Ethical Diamond came with a stunning late run to win the Breeders’ Cup Turf in a course record for Grand National-winning trainer Willie Mullins.
The 20-1 chance, who spent most of his early career jumping over hurdles, surged down the outside under Dylan Browne McMonagle to claim one of Flat racing’s biggest races, with more than £2m going to the winner at Del Mar in California.
Ethical Diamond, winner of the Ebor Handicap at York in August, triumphed from runner-up Rebel’s Romance and third-placed El Cordobes, with favourite Minnie Hauk unplaced.
OCTOBER half term is right around the corner and if you’re looking for a last minute holiday to entertain the kids, this hotel is for you.
It has eight pools, plenty of slides, a kids club and daily mini disco, families will never be bored.
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The Globales Playa Estepona is on the Costa del SolCredit: Trip AdvisorThe hotel has the biggest waterpark in the area and plenty of other activitiesCredit: Trip Advisor
There’s lots to see as the hotel site is across 40,000 square feet.
If guests want to escape the hotel there’s a free shuttle bus to Puerto Banús, a luxury marina and resort town inMarbella.
As for food and drink, the hotel has a main buffet restaurant which serves up breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
Mostly the food is Mediterranean-style, but there are other international options too.
There’s also the Terrace Bar and poolside bar for drinks and snacks, and the Beach Club is where guests can enjoy al fresco dining.
There are plenty of room choices from Double for single use without balcony, to Double without balcony, Superior Double with or without a balcony and Premium Doubles.
Temperatures on the Costa del Sol are in the 20s during October half termCredit: Trip AdvisorSome rooms have balconies overlooking the coastCredit: Trip Advisor
Each room features a bathroom, satellite TV, Wi-Fi service, air conditioning and comfortable beds
The hotel is just half an hour away from Marbella which is not just the place to go for a party.
Marbella has lovely beaches like Nagüeles Beach, Cabopino Beach and Fontanilla Beach which is known as a popular family-friendly option.
A week-long all-inclusive stay during half-term week in the hotel for a family of four in a Double Superior with Balcony costs €1,077.78 (£938.87) – which is £234.72pp.
To get to Globales Playa Estepona, Brits will have to fly to Málaga-Costa del Sol Airport.
Magic Aqua Rock Gardens, Benidorm Located in Benidorm, Costa Blanca, the Magic Aqua Rock Gardens Hotel, pictured above, is African-themed and less than a mile from the beach. The hotel boasts two outdoor pools, including a children’s freshwater pool with a waterfall and a tipping water bucket for the little ones. There’s also an aquapark featuring slides and kamikaze.
Magic Natura Animal, Water Park & Polynesian Lodge Resort, Benidorm The resort is located in the Terra Natura animal park. Guests get unlimited access to the animal park and the Aqua Natura waterpark. Terra Natura’s anime park has a ‘zooimmersion’ concept, meaning you can interact with more than 1,000 animals, including tigers, rhinos, and elephants, without barriers blocking your view. The hotel features three outdoor pools, including one with a children’s section, with a tipping water bucket, jets and a whirlpool.
Golden Taurus Aquapark Resort, Costa Brava
The resort has four pools and two whirlpool baths, and guests have unlimited access to the neighbouring waterpark, which has flumes and racing slides. The hotel’s main restaurant offers a buffet with a mix of international dishes and Spanish specialities. There are also two pool bars, a snack bar and a cocktail lounge. A kids’ club is available daily, as well as evening entertainment for visitors of all ages.
A curse befell Jacob Elordi when he was a child. It happened in the aisle of a Blockbuster Video. The culprit for the incantation was the image of the now emblematic Pale Man from “Pan’s Labyrinth,” flaunting eyes on his palms on the back cover of the DVD.
“My mother remembers this,” an energetic Elordi tells me in a Hollywood conference room. “I came running through the corridor and I was like, ‘I need this DVD.’ And she was like, ‘That’s so much blood and gore. You can’t watch it.’”
“She told you, ‘I’ll get it if you promise never to work with that director,’” Guillermo del Toro, the filmmaker behind the Oscar-winning dark fantasy, chimes in, sitting next to Elordi.
His wish granted, Elordi watched “Pan’s Labyrinth” at a young age. The fable set against the Spanish Civil War forever changed him. “From that moment, because of the way that Guillermo wills magic into the world and into his life, I feel like there was some kind of curse set upon me,” the actor says. “I do genuinely believe that, as out there as it sounds.”
Now, Elordi, 28, has become one of the Mexican director’s monsters in his long-gestating adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (in theaters Friday, then on Netflix Nov. 7). Under intricate prosthetics and makeup, Elordi plays the Creature that arrogant scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) breathes life into — an assemblage of dead limbs and organs imbued with a new consciousness.
Elordi with writer-director Guillermo del Toro on the set of “Frankenstein.”
(Ken Woroner / Netflix)
Receptive to tenderness but prone to violence, the nameless Creature now has, in Elordi, a performer suited for all its unruly emotions. “It was the innocence in Jacob’s portrayal that kept getting me,” says makeup artist and prosthetics designer Mike Hill. “The Creature could snap on a dime like an animal.”
Capable of complex thought, Del Toro’s version of the monster ponders the punishment of existence and the cruelty of its maker. “They’re almost like John Milton questions to the creator,” the director says of the Creature’s dialogue. “You have to give it a physicality that is heartbreakingly uncanny but also hypnotically human.”
The imposingly lanky, gracefully handsome Elordi, born in Australia, has risen in profile over the last few years, thanks to roles in the hit series “Euphoria” and the psychosexual class-climbing thriller “Saltburn.”
“It came from some other place,” Elordi says about the pull to the role of the Creature. “It felt like a growth, like a cancer in my stomach that told me that I had to play this thing.”
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
“Frankenstein,” however, seems to have been calling his name for a long time.
“Early in my career, I had been reading what folks on the internet would say about me and someone had written after my first film, ‘The only thing this plank of wood could play is Frankenstein’s Creature. Get him off my screen!’” Elordi recalls. “I went, ‘That’s an absolutely fantastic idea.’”
The thought reentered Elordi’s mind while making Sofia Coppola’s 2023 “Priscilla,” in which he played a moody, internal Elvis Presley to Cailee Spaeny’s title character. Long before he was offered the part, the hair and makeup team on “Priscilla” shared with him their next job was, in fact, Del Toro’s “Frankenstein.”
“I looked at [hair designer] Cliona [Furey] and I said, ‘I’m supposed to be in that movie.’ And she said, ‘Did you audition?’ And I was like, ‘No, but I’m meant to be in that movie.’”
“It came from some other place,” Elordi further explains. “It felt like a growth, like a cancer in my stomach that told me that I had to play this thing. I’ve heard stories about this from actors, and when you hear them, you kind of go, ‘Sure, you were meant to play this thing.’ But I really feel like I was.”
Due to scheduling conflicts, Andrew Garfield, originally cast as the Creature, dropped out in late 2023. With production set to start in early 2024, Del Toro had limited time to find a new actor. When Elordi finally heard he was being considered, he had to read the screenplay within hours of receiving it, and be willing to dive into the darkness.
“I had a few weeks to prepare, but I was lucky to have also had my whole life — and I mean that sincerely,” he says, a grin crossing his face. “Playing this was an exploration into a cave of the self, into every experience with my father, with my mother, my experience with cinema, my scraped knees when I was 7.”
Del Toro says he knew Elordi would make the perfect Creature from speaking with him over Zoom. He remembers immediately messaging Isaac, his Victor, convinced that Elordi could play both “Adam and Jesus,” which are the two facets that the creature represents for the director.
Jacob Elordi as the Creature in the movie “Frankenstein.”
(Ken Woroner / Netflix)
“I don’t think I’ve experienced miracles many times in my life,” Del Toro says. “And when somebody comes to your life in any capacity that transforms it, that happened here. This man is a miracle for this film.”
As he typically does for all the actors in his films, Del Toro sent Elordi several books ahead of working together. Elordi’s deep-dive reading list included the bedrock Taoist guide “Tao Te Ching,” Stephen Mitchell’s well-regarded translation of the Book of Job and a text on the developmental stages of a baby.
The most complex element of the performance, Del Toro believes, is playing “nothing,” meaning the blank, pure state of mind of a living being in infancy. “A baby is everything at once,” Elordi says. “It’s deep pain, deep joy, curiosity. And you don’t have chambers for your thoughts yet.”
Right before “Frankenstein,” Elordi had been shooting Prime’s World War II miniseries “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in Australia, an experience he describes as “grueling,” one that involved losing substantial weight. He repurposed his body’s subsequent fragility as a dramatic tool.
“My brain was kind of all over the place,” he remembers. “I had these moments of great anguish at around 3 a.m. in the morning. I’d wake and my body was in such pain. And I just realized that it was a blessing with ‘Frankenstein’ coming up, because I could articulate these feelings, this suffering.”
Aside from being an outlet for his exhaustion, the transformation also helped Elordi to recalibrate. “Frankenstein” arrived at a time where he found himself wrestling with a crisis of purpose.
“At that time in my life I really wanted to hide,” Elordi says. “I really wanted to go away for a while. I was desperate to find some kind of normalcy and rebuild the way that I acted and how I approached making movies,” Elordi says. “And when the film came along, I remember being like, ‘Ugh, I really wanted to go away right now.’ And I realized immediately the Creature was where I was supposed to go away to. I was supposed to go into that mask of freedom.”
Was he trying to escape the pressures of dawning fame? Elordi says it was much more philosophical than that.
“Who do I think I am? Who do I present myself as? What do I like? What don’t I like? Do I love? Can I love? What is love? Every single thing of being alive,” he says with a radiant smile. “The unbearable weight of being.”
“At that time in my life I really wanted to hide,” Elordi says of the moment just before taking on Del Toro’s version of the classic. “I really wanted to go away for a while. I was desperate to find some kind of normalcy and rebuild the way that I acted and how I approached making movies.”
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
The part entailed physically burying himself in another body. It allowed Elordi to renounce any hang-ups, surrendering to a fugue state of mind. Every moment felt like a discovery.
“I was liberated in this makeup,” he adds. “I didn’t have to be this version of myself anymore. In those six months, I completely rebuilt myself. And I came out of this film with a whole new skin.”
Elordi sat for 10 hours in the makeup chair on days that required full body makeup — only four if they were only shooting the Creature’s face. “Jacob wanted to wear the makeup and he knew it would be grueling,” Hill says.
“It was nothing short of a religious experience,” Elordi says. “The excitement I had even just getting my body cast — I was buzzing.”
Hill believes that the decision to make the Creature bald for the scenes where he is a “baby” is what makes Del Toro’s take unique within the “Frankenstein” mythos.
“Instead of what happens in cloning where a baby grows, Victor literally did make a baby, just a big one,” says Hill. “The Creature learns quickly because its brain and its bodies have already lived once. God knows what this Creature knew before he forgot and needed to be reminded.”
As for the skin, Del Toro envisioned a marble-statue look that he had been pursuing in earlier movies like “Cronos,” “Blade II” and “The Devil’s Backbone.”
“Mike took it and made it incredibly subtle: flesh with the violets and the purples and the pearlescence,” Del Toro says. “He bested every concept I’ve ever imagined by making it look like parts of exsanguine bodies. That was so brilliant.”
“It was the innocence in Jacob’s portrayal that kept getting me,” says makeup artist and creature designer Mike Hill, here seen working on a model for “Frankenstein.”
(John P. Johnson / Netflix)
A Frankenstein’s monster with rainbow-colored flesh, Hill says, could only exist in the context of a Del Toro picture.
“He had to look beautiful, like a phrenology head or an anatomical manual,” Del Toro adds. “We agreed — no scars. No sutures. No vulgarity.”
Del Toro’s casting of Elordi was fully validated when the actor walked on set for the first time in full makeup. “The whole process was anticipation,” Elordi says. “And then I opened my eyes and he was looking back at me, and it was exactly what I thought it would be when I first read the screenplay.”
For Hill, it was watching Elordi doing an interview, where his limbs seemed loose and relaxed, that convinced him he was the right actor to sculpt the Creature on. “I was like, ‘Look at those wrists.’ And then he turns, and he has these lashes,” Hill says. “Big eyes are beautiful for makeup. And structurally, Jacob has an unassuming nose, so you can build on that.”
“And he has a big chin,” Hill continues amid Del Toro’s boisterous laughter. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to glue one on.’”
Amused at his anatomy being dissected in front of him, Elordi claps back, mock-defensively: “He was grotesque to look at, but he was somewhat gifted. A deformed skinny freak.”
By the time Elordi got out of the makeup chair, he says, the electricity in his body had shifted. He stepped on set physically depleted but in the ideal headspace to embody the creature as it navigates an inhospitable reality.
“He’ll forever be fused into my chemistry,” Elordi says. “He was always there and now I have a little place for him. But I can’t rationalize him.”
Whether by curse or by miracle, Elordi’s Creature lives. And the actor feels reborn.
Out in theaters Friday, ‘Brownsville Bred’ is an intimate portrait of the actor, writer and director as a young girl in 1980s New York.
When Elaine Del Valle was in the sixth grade, she starred in the lead role of Sandy in her school’s production of “Grease.”
Decades later, she would return to that same school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to shoot scenes for her autobiographical film “Brownsville Bred” — which will debut in select theaters nationwide on Friday.
Tethered to the people and places that shaped her into the person she’s become, Del Valle, 54, has been working on this intensely personal project for over 16 years. Now a filmmaker, she began her entertainment career as an actor and later as a casting director.
Before reaching its final cinematic form, “Brownsville Bred” first had other iterations: a one-woman stage show, a novel, and a TV pilot doubling as a short film.
“I knew all along that I wanted to make ‘Brownsville Bred’ into something that people could see visually on screen, and that it could be shared more widely. But I never really had the resources,” she says from her home in New York during a recent video call.
The feature film fictionalizes Del Valle’s childhood and adolescence during the 1980s in the titular underprivileged Brooklyn neighborhood, where crime and drug use were just as quotidian as the sounds of salsa music and memorable family moments.
Central to this heartfelt coming-of-age story is Del Valle’s complicated relationship with her vivacious but troubled Puerto Rican father, a musician struggling with addiction who, after a stint in prison, returned to the island while she was still young.
For the scenes depicting Elaine (played as a teen by Nathalia Lares) visiting her father Manny (Javier Muñoz) in Puerto Rico, the writer-director chose to shoot on location in the town of Cataño where her father, the real-life Manny, was from. Bringing the film there reinforced Del Valle’s sense of belonging in her Boricua identity.
“People say to me, ‘Elaine, you’re so happy all the time. You’re so energetic, you’re so willing, what is that?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know, that’s just me. And after filming in Puerto Rico, I feel strongly that it is part of the culture there, because I felt that in every single person that was on set with me.”
Still from Elaine Del Valle’s Brownsville Bred, opening Sept. 19, 2025.
(Benjamin Medina)
Growing up in a low-income community, Del Valle couldn’t fathom a path into the performing arts. She married at 18 years old and had a daughter not long after. Around that time, she attended an event put on by the Hispanic Organization of Latino Actors. There, she learned she needed headshots to start reaching out to agents and going out for roles.
“I knew that I wanted more out of life, and I would take my daughter with me in her baby carriage to auditions,” she recalls. A determined Del Valle quickly found success as a bilingual actor for commercials. Eventually, Del Valle also landed the voice role of Val the Octopus, a motherly figure in the now-beloved animated series “Dora the Explorer.”
In the late 2000s, as she studied acting at Carnegie Hall, she started writing down her most significant childhood memories encouraged by her instructor Wynn Handman. She wrote about 10,000 words before deciding to adapt the text into prose that she could speak out loud in front of an audience. Recounting her foundational experiences became a cathartic, healing process. That’s when “Brownsville Bred” took the form of a one-woman stage play.
In 2009, Del Valle started performing the inspirational account numerous times at schools and corporate events; by 2011, it was off-Broadway.
“The audience reception made me understand how important this story was, not just to me and my artistry and my ability to heal as a human, but also to other people who needed those things as well, and to see themselves reflected on screen,” she recalls.
It was thanks to one of those performances that Del Valle got offered a job as a casting director. Her credentials: “I had been to every casting office in New York as an actor.”
To support her intention of one day turning this personal narrative into a film, Del Valle decided to turn it into a book so that she could own it as an intellectual property. These days, that’s become common practice in Hollywood: turn the story into a book, so that the screenplay is no longer an original creation, but an adaptation of an intellectual property.
The audiobook version of the tome, published in 2020, was narrated by Del Valle herself.
Del Valle first stepped behind the camera when she couldn’t find a director to helm her 2013 web series “Reasons Y I’m Single.” She had written the project, cast the actors, scouted locations and was ready to serve as producer — but in the end, “by default,” as she says, she had to direct it.
“That is where I really found my passion to work with actors and to get them to where I thought that they could get to,” she explains. “I do like directing more than acting, because I still get to act,” she says. “I am a scene partner as a director.”
Director Elaine Del Valle poses with her brother, Benjamin Medina, who also worked on set.
The road to finally bring “Brownsville Bred” to the screen was in motion when Del Valle received funding from WarnerMedia OneFifty, an artist development initiative, to produce a pilot that could serve as proof of concept for an episodic series. With that grant, the filmmaker would shoot the first 15 minutes of narrative, which played at multiple festivals as a short piece.
Del Valle’s experience as a casting director proved an advantage when she needed to cast the young woman who would play her in most of the film. Her search came down to two finalists, and ultimately Lares reminded her more closely of who she was at that age.
“The other girl is who I wanted to be when I was growing up, because she was so cool and tough,” Del Valle says. “And Nathalia was actually who I was growing up, which was very vulnerable.”
Muñoz, in turn, convinced Del Valle he could play Manny because of his musicality and talent for singing, qualities her father had. It was an Instagram video of Muñoz singing inside an empty New York subway car that solidified her belief in the actor. That Muñoz is an HIV activist also made him an ideal candidate, since Del Valle’s father lost his life to AIDS.
For the most part, reliving some of the most painful experiences of her early years while shooting didn’t affect Del Valle. Yet, she still needed to tap into her lived experience to guide the actors as they navigated this fiction constructed from her former reality.
“Leaning into the emotion a lot of the times was for them, always healing, but definitely for them, so that they can feel secure in the choices they were making to honor my story,” she says. “Sometimes they needed that more than I did. But every time I shared with them I was able to grow from that experience as well, to give them what they needed, but also feel it.”
Film still from the movie ‘Brownsville Bred,’ directed by Elaine Del Valle.
To produce the rest of the film, Del Valle invested her own savings, and utilized any cost-effective opportunity. At a party, she met the owner of a disheveled building in Queens, and asked if she could film there before they renovated it. On the corner near that building she found a Latino-owned pizzeria, and after explaining the significance of the story, the owner let her shoot there. She was cleverly frugal to bring it to fruition.
Through all the transformations from one medium to the next, the unchangeable essence of “Brownsville Bred” is “showing the contradictions in who we are, because so many times Latinos are seen as one dimensional,” Del Valle thinks. “This very much shows the layers of who made me who I am. I am urban, I am American, I am Latina, I’m Puerto Rican, I’m a daughter and a mother,” she adds.
“Brownsville Bred” ends with a quote by Del Valle for her father: “I made it mean something, Papa.” For the multihyphenate, the film is the culmination of a lifelong dream to honor him in all his complexity, both the joy and pain that they share in their time together.
“This film made his life mean something,” she says, barely holding back tears. “It made his experience mean something. It made his death mean something. I got to give him a legacy.”
Simultaneously, “Brownsville Bred” bears witness to what she overcame to accomplish this feat. “We all have our struggles and I’ve always believed that it is up to us to turn those struggles into triumph,” she explains. “We don’t have to wallow in the misery that people expect us to be wallowing in. We can use those obstacles and stand on them. And I did.”
TORONTO — Welcome to a special daily edition of the Envelope at TIFF, a newsletter collecting the latest developments out of Canada’s annual film showcase. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Christina House, our staff photojournalist, continues to kill it with her portraits out of the Toronto International Film Festival. In the last day alone, she’s seen Angelina Jolie, Jacob Elordi and the cast of “Frankenstein,” Jodie Foster and more.
‘Blood will be shed. Possibly even a tear’: Our critic on Rian Johnson’s new ‘Knives Out’ mystery
Josh O’Connor, left, and Daniel Craig in Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”
(Netflix)
Amy Nicholson had fun with “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”
She’s also noticing a fair amount of Canadian pride at her screenings. It’s been an unusually loaded moment for foreign relations with our neighbors to the north.
Amy weighs in on the scene from the first four days, her favorite (and less-than-favorite) movies at TIFF and a few surprises.
The day’s buzziest premieres
‘The Smashing Machine’
Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson in the movie “The Smashing Machine.”
(Ken Hirama / A24)
Sunday saw the TIFF schedule loosen up its restrictions regarding films that premiered at other festivals and audiences started to see more major titles from competing fests.
Take for example the Monday night premiere of “The Smashing Machine,” which just won the directing prize at Venice for Benny Safdie.
Making his solo debut apart from brother Josh — their most recent collaboration was “Uncut Gems” — Benny turns in a surprisingly heartfelt sports story based on mixed marital arts fighter Mark Kerr.
Taking the leading role is none other than wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne Johnson, in a part seemingly tailor-made to play off his own career arc and give him a prestige boost he has never had before.
Add Emily Blunt to the mix, as Kerr’s supportive partner, along with boutique studio A24 and the film seems like it should land the right combinations. — Mark Olsen
‘Exit 8’
A scene from the movie “Exit 8.”
(TIFF)
Ever fear that you’re racing around but going nowhere — that you’re in such a rush to make your way through the world that you’re barely seeing it?
Japan turned that feeling into a best-selling video game in which commuters are condemned to roam an underground subway station until they learn to pay attention to their surroundings.
Now Genki Kawamura has transformed that game into a movie. In Kawamura’s emboldened adaptation, our main player, the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya of the pop band Arashi) is an aimless young slacker who is stuck both physically and emotionally.
If he ever wises up and escapes, he’s got to make better choices.
I’ve got a few quibbles with the film’s mechanics, but “Exit 8” is a moving metaphor for the art of giving things a close, appreciative watch. On day five of a film festival, we could all use a reminder to look sharp. — Amy Nicholson
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Steven McIntoshEntertainment reporter at the Venice Film Festival
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Saltburn star Jacob Elordi (right) stars as Frankenstein’s creation in the film from Guillermo del Toro (left)
A few years ago, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos was meeting with Guillermo del Toro when he asked the celebrated director which films were on his bucket list.
Del Toro answered with two names: “Pinocchio and Frankenstein.”
“Do it,” Sarandos replied, effectively agreeing to fund both projects for the streaming giant. The first film, Del Toro’s acclaimed dark-fantasy version of Pinocchio, arrived in 2022.
But when it came to starting work on Frankenstein, del Toro had one warning: “It’s big.”
He wasn’t joking. The Mexican filmmaker’s ambitious take on the famous mad scientist and his monstrous creation is one of the centrepieces of this year’s Venice Film Festival. It’s a project he has been working towards for decades.
“It’s sort of a dream, or more than that, a religion for me since I was a kid,” del Toro tells journalists at the festival.
He highlights Boris Karloff’s performance in the 1931 adaptation as particularly influential, but it’s taken a long time for del Toro’s own version to reach the screen.
“I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, creatively, in terms of achieving the scope that it needed, to make it different, to make it on a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” he explains.
Now that the process has come to an end and the movie is about to be released, the director jokes he’s “now in postpartum depression”.
Netflix
Oscar Isaac plays Frankenstein, a gifted scientist who gradually comes to regret his creation
Since the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, there have been hundreds of films, TV series and comic books featuring some iteration of the famous character.
The latest adaptation sees Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, with Saltburn and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi unrecognisable as the monster-like creature he gives life to.
Isaac recalls: “Guillermo said, ‘I’m creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat’. And that was the truth, there was a fusion, I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well.
“I can’t believe I’m here right now,” he adds, “that we got to this place from two years ago. It just seemed like such a pinnacle.”
Andrew Garfield had originally been cast as the titular creature, but had to leave the project due to scheduling conflicts which arose from the Hollywood actors’ strike.
Elordi stepped in at short notice. “Guillermo came to me quite late in the process,” the actor recalls, “so I had about three weeks before I got to filming.
“It presented itself as a pretty monumental task, but like Oscar said, the banquet was there, and everybody was already eating by the time I got there, so just had to pull up a seat. It was a dream come true.”
Netflix
Del Toro said he tried to use real sets wherever possible, and keep CGI use to a minimum
The film is split into three parts – a prelude, followed by two versions of events told from the points of view of both Frankenstein and his creation.
It shows Frankenstein’s childhood and the factors that drove him to start work on the project in the first place. But it also encourages audiences to see things from the creature’s point of view – shining a light on how badly treated he was by his creator.
At 149 minutes, there is room for the characters and their back stories to be fleshed out. In early reviews of the film, most critics agreed it just about earns its run time.
“It perhaps might have been shortened, but del Toro’s sandbox is so irresistible, the return to big Hollywood moviemaking so pronounced, it must be hard to stop,” said Deadline’s Pete Hammond.
“Once a filmmaker on the scale of del Toro gets unleashed in the lab, why cut it short?”
But other reviews suggested it was far from del Toro’s best. The Independent’s Geoffrey McNab said it was “all show and little substance”, adding: “For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.”
There was much more enthusiasm from the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, who wrote: “One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.”
And in a four-star review, Total Film’s Jane Crowther said: “Masterfully concocted and pertinent in theme, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a classy, if somewhat safe, adaptation with awards legs.”
Netflix
Jacob Elordi has been praised for his portrayal of the monster-like creature
Del Toro is one of his generation’s most beloved directors, treasured in the industry for his own love of cinema and his ambition for what it can do.
The 60-year-old is also Hollywood’s go-to filmmaker for stories involving monsters or other fantastical creatures. His credits include Pan Labrynth, Prometheus and The Shape of Water, which won him the Oscar for best picture and best director in 2018.
He has great affection for monsters and is known for humanising them in his films, evoking sympathy from the audience for characters previously seen as villains.
In Frankenstein’s case, he says: “I wanted the creature to be newborn. A lot of the interpretations are like accident victims, and I wanted beauty.”
Netflix
Mia Goth plays Elizabeth, who develops a close bond with the creature
His vision and attention to detail with Frankenstein extended to every aspect of the production, ensuring great care went into costumes and sets – which are overwhelmingly real, physical settings rather than computer-generated landscapes.
“CGI is for losers,” comments Waltz, to much laughter. Del Toro adds that filming with real-life backdrops ultimately draws out a better performance from the actors than using green screens.
He likens the distinction between CGI and physical craftsmanship to the difference between “eye candy and eye protein”, but adds he does use digital effects when absolutely necessary.
The idea of creating a sapient being which ends up operating on its own terms might sound familiar today, but del Toro says the movie is “not intended as a metaphor” for artificial intelligence, as some critics have suggested.
Instead, he reflects: “We live in a time of terror and intimidation, and the answer, which art is part of, is love. And the central question in the novel from the beginning is, what is it to be human?
“And there’s no more urgent task than to remain human in a time when everything is pushing towards a bipolar understanding of our humanity. And it’s not true, it’s entirely artificial.”
He continues: “The multi-chromatic characteristic of a human being is to be able to be black, white, grey, and all the shades in between. The movie tries to show imperfect characters, and the right we have to remain imperfect.”
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Many fled when wildfires devastated Los Angeles earlier this year, but Guillermo del Toro rushed back in, determined to save his lifelong collection of horror memorabilia.
It’s the same loyalty that finds him making another tough decision to protect the items he loves like family: letting some of them go.
Del Toro partnered with Heritage Auctions for a three-part auction to sell a fraction of a collection that is bursting at the seams. Online bidding for the first part on Sept. 26 started Thursday and includes over a hundred items, with more headed to the auction block next year.
“This one hurts. The next one, I’m going to be bleeding,” Del Toro, 60, said of the auction series. “If you love somebody, you have estate planning, you know, and this is me estate planning for a family that has been with me since I was a kid.”
Del Toro is one of the industry’s most respected filmmakers, whose fascination with monsters and visual style will shape generations to come. But at his core, the Mexican-born horror buff is a collector. The Oscar winner has long doubled as the sole caretaker of the “Bleak House” — which stretches across two and a half Santa Monica homes nearly overflowing with thousands of ghoulish creatures, iconic comic drawings and paintings, books and movie props.
The houses function not just as museums, but as libraries and workspaces where his imagination bounces off the oxblood-painted walls.
“I love what I have because I live with it. I actually am a little nuts, because I say hi to some of the life-size figures when I turn on the light,” Del Toro told The Associated Press, sitting in the dining room of one of the houses, now a sanctuary for “Haunted Mansion” memorabilia. “This is curated. This is not a casual collection.”
The auction includes behind-the-scene drawings and one-of-a-kind props from Del Toro’s own classics, as well as iconic works like Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations for “Frankenstein” and Mike Mignola’s pinup artwork for “Hellraiser.”
A race to save horror history
In January, Del Toro had only a couple hours, his car and a few helping hands to save key pieces from the fires. Out of the over 5,000 items in his collection, he managed to move only about 120 objects. It wasn’t the first time, as fires had come dangerously close to Bleak House twice before.
The houses were spared, but fear consumed him. If a fire or earthquake swallowed them, he thought, “What came out of it? You collected insurance? And what happened to that little segment of Richard Corben’s life, or Jack Kirby’s craft, or Bernie Wrightson’s life?”
An auction, Del Toro said, gives him peace of mind, as it ensures the items will land in the hands of another collector who will protect the items as he has. These are not just props or trinkets, he said, but “historical artifacts. They’re pieces of audiovisual history for humanity.” And his life’s mission has been to protect as much of this history as he can.
“Look, this is in reaction to the fires. This is in reaction to loving this thing,” Del Toro told the AP.
The initial auction uncovers who Del Toro is as a collector, he said. Upcoming parts will expose how the filmmaker thinks, which he called a much more personal endeavor. The auction isn’t just a “piece of business,” for him, but rather a love letter to collectors everywhere, and encouragement to think beyond a movie and “learn to read and write film design in a different way. That’s my hope.”
A house full of ‘unruly kids’
Caring for the Bleak House collection feels like being on “a bus with 160 kids that are very unruly, and I’m driving for nine hours,” Del Toro said. “I gotta take a rest.”
The auction will give the filmmaker some breathing room from the collection’s arduous maintenance. The houses must stay at a certain temperature, without direct sunlight — all of which is monitored solely by Del Toro, who often spends most of his day there.
He selects the picture frame for every drawing, dusts all the artifacts and arranges every bookshelf mostly himself, having learned his lesson from the handful of times he allowed outside help. One time, Del Toro said, he found someone “cleaning an oil painting with Windex, and I almost had a heart attack.”
“It’s very hard to have someone come in and know why that trinket is important,” he said. “It’s sort of a very bubbled existence. But you know, that’s what you do with strange animals — you put them in small environments where they can survive. That’s me.”
Each room is organized by theme, with one room dedicated to each of his major works, from “Hellboy” to “Pacific Rim.” Del Toro typically spends his entire work day at one of the houses, which he picks depending on the task at hand. The “Haunted Mansion” dining room, for instance, is an excellent writing space.
“If I could, I would live in the Haunted Mansion,” he said. “So, this is the second best.”
Building a mini Bleak House
In selecting which items to sell, Del Toro said he “wanted somebody to be able to re-create a mini version of Bleak House.”
Auction items include concept sketches and props from Del Toro’s 1992 debut film, “Cronos,” all the way to his more recent works, like 2021’s “Nightmare Alley.”
The starting bids vary, from a couple thousand dollars up to hundreds of thousands. One of Wrightson’s drawings for a 1983 illustrated version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is the highest priced item, starting at $200,000.
The auction also includes art from legends like Richard Corben, Jack Kirby and H.R. Giger, whose work Del Toro wrote in the catalog “represent the pinnacle of comic book art in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”
Other cultural touchstones in illustration that are represented in the auction include rare images from the 1914 short film “Gertie the Dinosaur,” one of the earliest animated films, and original art for Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” by Eyvind Earle and Kay Nielsen.
“As collectors, you are basically keeping pieces of culture for generations to come. They’re not yours,” Del Toro said. “We don’t know which of the pieces you’re holding is going to be culturally significant … 100 years from now, 50 years from now. So that’s part of the weight.”
The summer rain in Mexico City has been driving Meme del Real crazy. “This season of permanent torrential downpour gets to a point where you’re like, ‘Enough,’ he says with a sigh. “There’s people who really enjoy it, but I’m done. It’s too much introspection to be in here all day, to not be able to go outside. It forces you to try other things, to find a conversation within that rather than a resistance.”
Surrender has been a big theme lately in the life of the longtime vocalist and keyboardist of legendary Mexican alt-rock group Café Tacvba. Del Real — a Swiss Army Knife of a musician who has produced for the likes of Julieta Venegas and Natalia Lafourcade, among others — has been unpacking his life after a recent move back to the Mexican capital, after five years in the idyllic Valle de Bravo. About two hours away from CDMX, the lakeside town became his district of solitude.
It was in this escape from city life that the singer-songwriter was able to be quiet enough to tap into something beyond himself. With his own studio, a broad space overlooking a forest, he had the mental space to look inward. Perhaps more importantly, he gave himself permission to welcome the inspiration that arrived without him seeking it.
“It’s not that I went to this place and said, ‘OK, now I’m going to find inspiration.’ It was more of a tension within myself that naturally unraveled,” says Meme of his “Walden” moment. “From that exercise of exploring old songs and ideas in process, something started to bloom within me in a way that had never happened before. It was a moment that invited me into a solitary process that I hadn’t undertaken with any formality or intention. If these songs have anything to do with where I was physically at the time, I do think that distance I had from everything manifested itself as music.”
The songs on Del Real’s first solo album — the title yet to be revealed — plumb the depths of silence and sonic expansion. He is unpretentious in his experiments and unafraid to get playful. “Tumbos” is a warbling electronic love song intercepted at times by plinking bachata strings. Del Real swelters on futuristic bolero “Incomprensible,” which takes the old-school Cuban torch-song genre and pitches its emblematic guitar to psychedelic new heights. Atmosphere is everything here: Two of the soon-to-be-released tracks border on ambient, zeroing in on the sounds of church bells and chirping birds and the expansive feeling of mushrooms blooming across a forest floor.
These little mountains of fire blaze with a gentle heat emanating from Del Real’s voice. Die-hards and casual fans of Café Tacvba have heard “Eres” at least in passing, a smash from the group’s 2003 album, “Cuatro Caminos,” that features Del Real on lead vocals. He’s still singing about love: Careening norteña-inspired “Embeces” sees Del Real’s voice soar over warbled trumpets, and lead single “Princesa” layers cinematic orchestration with trip-hop beats and sweltering lyrics about failed promises and proclamations of loyalty.
For those who can’t get enough, Del Real is set to preview some of the new music with a special performance on Sept. 2 at the Grammy Museum.
“These songs arrived, and I couldn’t look the other way. It was an instinct that was stronger than me, a now-or-never moment,” says Del Real. “I’ve found that every unknown and every challenge has left me with a lesson. When I’m onstage [with Café Tacvba], I play and sing, but I also love to dance and express myself with my body. Before we can play, when we’re children, we hear a rhythm and dance. It doesn’t matter if you look ridiculous, but you made something. It’s better to make a fool of yourself and experiment rather than not live what you’re feeling.”
De Los spoke with Del Real over Zoom from Mexico City as he’s settling into a number of beginnings: a new home, a new daily rhythm and his first solo project, which is out next month.
There are so many places where artists go to isolate and channel, but you weren’t looking for that at all. Listening to the album, I heard the parallels between the songs and the space that natural environments bring. There are two tracks that border on ambient, focusing on the sounds of a church bell and a small sound that grows into an encompassing roar. The creative act is intuitive and spontaneous, and I think it makes a symmetry with the cycles and forms of nature. Having such a tangible way to witness creation left a deep impression on me, to be in such an exuberant forest coexisting with so much.
How was making this solo record different from making a Café Tacvba record? I have a certain experience of creation with the band — of making an album, a project, a video, a tour, a spectacle — but these songs manifested themselves almost like they rose out of the floor to meet me. At my old house, the studio I made was surrounded by a massive forest. I really felt like I was yet another element of nature in that cycle of life that I had to live there. Something bloomed in that moment for me. More than the result, the experience itself for me was its own project, and it’s been so personally valuable to me that anything that comes of that is a consequence, an extra gift. The process was transformative, like nature itself, something that couldn’t be controlled or manipulated.
I love that you describe the songs as arriving; that’s very different than creating with the intention of connecting to a muse. To your point about movement, there’s so much of it here: bachata, cumbia, electronic music … so much to dance to. Everything you describe came about very organically. My dad was a musician, and he devoted his life to music. At home, my mom and dad and siblings and I all grew up hearing a lot of music across genres. I got very familiar. Watching my dad [on the trumpet] with his orchestra play at parties, specifically all of these formal Latin American genres to dance to …
When I started making the songs, the genres rose out pretty organically. If it came out sounding like Ministry or a norteña or a bolero or disco or punk, then that’s what it was. If creating doesn’t have that playful factor, if it doesn’t translate honesty, then it becomes so intellectualized. I think it’s a balance between spontaneity, a game between the organic, the intellectual, the conceptual. When I listened to all the songs, I really didn’t know if it was an album. I approached Gustavo Santaolalla [Godfather of Latin rock] to get his feedback, and that’s when it became clear to me that something was happening.
The songs were there, as I built them there in this place I described to you, like beyond just composing on guitar, piano and making a demo, it was like, “Well, what if I add something else?” I started experimenting, and before I knew it, there were already quite robust and complex arrangements in most of them. But another thing is that, when I [would] bring a demo to [Café Tacvba], I [would] sing it, and that [was] it. But in this case, the same thing. Gustavo told me, “Hey, one of the things that’s interesting is the way you’re singing … What’s happening on a vocal level, that seems to me to be revealing a very clear picture of you at this moment.” So, nothing, it stayed that way.
When I was trying to find the throughline here, I was thinking about the subject matter: There’s a lot of love and yearning here. Would you consider yourself a romantic? Based on some interviews I’ve been doing, they haven’t asked me this question, but the term “romantic” has come up. And it’s not that I’ve thought about it or assumed it, but I think that if romantic means, in my case, finding a translation of what I feel and what I reflect on and resonating well with it, then yes.
I’ve also found myself — who hasn’t in these times? — being attentive and reflecting on the issues that are happening around the world, all the horrors of certain situations and in certain regions. But I definitely find that there is beauty in human relationships or in personal relationships, in relationships with your personal, universal, cosmic or internal ecosystem, with paradoxes, with what is opposed. I don’t know if that’s romantic, but that’s it. Even at the end of the world, in the midst of so much horror, love and beauty are the things that give us the desire to want to go on, right?
This album is so sonically forward-thinking, and I’d say it’s aligned to the current zeitgeist of genre mixing. Where do you situate it? I am also very attracted to the way in which I don’t understand much of what is happening with these new generations and all the music, all the art and creation that is taking place. It seems that, as in other eras, attention was focused on the situations that were happening around them, socially and politically, and there was a lot of talk about it and criticism was made. Today, it seems that this generation is not observing that, but I have discovered in my theory that discourse is more powerful precisely because it is not talked about directly, but rather it is talked about as, “I am going to have a good time and enjoy it because this is coming to an end … I have no choice but to take what I have and what I can do and what I can experience with my gang, with my people, and with this global digital community.”
I find that very powerful and very sad at the same time. I mean, it’s very sad to think that there is a generation that sees the world as ending. That’s my take on it — that there’s little hope, that everything is so complex that it’s better not to look at that. “Just look at what’s in front of me, because I’m young and because if I don’t take advantage of my youth to have a good time right now, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the next stage. Or I don’t see how.”
In our time, at least in my time, I think there was more. The outlook was clearer. You could see further ahead.
This interview was conducted in Spanish, translated, edited and condensed for clarity.
Substitute Athenea del Castillo fires Spain ahead against Switzerland from Aitana Bonmati’s superb backheel assist in their Euro 2025 quarter final in Bern.
Del Monte’s losses have piled up as consumers choose healthier or cheaper alternatives.
Del Monte Foods, the 139-year-old company best known for its canned fruits and vegetables, is filing for bankruptcy protection as consumers in the United States increasingly bypass its products for healthier or cheaper options.
Del Monte announced the bankruptcy filing late Tuesday.
Del Monte, which also owns the Contadina tomato brand, College Inn and Kitchen Basics broth brands and the Joyba bubble tea brand, has secured $912.5m in debtor-in-possession financing that will allow it to operate normally as the sale progresses.
The Walnut Creek, California-based brand has assets and liabilities ranging from $1bn to $10bn, according to a filing in a New Jersey bankruptcy court.
“After a thorough evaluation of all available options, we determined a court-supervised sale process is the most effective way to accelerate our turnaround and create a stronger and enduring Del Monte Foods,” CEO Greg Longstreet said in a statement.
The company has seen sales growth of Joyba and broth in the 2024 fiscal year, but not enough to offset weaker sales of Del Monte’s signature canned products.
“Consumer preferences have shifted away from preservative-laden canned food in favour of healthier alternatives,” Sarah Foss, global head of legal and restructuring at Debtwire, a financial consultancy, told the news agency The Associated Press.
Grocery inflation also caused consumers to seek out cheaper store brands. Last month, the consumer price index report showed a 0.3 percent increase in the price of food and 2.2 percent compared with this time last year.
Another blow is expected from US President Donald Trump’s 50 percent tariff on imported steel. This went into effect in June and will also push up the price that Del Monte and others pay for cans.
Del Monte Foods, which is owned by Singapore’s Del Monte Pacific, was also hit with a lawsuit last year by a group of lenders that objected to the company’s debt restructuring plan. The case was settled in May with a loan that increased Del Monte’s interest expenses by $4m annually, according to a company statement.
Del Monte’s stock is about even from the market open, and it is up 4.62 percent over the last five days.
Rebekah Del Rio, the singer-songwriter known for bringing her talents to the David Lynch classic “Mulholland Drive,” has died.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner confirmed Del Rio died in her home but did not disclose a primary cause of death, which is currently listed online as deferred. She was 57.
In Lynch’s 2001 thriller, Del Rio was the siren of the Club Silencio and introduced as “La Llorona de Los Angeles.” In front of a red velvet curtain with smudged mascara and a crystal teardrop on her cheek, Del Rio delivered a moving a cappella performance of “Llorando,” a Spanish-language take of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Her voice echoes through the venue, bringing tears to the characters portrayed by stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring. Del Rio’s appearance suddenly ends when she collapses and is carried off stage.
Del Rio was one of a handful of musical acts who collaborated with Lynch. The visionary director died in January. He also also worked with “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti, and singers Julee Cruise and Chrystabell. The last, who starred alongside Lynch in “Twin Peaks: The Return,” paid tribute to Del Rio on social media.
“The beauty and astonishing power of your voice could actually take my breath away. May your spirit know the deepest peace, may your heart rest,” Chrystabell captioned a still of Del Rio’s “Mulholland Drive” cameo. “Thank you for the kindness and care you showed me, it is written on my heart.”
In addition to “Mulholland Drive,” Del Rio appeared in Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” as a musical guest and performed her dreamy rock ballad “No Stars.” Her screen credits also include films “This Teacher,” “2307: Winter’s Dream,” “Southland Tales” and “Rabbits,” according to IMDb.
Prior to working with Lynch, Del Rio gained popularity in the Netherlands during the mid-1990s for the title track of her debut album “Nobody’s Angel.” She briefly moved to Nashville to take her music career to the next level — she was signed to Giant Records — but a car accident got in the way of those ambitions.
“Some man crashed into me and basically stole my opportunity, and I saw my own dream die,” she recalled to the Guardian in a 2022 interview.
She continued to pursue music, counting Il Divo, producer Heather Holley and composer Danny Elfman among her collaborators. Her discography includes her 2011 album “Love Hurts Love Heals,” a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and her 2021 single “Adios.” Weeks before her death, Del Rio performed at a charity event for the Philosophical Research Society.
Del Rio is preceded in death by her son Phillip, who died of cancer in 2009.
Visma-Lease a Bike rider Yates was visibly frustrated after finishing 24 seconds behind Del Toro in seventh.
“The plan was completely different from what we did today, so I will talk about that with the team,” he told Eurosport.
“I will not say anything more about that.”
However, team director Marc Reef said the day went “exactly as we agreed”, and added Carapaz and Del Toro were “just a bit stronger”.
Although Yates, 32, could still overhaul Carapaz and Del Toro, it looks most likely this year will again add to the heartbreak he has experienced in bids to win the Giro.
He led for 13 days in 2018 but cracked in the final week when Chris Froome launched an astonishing comeback to win the race.
After an underwhelming eighth-placed finish in 2019, Yates had to withdraw from the 2020 edition with Covid-19 and then had to recover from a difficult first two weeks to claim third in 2021.
Yates’ twin brother Adam sat up and dropped out of the top 10 overall in order to save himself to help team-mate Del Toro on Saturday.
Ecuador’s Carapaz, the 2019 Giro champion, tried to drop Del Toro on the final climb, but could not shake the 21-year-old, who is bidding to become the youngest winner of the Giro since 1940.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider Del Toro, who won stage 17, showed impressive nous to grab the six bonus seconds for second place, with EF Education-EasyPost’s Carapaz, 32, having to settle for four bonus seconds in third.
For nearly six decades, Los Tigres del Norte’s name has been all over the charts, on countless marquees, seven Grammys and, now, one street in New York City.
On Thursday, the historic música Mexicana band showed up to the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, surrounded by fans at the grand presentation of the newly minted Los Tigres del Norte Way.
“Starting today, a street in Brooklyn carries the name of Los Tigres del Norte,” the group wrote in an Instagram post Thursday evening. “Thank you for walking with us, today and always.”
The Sinaloense legends’ street sign is located on 5th Avenue and 47th Street in Brooklyn, surrounded by a litany of Latino restaurants.
“We’ve been coming to New York for so many years,” vocalist and accordion player Jorge Hernandez said in a TV interview Wednesday with New York’s Fox 5. “We’ve been able to connect with the community, so that’s why we’ve been selected today to have the street and we are very happy to be honored tomorrow.”
The road naming occurred on the same day as the release of the “La Puerta Negra” artists’ latest five-track EP “La Lotería.” The title track is a sociopolitical corrido that uses the imagery of the popular bingo-like Mexican game to comment on topics like immigration and the past criminality of the current U.S. president.
The band will play its first-ever show at New York’s historic Madison Square Garden on May 24 to wrap up their current East Coast stint before performing June 13 at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and June 15 in Del Mar, Calif.
However, Thursday’s festivities weren’t the first time that the “Jaula de Oro” band was honored with a street-naming ceremony. A strip of W. 26th Street in Chicago is honorarily named after the 12-time Latin Grammy winners. The street runs through the Windy City’s Little Village neighborhood, which is known as the “Mexico of the Midwest” due to upwards of 80% of its residents being of Mexican descent.
In June, the group will receive lifetime recognition for its members’ continued immigration advocacy from Monterey County officials ahead of their tour date in Salinas, Calif.
