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Jennifer Runyon, a film and television actor known best for her roles on “Ghostbusters,” “A Very Brady Christmas” and “Charles in Charge,” has died. She was 65.

Runyon died Friday, according to a Sunday statement reportedly posted to her social media account, which has since gone private.

“This past Friday, our beloved Jennifer passed away. It was a long and arduous journey that ended with her surrounded by her family,” the statement read, according to ABC7. “She will always be remembered for her love of life and her devotion to her family and friends. Rest in peace our Jenn.”

“Bewitched” actor Erin Murphy shared in a Sunday post on Facebook and Instagram that Runyon died “after a brief battle with cancer.”

“Some people you just know you’ll be friends with before you even meet,” Murphy wrote in her tribute. “She was a special lady.”

On the 1980s sitcom “Charles in Charge,” Runyon portrayed Gwendolyn Pierce, a fellow college student of the show’s titular live-in housekeeper (portrayed by Scott Baio) and the target of his affections.

In his Facebook tribute, fellow “Charles in Charge” actor Willie Aames described Runyon as a “dear dear friend, muse, and encourager.”

“From the moment we met on set all those decades ago- I knew you ‘got me,’” wrote Aames. “Watching you slip away these last few months was one of the hardest times of my life… I can still hear your voice so clearly. No one will ever be able to fill the massive hole that’s been left in our hearts… ever.”

A Chicago native, Runyon made her television debut as Sally Frame in the long-running soap opera “Another World.” She also appeared in episodes of “Magnum, P.I.,” “Quantum Leap” and “Murder, She Wrote.” Runyon also portrayed the grown-up Cindy Brady in “A Very Brady Christmas.”

Her film credits include the 1984 classic “Ghostbusters,” where she appeared as one of the students participating in the ESP study conducted by Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman.

On Instagram, Runyon’s daughter Bayley Corman, an actor who has appeared on TV shows such as “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” “Bel-Air” and “Running Point,” described her mother as “the kindest most compassionate person i’ve ever known.”

“All of the best parts of me came from you,” Corman wrote in her tribute. “i would give anything for one more day together.”

Walt Disney Co. and Pixar’s “Hoppers” took the box office crown this weekend in an encouraging sign for the company’s original animated films.

The film generated $46 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada, marking the highest domestic opening for an original animated movie since 2017’s “Coco,” according to studio estimates. The global box office total for “Hoppers” was $88 million.

The zany movie features a young environmental advocate who “hops” her consciousness into a robotic beaver and bands together with other woodland creatures to stop a planned freeway expansion through a glade.

The film is directed by Daniel Chong, who created the Cartoon Network animated series “We Bare Bears.”

The muscular debut for “Hoppers,” as well as the strong performance from Sony Pictures Animation’s “Goat” last month, has been a positive sign for audience interest in original animated films.

Since the pandemic, theatrical returns for animated sequels have far surpassed that of original films. Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” for instance, has now grossed more than $1.8 billion in global box office revenue, with more than $426 million domestically. Disney and Pixar’s 2024 hit “Inside Out 2” also crossed more than $1.6 billion globally.

By contrast, Disney and Pixar’s 2025 original film “Elio” brought in about $154 million in worldwide box office revenue.

Original films are vital to Pixar’s future, as the Emeryville-based studio built its reputation on its string of nearly uninterrupted original blockbuster hits, including 1995’s “Toy Story” and 2004’s “The Incredibles.”

Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream 7” came in second at the box office with $17.3 million in its second weekend in theaters. Warner Bros. Pictures’ “The Bride!,” Sony’s “Goat” and Warner Bros.’ “Wuthering Heights” rounded out the top five at the box office, according to data from Comscore.

With several strong releases, as well as popular holdover films from 2025 that continue to bring in revenue, the first few months at the box office have been a notable improvement over last year’s dismal first quarter.

Domestic box office revenue so far is up more than 12% compared to the same time period in 2025, according to Comscore.

One of the best action blockbusters of the past few years has just been added to Netflix just in time for an adrenaline-fuelled weekend viewing

Netflix has just added an exhilarating action film starring two of Hollywood’s greatest stars that you won’t want to miss.

Both leads are featuring in some of the most highly anticipated films of 2026, while the director is one of the most prominent action filmmakers in recent years.

The Fall Guy stars Ryan Gosling as stunt performer Colt Seavers, who reluctantly agrees to a comeback after a life-threatening injury when his ex-girlfriend Jody Moreno (played by Emily Blunt) lands her first gig as the director of a major studio film.

However, the pair soon find themselves wrapped up in a complex conspiracy when the movie’s lead actor, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), goes missing.

When Colt is covertly hired to go after the people the producers suspect are responsible for his disappearance, he leaps at the chance to win back his ex by saving her debut. But he quickly realises he’s in over his head.

Both megastars are poised to rule the box office over the coming months. Gosling is about to return to the big screen for the bombastic space opera Project Hail Mary, while Blunt is also tackling extraterrestrial threats in Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day.

She is also returning to one of her most iconic roles in The Devil Wears Prada 2, along with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. With The Fall Guy available to stream on Netflix, now is the perfect time to revisit one of their best films ahead of their must-see cinematic experiences.

Fans have been raving about the film since its release, and it received an impressive 82 percent Rotten Tomatoes score from critics, with 84 percent from audiences.

One five-star review from an RT user gushed: “A truly phenomenal film! It’s fun, but locks in when seriousness is needed. I love it so much!”

Someone else described it as “Pure adrenaline popcorn perfection that delivers unfiltered chaos candy!”

The stellar reviews continued on IMDb, where one viewer called The Fall Guy “Pure entertainment” and said: “While watching this movie, I found myself smiling nearly the entire time. If you are looking for pure, unfettered fun (in the form of romcom action of course), then this is the movie for you.

“The plot was fun, the acting was solid, the situations that the characters found themselves in were hysterical, the action was on point, the cinematography was nice, and the romance was entertaining.”

And a final fan wrote: “The Fall Guy is insanely fun, with incredibly cool action scenes, romantically charming elements, and a captivating world of stuntmen.

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“It’s full-on entertainment, especially for film enthusiasts, with meticulously crafted action sequences in both real and fake movies that look fantastic, grand, and impressively complete.

“Both Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt have impeccable chemistry, and the portrayal of the stuntman profession is sharp. The film cleverly satirizes the Hollywood industry with excellence.

“Watching this movie in theaters is an absolutely delightful experience. Director David Leitch nails every aspect of the film, truly delivering on the action-packed excitement.”

The Fall Guy is available to stream on Netflix.

For the latest showbiz, TV, movie and streaming news, go to the new **Everything Gossip** website.

In 2020, “We Bare Bears” creator Daniel Chong came to Pixar leaders with an idea.

He had seen documentaries in which robotic animals with eyeball cameras captured footage of natural habitats. But what if that technology was so good that no one could tell the difference? And to make it even more zany — what if someone went undercover in that animal body?

That idea became the basis of Walt Disney Co. and Pixar’s new animated movie, “Hoppers,” which debuts this week. The film is Pixar’s latest attempt to break through at the box office with an original story, something that has been a struggle for the storied animation studio since the pandemic.

The pressure of Pixar’s legacy can be a little overwhelming and coming up with an original idea is difficult, said Chong, who directed “Hoppers” and also serves as a writer on the film.

“For a Pixar movie, it’s very high stakes,” he said. “But I just felt like I had a really funny idea, and I thought as long as we made it really funny and had characters you loved, to me that’s the key to every Pixar movie — really awesome characters that really connect emotionally with people.”

Recent theatrical success for Pixar as well as other animation studios has come from sequels, such as 2024’s “Inside Out 2,” which grossed $1.7 billion globally. But the reputation of Emeryville-based Pixar is built on its string of blockbuster originals, including 1995’s “Toy Story,” 2001’s “Monsters, Inc.” and 2004’s “The Incredibles,” making new stories crucial to the studio’s future.

People like coming back to familiar characters like Woody and Buzz from “Toy Story,” but the studio can do only so many sequels, said Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer. And some films don’t lend themselves to new chapters, he said, noting the studio’s efforts to look at “Monsters, Inc.”

“We’ve been trying, struggling for a long time to get somewhere with that, and we’ll see in the future how things go, but it’s been an uphill battle,” he said. “For whatever reason, that movie seems to be self contained and doesn’t want to go forward without repeating some of the same themes, which I think would be disappointing.”

Opening weekend expectations for “Hoppers” are wide-ranging, from $25 million to $40 million, on a production budget of $150 million. So far, the reviews have been strong, with a 96% approval rating on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Docter said. “If ‘Hoppers’ can really catch on, it could show that audiences still want original movies. They’re still excited to see things that surprise them, that are not just following through on characters and worlds that they’ve seen before.”

It’s been a tough time for original animated movies — and new films in general. As the theatrical market continues to find its footing after the pandemic, audiences still largely have gravitated toward familiar fare, including sequels and reboots, even as they profess to want new stories.

Pixar’s previous original film, 2025’s “Elio” cratered at the box office, partially beset by the tough climate for new animated stories as well as strong competition from other kids’ movies such as live-action adaptations of Universal Pictures’ “How to Train Your Dragon” and Disney’s “Lilo and Stitch.”

The pandemic played a major role in Pixar’s recent track record with originals. When COVID-19 hit, original films like 2020’s “Soul,” 2021’s “Luca” and 2022’s “Turning Red” all were sent straight to the Disney+ streaming service to give families something to watch during the stay-at-home orders. But that also got audiences accustomed to waiting to watch Pixar films at home, and as theaters started opening up again, families were some of the last groups to return because of concerns about health and safety.

“There had been a conditioning process,” said Heather Holian, a professor of art history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “It was challenging to turn the ship around a little bit, or getting people to rethink how they engage with Pixar films and getting them back to theaters.”

To connect with audiences, Pixar films need to feel familiar in some way, but with a surprising twist — something that is incredibly difficult to do, Docter said. “Hoppers” also involved extensive, early stage collaboration with the studio’s story artists. Chong would give them a rough idea of his thoughts, which the artists would then use to develop dialogue and other details that expanded on his vision. That’s a bit of a departure from Pixar’s typical process, which involves writing pages and giving them to the artists, who then go to work..

Chong worked as a story artist at Pixar before he went on to create Cartoon Network’s “We Bare Bears” and then returned to the studio in 2019.

“Hoppers” could get strong tailwinds from the success of Sony Pictures Animation’s “Goat,” which was produced by Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry and tells an original story set in an all-animal world about an undersized “roarball” player who pushes to make it in the big leagues.
That film has netted nearly $75 million in the U.S. and Canada, with a global total of more than $131 million..

The two movies are the beginning of a potentially big year for animated films. After “Hoppers,” Nintendo and Universal Pictures’ sequel “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is out in April, followed by Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” in June and Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment’s “Minions & Monsters” in July. In the fall, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation plans to release “The Cat in the Hat.”

High-performing years at the box office traditionally are anchored by strong family movies, said Shawn Robbins, director of movie analytics at Fandango and founder of the site Box Office Theory.

“A lot of us are so optimistic about what the box office can do overall this year because of the animated releases,” he said. “When there is appealing content out there, families are a big driver for this industry.”

Los Angeles has a secret magic to which you have to earn access, and the way you earn it is by making it, becoming a contributor to the city’s misapprehended culture of spectacle and soul, diversity and monolithic elitism. It’s a get-in-where-you-fit-in or get-edged-all-the-way-out kind of city, wherein a deceptively laissez-faire game of musical chairs can determine your fate. Kahlil Joseph has a private magic to which you have to earn access, and you earn it by resonating with the untapped nerve centers of Black culture that animate this city, and even then you might be denied.

Joseph is like the city (Los Angeles, not Hollywood), and the city enforces confidentiality, drive, wit, style and devotion often mistaken for diva-ism. The filmmaker and video artist moved to Los Angeles from Seattle for university, and was quickly followed by his brother, the painter Noah Davis, who would found the Underground Museum, a venue and near-speakeasy with West Coast casual gravitas and pan-African rigor and breadth, which became as important to the zeitgeist of Black Los Angeles as both brothers have.

Movie still from Kahlil Joseph’s film “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.” Funmilayo Akechukwu (Kaneza Schaal) channels a 93-year-old W.E.B Dubois, 200 years in the past.

(Courtesy Rich Spirit / BLKNWS©)

In somewhat rapid succession, Joseph lost his father, Keven Davis, an accomplished attorney who represented the likes of the Williams sisters and Wynton Marsalis, in 2012, and his brother Noah in 2015. Joseph navigated those years in the wake with unadorned reverence, while starting a family of his own and directing some of the most transcendent music videos of the 2010s. As testament to his resilience and that of the community around him, grief sharpened Joseph’s purpose and became a kind of grace he transmuted into moving images so saturated with feeling, sans easy pathos, they offered new ways of seeing. The stakes were higher and layered with the existential absurdity of abrupt shifts, which he carried with an elegant, slightly seething temperament that has found its expression in the work. It’s relevant that he shares a birthday with Miles Davis — this is Los Angeles, where it’s customary for a person to request your cosmic DNA before asking your name — and it’s relevant that like Miles, Joseph’s vocal tone is whisper-pitched, toward the mode of retreat that begets echo; you lean in and hear him twice. His quiet tone is not shyness or false modesty but circumspection and a sense of boundaries that imply respect and love for real communication. You sense this in his work ethic and what it produces, an intimacy of form that implies an almost ritualistic attentiveness to the world around him on its own terms. In the 2012 Flying Lotus music video “Until the Quiet Comes,” directed by Joseph and set in Los Angeles, death and rebirth are addressed as a duet, companions in the expansion of collective consciousness instead of foils or adversaries, as a fallen child leaves his body and returns more alive than before he was bloodied on screen. And the violent scenes aren’t grotesque or didactic — think of Miles’ muted trumpet sound reconfigured as resurrection visuals, of his ability to play and stage ballads so well that their uptempo momentum moves into territories too macabre to mute. Like Miles, Joseph tests and stretches his range.

With the closure of the family-run Underground Museum, first in 2020 and then officially in 2022, the path uptempo was visited by more obstacles and disappointments, a shift, if temporary, in Joseph’s role in the local community, as he became more private and distant from public elegy. On the phone recently, Joseph and I discussed the trauma economy, how much of a trap it is for Black art and artists, especially in this post-BLM, post-Obama, post-neoliberal dominance, post-nonprofit industrial complex dominance territory we’re all in now, whether we face it or not. As antidote and balm to the market for repackaged abjection, Joseph adapted the sensibility that makes his music video landscapes so lush and transgressive for the art world with “Blknws,” which debuted in 2019 as an imagined syndication or television network, a nonlinear merger of digitized Black archival material pulled from the center to the margins and the radical academic avant-garde — an infinitely looping ensemble wherein Fred Moten enters into conversation with memes of ghetto-fabulous street gymnasts doing backflips into a fried chicken spot, for example, collapsing so-called high and low into an endless woodshed for an impossible concert.

The result was so compelling that the project was commissioned by A24 as a feature film sans script, then purchased from them by Rich Spirit and released last year as “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.” In this longer and more structured form, what began as an intentional scattering of ashes becomes an elegiac letter home mediated by shipwreck. Joseph weaves together an imaginary “Transatlantic Biennial” and W.E.B. Dubois’ “Encyclopedia Africana” — a project that Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah transformed into a book, which Joseph’s father had given his brother before they passed. In this way, the film becomes a manifesto for alternate destinies within the Black experience, and a semi-formal goodbye letter to the delusional but politically expedient optimism of the 2010s, wherein the end of the neoliberal order becomes a gateway to renewed self-possession and agency. Since our grief is less of a ready-made commodity lately, we can reorient it around ourselves, a little safer and more sovereign from the gnawing public gaze. And we can be more honest about its paces and paths in that more autonomous landscape. “Blknws” arrives how a successful jazz album does, belligerently inconclusive about the next stylistic leaps the music might make but clearly in the process of launching in that unknown or unspeakable (perhaps secret) direction. The film is agitation made vivid and precise in the dialectic between theorized “Black Study” and practical applications of Black marronage, where we realize that big disembodied ideas are no more sophisticated than what can be danced and gestured at and spoken in our real and virtual conversations. Here, the multiverse becomes one transcendental, transatlantic consciousness where past and present, life and afterlife, blur the way they do in Joseph’s interpretation of “Until The Quiet Comes” to give us a film with a song-like hook and an album’s non-sequitur whimsy.

Movie still from Kahlil Joseph’s film “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.” The underwater study of Funmilayo Akechukwu (Kaneza Schaal) located in the hold of the ship.

(Courtesy Rich Spirit / BLKNWS©)

Over the last several months, I’ve discussed with Joseph what might become of the momentum propelling “Blknws: Terms & Conditions,” after the film’s run, as speculators enclose searching for clues and stake in his next project. He’s considered its potential evolution into a media company, a real paper, a production house, a series of related films, or a hybrid of all of these endeavors. Alongside his experience on all sides of the art world, he has an acute awareness of the wayward state of print and digital culture, writing and production, the constant closure or downsizing of veteran media outlets, the aftermath of diversity fever in the form of shrinking major magazines often starting with those who cover culture explicitly, the mass turn toward brand-name digital platforms that become extractive monopolies and diminish what can be covered and produced as writers and artists are overworked, understaffed and undervalued. Galleries are also closing and downsizing, and films that don’t oblige the content farm aren’t solicited as readily as influencer-helmed or easily digestible projects that can be played as background noise for scrolling.

After a screening last December of “Blknws: Terms & Conditions” at 2220 Arts + Archives, a space I co-curate, the rapt audience of local cinephiles seemed eager for some magic-bullet insight into Joseph’s path to creative breakthrough and relative creative freedom. Rather than hacks and shortcuts, he shouted out collaborators and inspirations — Wales Bonner, who hand-stitched garments for the film’s Ghana-based scenes; British composer Klein, who helped score the film; Joseph’s time in Brazil, where his father was from and where he went to high school. Sensibility and natural eclecticism, rather than unchecked ambition, is what propels Joseph; he has an innate knack for assembling bands and ensembles, good taste and good timing.

Kahlil Joseph with friends at the screening of “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.”

“I found the encyclopedia at the Underground,” he explains, of the DuBois work that became central to “Blknws.” “It seemed no one had looked through it, as if my dad and brother left it for me in the future.” And instead of ruminating on the weight of that inheritance, he integrates it into his film, whose refrain-as-question is do you remember the future? As if his father and brother are awake in some scenes, asking him to remember. Another resurrection. “I just want to make films,” Joseph reaffirms as a personal coda when the questions get too meta or abstract, never conflating the material conditions of the craft with the magical thinking that can unfold in scripts and on screen. Most everyone in attendance at 2220 seemed to be there to meet or support one of their favorite artists, one of the devout purists of our time who manages to remain that without getting smug, lazy or feral, all common pitfalls.

Last October, I gave Joseph a copy of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” which I’d just finished reading myself for the first time. I was impressed to the point of restlessness with the authority of Hemingway’s memory, his recall; it’s one of those books you wanna throw at the wall and absorb word for word at the same time. Hemingway seemed to effortlessly savor and store every detail of his days, while remaining agile and present enough within them to focus on writing one true thing after another, in his daily sessions at the typewriter, as if possessing two coterminal minds and the capacity to access or silence both at will. A juggler too advanced for the circus, language’s great folk hero. Joseph is kind of like this, capable of intense simultaneous focus on both creative and mundane tasks without complaint, and he took to the book as I expected he might, sharing my sense of awe over the writer’s command of time and scene. They are both among the artists who have a polite way of making those around them feel like a team and want to work a little harder and little less aggressively (more communally) at the same time. Editors at his post-production studio have come from all over the country to work with him based on that leadership.

Joseph’s next feature, he suggests, will certainly be more narrative, more of a linear beginning-middle-end story, more Hemingway-esque in its commitments to the blunt daily reality that “Blknws” blurs with Black myth. He and his family have sacrificed unquantifiably in effort to defy stale archetypes and outdated patterns of art practice, and it might be his time or turn to be reciprocated for having endured those risks, time to give his family unequivocal and vivid afterlives on and off screen.

Gina Gershon considers herself a storyteller, first and foremost. When we connect via video call, Gershon admits this is the first interview she’s done since submitting the manuscript for her latest book, “AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs.”

“I don’t have my spiel yet!” she warns, inquiring for the first of a few times what I thought of it and whether I enjoyed it. Despite the many decades Gershon has been treading the boards, starring in indie films and Hollywood star vehicles, and stalking the stage as a singer-guitarist, she still really cares about what you think, even if it won’t change her own mind. Perhaps that’s the key to her professional longevity.

“AlphaPussy” is neither a memoir nor a guide to self-betterment, but elements of both feed into Gershon’s stories. Each wittily titled chapter plunges readers into Gershon’s freewheeling 1970s childhood, defiant adolescence, burgeoning performance career and collaborations with some of the biggest names in film (including Sharon Stone, Paul Verhoeven and Tom Cruise). Most of the stories take place in the San Fernando Valley, where young Gershon was discovering weed, mushrooms and rock ‘n’ roll. This is not a titillating tell-all, and all the better for it.

“AlphaPussy” by Gina Gershon

(Akashic Books)

“This book realistically started during COVID,” Gershon explains from her New York home. “I’d told my book agent, a friend, some stories one day when we were drunk, and he kept prodding me to write a book. I was hesitant, though. I’m not a tell-all gal, that’s not my MO.”

She adds, “It was during lockdowns, and I think his mother was sick and he was having a hard time, so when he said, ‘Just write me stories to keep me cheered up,’ I started to write stories in no particular order, whatever bubbled up, because otherwise I figured I’d forget them one day.”

At the same time, Gershon had observed that young women weren’t feeling empowered to advocate for themselves in their personal relationships and workplaces.

“I noticed that especially with younger women friends of mine, they’d tell me about things they were going through on set or with their bosses, and I don’t know if it’s a millennial thing, but I said, ‘Why don’t you just look him in the eye and tell him to stop?’ and there was this sense [for me] of ‘Why can’t you do that? Because if you don’t, you’ll always be prey to these guys.’ ”

She clarifies that she means “annoying” men rather than abusive men.

“I’m not that tough,” admits Gershon. “But I’d learned how to maneuver a lot just from growing up in the Valley, and it was a crazy time to be living there. So I thought about the stories that led me to be able to steer myself through toxicity.”

In her new book, Gina Gershon recalls the industry vitriol toward her 1995 erotic film “Showgirls.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

And also to steer herself through well-intended advice, both personal and professional, to follow her instincts.

“Listen, it’s not like I’ve had the most normal career. I’ve done most of my projects despite warnings from other people and from my agents saying, ‘You can’t do this, you’ll ruin your career.’ I’m like, ‘Why? I like this project!’ ”

One of those projects, most infamously, was “Showgirls,” which gets plenty of mentions in the book.

As Gershon recalled, it was 1994, and an astrologer had predicted her major breakout role would arrive in October that year, testing the young actor and her ability to cope with notoriety. Great, thought Gershon, bring it on.

Months later, Gershon was hanging from the ceiling, dressed in bondage gear, reflecting upon her early acting goals to perform Chekhov, portray Medea and stun audiences into silence.

She was on the set of “Showgirls” (or “Survival of the Titties,” as she nicknames it), dressed in one of the many glittering, spangled, flimsy outfits that her character Cristal Connors parades about wearing as a veteran of Vegas striptease. That role, and the vitriol from within the industry toward the movie (a flop turned cult favorite), still stings.

“I was super excited going into ‘Showgirls.’ As I talk about in one of the chapters, it was just very different when I got there. It was a completely different show than I thought I was going to be doing. … I thought it was gonna be one of [director Paul Verhoeven’s] dark Dutch films.”

Realizing that it was something else, to say the least, Gershon pivoted.

“I learned how to deal with an insane environment while keeping focused on what it is that I was trying to achieve with the part, without getting swallowed up by the insanity, which is a valuable lesson, you know? I mean, it’s a good lesson to learn no matter what you’re doing.”

Last year, Gershon watched the movie for the first time in decades.

“I hadn’t seen it in a zillion years, and when I saw it, I understood it a little bit more. It made me feel tense, but I also thought, ‘Oh, interesting.’ Some scenes that I thought shouldn’t have been there and others that absolutely have to be there. I saw it with a different lens.”

She says, “Weirdly, I feel like I’m not supposed to be talking about ‘Showgirls,’ although I think I have five chapters about ‘Showgirls’ [in the book]. I did the ones that I thought were kind of funny and fun and had some sort of growth in it for me.”

Having recently wrapped filming on “an independent film, a trans love story” in Palm Springs, penned a script and midway through writing another, Gershon doesn’t intend on writing another book anytime soon. Still, “there’s so many stories I left out,” she concedes.

“I could write three more books with things, but I really wanted to stay on point with the themes of manipulation, survival, and moving around and being able to stand on your own two feet and know who you are and to have agency over your life, especially as a woman, especially as an actress, especially in this world.”

“I’m not that tough,” says Gina Gershon. “But I’d learned how to maneuver a lot just from growing up in the Valley, and it was a crazy time to be living there. So I thought about the stories that led me to be able to steer myself through toxicity.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

There were tears (and cheers) for Catherine O’Hara. Rhea Seehorn explained “Pluribus,” or at least tried to. Harrison Ford was celebrated at the “half-point of his career.” And, because the show’s on Netflix, there were a few well-placed F-bombs, not including the swears muttered by the actors who didn’t win.

The 32nd Actor Awards — or the very first Actor Awards, since for the previous 31 years this ceremony has been known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards — went off without a hitch Sunday, and ended with a bang, scrambling a best picture race that felt settled after “One Battle After Another” won the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday.

There were TV awards presented too. But we pay attention to the Actor Awards because the show takes place while Oscar ballots are out and are, for the most part, a reliable precursor to the Academy Awards. How trustworthy will they be for the acting winners this year? Let’s take a look.

Cast in a motion picture

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Winner: “Sinners”

The past: The winner of this award has gone on to take the best picture Oscar in 15 of 30 years, making it basically a coin flip and easily the Actor Awards’ least trustworthy Oscar precursor. (The ensemble prize wasn’t awarded in 1994, the ceremony’s first year.) Oscar also-ran “Conclave” won last year, ending a three-year streak — “CODA,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Oppenheimer” — where the winner of the cast prize went on to take best picture.

Will history repeat itself? If “Sinners” had simply taken this award and nothing else, I would say “One Battle After Another” would still be the overwhelming favorite to win the best picture Oscar. But snagging this prize and Michael B. Jordan winning lead actor gives one pause, doesn’t it? Again, the cast award is not a reliable best picture precursor. A Ryan Coogler movie (“Black Panther”) won in 2019, but lost the Oscar to “Green Book.” And while “Sinners” did haul in a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, “One Battle” wasn’t far behind with 13, just one shy of the previous record. It’s easy to get carried away with the way the room exploded when Samuel L. Jackson announced the winner, but “One Battle’s” Producers Guild win carries more weight. I’ll need a couple of days to sit with this.

Female actor in a leading role

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Winner: Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”

The past: SAG and the academy have matched 21 of 31 years. The last two years have seen the groups split, with Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) winning her second Oscar over SAG winner Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) in 2024 and Mikey Madison prevailing for “Anora” over Demi Moore, who won over SAG-AFTRA voters and earned a huge standing ovation when she took the stage for her gonzo comeback turn in the body horror movie “The Substance.”

Will history repeat itself? Buckley has been a lock for the lead actress Oscar since “Hamnet” premiered in September at the Telluride Film Festival, her searching, searing turn as the film’s grieving mother producing the kind of visceral reaction that guts audiences and wins awards. And, boy, has she won awards these last few months, taking pretty much everything save for the major critics groups. The naysayers decried the acting as overripe, sniffing instead of sniffling. Monsters. There’s no denying Buckley goes big with her emotions here, but the magic in her work also can be seen in a much-used still photo from “Hamnet,” the one where she’s resting her elbows on the Old Globe stage, hands clasped, face transfixed, heart opened. You know the shot. And you’re probably getting a little verklempt just thinking about it.

Male actor in a leading role

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Winner: Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”

The past: This category has been the most reliable indicator of Oscar victory, with SAG and the academy matching 24 of 31 times. There are exceptions, though, such as just last year when Adrien Brody won the Oscar for “The Brutalist,” prevailing over SAG winner Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”).

Will history repeat itself? Entering the month of February, it looked like Timothée Chalamet was a shoo-in for playing a talented, self-promoting ping-pong player in “Marty Supreme.” In fact, some know-it-all called this race more or less over just a week ago. (That was me.) Chalamet could still win. Maybe SAG-AFTRA voters didn’t want to give him the award again, just a year after they honored him for his lead turn in “A Complete Unknown.” Maybe SAG-AFTRA voters felt he was a bit, shall we say … “brash” in the way he marketed the movie and needed to be taken down a peg.

So now, entering March, it’s looking like “Marty Supreme” could be this year’s version of “The Irishman,” a film that earns a lot of nominations (in this case, nine) and comes away with nothing.

Meanwhile, Jordan’s big swing movie star turn in “Sinners,” playing twin brothers Smoke and Stack, was the best work of his career. That scream that Viola Davis let out when she opened the envelope spoke to the enthusiasm in the room both for the actor and the film. Momentum definitely seems to be on Jordan’s side right now.

Female actor in a supporting role

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Winner: Amy Madigan, “Weapons”

The past: The Actor Award winner has gone on to take an Oscar 23 of 31 times, including last year, when Zoe Saldaña won for “Emilia Pérez,” one of countless prizes she won that season. (Note: One of those 23 winners, “The Reader’s” Kate Winslet, was nominated for — and won — the 2009 Oscar for lead actress for that performance.)

Will history repeat itself? Who knows? This category has been all over the place, but as Madigan said in her speech, she’s been doing this a “long ass time” and there’s a lot of love for this 75-year-old acting great. Teyana Taylor (“One Battle After Another”) took the Golden Globe, and Wunmi Mosaku (“Sinners”) won at the British Academy Film Awards. And the “they’re due” narrative doesn’t always play at the Oscars. (Just ask Demi Moore or Glenn Close.) Will a “One Battle” sweep carry both Taylor and Sean Penn? Or is there room for an outlier? It’s tempting to lean toward Madigan.

Male actor in a supporting role

Winner: Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”

The past: The SAG winner has gone on to win the Oscar 22 times in 31 years, including the last dozen, the longest streak of any category.

Will history repeat itself? Penn did not attend the Actor Awards, the only thing less surprising than this win. Coming on the heels of taking the supporting actor prize from BAFTA last weekend (Penn didn’t go to that ceremony either), it’s looking likely now that Penn will win his third Oscar. He’s barely campaigned and remains a divisive figure. But his menacing turn as the outrageous Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, a man given to zealotry and tight T-shirts, is the best work he has done in years. Will he go to the Oscars, if only to collect the trophy so he can give another statue to Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky? We’ll soon see.

It starts with the exclamation point, right there in the title. “The Bride!” is a wild, willfully over-the-top double-barreled reinvigoration of 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein” that is always doing something a little extra in telling its unpredictable story of identity and the reclamation of the self.

“I probably can’t definitively explain it,” says writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal about that punctuation. “I think I first just put it there and wondered when someone was going to tell me to take it away. And nobody ever did.”

Set in a dreamscape 1930s — imagine a steampunk-meets-art-deco version of “Bonnie and Clyde” — the film features a title performance by Jessie Buckley in three roles, sometimes in conversation with each other. First, there’s Ida, a Chicago party girl who is killed when she becomes an inconvenience to powerful men. Then there’s “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley, taking possession of another person’s body and voice.

Finally, there’s the Bride herself, the rebellious, reanimated corpse of Ida brought back to life as a companion to a creature here known as Frank (Christian Bale). The duo sets off on a lovers-on-the-run-style crime spree that captures national attention.

On a February Los Angeles morning, Gyllenhaal moves briskly across the lobby of a low-key-chic hotel, barely breaking stride to ask that, instead of a discreet celeb-friendly indoor corner table, perhaps our interview could take place on an outdoor patio. She would like to take in a bit more California sunshine before returning home to wintry Brooklyn.

Dressed in a baggy suit that is both sharp and casual, Gyllenhaal doesn’t come across as particularly fussy but, rather, as someone certain of what she wants, even if what she wants is to explore the messiness of uncertainty, pushing the edges for herself and her collaborators.

Jessie Buckley in the movie “The Bride!”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Take, for example, that exclamation point. What might at first seem a bit of preciousness, and which even Gyllenhaal initially makes seem a bit of a throwaway, reveals itself to have a much deeper meaning.

“It wasn’t that it was careless,” Gyllenhaal says with a calm focus. “If you are Ida or Mary Shelley or many women in the world and you’ve been sort of tamped down and silenced and not able to express everything it is that you wanted or needed to express, it’s like if you’ve had your hand on a geyser. When the geyser finally breaks, it’s going to break with a whole lot of extra energy. And maybe that’s where the exclamation point comes from.”

“The Bride!” is the second feature film as writer and director for Gyllenhaal, 48, following 2021’s “The Lost Daughter.” That movie, a bracing examination of the psychological toll of motherhood, would go on to wide acclaim and awards recognition, including Oscar nominations for actors Buckley and Olivia Colman, as well as for Gyllenhaal’s screenplay (an adaptation of the 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante). Prior to that, Gyllenhaal had been known for emotionally fearless performances in films such as “Secretary,” “The Dark Knight” and “Crazy Heart,” for which she received a supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Deciding how to follow up “The Lost Daughter” wasn’t easy. Gyllenhaal says she went to a party and saw someone with a tattoo on their forearm of Elsa Lancaster‘s intense gaze from “Bride of Frankenstein.” Taken with the image, Gyllenhaal checked out the movie and was surprised to discover Lancaster’s iconic character was only in it for a few minutes. After reading the original novel of “Frankenstein,” she started to wonder whether Mary Shelley had other things on her mind at the time of her debut novel.

“I just had this fantasy,” she says with a slightly conspiratorial air. “I’m not speaking for Mary Shelley, but there must have been some other, naughtier, wilder, more dangerous things that Mary Shelley wanted to say that weren’t said in ‘Frankenstein.’ What else might she have wanted to express?”

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in the movie “The Bride!”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

And so Gyllenhaal set about writing, with her “Lost Daughter” star in mind for the lead, though she initially didn’t tell Buckley. One of Gyllenhaal’s biggest learning curves in directing “The Lost Daughter” was figuring out how to speak to each actor individually to get the most out of them.

“With Jessie, I just spoke to her like I speak to myself,” Gyllenhaal said. “No translation needed.”

Reached via email, the “Hamnet” star evokes a Frida Kahlo painting to convey their closeness.

“We share two beating hearts,” Buckley says. “Maggie has absolutely been instrumental to waking me up to a part of myself I needed to know — and I think vice versa. We share a similar language and curiosity.”

Moving from the intimate scale of “The Lost Daughter” to the expanded scope of “The Bride!” was exciting for them both.

“I loved seeing her in a bigger sandpit,” Buckley says. “From ‘The Lost Daughter’ it was clear that Maggie had something to say as an artist. But where do we grow? What’s the scarier place? What are the questions we might whisper to ourselves? And what happens if we put those whispers into the ether?”

Gyllenhaal’s new film is unafraid to risk being too much. One extravagant party turns into a musical sequence that finds Bale’s creature singing and dancing to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” — a wink to a whole other self-aware frame of reference and Mel Brooks’ satirical 1974 “Young Frankenstein.”

“Sometimes it was too much too much — that’s the line I was trying to walk,” Gyllenhaal says. “I think so many women are told that we’re too much, over and over again, from the moment we get here. And so I’m used to that.

“But I think that scene is sort of about that. It’s about a kind of explosion of life and humanity. So much of the movie is about these people who cannot fit into their box. This is where they celebrate their bigness, their too-muchness, their monstrousness. That’s the monster mash: ‘I am who I am.’”

“Sometimes it was too much too much — that’s the line I was trying to walk,” Gyllenhaal says. “I think so many women are told that we’re too much, over and over again, from the moment we get here. And so I’m used to that.”

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

Making a purposefully idiosyncratic retelling of a classic tale came with its own challenges. “The Bride!” was originally scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. last fall, on the date that would eventually go to “One Battle After Another.” When a rescheduled March 2026 opening was announced, there were reports — “Beware ‘reports,’ ” Gyllenhaal tells me, wryly — of behind-the-scenes clashes between the director and the studio.

Gyllenhaal doesn’t deny that, to find the final version of the movie, she worked closely with Pam Abdy, who, along with Mike De Luca, is co-chair and co-chief executive of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group. This time the stakes were higher, the filmmaker says, and being left to her own devices, as she had been on “The Lost Daughter,” wasn’t always the best solution.

“If I make a big, hot roller coaster of a movie and remain totally honest in what I’m trying to explore and think about inside it, will people respond? That was my question,” she says. “And then I cut it in a way that was entirely my expression. And I have to say in particular, Pam, who was my point person on this and also has become a friend, she really took me to task on that and said, ‘You want many people to respond and understand this. You have to clarify here and here.’ ”

Though Gyllenhaal admits there were moments of “friction” and that Abdy “has a slightly different agenda than I do,” she now sees the merit in the process. “Something really alive was born, and I think the movie is better for the work that she and I did together,” Gyllenhaal says. “I know that’s an unusual thing to say. I know that you have lots of people saying like, ‘Ah, the studio f— my movie up.’ That is not my experience. It’s really not.”

In a phone interview, Abdy says, “Listen, she tasks me with challenging her, and I task her with challenging us. We’re all in the service of making the best movie we can possibly make for the audience. And we, privately, all of us — studios, directors, filmmakers — we go through a process. It’s unfortunate that certain people choose to assume they know what’s happening in those rooms. But they don’t.”

Abdy describes their collaboration as a healthy and normal one. “You test the movie, you get information, you make adjustments,” she says. “And we needed the time and space to do that.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal, right, on set with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale while making “The Bride!”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

The courage Gyllenhaal once exhibited as a performer now seems to be serving her as a filmmaker. The last feature Gyllenhaal appeared in as an actor was 2018’s “The Kindergarten Teacher,” playing an overzealous mentor to a young poetry prodigy. She also appeared in three seasons of the HBO series “The Deuce” from 2017 to 2019, in which she played an adult film performer struggling to move behind the camera into directing.

As to whether she will return to acting, Gyllenhaal says, “I don’t know. I really prefer directing. This is a better job for me.”

Better how? “I felt as an actress, to be honest, like I always would hit up against a wall of how much I was able to participate or express,” she says. “And I thought for a long time, OK, this is the gig, and what I have to do is learn how to protect self-expression, even if that means I just need a tiny bit of space around me where I have the real estate to do what I need to do as an actress.

“And then when I moved into writing and directing, I didn’t have to play that game anymore,” she says. “And also I could create an environment where nobody had to play that game. Anyone could explore and express the things that were interesting to them. It was ultimately up to me to decide if I wanted to use them or not. So why not let people explore and surprise me?”

Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” may catch the same current wave of pop-inflected Gothic-style romances as Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein.” A catchphrase that emerges in the film is “brain attack,” the Bride becoming a folk hero to women around the country who emulate her distinctive look: Jean Harlow by way of Courtney Love with an inky smear of makeup across the face.

There is something intuitively catchy about brain attack, even if it’s also a little bewildering.

Gyllenhaal remembers an “aspect of terror” about stepping into a bigger studio release. “So do most things that require that you really grow and learn in order to do them. But I’m interested in terror and so I guess I was playing around with the idea of heart attack, panic attack. And I think in order to really do that, some brain attacks are required.”

Gyllenhaal tells me how a few days earlier she had been wearing a hat with the phrase on it while reading by the hotel pool and three 20-something women, maybe a little day drunk, began asking her about it. Two of them seemed puzzled by the phrase, struggling to parse out its meaning, while the third instinctively got it. She just knew. So Gyllenhaal gave her the hat.

“I guess ‘brain attack’ is a phrase you might have to feel,” Gyllenhaal offers, her mouth widening into a smile.

So too, perhaps, with Gyllenhaal’s telling of “The Bride!” with its visions of reckless abandon and personal reclamation — exclamation point and all. It will become a movie waiting for those who need it.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s darkly comedic action-thriller “One Battle After Another” won the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday, continuing its dominating run through awards season.

The PGA honor, presented at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, cements Anderson’s celebrated film as the front-runner for the best picture Oscar. Since 2009, when both the Producers Guild and the motion picture academy expanded their best picture nominee slates from five to 10 and adopted a preferential ballot, the PGA winner has gone on to win best picture all but three times.

The last time the groups diverged came six years ago when PGA winner “1917” lost the Oscar to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” a film that surged in momentum in the weeks leading up to the 2020 Oscars.

No other movie this season has shown that kind of strength other than Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” which scored a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations in January. However, “One Battle” has prevailed at the major ceremonies since then, winning best picture at the British Academy Film Awards last week and Anderson taking the top honor with the Directors Guild earlier this month.

“Sinners” has one more chance to reverse the tide. It will compete against “One Battle After Another” for the cast award at the Actor Awards on Sunday. That ensemble honor, the most prestigious prize handed out by SAG-AFTRA voters, isn’t as strong a precursor as the PGA’s best film. But “Parasite” did win it right before the 2020 Oscars.

Hope springs eternal. Oscar voting ends on Thursday.

Read the full list of 2026 Producers Guild Award winners below.

Darryl F. Zanuck Award (outstanding theatrical motion picture): “One Battle After Another”

Outstanding animated theatrical motion picture: “KPop Demon Hunters”

Norman Felton Award (outstanding episodic television — drama): “The Pitt”

Danny Thomas Award (outstanding episodic television — comedy): “The Studio”

David L. Wolper Award (outstanding limited or anthology series): “Adolescence”

Outstanding televised or streamed motion picture: “John Candy: I Like Me”

Outstanding nonfiction television: “Pee-wee as Himself”

Outstanding live entertainment, variety, sketch, standup and talk series: “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”

Outstanding game and competition television: “The Traitors”

Outstanding documentary film: “My Mom Jayne”

Outstanding children’s program: “Sesame Street”

Outstanding sports program: “Formula 1: Drive to Survive”

Outstanding short form program: ” Adolescence: The Making of Adolescence”

PGA Innovation Award: “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere”

David O. Selznick Award: Amy Pascal

Milestone Award: Jason Blum

Norman Lear Award: Mara Brock Akil

Final Oscar voting began yesterday. How many of the nominated movies have you seen? Are you doing your due diligence in all the categories before the March 15 ceremony or, given the summer weather outside your window, might the mountains be calling?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. It’s never too early for flip-flops, is it?

Testing out a new mandate

To vote for the Oscars, you have to watch all the nominated movies.

This may seem obvious. But until this year, the motion picture academy operated entirely on the honor system, strongly encouraging members to see everything before voting.

Now voters have to show their work — up to a point.

This year, academy members are required to certify through the group’s screening room portal that they have viewed all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in that category. Since nominations were announced in January, the academy has been emailing voters with updates on their progress, indicating where they’re cleared to vote and where they still have work to do.

One wrinkle, and it’s not a small one: Members can simply check a box indicating that they’ve watched a movie outside the academy’s platform. Perhaps they saw it at a festival, on a streaming platform other than the portal or the place God intended films to be seen — a movie theater.

Whether they actually did watch the movies is left to the honesty of the voter. It’s still an honor system, and members do not need to show movie stubs, tickets or receipts.

Talking with academy members, there seems to be a little wiggle room when it comes to having a clear conscience.

Take the voter who loved Ethan Hawke‘s lead turn as legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon,” but hated “Marty Supreme,” turning it off 20 minutes after starting it. Since the academy’s screening room counts a movie as watched only if it’s viewed in its entirety, this voter told me they planned on restarting “Marty Supreme” one night and running it on mute so he could vote in the lead actor category.

“I’d seen enough,” he said. “Watching [Timothée] Chalamet play another pingpong tournament wouldn’t make me change my mind.”

Other academy members told me they were OK marking the “watched” box next to a movie they hadn’t seen, provided they had viewed four of the category’s other nominees. By and large though, they were the outliers. Most voters said they were happy to abstain from voting in a category in which they hadn’t watched all the nominated work. (As academy members may not publicly state voting decisions or preferences, voters spoke on the condition of anonymity.)

“I don’t need to see another ‘Avatar’ movie,” a producers branch member said. “So I’m fine not voting for visual effects or costume design this year. Life is short.”

“I like the idea that I can abstain from categories without any guilt,” an Oscar-nominated writer noted, adding that she thought the new system has been “helpful, reminding me to watch things.”

To that effect, academy members have been receiving a flurry of emails and texts that would give off Big Brother vibes if it didn’t simply boil down to an admonition to watch “Frankenstein” so they could vote in the nine categories where Guillermo del Toro’s monster movie is nominated.

It really isn’t that big an ask, as in recent years the Oscars have become increasingly dominated by a smaller number of movies vacuuming up a greater share of the nominations. This year, the five movies earning the most recognition — “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” “Marty Supreme,” “Frankenstein” and “Hamnet” — hauled in 56 nominations.

If an Oscar voter viewed the 10 best picture nominees, they’d be eligible to mark their ballots in best picture and eight other categories — supporting actor, adapted screenplay, casting, cinematography, film editing, production design and original score. Add Hawke’s “Blue Moon” and that opens up lead actor. Make it a double feature with “It Was Just an Accident” and original screenplay becomes available.

“You don’t really need to be much more than a casual moviegoer to knock out most of your ballot,” an actors branch member told me, “except for things like animation and documentaries and the shorts. I don’t know how many people watch all of those.”

Nobody does, save for the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants counting the ballots. The question vexing both voters and the awards consultants paid to persuade them is how this new, formalized voting will affect the results. As Oscar winners are sometimes the movies that are the most-watched, might requiring voters to see all the nominated work boost less-publicized efforts?

“If ‘Sirât’ wins sound over ‘F1,’ then I think it’s a new ballgame,” one veteran campaigner said. “Right now, though, nobody knows.”

We will soon. In the meantime, with Oscar voting running through Thursday, some academy members tell me their weekend is booked.

“Three nights, three movies,” one voter said. “And then I’m watching ‘Bridgerton.’”

That the “The Napa Boys” won’t be everyone’s cup of tea — or in this case, goblet of wine — almost feels like this meta comedy’s raison d’être. And to say its fusillade of jokes is hit-and-miss would also be a charitable take. They’re mostly miss, even if that, too, can seem like kind of the point.

Co-writers and co-stars Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman (Corirossi also directed) have assembled a series of scenes in search of a story, sending up pivotal moments from a hodgepodge of movies, some real (“Sideways,” “American Pie,” “The Lord of the Rings”), some invented. I’ll admit, it took a minute to understand what the filmmakers were doing (their grandiose statement in the movie’s press kit is purposely unenlightening) and, thus, for this grab bag of nonsense to sink in.

Still, once you realize what the heck it is you’re watching, you might just settle in for a more diverting — or less terrible — time than first expected. But the lower your entertainment bar, the better.

The barely-there plot finds a group of pals and wine aficionados, a.k.a. the Napa Boys, gathering in the California valley (Malibu subbed) for a screwball adventure that, among much else, will involve a coveted wine competition at something called the Great Grape Festival.

The hapless group includes its leader, the crassly horny Jack Jr. (Corirossi), sad-sack widower Miles Jr. (Weitzman), conflicted family man Kevin (Nelson Franklin), underdog vintner Mitch (Mike Mitchell) and a kinder, newer member known only — in an all-caps nod to “American Pie” — as Stifler’s Brother (Jamar Neighbors). Meanwhile, a devotee and “investigative podcaster,” Puck (Sarah Ramos), also joins the guys on their wayward journey.

The film’s goofy conceit is that this is the fourth installment of a Napa Boys movie series (based on nonexistent graphic novels), with the official on-screen title of “The Napa Boys 4: The Sommelier’s Amulet” (Dig that “Indiana Jones”-style font.) As a result, it unfolds as if the viewer is already intimate with a franchise’s culture and lore, dropping us smack into the thick of things with little, if any, context. Confused yet?

This ploy hands Corirossi (a former head creative at Funny or Die) and Weitzman a license to be as slapdash and surface as possible, which, it would seem, is also part of the picture’s wobbly in-joke. Because this alt comedy makes no bones about its characters or situations being even remotely logical or realistic, anything goes — and does. You sometimes wish it didn’t.

Case in point: After a meds mix-up, unruly Jack Jr. (he and Miles Jr. are always addressed with the suffix) unleashes his explosive diarrhea into a barrel of contest-qualifying wine, after which he “spontaneously” ejaculates into it. And then, natch, the judges must sample the concoction. It’s an awful, protracted sequence that begs the question, satire or not, is this truly the funniest bit they could hatch? (To be fair, it’s likely some viewers will, uh, eat it up.)

That aside, the film’s barrage of scenes, sketches, shout-outs and absurdist scenarios leading up to the climactic wine-making championship are largely harmless flights of farce. These involve sex, love, death, near-death, maybe incest, lots of wine tasting (why is the vino here iced-tea brown?) and a moose on the loose.

There are also rides in Jack Jr.’s showy “Wine Wagon” SUV (license plate: IH8MERLOT), beatific montages backed by swelling strings celebrating the “joys” of Napa Boys life (“To be a Napa Boy is to be free!”) and a surprise — and rather pointless — cameo by those other movie “brainiacs,” Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith). There’s also an anxious visit to Jack Jr.’s onetime hookup, the now-elderly sexpert called the Milfonator (Eve Sigall). Oh, and is that really iconic filmmaker and vintner Francis Ford Coppola as the wine competition’s “super-secret celebrity guest judge”? (Two guesses.)

All this inanity takes place over the course of a handful of days, during which no one ever seems to change clothes. Couldn’t Jack Jr. have packed at least two Hawaiian shirts?

And what of the title’s elusive sommelier (DJ Qualls of “Road Trip” fame) and his mystical green amulet? He makes an almost tacked-on, Yoda-like appearance, but it’s too little, too late.

The game if uneven cast includes Paul Rust (channeling Paul Reubens, with whom he co-wrote 2016’s “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday”) as Squirm, Mitch’s insufferably cruel wine-making rival; David Wain (who directed and co-wrote “Wet Hot American Summer,” another spoofy touchstone here) as the wine contest’s even-handed host; and playing the guys’ various love interests: Chloe Cherry, Vanessa Chester, Riki Lindhome and Beth Dover.

Reportedly shot in under 10 days, the film features such fun needle drops as the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” Gerry Rafferty’s “Family Tree” and, of all things to accompany a seduction scene, “The Girls of Rock ‘n’ Roll” sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks and the Chipettes. How this proudly low-budget effort managed to license those tunes is as curious as so much else in this ragtag oddity.

Feb. 27 (Asia Today) — Revenue and admissions for South Korean films plunged about 40% in 2025 from a year earlier, according to industry data released Thursday, underscoring ongoing challenges for the domestic box office.

The Korean Film Council said in its annual industry report that total theater revenue reached 1.047 trillion won ($785 million) last year, while total admissions stood at 106.09 million, down 12.4% and 13.8% respectively from 2024.

The industry narrowly maintained the 1 trillion won and 100 million admissions thresholds, helped by a string of late-year hits including “Zombie Daughter,” “F1: The Movie,” “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle,” “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

However, Korean films alone saw a much steeper decline.

Domestic titles generated 419.1 billion won ($314 million) in revenue and drew 43.58 million viewers, down 39.4% and 39.0% from a year earlier. Their market share fell to around 40%, and no Korean film surpassed 10 million admissions in 2025.

In contrast, foreign films posted revenue of 627.9 billion won ($471 million) and 62.51 million admissions, up 24.7% and 21.0% year-on-year.

Special format screenings such as IMAX and 4D recorded 110 billion won ($82 million) in revenue, up 46.3% from 75.9 billion won the previous year. The average number of cinema visits per person declined to 2.08 from 2.40.

The export value of completed Korean films rose 19.9% to $50.28 million, driven largely by demand in Asian markets including Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam.

The council said overall theater visits declined, but audiences showed a stronger tendency toward selective viewing of major titles, suggesting a more concentrated box office environment.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260227010008420

BRAD Pitt’s estranged son Maddox has dropped the actor’s surname for his credit on his new film with mum Angelina Jolie.

Maddox, 24, served as the production assistant on Angelina’s critically acclaimed 2024 Maria Callas biopic and is now an assistant director of her latest feature, Couture.

For the first time, he’s been credited as Maddox Jolie rather than Maddox Jolie-Pitt.

The new flick sees Angelina play the lead role of Maxine, an American film director diagnosed with breast cancer before jetting to France to shoot the film that will open Paris Fashion Week.

Brad and ex-wife Angelina, 48, have six kids — they adopted Maddox, Pax, 22, and Zahara, 21, and also have their biological children Shiloh, 19, and 17-year-old twins Knox and ­Vivienne.

Maddox isn’t the first child to ditch the Pitt name.

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Shiloh made the same decision in 2024. The legal forms were published in the LA Times for a month before a judge finalised the move as per California law.

Brad was reported to have been upset by the name change.

A source told People: “He’s aware and upset that Shiloh dropped his last name. The reminders that he’s lost his children, is of course not easy for Brad. He loves his children and misses them. It’s very sad.”

The same year Vivienne only used her mother’s name when she was credited as a producer on Broadway musical Playbill for The Outsiders.

While Zahara presented herself as ‘Zahara Marley Jolie’ at her introduction to the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at Spellman College in 2023, this despite Brad describing her enrolment at the college as “really beautiful” months earlier.

The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actor’s marriage to Angelina came to an end in 2016 after an explosive row in front of their kids on a private jet. Brad allegedly clashed with Maddox on the same flight.

As the bitter divorce rumbled on, it became clear the kids were on their mum’s side.

An insider told The Sun: “As far as Maddox, Pax and Zahara go, the word is that they are totally in support of their mother and Brad doesn’t hear from them these days at all — certainly not the boys, and it’s been that way for a very long time.”

The source suggested Brad still had contact with his biological kids, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne.

They said: “He still sees Shiloh and the twins whenever he can, though not as often as he would like.”

The multi-millionaire fought a long, bitter and expensive battle to try to gain equal custody rights with Angelina.

And in May 2021, a judge ruled he could jointly share access.

But just a few months later that was overturned following an appeal by Jolie on the grounds that the judge had financial connections to Brad’s legal team.

None of that stopped Brad from seeing the children under supervision, which he had to book in advance.

Following the break-up, Brad joined Alcoholics Anonymous and he has spoken about drinking too heavily for much of his life.

Pax’s private Instagram post in 2020 on Father’s Day suggested the kids experienced problems before and beyond the plane incident.

He wrote: “You time and time and again prove yourself to be a terrible and despicable person.

“You have no consideration or empathy toward your four youngest children who tremble in fear when in your presence.

“You will never understand the damage you have done to my family because you’re incapable of doing so.”

Neve Campbell helped cement the “Scream” franchise’s legacy in the horror genre, which is why stepping away from the sixth movie was a difficult decision.

But it’s one the actor stands by, she told “CBS Mornings” on Tuesday, adding that she “didn’t think I could live with myself walking on set.”

Campbell, the original “Scream” queen, declined to return for the sixth film following a pay dispute.

“I just didn’t feel right. I just knew that my value to this franchise was bigger than what had been offered,” Campbell told the morning show. “For me, I needed to make that choice.”

However, the actor is now back for “Scream 7” after securing a nearly $7-million deal, according to Variety.

The seventh installment is expected to open to a franchise-high $45 million to $50 million in North America this weekend, according to Variety.

But the film’s journey to the big screen wasn’t easy. Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega led the sixth movie in lieu of Campbell, both of whom subsequently left the franchise in 2023. Director Christopher Landon also exited the movie shortly after.

Barrera was fired from the seventh film in late 2023 after sharing on social media pro-Palestinian statements regarding the Israel-Hamas war. Ortega then exited the film, citing her conflicting filming schedule for Netflix’s “Wednesday.”

In “Scream 7,” Sidney Prescott is now a mom living a quiet family life; a “pretty bold choice” for the character, Campbell told “CBS Mornings,” “considering what happens to most of the people she loves, but she’s decided not to let her past dictate the way she’s going to live her life now.”

Campbell’s co-stars from the original film, along with fans of the franchise, were quick to voice their support for the actor’s decision in 2022. Matthew Lillard, who starred opposite Campbell, tweeted that the decision was “straight up sexism.”

“When I spoke out about it, it wasn’t really to sort of rally everybody,” Campbell said. “It was really just my truth at the time and the fact that people sort of got behind me, I got lovely support and that was really nice.”

“Every makeup artist has their own style, but it was really important to keep what was passed down,” says Naomi Hibino, the kabuki makeup artist behind director Sang-il Lee’s “Kokuho,” a mesmerizing tale of centuries-old Japanese theatrical tradition told through a lens of friendship, rivalry and the cost of pursuing perfection. Orphaned Kikuo (Ryô Yoshizawa) is taken in by a renowned kabuki actor (Ken Watanabe) and raised alongside his son Shunsuke (Ryûsei Yokohama), as the two devote their lives to mastering the stylized art. Their breakthrough arrives with a performance of Temple Maiden, a dance tracing the love and envy of two maidens who turn into serpents. Together with kabuki hairstylist Tadashi Nishimatsu — Kyoko Toyokawa did the film’s non-performance hair and makeup — Hibino blended faithful Edo era references with visual distinctions between characters. “Shunsuke is from a well-to-do family, so I wanted to give him a vibrant, youthful and also a cute look,” notes Hibino. “The way I imagined Kikuo was to keep it simple, so the simplicity is reflected in the makeup. [In Temple Maiden] it’s really subtle, but the edge of the eye is a little different. I made [Kikuo] look more down-turning.” Hibino applied the white foundation (oshiroi) using methods from the theater, refining it for film to look more “beautiful and delicate.” Hints of pink eye shadow, dark eyeliner, red pigmented eyebrows and crimson lipstick complete the transformation — the next “national treasure” has taken the stage.

THE Pretty Woman star who infamously scolded Julia Roberts in the iconic scene looks very different these days.

Dey Young has made a rare appearance 35 years after starring as a rather snobby saleswomen on Rodeo Drive in the 1990 romantic comedy.

She has appeared in over 100 movies and television programs throughout her career, but is perhaps best known for her Pretty Woman stint, alongside Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.

The actress, who is now 70-years-old, was seen on a leisurely Sunday morning stroll with her pooch by her side.

She and her dog were strolling along the sidewalk in Los Angeles.

Dey looked chic but kept things simple in a red zip-up, black trousers, and a burgundy colored cap. 

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As she walked her dog, which was on a leash, the actress also donned some sunglasses and wore her phone on a lanyard across her body.

In Pretty Woman, Dey’s character works at a swanky shop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

Julia Robert’s character of Vivian Ward works as a prostitute and goes shopping with her client’s credit card.

When she walks into Dey’s character’s shop, the saleswoman tells Vivian they don’t have clothes for her.

Vivian later goes shopping elsewhere before returning to the snobby shop to tell them “big mistake” after splashing hundreds of dollars.

Despite having long been in the business, Dey isn’t slowing down.

She currently has two projects in the works.

Dey previously spoke about her Pretty Woman role.

Speaking to Today in 2021, she said, “I never knew that this movie would be as big as it was, or that this scene would be so iconic.

“I really think the reason is that it’s a moment a lot of people can relate to it.”

Before her Pretty Woman stint, Dey had taken on roles in the likes of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Strange Behavior.

She wasn’t planning to audition for Pretty Woman until a chance encounter.

“Alan Thicke and I were friends and he invited me to a tennis party,” she said.

“I got paired with up Garry Marshall.

“We ended up winning our match, and that was a really fun thing. At the end of it, Alan told him I was an actress and (Marshall) was like, ‘Oh, really? Well, you know, I think I might have something for you.’”

She then went on to audition for the film, which was in fact originally called 3,000.

The reason the movie was originally titled 3,000, was because that was the amount negotiated for Julia Robert’s character’s rate.

We made it! After this weekend, when the Producers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild hand out their highly predictive precursors, the final shape of the Oscar race should be (reasonably) clear — and nominees worn out by months of campaigning will be breathing a sigh of relief.

Before I share highlights from this week’s issue, one programming note: This will be my last letter from the editor until our inaugural Cannes issue drops in May. (Don’t worry, I will be plenty busy in the interim catching up on this year’s top Emmy contenders.)

Thanks as always for following along, and may you triumph in your Oscar pool!

Cover story: Rose Byrne

(Ryan Pfluger / For The Times)

Times columnist Mary McNamara and I don’t agree on everything, but we do agree on this: “Damages” deserves to be ranked alongside “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” in any discussion of the Golden Age of TV.

That’s thanks in one part to a gripping flash-forward narrative structure now so common it could be considered a cliché, and in another to Glenn Close’s indelible performance as ruthless litigator Patty Hewes. But it’s also a testament to the multifaceted talents of Rose Byrne, who went “toe-to-toe” with Close in what would become her breakthrough role — and then confidently pivoted to projects like “Insidious,” “Bridesmaids” and “Spy.”

“Byrne is something of a creative chameleon, moving easily from drama to comedy to horror, film to television to stage and back again,” McNamara writes in this week’s cover story. “In many ways, her gut-wrenching, darkly funny performance as a woman pushed beyond all endurance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a culmination of all the characters she brought to life before it.”

Inside Warner Bros.’ dominant Oscar haul

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Whether you come down on the side of “Sinners” or “One Battle After Another” in the best picture race may be perfect fodder for debate with friends over a few small beers, but for Warner Bros. executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy it would be akin to choosing a favorite child. After all, both projects emerged from the pair’s desire, as contributor Gregory Ellwood writes, to make WB “a destination where filmmakers of all varieties, including auteurs, bring their projects for ‘white glove’ treatment.”

As De Luca explains, “Everything was original once… If you don’t refresh the coffers with new IP to create new franchises, at some point you get to Chapter 10 or 11 and people start to move on.”

The many faces of ‘The Secret Agent’

(Ryan Pfluger/For The Times)

The moment Tânia Maria arrives onscreen as Dona Sebastiana in “The Secret Agent,” you can’t help but ask yourself, “Who is that?!” (Star Wagner Moura had the same reaction.) But the real feat casting director Gabriel Domingues pulls off in the Oscar-nominated Brazilian thriller is to make you ask yourself the same question, over and over, every time a new character appears.

How did Domingues find a range of actors to represent the country’s endless diversity? It’s part of his process, writes contributor Carlos Aguilar: “He prides himself on doing the shoe-leather work of looking for fresh, compelling faces in cities where others might not think to look — those without a prominent arts scene, for instance.”

More stories from our Feb. 26 issue

Fans of historical dramas are in for a treat as Outlaw King is now available on Netflix UK. The 2018 film stars Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce in a stirring tale of Scotland’s fight for independence.

Fans of historical dramas and period productions are set for a real treat as an outstanding option has landed on the Netflix UK catalogue.

The film, featuring Chris Pine in the leading role alongside Florence Pugh, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Tony Curran, Callan Mulvey, Billy Howle, Sam Spruell, James Cosmo and Stephen Dillane, portrays pivotal moments from the Scottish Wars of Independence spanning 1304-07.

Outlaw King, a rousing 2018 historical drama, was co-written, produced, and directed by David Mackenzie. The official synopsis reads: “After being crowned King of Scotland, legendary warrior Robert the Bruce is forced into exile by the English and leads a band of outlaws to help him reclaim the throne.”

It’s a classic underdog story of how the 14th century Scottish ‘Outlaw King’ Robert the Bruce employed cunning and courage to vanquish the considerably larger and better equipped occupying English army.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Pine revealed the challenges of perfecting the Scottish accent for the role. The actor admitted: “It was difficult to get an accent to be organic that is so foreign from my own. There were particular sounds that I stumbled on, but also just getting the musicality of the language down.”

“I didn’t want it to be a movie about an accent; I didn’t want people to not believe I was Scottish, but I also couldn’t draw too much attention to it and away from the story.”

Holding a 69 per cent audience approval rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Outlaw King received largely positive notices, with one fan saying: “Great movie all around, deserves way more love than it has received. This one will age well, fantastic period piece with stunning cinematography, solid acting/cast, and realistic fight scenes.”

A further viewer lauded the production, writing: “Noticed that not only were the cast amazing but the extras in the battle scenes were unbelievable, probably the best extras I’ve seen in any movie.”

One noted: “I quite enjoyed this historical tale. It has a quick pace, simple dialogue, brutal violence and charming characters. Quite simply a fun film to watch.”

A professional assessment of the film reads: “The film lifts itself and has great technical and production design, great lead performances, and a story that whilst familiar, is a much better representation of the same story we have gotten before.”

Yet another critic heaped praise upon Chris Pine for his portrayal of the Scottish king: “Chris Pine gives a strong performance in this well-constructed tale of Robert the Bruce’s fight for Scotland’s freedom.”

A third reviewer weighed in on the picture: “Outlaw King is a gripping, moving and grand film full of spellbinding performances. Pine effortlessly embodies Bruce’s conviction, bravery, and compassion.”

Outlaw King is streaming on Netflix now.

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The director of one of the best films of 2025 that’s up for several Oscars is working on a highly anticipated revival of an iconic series

Ryan Coogler’s The X-Files reboot has just been given a thrilling update.

The revamped sci-fi mystery drama was first announced back in 2023, with the acclaimed director releasing his hit period horror blockbuster Sinners in the meantime.

Nearly three years later, the project has finally been given a pilot greenlight by streaming service Hulu, with Jennifer Yale (The Copenhagen Test) coming on board as showrunner.

Black Panther filmmaker Coogler will write and direct the first episode, which will star Danielle Deadwyler (The Piano Lesson) as an FBI agent investigating the paranormal.

A synopsis via Deadline confirms the series will follow “two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents — one played by Deadwyler — [who] form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.”

Deadwyler has a big year ahead as she’ll next be seen in the HBO comedy series Rooster with Steve Carell as well as the third season of Euphoria. Her X-Files co-star has yet to be confirmed.

The original series starred David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, a believer and a skeptic who investigate unsolved cases known as X-Files.

Originally airing from 1993-2002 over nine seasons, the series is widely considered one of the greatest shows of all time, with Radio Times calling the first episode ‘the greatest pilot in TV history’. It returned for two new seasons in 2016 and 2018.

One Redditor claimed it’s “never to be dethroned”, and someone else agreed: “This show is my #1 of all time. It has its flaws but this is the show I go to every night.

“If TV died as a whole entirely and I was stranded on a desert island, this would be my one and only choice.”

And an X user called it “literally the best show ever made, so beautifully shot and a killer soundtrack!”

The reboot certainly has a daunting legacy to live up to, though thankfully director Coogler has more than enough credentials to meet fans’ high expectations.

His latest film, Sinners, starring Michael B Jordan as twin gangsters who encounter a chilling cult of vampires in 1930s Mississippi, was named the best film of 2025 by the African American Film Critics Association.

The critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads: “A rip-roaring fusion of masterful visual storytelling and toe-tapping music, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s first original blockbuster reveals the full scope of his singular imagination.”

Teasing his next project on the Last Podcast on the Left, Coogler said: “I’ve been excited about that for a long time, and I’m fired up to get back to it. Some of those episodes, if we do our jobs right, will be really f***ing scary.

“We’re gonna try to make something really great and really be something for the real X-Files fans, and maybe find some new ones.”

He also revealed that he had spoken to Anderson about the revamped series, though her and Duchovny’s involvement is currently unconfirmed.

“She’s incredible. Fingers crossed there,” Coogler added cryptically.

The X-Files does not yet have a release date.

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For casting director Gabriel Domingues, putting together the ensemble of “The Secret Agent” meant materializing characters inspired by director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s recollections.

“It’s not that he was showing us a picture and saying, ‘They must look like this.’ They were ideas of memories that could change,” Domingues says of the Brazilian period thriller about a father on the run during an interview at The Times newsroom. One of the nominees for this year’s inaugural Academy Award for casting, Domingues appreciates how politically charged Mendonça Filho’s films are. His narratives are often fertile ground for an eclectic mix of performers.

And there are no throwaway roles in “The Secret Agent”: “Even the small characters represent ideas about Brazilian life and its contradictions,” Domingues adds.

To honor his large cast, a “panorama” of his country’s people, Mendonça Filho includes a montage at the end of the film in which each actor is acknowledged individually. The director thinks of this as the cinematic equivalent of a curtain call or final bow at the end of a stage production.

“Gabriel tries to find an interesting mix of experienced actors and people that we can discover,” says producer Emilie Lesclaux about Domingues, with whom she’s worked on multiple projects. He first collaborated with Mendonça Filho and Lesclaux on “Aquarius” as a casting assistant.

Domingues believes working on “Aquarius” was instrumental in developing his casting method, which involves searching for the least obvious option to cast the character. He prides himself on doing the shoe-leather work of looking for fresh, compelling faces in cities where others might not think to look — those without a prominent arts scene, for instance.

Gabriel Leone as Bobbi/Abdias  (Victor Juca)

Hermila Guedes as Claudia  (Victor Juca)

Luciano Chirolli as Henrique Ghirotti  (Victor Juca)

Roberio Diogenes as Euclides Cavalcanti  (Victor Juca)

Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana  (Victor Juca)

Joalisson Cunha as Frentista  (Victor Juca)

Isabel Zuaa as Tereza Victoria  (Victor Juca)

Kaiony Venancio as Vilmar  (Victor Juca)

That’s not to say the entire cast was discovered. Mendonça Filho had lead Wagner Moura in mind from the outset, while others sprung to mind as he wrote the screenplay: Maria Fernanda Cândido, a famous soap opera actor, as a crucial ally to Moura’s character; and the late Udo Kier, who had previously appeared in the director’s blood-soaked film “Bacurau,” as a German Jewish immigrant who lived through World War II.

The filmmaker admits that envisioning parts with a specific person in mind is “dangerous.” “I can write a character thinking of you, but I never know if you will want to make the film,” says Mendonça Filho. “And I grow attached to the image.”

Among the other supporting roles, the most challenging to cast, the team agrees, was that of Euclides, the sleazy police chief. Though the character is “repulsive,” it also required an edge of charisma to make him more emotionally layered. Eventually, they came across actor Robério Diógenes. “Robério has studied the clown art in the theater, and he’s a very funny guy, so he adds a component of ridiculousness to this character,” Domingues says.

For Vilmar, an impoverished man hired as a subcontractor for a murder, Mendonça Filho had in mind a real-life contract killer he’d seen in a 1970s TV program. The actor had to convey a certain ambiguity not often afforded to people of a lower social class. There’s no doubt Vilmar is acting out of necessity, but he is not entirely without agency since he negotiates his payment. Domingues found the ideal embodiment of this complex character in Kaiony Venâncio, an actor from the city of Natal who had mostly worked in short films.

Then there’s the scene-stealing Tânia Maria, who plays the endearing, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana. The 79-year-old talent first appeared in “Bacurau” as an extra. “I just could not help thinking of her,” says Mendonça Filho about casting her in his latest film. “I even pre-ad-libbed many of her lines knowing what she might say.”

Before finding her way onto the screen, Tânia Maria has long made a living as an artisan handcrafting rugs. “I never thought about being an actress. I only thought about sewing,” she says with an endearing smile. “All of this came as a surprise.”

Igor de Araujo as Sergio  (Victor Juca)

Joao Vitor Silva as Haroldo  (Victor Juca)

Robson Andrade as Clovis  (Victor Juca)

Maria Fernanda Candido as Elza/Sara Gerber  (Victor Juca)

Alice Carvalho as Fatima  (Victor Juca)

Thomas Aquino as Valdemar  (Victor Juca)

Licinio Januario as Antonio  (Victor Juca)

Udo Kier as Hans  (Victor Juca)

And though she’s still sewing, her acting prospects look bright. She’s already appeared in another film, “Yellow Cake,” premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival this month. That Tânia Maria also recently starred in humorous local commercials for Burger King and Heineken is proof of her current status in Brazilian pop culture — as are the Dona Sebastiana costumes that have become popular during this year’s Carnival.

“I can’t go out on the street without people stopping me. They ask me for autographs, for photos, they want to talk to me, they ask me questions,” she says in Portuguese via an interpreter while on a video call from her home. “I make time for everyone, and I’m enjoying all of it.”

Undaunted by what she calls the most challenging aspect of acting — memorizing the lines — Tânia Maria is eager to continue exploring this unexpected new facet. “I don’t want to stop because I’m not old! I’m waiting for more invitations to move forward in acting,” she says.

The success many of the actors have found thanks to “The Secret Agent” very much pleases the filmmakers, but it also has a major downside.

“That’s all that we want for the people that we work with, that the film is good for them and their career,” says Lesclaux. “But for us, it also makes things more complicated for the next film because we will want to work with them, and they might not be available.”

The 2026 original song contenders come from deep inside the characters singing them: a simple man wistfully looking back on his ordinary life; a budding bluesman with talent to burn down the house; a 17-time Oscar nominee; a demon-hunting K-pop star channeling the real-life singer-songwriter behind her; and a joyous expression of life from inside a documentary’s main “character,” a retirement home for musicians.

‘Dear Me’ from ‘Diane Warren: Relentless’

Music and lyrics by Diane Warren

Diane Warren in “Diane Warren: Relentless.”

(Don Holtz)

When 17-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren agreed to be in a documentary about her life, she found herself back in her childhood home in Van Nuys — specifically the bathroom where she wrote songs as an angsty teen.

“The acoustics in that bathroom were always great,” she says. “It was cool to go back and look at the bedroom window I used to sneak out of. I’m always connected to that 14-year-old me, with a guitar my dad bought me.”

Inspired by the documentary’s examination of her troubled youth, Warren wrote an “It gets better” ballad sung by Kesha: “Dear me, it’s gonna be all right, all right / Trust me, all of the pain is gonna fade.”

“I get notes from all ages; the song makes them feel like they could hug the little kid inside them,” says Warren. “It’s a love song to your younger self.”

‘Golden’ from ‘KPop Demon Hunters’

Music and lyrics by Ejae, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seon and Teddy Park

A scene from “KPop Demon Hunters.”

(Netflix via Associated Press)

Though “Golden” went to No. 1 and has been winning awards, singer and co-writer Ejae still connects “one hundred million percent” to its painful roots in her own, frustrated K-pop dreams.

She related to the film’s protagonist, Rumi, a monster-fighting singer who is secretly part monster herself. “She has this side that she’s so ashamed of, that she was born with. I struggled with my own demons that I was ashamed of, growing up in the K-pop industry, [harshly critiqued for] my physical appearance, my voice, my personality.

“Even when writing ‘Golden,’ things were just not happening. It was a really bad time.”

Yet the hit is a catchy K-pop banger.

“It was very cathartic,” she says. “I remember crying while recording the demo. I was desperate.

“Now when I sing it, it’s a different feeling. I was able to reach a dream, and it makes me feel like this is who I was meant to be.”

‘I Lied to You’ from ‘Sinners’

Music and lyrics by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson

Miles Caton, center, in “Sinners.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” features a central moment of musical ecstasy. Emerging bluesman Sammie plays a song he wrote as a confession to his pastor father, a paean to the music he loves. As the juke joint crowd responds, he loses himself in the timeless transcendence artists hope for.

Co-writer Ludwig Göransson says, “It doesn’t happen very often, but you have those experiences when you really are getting into the music and time and space disappears. Ryan’s not a musician, but it was written like he’s been in that position.”

In cosmic communion, practitioners of Black music from many eras appear to Sammie, the joint’s roof combusting in his mind. Göransson assisted in the Dolby Atmos mix, moving the music and sound around spatially as the camera travels.

Co-writer Raphael Saadiq says, “Sammie’s father felt secular music was devil music. Even today, you have people who go to church who don’t listen to the blues [for that reason], but deep down inside, they love it because it’s something we inherited from our ancestors.”

‘Sweet Dreams of Joy’ from ‘Viva Verdi!’

Music and lyrics by Nicholas Pike

Milan’s Casa Verdi, a retirement home for musicians depicted in “Viva Verdi!”

(Viva Verdi! LLC)

Even those who know little about opera have heard of Giuseppe Verdi. What many don’t know is one of his most enduring accomplishments is Casa Verdi — a retirement home for musicians. Yvonne Russo’s documentary “Viva Verdi!” captures the vibrant life inside its walls, expressed in the aria “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” sung by soprano Ana María Martínez and composed by Nicholas Pike.

The filmmakers “sent me this 12-minute assembly, kind of like a teaser, and that’s all I saw,” says Pike. “The passion, the vitality of these residents, the mentoring of young, up-and-coming artists … I went over to the piano and wrote the song.”

He says the whole thing took about a day to craft, with its contemporary piano figures and classical vocals, imbued with the vivaciousness of Casa Verdi’s residents.

He wanted to capture the footage’s “energy and life and hope. We’ve all been to retirement homes; they can be pretty down places. This is 180 degrees from that.”

‘Train Dreams’ from ‘Train Dreams’

Music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner; lyrics by Nick Cave

Joel Edgerton in “Train Dreams.”

(Netflix)

When “Train Dreams” star Joel Edgerton called Nick Cave to work with composer Bryce Dessner on a song for the film, the postpunk poet and art rocker was on holiday, avoiding the “attendant agony” of songwriting. But Denis Johnson’s book happened to be a favorite of Cave’s.

Edgerton sent him the film. Cave says, “I sat up in bed and watched it with Bryce’s gorgeous score and fell asleep and had a kind of fever dream with all the images of this extraordinary film, and woke up with the lyrics fully formed, which is extremely unusual for me.”

He went to the hotel’s breakfast room, where there was a piano. “It all just sort of poured out of me. The melody and the lyrics fit perfectly to Bryce’s score.”

The song expresses “the inarticulate wonder at the world that the lead character has. There’s this chordal thing after the refrain, that rises up — an expression of that wonder, rising out of the grief.

“‘This has been going on for years … I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.’”

When Jared Snow goes to the hospital, he’s usually in serious pain, which he hopes will be assuaged soon. But living with sickle cell disease as a Black man in America often tests this hope.

The Compton born stand-up comedian and actor has been living with sickle cell disease since he was a child. Hospital visits and pain have always been part of his life. But now he’s using his latest project, a documentary film called “You Look Fine,” to show the world how he copes as an entertainer with living with sickle cell disease in an industry steeped in image and perception.

Alongside actor-comedian Marlon Wayans, Snow wanted to make the film to raise awareness about the realities of sickle cell disease and how it impacts Black communities.

In the United States, sickle cell disease affects about 100,000 people, with more than 90% of cases being among Black people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sickle cell disease occurs in about one out of every 365 Black or African American births. People living with sickle cell disease have red blood cells that are crescent shaped due to a gene mutation. Because of this, the red blood cells can block blood flow to the rest of the body and can cause chronic pain, strokes, lung problems, infections and kidney disease.

The nearly 90-minute documentary has Snow filming himself inside small hospital rooms, nurses trying to find a vein in which to stick needles, and even him trying to work on material as he lies in hospital beds. The film also includes interviews with his friends.

Snow was adamant about showing the blood and needles in the film as well as footage of himself writhing in pain on hospital beds and the frustration of waiting hours for doctors to provide adequate dosages of pain medication that can help him. He cracks jokes during his hospital stays, but in between you get a front-row look at how tiring, tearful and emotionally devastating his illness can be. Interspersed within such footage are clips from his stand-up shows and him trying to live his best life by traveling, skydiving and even experiencing New York City snowfall.

The Times caught up with Snow and Wayans to talk about the film, vulnerability, Black men’s health, and finding levity through the pain.

J. Snow in the hospital in “You Look Fine”

(J. SnowPro)

I was struck by the handwritten notes with title ideas. Tell me where “You Look Fine” comes from?

J. Snow: It’s just something I hear a lot. It’s something I’ve heard a lot during my life. It’s cultural Black gaslighting is what it is. When you’re in pain, sometimes you look fine. When you are telling people, “I’m not fine,” they’re like, “Your hair is nice.” I can’t go to the hospital with gold. I had gold beads. Sometimes you go there looking too nice. Sometimes I got to dress down just to try to get the help. But if I dress too far down, I look homeless, and they really won’t be open to helping me. So you got to find the balance. But that’s kind of where it comes from. … I wanted to throw it back into people’s face. This is something that a lot of sickle cell warriors, and people with chronic illnesses in general hear, people with mental illness hear, and so I think it’s important to highlight how that literally is gaslighting.

What was your motivation to do this documentary now?

J.S.: I wanted to show that humor lives within this and that a lot of resilience and strength are also within this, and that was really the motivator. Also, just growing up with it, not having a lot of information, not seeing a lot of men talk about it. I wanted to be different, you know.

Marlon Wayans: For me it fits on brand for several reasons. One is because I love taking the dark things in life and finding some humor in it. And I think I try to do that with my comedy. I try to do it with my specials. I try to do it because I think we need to all find smiles no matter what your situation is; laughter is always healing and always necessary. Being African American, I grew up when sickle cell was like a prominent disease, and in our culture I know even when it came to dating, my mother would ask “Who you dating? You know, because if she got the trait, and you got the trait, you know, what could happen.” So I’ve always been aware of it, and I’ve lost now four friends to sickle cell. I just lost two in the last year. It’s a long fight, and so I’m here to support them and our culture and the awareness. And you know, Jay is a friend, and you know, I want him to see fame.

For Jared, in the film, you say, “I just want to see what my body can do.” I thought that was just so deeply profound. What is your relationship like with your body now, compared with the moment you were filming that?

J.S.: When somebody sees me eating a salad, and they’re like, “Oh, you eating salad?” I’m like, “This could save my life.” When I’m stretching and doing yoga, it’s not because I want to be a yogi. It’s because it literally gets oxygen into the joints that are suffering without oxygen. It stretches my hips and I want the longevity. I see what happens in sickle cell warriors and people without sickle cell who just age without moving frequently.

J. Snow walks through the halls of a hospital while dealing with issues from sickle cell.

(Courtesy of J. SnowPro)

Black people, especially for Black men, don’t have their pain taken seriously — be it their physical pain or their emotional pain. What has it been like for you to publicly show that pain?

J.S.: It’s been challenging. It took awhile for me to get to the point where I could even talk about this publicly, especially being in entertainment and trying to maintain a certain persona and image in entertainment where like your ego clashes against your vulnerability and you feeling like you’re weak. That’s the stigma that comes with people who admit that they have illnesses and stuff like that, especially in entertainment. It makes people not want to work with you. I’ve suffered through that. I’ve lost jobs while in the hospital because of this. And so it got to a place where it just was unavoidable. The pressure built so much and the frequency of the hospital visits became so crazy that it was like, you’re either going to be viewed as this very lazy, sometime-y person, or you’re going to come clean about what you’re actually dealing with and just face it.

M.W.: I live in the pain. I live in the vulnerability. I think that’s why I create my best work. You know, my parents died. I thought it was only appropriate to talk about that thing that hurts me so much. I think part of it takes courage, but at the same time, I know it’s necessary.

What was going through your mind when you first saw that footage of [Snow] in the hospital?

M.W.: “This [man] is crazy. Why you filming?” He made sure he had a GoPro on his foot and set cameras up — dude really wants to make it. Forget this disease. He may be faking it just to make it bigger. I was proud, right? That’s because I love the resilience, I love that you still have a passion, that you still have a thing that you want to do, and you have this art and this vessel and this expression, and I know that even though he’s hurting, that he’s healing at the same time, at least, you know, emotionally and spiritually. Because to put art out there at the time that it’s happening, that you’re in pain, that takes a lot of courage from the artist, and so I was proud. That’s why I stand behind it, because I think it’s something I’ve never seen, and I think it’s something that’s necessary for the culture.

How has this film changed your relationship to your understanding of masculinity and strength?

M.W.: For me, it’s just on theme. It hasn’t changed, it just enforced how I feel. You know, I’ve never been one to hide my feelings. I go to therapy. I have two therapists, I go on my walks. I talk to God. I’m reading my Bible. I understand that life is a long journey of suffering, and you need these outlets, and this movie and art are part of that. I have the stage. I always have this thing that I’m expressing because it helps me reconcile all that’s going on with me, especially when I take this pain and make other people laugh or are entertained by it, then I go, all right, I did something good with that thing that was bad. And so this enforces what I want people to feel. I want people to watch this. That’s why I stand behind this, because it’s on theme spiritually for me.

J.S.: I think when you stand outside of that vulnerability and you’re afraid to really go into it, I don’t know, I feel like that’s orbiting your true power. The most masculine thing you can do is face your highs and lows head on and own them. And that’s where you find out who you really are. This is where you find out what you can really bring to the table for yourself, for others, and where you become fearless. And that’s exactly what this showed me, was that I can do anything, I can conquer a lot of things. I walk around with a new energy because I’ve done this. I literally had a film on hard drives, and I sat for 11 months and edited it relentlessly, and now I have my first feature film because I was fearless enough to at least try to do it and not feel, what are people going to think, or what are people going to say? That didn’t matter to me. Also with this clock over my head, you don’t got time to think about stuff like that. It’s like, what do you want to do while you’re here? And what I wanted to do was make movies, make people laugh and inspire others to do things that they want to do too. And that took letting go of whatever this masculine image was that was blocking me.

J. Snow on stage at the Hollywood Laugh Factory

(Brianna Joseph)

The whole film is endearing, but I found those moments of levity so well- timed and so thoughtful and funny. How do Black people find those moments of levity, oftentimes, during these moments of pain?

M.W.: Because Black people have been through so much trauma before we get into family trauma, just as a people. We have suffered the most trauma from being separated from our family, slavery — we’ve been through it — and yet, and still, we find that funny. And that has been, I think, our saving grace is our sense of humor. It’s been a lifesaver. It’s been a raft in a really rough ocean for us. And I think it’s beautiful that we can. I will always promote laughing when you’re in your most pain to find the funny, because that takes a little pressure off. You’re laughing and crying at the same time. It’s like the best feeling.

J.S.: It’s like oxygen, like when the air is being sucked out of the room by your circumstances, your trauma, your pain or whatever. That little laugh is like a little breath of oxygen. It gives you something to keep going forward, to continue to think, “OK, like, where’s another solution from here? What else can I do here?” It gives you that breath that you need.