on-air hosts said that’s exactly the way they want it. “This show, it’s my name because it’s who I am as a person,” said Zerlina Maxwell, host of the evening talk show “Zerlina....

“We were shooting ‘Two Towers’ and it was introducing Gollum,” Jackson said. “A key thing with Gollum is that most people know he’s Sméagol and he’s Gollum, it’s like a split. But we hadn’t got a scene where you really got the idea of it…‘This guy is two people.’ So we knew that we needed it but we had no time to shoot it.” Jackson was preoccupied with other elements of production at the time, so he convinced his co-writer and co-producer Fran Walsh to create the scene featuring the two halves of Gollum interacting with one another....

The late Kevin Conroy is the voice of Batman. I don’t say that in the past tense, because he will always be the voice of Batman. Conroy voiced Bruce Wayne and his superhero alter ego in hundreds of appearances across television, film, and video games, playing the character from a dizzying number of angles. No matter how comedic or dark the story was, whether Batman was snarling at supervillains or crooning in a jazz bar, Conroy imbued the character with charm, pathos, and menace, setting the pinnacle for superhero performance that has not been reached by anyone since....

The late “Goodfellas” icon passed away in his sleep at age 67 while filming “Dangerous Waters” in the Dominican Republic. One of Liotta’s final screen credits is the AppleTV+ limited series “Black Bird” co-starring Taron Egerton, which premieres July 8. While promoting the series on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Egerton opened up about working with his “hero” Liotta. “Sometimes actors can be…we’re a weird bunch, we do weird stuff, so I thought I’d leave him to it, give him his space, and across the room he sort of caught my eye and just stood up, walked towards me in a sort of frail way,” the “Rocketman” alum said....

“Aretha was not a slave to fashion, and she wasn’t also a mannequin,” said the Tony Award-winning Ramos (“Eclipsed,” directed by Tommy). “The best way to describe her was that she was an independent dresser. For me, it really meant that she deployed fashion and clothing in a way to telegraph her emotional state, her spiritual state, and her political state. She was going through a lot of [trauma and abuse] and telegraphing that....

“For me, everything in the movie is ‘Star Wars,’ and everything in the movie I can trace back to deeply, in a deep way, what ‘Star Wars’ is for me,” Johnson told GQ. “Everyone has a different take. I know there are ‘Star Wars’ fans who somehow think that ‘Star Wars’ was a serious thing, like the Batman movies or something. I was so young that when I watched ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ it had this deep, profound impact on me, because it was terrifying, because I was just young enough to not experience it as watching a ‘Star Wars’ movie, but to have it feel like too real....

The beloved 2004 romance drama, based on Nicholas Sparks’ novel of the same name, quickly became an iconic film, in part due to the famous quotable line Gosling’s Noah tells tortured love interest Allie (Rachel McAdams). In an interview with MTV News’ Josh Horowitz, Gosling joked he went to the “Marie Kondo school of acting” and prefers less dialogue, teasing he prefers to cut lines that don’t “spark joy.” Horowitz asked, “When you say, ‘If you’re a bird,’ are you like, ‘Oh wait, when I finish this line, it’s going in the canon....

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sam Mendes reflected on “Skyfall” and “Spectre.” His assessment of the two movies appears to align quite closely with popular fan sentiment. The director understands that “Spectre” was not received nearly as well as “Skyfall,” and he attributes the difference in quality to the films’ differing production timelines. The success of “Skyfall” incentivized producers to quickly turn around another movie, and he believes the lack of prep time ultimately hurt the story....

Over the past year or so, Seth Meyers has taken NBC’s “Late Night” on some type of agoraphobic road show. Driven from NBC Studio 8G by the global pandemic that forced the entire world to huddle, isolated in their homes, Meyers and the crew at “Late Night,” like so many late-night talk shows, endeavored to keep on keeping on, come hell or no haircuts. And so the show went on....

Here’s the synopsis: “In ‘Severance,’ Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team at Lumon Industries, whose employees have undergone a severance procedure, which surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. This daring experiment in ‘work-life balance’ is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself.” The series notably reunites director Ben Stiller with Patricia Arquette, who earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the 2018 Showtime series “Escape at Dannemora....

The subtext was clear: Sony is an outlier among major studios; it’s the only one without its own streaming service and the only one that has not used the pandemic as an excuse to premiere films in theaters and for at-home viewing on the same date, a move that his drawn ire from theatrical exhibitors. But Sony Pictures Chairman Tom Rothman put an even finer point on it when he congratulated 20th Century’s “Free Guy” on its box office performance, citing two reasons: “Number one, it’s terrific, and number two, you can’t watch it at home....

Meanwhile, the studio is celebrating the latest milestone for “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” On Monday, it crossed $760 million in domestic gross. That places it as #3 of all-time moneymakers on the “ignore film history and inflation list,” or around #23 among all sound-era domestic releases based on ticket sales (rather than variable prices). Either way: That’s phenomenal. It’s doing 80 percent or more of the business seen by “Avatar,” “The Force Awakens,” and “Avengers: Endgame,” none of which had to contend with a pandemic or a freefall in theater attendance....