Film

A Gold Rush movie from director Ang Lee and a biopic set in Long Beach and produced by Snoop Dogg are among the 28 films that have been awarded a tax credit for shooting in California, the state’s film commission said Wednesday.

Together, the 28 films are expected to hire more than 4,800 cast and crew members, as well as more than 22,000 background actors, the commission said. The projects are projected to generate $562 million in economic activity throughout the state.

Of the 28 projects, 18 are indie films with budgets of $10 million or less, five are indies with budgets of more than $10 million and five are non-independent feature films.

Seventeen of the projects will be shooting outside the Los Angeles region, which qualifies them for additional benefits under the revamped California film and television production incentive program that was approved earlier this year. The state has now doubled the annual amount of funds allocated to the program from $330 million to $750 million and expanded the eligibility criteria.

This is the fourth round of TV or film projects that have been awarded tax credits under the revised program. Together, those projects are on track to generate $4.2 billion in economic activity in California and more than 25,000 cast and crew jobs across 4,000 filming days in the state, the commission said.

“In a highly competitive global environment, productions have choices,” said Colleen Bell, director of the California Film Commission. “This round shows that when California puts the right tools on the table, filmmakers want to stay, create and invest here.”

In addition to the “Gold Mountain” film from Lee, which was awarded $7.7 million in tax credits, and the untitled NBCUniversal project from Snoop Dogg ($17 million), an indie film called “Guerrero” directed by Gina Rodriguez was also awarded a $4.5-million tax credit, along with an untitled Sony project produced by actor Glen Powell ($9.9 million).

“California raised me, inspired me, and now helpin’ bring this biopic to life in 2026,” Snoop Dogg said in a statement. “Much respect — that’s real teamwork, ya dig.”

No, our Women in Film issue doesn’t exclusively feature women — Noah Baumbach and Brendan Fraser feature in our Dec. 16 edition as well — but it does shine a particular spotlight on their extraordinary contribution to the year in film.

As performers and production designers, writers, directors and more, the women included here helped fashion deeply felt stories of parenthood, friendship, grief and betrayal, and that’s just for starters. Read on for more highlights from this week’s Envelope.

The Envelope Actresses Roundtable

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

This year’s Oscar Actresses Roundtable was full of laughter, sparked by everything from Gwyneth Paltrow’s impression of mother Blythe Danner to Sydney Sweeney’s tales from inside the ring on “Christy.” But when it comes to self-determination, this year’s participants — who also included Emily Blunt, Elle Fanning, Jennifer Lopez and Tessa Thompson — are dead serious.

As performers, producers and businesswomen, the sextet told moderator Lorraine Ali, the boxes that Hollywood and the broader culture seek to put them in need not apply. And realizing that is its own liberation. As Lopez put it, “I don’t ever feel like there’s somebody who can say to me, ‘No, you can’t.’”

‘Hamnet’s’ last-minute miracle

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times))

Since the moment I first saw “Hamnet,” I’ve been raving to everyone I know about its climactic sequence, set inside the Globe Theatre during a performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” (Well, if you can call it “raving” when you preface your recommendation with the sentence, “I sobbed through the last 45 minutes.”) As it turns out, though, the process of making the film’s final act was as miraculous as the finished product.

“There were only four days left of shooting on ‘Hamnet’ when Chloé Zhao realized she didn’t have an ending,” Emily Zemler begins this week’s digital cover story, which features Zhao, actors Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Joe Alwyn and production designer Fiona Crombie. What they created from that point, combining kismet, creative inspiration and grueling preparation, will buoy your belief in the power of art. “It was like a tsunami,” Buckley tells Zemler. “I’ll never forget it.”

A Is for Animal Wrangler

When I first read Helen Macdonald’s transporting “H Is for Hawk,” which combines memoir, nature writing and literary criticism, I can’t say I closed the book wondering when we’d get a film adaptation. Little did I know that director Philippa Lowthorpe, star Claire Foy and a pair of married bird handlers would provide such a thorough answer to my skepticism.

As Lisa Rosen writes in her story on the marriage of art and goshawk in “H Is For Hawk,” that meant shaping the production around the notoriously wary birds of prey, including its lead performance. “It wasn’t like having another actor who had another agenda or actions or a perspective that they wanted to get across in the scene,” Foy told Rosen of her extensive screen time alone with the five goshawks who stood in for Helen’s. “I was along for the ride with these animals.”

More stories from our Dec. 16 issue

Joe Ely, a singer-songwriter and foundational figure in Texas’ progressive country-rock scene, has died. He was 78.

According to a statement from his representatives, Ely died Dec. 15 at home in New Mexico, from complications of Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s disease and pneumonia.

Ely had an expansive vision for country and rock, heard on singles like “All My Love,” “Honky Tonk Masquerade,” “Hard Livin’,” “Dallas” and “Fingernails.” Born in 1947 in Amarillo, Texas, Ely was raised in Lubbock before moving to Austin and kicking off a new era of country music in the region, one that reflected both punk and the heartland rock of the era back into the roughhousing country scenes they came from.

After founding the influential band the Flatlanders with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock (which dissolved soon after recording its 1972 debut), he began a solo career in 1977. He released several acclaimed albums, including 1978’s ambitiously rambling “Honky Tonk Masquerade,” before finding his popular peak on 1980’s harder-rocking “Live Shots” and 1981’s “Musta Notta Gotta Lotta.”

Ely, beloved for barroom poetry that punctured country music’s mythmaking, was a ready collaborator across genres. He befriended the Clash on a tour of London and sat in on the band’s sessions recording their epochal “London Calling” LP. He later toured extensively with the group, singing backup on “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” and earning a lyrical tribute on “If Music Could Talk” — ”Well there ain’t no better blend than Joe Ely and his Texas men.”

Ely was a favorite opener for veteran rock acts looking to imbue sets with Texas country swagger. He performed with the Rolling Stones, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Bruce Springsteen, who later sang with him on “Odds of the Blues” in 2024. Springsteen once said of Ely: “Thank God he wasn’t born in New Jersey. I would have had a lot more of my work cut out for me.”

In the ‘90, Ely joined a supergroup, the Buzzin Cousins, with John Mellencamp, Dwight Yoakam, John Prine and James McMurtry, to record for Mellencamp’s film “Falling From Grace.” Robert Redford later asked Ely to compose material for his film “The Horse Whisperer,” which led to collaborations with his old Flatlanders bandmates and a reunion in the 2000s. He also acted in in the musical “Chippy: Diaries of a West Texas Hooker” at Lincoln Center in New York City and joined the Tex-Mex collective Los Super Seven — he shared in the band’s Grammy for Mexican-American/Tejano Music Performance in 1999, his only such award.

Ely was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2022 and released his last album, “Love and Freedom,” in February.

Even the most accomplished actors sometimes feel out of their depth on a movie.

Gwyneth Paltrow, who returns to the big screen this fall as an Old Hollywood star trying to make a new start in “Marty Supreme,” was “way out over her skis” in her early 20s when she played a Park Avenue wife opposite older co-star Michael Douglas in “A Perfect Murder.” Jennifer Lopez, who showcases her triple-threat skill set in the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” felt a “huge” responsibility to get it right when portraying Tejana icon Selena Quintanilla in the 1997 biopic about the late singer. And Emily Blunt, who goes toe-to-toe with Dwayne Johnson in the mixed martial arts saga “The Smashing Machine,” had to avoid being typecast as the go-to “acerbic British bitch” after the success of 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada.”

These and many more tales from inside the maelstrom of megawatt stardom were the subject of The Envelope’s 2025 Oscar Actresses Roundtable, where Paltrow, Lopez and Blunt were joined by Sydney Sweeney, who transformed physically and emotionally to play boxing legend Christy Martin in “Christy”; Tessa Thompson, who tries to keep up appearances as the title character in “Hedda,” Nia DaCosta’s acclaimed new adaptation of “Hedda Gabler”; and Elle Fanning, who plays an American star struggling to find her way into a Norwegian art film in “Sentimental Value.”

In conversation with Times critic Lorraine Ali, the six performers discussed how they deal with bad press, resist being put in career boxes and inhabited some of the most-talked-about film roles of the year.

Jennifer, you play the title role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a story set in Argentina during a military dictatorship. It takes place in a political prison where the men imagine themselves in a glamorous, sweeping musical. As producer on the film, why was it important for you to tell this story now?

Lopez: It’s never been more relevant, which is really scary. Manuel Puig wrote the novel in the 1970s about these two prisoners during the uprising in Argentina. It really is a love story about seeing the humanity in another person, like two very different people with different political views. One is queer, and the other is a political revolutionary. The two of them were like oil and water. But they escaped into the [fantasy of] a movie, which is “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” They slowly come together and see each other’s souls instead of who they were on the outside. I think with everything that’s happening in the world right now, especially in this country, with Latinos and queer communities being targeted, demonized — there’s never been a more important time to say, “Look at me on the inside. Stop with all of this divisiveness. See people for who they are.”

Gwyneth, “Marty Supreme” is set in the 1950s. You play Kay Stone, a faded starlet. Who did you base her on?

Paltrow: She’s an amalgam of a few ideas, but principally Grace Kelly, who also had this amazing movie career and was this incredible star, and then walked away from it for marriage. My character does the same. When I was looking at photographs [of Kelly during] her films, and then photographs after she got married, it was like the light dimmed. She lost something. My character had a very rough road to get to stardom, so she walks away from this big career to marry an unsuitable but very wealthy man. And then her son dies, so she has a lot of tragedy.

Sydney, “Christy” is the story of Christy Martin, a pioneer in popularizing women’s boxing in the 1980s and 1990s. You really transformed for the role. Can you talk about that transformation?

Sweeney: Her story is probably one of the most important stories I’ll ever get to tell, so I felt that immense importance. I needed to fully transform myself. I trained every day for three months leading up to shooting. I put on 35 pounds. And I got to spend time with her, and now she’s like one of my best friends. I just kinda lived and breathed Christy for the entirety of the whole thing.

There’s so much violence in her world, particularly outside the ring. Was the real-life Christy there when you shot the domestic abuse scenes between her and her husband, Jim Martin (played by Ben Foster)?

Sweeney: To protect her, we didn’t have her on set when we were shooting the last part of the movie where the domestic violence came into play. The following Monday, we had her come to set, and the entire crew stood up and just started applauding. It was so beautiful. Then after that, she was on set all the time. We would be in the ring, and she’d be sitting [outside the ring], and I’d hear her say, “Hit her with the left hook, Sydney!”

Lopez: She was coaching from the sidelines?

Sweeney: Oh, yeah. We were having a blast. And in the fights, we actually fought. My No. 1 thing with all the girls was that I don’t want this to be fake because so much of Christy comes to life in the ring. I didn’t want to have [the camera] at the back of my head or have to cut to fake the punches. Every single one of those girls, they’re badasses. They punched me, and I punched them. We had bloody, broken noses. I had a concussion.

Blunt: Sydney broke someone’s nose.

Sweeney: I got a concussion. I’m not going to confirm [what else happened]. But I definitely caused some, uh, bruises and blood.

Emily, with “The Smashing Machine,” you play Dawn Staples, girlfriend to Mark Kerr, who was a pioneer in the field of MMA fighting. How much did you know about that world before taking on the role?

Blunt: I knew very little, and I was moved that Mark Kerr was my first window into [MMA] because he is such a juxtaposition to the violence of the world. This is a man who headbutted people to oblivion, and when you meet him, he’s like [subdued tone], “Hi, how are you?” He’s so nice. And I said to Mark one day, “How did you do that?” And he goes, “I know, it was nasty.” He’s just so sweet and dear and eloquent. But I think he was sort of filled with this uncontrollable rage that he hardly knew what to do with, and he struggled so much with his own demons. The movie is more about struggle and fragility than it is about fighting.

Tessa, “Hedda” is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play “Hedda Gabler” and you play the title role. Your castmate, Nina Hoss, said the role of Hedda Gabler is for women actors what Hamlet is for men. Do you agree?

Thompson: I like to say that Hamlet is the male Hedda, just because I think it’s a nice reversal. But people say that because the truth is that we don’t have that many [roles] that are canonical in the same way that Hedda Gabler is, so it feels like this behemoth. It’s one of the parts in theater that feels like a mountain to climb. There’s a kind of complexity to the character that has compelled audiences and actors for centuries … which is the case with both [Hedda and Hamlet]. But I think the comparison is kind of boring, frankly. I remember an actor saying to me, “Oh, I learned in drama school you have to have your Hedda ready.” And I did not have my Hedda ready, but I got it ready.

The wardrobe and sets in “Spider Woman,” “Hedda” and “Marty Supreme” are beautiful. Did you swipe mementos when the films wrapped?

Paltrow: No, you can’t.

Lopez: I mean, you can.

Paltrow: I tried the Birkin bag from “The Royal Tenenbaums” [but I could not], so I took the loafers instead.

Blunt: Not the same. Not quite.

Thompson: [To Gwyneth]: I was almost you [in “Tenenbaums”] for Halloween, but I couldn’t get it together in time and I wanted do you justice. But one day …

Paltrow: Next year. I’ll lend you the loafers.

Elle, in “Sentimental Value,” you play a Hollywood star who’s cast in an art–house European production. In reality, you were shooting the massive production “Predator: Badlands” when you joined “Sentimental Value,” a smaller European film. Were the parallels with your character, Rachel, apparent at the time?

Fanning: I got a call that “Joachim Trier has a part for you and would like to talk over Zoom, and here’s the script.” I was like, “Oh, my gosh, Joachim Trier [who made] ‘The Worst Person in the World.’” I would’ve said yes to one line. But I was already doing “Predator.” I was about to go off to New Zealand, but it’s very important for Joachim to rehearse, so he [wanted me] to come to Oslo. I wasn’t sure which movie I could do, and I wanted to do both. So, of course, there were parts to the character that I could relate to. I kept thinking, “There’s a lot of meta-ness going on in this film,” particularly for my character, being the Hollywood actress coming to Oslo for the first time, working with a Norwegian director. And coming off of this action-packed film to go to this very intimate, emotional foreign film, they fed into each other in ways that I didn’t expect them to.

How do you all deal with rough reviews?

Paltrow: I try to never read anything about myself, full stop, ever. Period.

Lopez: Wait, not anything about yourself? Ever? Period? Because I don’t read reviews of my films either, but people will bring it to you it when it’s good and you’re like, “Oh, nice.” But there’s other things they’ll bring you …

Paltrow: Sometimes I’ll come upon it.

Lopez: And you want to die.

Paltrow: Want to die. Like when someone forwards you a link to something really horrible about yourself, and they’re like, “Oh, this is bull—.” I do try to avoid [that kind of stuff]. I deleted Instagram.

Blunt: Me too.

Lopez: You need to cleanse every once in a while.

Sweeney: Sounds nice. I can’t do that.

How do you push the negative stuff about you or your personal life aside and focus on your work?

Sweeney: It helps when you love what you do. Like, if you’re loving the characters that you get to play, you’re loving the people you get to work with, and you’re proud of what you’re doing, then it’s just outside noise. When we walk on set, the world kind of disappears and we get come to life in a different kind of way. Those are the moments and the relationships that matter. Everything else is just people we don’t know.

Paltrow: [To Lopez] I want to hear your answer to this question.

Lopez: From the very beginning, for whatever reason, I’ve been a lightning rod for nice things and a lot of negativity. And it’s hard because you say to yourself, “These people don’t get me. They don’t see me. They don’t understand me.” Then all of a sudden they do. And then they don’t again. Even from when I was very young, I would always say, “I know who I am. I’m a good person. I know what I’m doing. People wouldn’t hire me if I wasn’t good at what I do.” I was always affirming myself and keeping my feet on the ground. Luckily, I had a great mom and dad who really instilled in me a sense of self. And what Sydney was saying, I’d have to block out the noise so I can put my head on the pillow at night and go, “I did good today. I was a good person. I was kind to people. I worked really hard. I’m a good mom.” That has always helped me through.

Thompson: Not having your sense of self or identity entangled in this other self that belongs to the public seems like such a healthy thing. I’m still trying to figure out my balance with that. When I was acting in some projects, I felt like I was delivering a lump of clay that got sculpted by somebody else. So if someone was harsh on the final [product], I was like, “Well, I didn’t sculpt it. I’m just the material.” But now that I produce, it’s a completely different thing. It’s building it from the ground up and feeling so much responsibility to the people that you’ve made it with. You made a baby and sent it into the world, and you just hope it doesn’t get misunderstood.

Gwyneth, you’re stepping back into the film world with “Marty Supreme” after seven years doing other things, such as Goop. Were you nervous coming back into the fold?

Paltrow: I [had been] doing things like “Iron Man” and “The Avengers,” which are totally fun, but it’s like doing a TV show where you go back in and you know the character. It’s not that difficult. So it had been a really long time, and I was like, “How did I used to do this? How are you, like, natural?” And then I did the camera test and I was really nervous. I felt like a fish out of water. And then luckily the first scene that I shot for real was a scene in the movie where she’s rehearsing a play. And I started in the theater, and I did a million plays before I ever did a film. The camera was far away, and I had my mom’s voice in my head. She’s like, “You’re on the boards, you know, just let the energy come through your body.”

Can wardrobe and styling help you embody the emotional core of a role?

Blunt: Dawn’s got a vibe for sure. It was that very overt ’90s, overglamorized thing, and everything was so revealing. I feel like my t— looked like two heads by the time they were done with the Wonderbra. They were just up under my chin. That helps you stand different, walk different. And the nails helped me. She had this incredibly long, square, chunky French tip manicure, and she’d talk with her hands. And the spray tan and the wig. It’s all fabulous. It’s such an amazing thing to look at yourself and go, “Who’s that?”

Thompson: [In “Hedda”], the construction of those dresses in the ’50s, there’s so much boning. We had Lindsay Pugh, who’s a brilliant costume designer. I also started looking up the starlets of the time and what their waist sizes were. It was like 20 or 21 inches. They were extreme. In the beginning, when we were constructing the dress, I was like, “I’m going to try to get down to that Dior-like silhouette,” which is impossible. Then we [fell in] love with the idea that the dress doesn’t actually fit her, because she’s inside of a life that doesn’t fit her. But the sheer sort of circumference of the dress makes her a woman who comes into a room and takes up space. A big part of [a woman’s] currency was their beauty and their body. That felt very foreign to me to inhabit. I didn’t recognize or had maybe suppressed the idea of using that part of me to gain power in the world.

The 2025 Envelope Oscar Actresses Roundtable: Top row, left to right, Tessa Thompson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Elle Fanning. Bottom row, left to right, Sydney Sweeney, Jennifer Lopez and Emily Blunt.

Hollywood likes to put people in boxes, particularly women. What boxes has it tried to stuff you in?

Fanning: I was in “Maleficent” and I played Sleeping Beauty, so like Disney princess in pink. Blond.

Blunt: But look at that face. Come on!

Fanning: But I can be mean too! In “The Great,” [I played] Catherine the Great, she was a queen, but she was raunchy. It was such a delicious show in that way. People were like, “Whoa.” They were surprised [seeing me like] that.

Blunt: If there’s a movie that takes off, you will have to carve out space away from that. I remember after “The Devil Wears Prada,” I got offered every acerbic British bitch. I’m like, “I should not do that for a while.”

Paltrow: When I stepped back to be an entrepreneur around 2008, I really confused and upset people. Nobody understood what I was doing, and I faced a lot of criticism and confusion over the course of the 17 years since I sent out my first Goop newsletter. I really do think that women, we are so incredibly multifaceted. We are all the archetypes. We’re not just a mother, or an artist, or an intellectual. We’re all the things. So I’ve always kind of tried to make it my mission to say, like, “No, don’t put us in boxes. We get to define who we are.”

Blunt: Was it hard for you to keep going and ignore it?

Paltrow: It was really hard. Some days I was like, “Why did I do this? The headwinds are so extreme and I’m so misunderstood. I had a perfectly good job. People did my hair. Why on earth did I do this to myself?”

Thompson: And you also did it before there was a cultural appreciation for people doing multihyphenates and starting businesses.

Lopez: I think our generation started thinking, like, “We need and want to do other things.” Even when I started acting and I had done my early films, “Out of Sight” and “Selena,” and then decided I wanted to record music, and it was such a big deal. People were like, “They’re never going take you seriously as an actor ever again.”

Paltrow: And you had the No. 1 movie and the No. 1 album in the same time, right?

Lopez: It was in the Guinness Book of Records. But that’s the thing, everybody’s always trying to tell you: “You can only do this,” or “You can only do that.” I had my perfume line. I had my clothing lines. I have my J Lo beauty now. You have to just do what feels good for you. It doesn’t mean it’s for everybody. Somebody wants to just act their whole life, that’s beautiful too. That’s fantastic. I still want to direct. I still want to write more books. And I don’t ever feel like there’s somebody who can say to me, “No, you can’t.”

Blunt: Say that to Sydney and she’ll break their nose.

I think about Rob Reiner almost every time I put on my socks.

I am old enough to remember the famously hilarious (and largely improvised) bit from “All in the Family” in which Reiner’s Mike “Meathead” Stivic and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker argue about the correct order of donning footwear — both socks first (Archie’s method) or sock/shoe, sock/shoe (Mike’s).

The straight-faced back and forth was, and is, a pitch-perfect exhibition of how much time and energy we waste judging, and arguing about, personal differences that are none of anyone’s business and matter not at all.

I also think about Reiner whenever my now-adult children and I sit down for a movie night. When all other suggestions fail, at least one of his films — ”Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride,” “A Few Good Men,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” “Misery” — will achieve consensus, in large part, because of that same understanding.

Reiner was, above all, a compassionate filmmaker, willing to excavate all manner of conflict and tension in search of the essential humanity that connects us all.

Reiner helped shape the culture of my youth and early adulthood with such brilliant empathy that his random appearances on television — as Jess’ (Zooey Deschanel) father in “New Girl” or, more recently, Ebra’s (Edwin Lee Gibson) business mentor on “The Bear” — sparked immediate reflexive delight, as if a beloved uncle had shown up unexpectedly at a family dinner.

It helped, no doubt, that I share his political leanings. Reiner’s advocacy for gay marriage and early education were well-known, as was, in recent years, his unvarnished criticism of President Trump, who Reiner, like many others, considered a danger to democracy.

That criticism should have prepared me for the chilling invective unleashed by some, including Trump, in the wake of the news that Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their home on Sunday night, victims of a knife attack, and that their son Nick, who has a history of drug addiction, was in police custody.

Even as the millions who were touched by Reiner’s work struggled to process their shock, grief and horror, Trump responded with a post in which he claimed that the Reiners’ murders were “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”

Horror unfolds around the world on a daily basis. This weekend, a father and son opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, killing 15 and wounding many others; a gunman killed two and wounded nine at Brown University; and two members of the Iowa National Guard were killed and three others injured by gunmen in Syria.

Even so, between the shocking news of the Reiners’ deaths, the possible involvement of their son and the unhinged and cold-hearted response of the president of the United States, it is difficult to know how to react, short of tearing out one’s hair and screaming up to an indifferent sky.

No person’s life means intrinsically more than any other — many people are killed by violence each and every weekend, often by family members; that we seem to have become inured to mass shootings is another sort of horror.

But Reiner’s work, in film, television and politics, affected millions around the world personally and culturally. In “All in the Family,” his young leftie was far from the hero of the piece — Mike’s values were more humane and progressive than the bigoted Archie’s, but he could be just as narrow-minded as his father-in-law and just as capable of change.

As a director, Reiner championed independent filmmaking, which is to say smartly written movies that told interesting stories about characters that were recognizable in their humor and humanity (which is one reason he was so successful in adapting Stephen King’s work, including the novella “Stand by Me” is based on and “Misery”).

His political activism too was grounded in the desire to make life better for those historically marginalized by policy and culture. He campaigned against tobacco use and for Proposition 10, which increased the tax on cigarettes, and funded early education. In 2009, he used his considerable influence to co-found the American Foundation for Equal Rights and successfully fought to legally challenge Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

As an artist and a public figure, he put his money where his mouth was and remained invariably sincere, a powerful and compelling trait that has become increasingly rare in a time of the sound-bite inanities, muddy thinking, obvious contradictions and outright falsehoods that threaten our public and political discourse.

Reiner mastered many mediums and wielded a broad palette but his signature artistic trait was empathy. No story was too small, or too brutal, to be examined with kindness and an understanding that the most grave injustice we can commit is to choose apathy or revenge when connection and transcendence are always possible.

The news cycle surrounding the Reiners’ deaths is likely to get worse, as details emerge and reactions of all kinds continue. For a long while, it will be difficult to think of Reiner and his wife as anything but victims of a brutal crime of truly tragic proportions and the regrettable heartlessness that our political divisions have created.

Ironically, and mercifully, solace for this loss, and so many others, can be found in Reiner’s work, films and performances that are impossible to watch without feeling at least a little bit better.

As Hollywood and the world mourns, I will try to think of Reiner as I always have. After all, no matter the order, we all put on our shoes and socks one at a time.

And then, as his artistic legacy teaches us, we stand and try to do the best we can with whatever happens next.

Lacock village in Wiltshire is steeped in history and has been used as a filming location for Harry Potter, Downton Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Wolf Hall, making visitors feel like they’re living in a period drama

A key filming spot for the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Lacock’s charming cottages and stunning countryside make visitors feel as though they’ve stepped into a period drama.

Its Wiltshire timber-framed buildings and magnificent cloisters have drawn numerous productions beyond Austen’s tale to its grounds. Lacock’s famous medieval Cloister, dating back to around 1450, also houses a verdant Cloister Garth. This striking architectural feature appeared in countless Downton Abbey scenes, and doubled as sections of the castle in the original Harry Potter films. It also featured in the BBC’s Wolf Hall adaptation. One TripAdvisor reviewer awarded the destination five stars, saying: “An absolute must if you are in the area! A beautiful village, which you can visit by parking just across the road in the National Trust car park.

“The village is a pleasure to walk around, totally untouched throughout history and is quintessentially English! From the rows of tiny cottages, the church, the tiny bakery, the village pub and a hotel, it has everything and all these are open and running. We stayed for a couple of hours and then had a wander around the Abbey which is also impressive.”, reports Gloucestershire Live. Another reviewer described the village as “frozen in time”, with Explore the Cotswolds concurring that the location “looks a lot like it would have done 200 years ago.”

Lacock’s magnificent abbey began life as an Augustinian nunnery, shuttered during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Subsequently, John Ivory Talbot constructed the mock-Gothic hall – both are now in the care of the National Trust and available for afternoon exploration. A stone’s throw away stands St Cyriac’s Church. Initially believed to be a Saxon worship site, it later became Norman-controlled. The Church was erected near the close of the 11th century by Edward of Salisbury and William of Eu. The dedication to St Cyriac honours a beloved Norman saint.

The church houses numerous later memorials to the Baynards, Bonhams, Crokes, Sharingtons, Talbots and Awdreys. Yet for Harry Potter enthusiasts, the cloisters steal the show. For one devotee, exploring the cloisters topped her agenda upon arriving in Britain. She wrote: “Harry Potter fans NEED to do this! We’re from Canada. As soon as we landed in London, this was the very first thing we did. We did the Harry Potter Tour of London for Private Groups by Black Taxi. “Our guide was Richard and we can’t say enough good things about him! He was absolutely incredible! Ask him how he knows so much about this…such an interesting person, so knowledgeable and passionate about it all.”

New Delhi, India – A newly released Bollywood spy thriller is winning praise and raising eyebrows in equal measure in India and Pakistan, over its retelling of bitter tensions between the South Asian neighbours.

Sunk in a sepia tone, Dhurandhar, which was released in cinemas last week, is a 3.5-hour-long cross-border political spy drama that takes cinemagoers on a violent and bloody journey through a world of gangsters and intelligence agents set against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions. It comes just months after hostilities broke out between the two countries in May, following a rebel attack on a popular tourist spot in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which India blamed Pakistan for. Islamabad has denied role in the attack.

Since the partition of India to create Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought four wars, three of them over the disputed region of Kashmir.

The film stars the popular actor Ranveer Singh, who plays an Indian spy who infiltrates networks of “gangsters and terrorists” in Karachi, Pakistan. Critics of the film argue that its storyline is laced with ultra-nationalist political tropes and that it misrepresents history, an emerging trend in Bollywood, they say.

What is the latest Bollywood blockbuster about?

Directed by Aditya Dhar, the film dramatises a covert chapter from the annals of Indian intelligence. The narrative centres on a high-stakes, cross-border mission carried out by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and focuses on one operative who conducts operations on enemy soil to neutralise threats to Indian national security.

The film features a heavyweight ensemble cast led by Singh, who plays the gritty field agent tasked with dismantling a “terror” network from the inside. He is pitted against a formidable antagonist played by Sanjay Dutt, representing the Pakistani establishment, and gangsters such as one portrayed by Akshaye Khanna, while actors including R Madhavan portray key intelligence officers and strategists who orchestrate complex geopolitical manoeuvering from New Delhi.

Structurally, the screenplay follows a classic cat-and-mouse trajectory.

Beneath its high-octane set pieces, the film has sparked an angry debate among critics and audiences over the interpretation of historical events and some key figures.

Why is the film so controversial in Pakistan?

Despite the longstanding geopolitical tensions between the two countries, India’s Bollywood films remain popular in Pakistan.

Depicting Pakistan as the ultimate enemy of India has been a popular theme retold for years, in different ways, especially in Bollywood’s spy thrillers, however. In this case, the portrayal of Pakistan’s major coastal city, Karachi, and particularly one of its oldest and most densely populated neighbourhoods, Lyari, has drawn strong criticism.

“The representation in the film is completely based on fantasy. It doesn’t look like Karachi. 
It does not represent the city accurately at all,” Nida Kirmani, an associate professor of sociology at Lahore University of Management Sciences, told Al Jazeera.

Kirmani, who has produced a documentary on the impact of gang violence in Lyari of her own, said that like other megacities in the world, “Karachi had periods of violence that have been particularly intense.”

However, “reducing the city to violence is one of the major problems in the film, along with the fact the film gets everything about Karachi – from its infrastructure, culture, and language – wrong”, she added.

Meanwhile, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has taken legal action in a Karachi court alleging the unauthorised use of images of the late former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, and protesting against the film’s portrayal of the party’s leaders as supporters of “terrorists”.

Critics, including Kirmani, say the film also bizarrely casts gangs from Lyari into geopolitical tensions with India, when they have only ever operated locally.

Kirmani said the makers of the movie have cherry-picked historical figures and used them completely out of context, “trying to frame them within this very Indian nationalistic narrative”.

Mayank Shekhar, a film critic based in Mumbai, pointed out that the film “has been performed, written, directed by those who haven’t ever stepped foot in Karachi, and perhaps never will”.

“So, never mind this dust bowl for a city that, by and large, seems wholly bereft of a single modern building, and looks mostly bombed-out, between multiple ghettos,” Shekhar said.

He added that this is also in line with how Hollywood “shows the brown Third World in action with a certain sepia tone, like with Extraction, set in Dhaka, Bangladesh”.

How has the film been received in India?

Dhurandhar has been a huge commercial success in India and among the Indian diaspora. However, it has not escaped criticism entirely.

The family of a decorated Indian Army officer, Major Mohit Sharma, filed a petition in Delhi High Court to stop the release of the film, which, they claim, has exploited his life and work without their consent.

The makers of the film deny this and claim it is entirely a work of fiction.

Nonetheless, the film’s storyline is accompanied by real-time intercepted audio recordings of attacks on Indian soil and news footage, film critics and analysts say.

Is this an emerging pattern in Bollywood films?

Shekhar told Al Jazeera that focusing on a deliberately loud, seemingly over-the-top, hyper-masculine hero’s journey is not a new genre in Bollywood. “There’s a tendency to intellectualise the trend, as we did with the ‘angry young man’ movies of the 1970s,” he said, referring to the formative years of Bollywood.

In recent years, mainstream production houses in India have, however, favoured storylines that portray minorities in negative light and align with the policies of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kirmani told Al Jazeera that this frequently means “reducing Muslims across India’s borders and within as ‘terrorists’, which further marginalises Muslims in India culturally”.

“Unfortunately, people gravitate towards these kinds of hypernationalistic narratives, and the director is cashing in on this,” she told Al Jazeera.

Modi himself lavished praise on a recent film called Article 370, for what he said was its “correct information” about the removal of the constitutional provision that granted special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. Critics, however, called the film “propaganda” and said the film had distorted facts.

Another Bollywood film Kerala Story released in 2023 was accused of falsifying facts. Prime Minister Modi praised the film, but critics said it tried to vilify Muslims and demonise the southern Kerala state known for its progressive politics.

In the case of Dhurandhar, some critics have faced online harassment.

One review by The Hollywood Reporter’s India YouTube channel, by critic Anupama Chopra, was taken down after outrage from fans of the film.

Went looking for Anupama Chopra’s Dhurandhar review? It’s gone. The Hollywood Reporter India quietly made the video private.

For context, The Hollywood Reporter India was launched by RPSG Lifestyle Media, part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, which also owns Saregama –…

— newslaundry (@newslaundry) December 9, 2025

India’s Film Critics Guild has condemned “coordinated abuse, personal attacks on individual critics, and organised attempts to discredit their professional integrity”, in a statement.

“More concerningly, there have been attempts to tamper with existing reviews, influence editorial positions, and persuade publications to alter or dilute their stance,” the group noted.

Months before his slaying, Rob Reiner talked about the power of forgiveness after the “horrific” assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.

“Horror. An absolute horror,” the director, actor and political activist said when asked about the shooting in a TV interview with Piers Morgan. “I unfortunately saw the video of it and it’s beyond belief what happened to him, and that should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are. That’s not acceptable.”

Contrast that with President Trump’s reaction to the killing of Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, who on Sunday were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home. Their son, Nick Reiner, has been arrested in connection with the slayings.

“Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS,” Trump said in a social media post.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

How is that anyone’s initial reaction to a tragic slaying, let alone an official comment from a sitting U.S. president? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. It’s just another Monday at Trump’s White House.

I’d be screaming into the void if I were to use the rest of this column to argue that the president is not only off his rocker but also has tumbled down the stairs and is in the foyer, mumbling something about speedboats, piggies and ballrooms. In his race to the bottom, he’s broken through the floor. Now we’re in the Trump Upside Down, where empathy and decency are negative attributes.

Even Republican lawmakers were compelled to speak out against their feared leader. “This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies,” said Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in response to Trump’s post.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) wrote on X, “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”

Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said it short and sweet to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the President of the United States. Can the President be presidential?”

No, he cannot. When given the chance on Monday to appear leader-like during a White House news conference, Trump doubled down on his dislike for Reiner, saying he “wasn’t a fan” and that the director “was a deranged person.”

Translation: Reiner was a Trump critic and the president has skin so thin it’s practically rice paper at this point. But the filmmaker’s social conscience was evident in everything he did, starting with his role as “All in the Family’s” liberal, hippie son-in law to conservative crank Archie Bunker. It was the 1970s, and Meathead (a.k.a. Michael) consistently called out Archie’s racism, bigotry and sexism on the weekly sitcom. Archie’s rants are now the ugly stuff embraced by feckless politicians and attention-seeking influencers, but back then, his tirades against “queers” and “coloreds” represented old prejudices that needed to be shed if the country were to move forward. Show creator Norman Lear made the ugliness funny by using Meathead to expose Archie’s ignorance. Even back then, Reiner was poking the bear.

Reiner was a staunch critic of Trump and other leaders and movements that sought to curtail the freedoms that were previously believed to be enshrined in the Constitution — until MAGA began shredding them one by one. The comedian was an advocate for democratic ideals, Democratic candidates, same-sex marriage, early childhood education, and government transparency, spearheading California’s Proposition 10 (First 5) to fund early development programs via tobacco taxes. He also helped overturn Proposition 8, California’s brief ban on gay marriage.

Reiner’s understanding that it takes all kinds was evident in his work. He was a director with range, as they say in the industry, helming a string of films that became cultural touchstones, starting with 1984’s groundbreaking mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” a satire that forever changed the language around heavy-metal decibel levels (“Crank it to 11!”). Then came 1986’s coming-of-age drama “Stand by Me,” 1989’s seminal romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally…,” and the terrifying, psychological horror-thriller, 1990’s “Misery,” about an injured novelist held captive by his biggest fan.

Some of his films directly addressed the inequity and violence that Reiner fought so hard to correct in his lifetime. “Ghosts of Mississippi” explored the 1994 trial of Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist accused of the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. And Reiner’s 2017 drama “Shock and Awe” told the true story of a team of reporters who countered the Bush administration’s justification for invading Iraq in 2003 when they found evidence of falsified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

Though it was already acceptable to speak out against that Middle Eastern war, in the same week of the film’s release, he caught flak for signing a petition led by Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir condemning Trump’s 2017 decision formally recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Reiner, who was Jewish, told the National that Trump had “no concept of geopolitical events or how things are interconnected. There was no consideration that went into this decision, no outreach to allies in the Arab world, or even the non-Arab world to see what the impact of something like this is.”

Reiner saw tragedy and sadness in the death of Kirk because he was able to empathize with the loss of life, no matter the difference of opinion.

Rob Reiner was a movie director who began as an actor who wanted to direct movies. The bridge between these careers was “This Is Spinal Tap” in 1984, his first proper film, in which he also acted. His original inclination, based on the music documentaries he had studied, had been not to appear onscreen, but he decided there was practical value in greeting the audience with a face familiar from eight seasons of “All in the Family” as Archie Bunker’s left-wing son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivic.

Reiner’s television career began at 21, partnered with Steve Martin, writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” As an actor, his early years were characterized by the small parts and guest shots that describe the early career of many performers we come to know well. He played multiple characters on episodes of “That Girl” and “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” a delivery boy on “Batman,” and appeared on “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Room 222.” His last such role, in 1971, the same year “All in the Family” premiered, was on “The Partridge Family” as a tender-hearted, poetry-writing, tattooed biker who becomes attached to Susan Dey‘s character and somewhat improbably takes her to a school dance. It’s a performance that prefigures the tenderness and humanity that would become a signature of his work as a writer, director and performer — and, seemingly, a person.

On “All in the Family,” in his jeans and work shirt, with a drooping mustache that seemed to accentuate a note of sadness, Reiner largely played the straight man, an irritant to Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, teeing up the issue-oriented dialectic. Once in a while he’d be given a broad comic meal to chew, as when wife Gloria (Sally Struthers) goes into labor while they’re out for dinner, and he accelerates into classic expectant-father sitcom panic. But minus the “Meathead” material, “All in the Family” is as much a social drama as it is a comedy, with Mike and Gloria struggling with money, living with her parents, new parenthood, and a relationship that blows hot and cold until it finally blows out for good. He’s not a Comic Creation, like Archie or Edith with their malaprops and mispronunciations, or even Gloria, but his importance to the storytelling was certified by two supporting actor Emmys.

Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton in a scene from Norman Lear’s television series “All in the Family.”

(Bettmann Archive via Getty Image)

What Reiner carried from “Family” into his later appearances was a sort of bigness. He could seem loud — and loudness is something Norman Lear’s shows reveled in — even when he’s speaking quietly. Physically he occupied a lot of space, more as time went on, and beginning perhaps with “Spinal Tap,” in which he played director Marty DiBergi, he transformed tonally into a sort of gentle Jewish Buddha. In the 2020 miniseries “Hollywood,” Ryan Murphy’s alternate history of the 1930s picture business, the studio head he plays is not the desk-banger of cliche, but he is a man with an appetite. (“Get me some brisket and some of those cheesy potatoes and a lemon meringue pie,” he tells a commissary waiter — against doctor’s orders, having just emerged from a heart attack-induced coma. “One meal’s not going to kill me.”) He’s the boss, but, in a scene as lovely as it is historically unlikely, he allows his wife (Patti LuPone), who has been running things during his absence, to also be the boss.

Reiner left “All in the Family” in 1978, after its eighth season to explore life outside Michael Stivic. (In 1976, while still starring on “Family,” he tested those waters, appearing on an episode of “The Rockford Files” as a narcissistic third-rate football player.) “Free Country,” which he co-created with frequent writing partner Phil Mishkin, about a family of Lithuanian immigrants in the early 1900s, aired five episodes that summer. The same year, ABC broadcast the Reiner-Mishkin-penned TV movie “More Than Friends” (available on Apple TV) in which Reiner co-starred with then-wife Penny Marshall. Directed by James Burrows, whose dance card would fill up with “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “3rd Rock From the Sun,” it’s in some respects a dry run for Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally…,” tracking a not-quite-romantic but ultimately destined relationship across time.

Future Spinal Tap lead singer Michael McKean appears there as a protest singer, while the 1982 CBS TV movie “Million Dollar Infield,” written again with Mishkin, features Reiner alongside future Spinal Tap lead guitarist Christopher Guest and bassist Harry Shearer; it’s a story of baseball, families and therapy. Co-star Bruno Kirby the year before had co-written and starred in Reiner’s directorial debut, “Tommy Rispoli: A Man and His Music,” a short film that aired on the long-gone subscription service On TV as part of the “Likely Stories” anthology. Kirby’s character, a Frank Sinatra-loving limo driver (driving Reiner as himself), found its way into “This Is Spinal Tap,” though here he is the center of a Reineresque love story.

After “Spinal Tap,” as Reiner’s directing career went from strength to strength, he continued to act in other people’s pictures (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “Primary Colors,” “Bullets Over Broadway” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” to name but a few) and some of his his own, up to this year’s “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.” On television, he mostly played himself, which is to say versions of himself, on shows including “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and, of all things, “Hannah Montana,” with a few notable exceptions.

Rob Reiner and Jamie Lee Curtis play the divorced parents of Jess (Zooey Deschanel) in Fox’s “New Girl.”

(Ray Mickshaw / Fox)

The most notable of these, to my mind, is “New Girl,” in which Reiner appeared in 10 episodes threaded through five of the series’ seven seasons, as Bob Day, the father of Zooey Deschanel’s Jess. Jamie Lee Curtis, married to Guest in the real world, played his ex-wife, Joan, with Kaitlin Olson as his new, much younger partner, Ashley, who had been in high school with Jess. He’s positively delightful here, whether being overprotective of Deschanel or suffering her ministrations, dancing around Curtis, or fencing with Jake Johnson’s Nick. Improvisational rhythms characterize his performance, whether he’s sticking to the script or not. Most recently, he recurred in the fourth season of “The Bear,” which has also featured Curtis, mentoring sandwich genius Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson); their scenes feel very much like what taking a meeting with Reiner might be like.

Coincidentally, I have had Reiner in my ear over the past couple of weeks, listening to the audiobook version of “A Fine Line: Between Stupid and Clever,” which he narrates with contributions from McKean, Shearer and Guest. A story of friendship and creativity and ridiculousness, all around a wonderful thing that grew bigger over the years, Reiner’s happy reading throws this tragedy into sharper relief. I have a DVD on the way, though I don’t know when I’ll be up to watching it. I only know I will.

MICKEY ROURKE is trying to get his movie career back on track – despite his Celebrity Big Brother disgrace.

The veteran Hollywood star was booted off the ITV reality show earlier this year for his “unacceptable behaviour.”

But luckily for Mickey his name has been linked to two big-screen biopics.

One is about the life of Black Sabbath legend Ozzy Osbourne while another will be on US country legend Johnny Cash.

One of my Hollywood insiders said Mickey’s name had repeatedly come up in meetings about the films when discussions turned to casting the older versions of the music legends.

They told me: “Producers here don’t even know about the Celebrity Big Brother thing, Mickey is golden in the States.

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“This town also loves an underdog, and movie bosses think Mickey still has an Oscar-worthy performance they can wring out of him.

“He was a top actor back in the day — he would have been on a par with James Dean and Marlon Brando if he hadn’t taken wrong turns and gone down a bad path.

If the evil overlords of Hollywood give us the green light we could be filming in the spring

Jack Osbourne

“There are scripts in the pipeline on Ozzy and Johnny, and Mickey’s name has come up in meetings about both projects.

“They want to portray Ozzy’s final days before that amazing show at Villa Park, and they want a performance like Mickey gave in The Wrestler.

“They’re confident he could do it.”

It’s understood streaming giants Amazon MGM and Apple are interested in both projects, with big-name directors in the frame to oversee it — including Martin Scorsese.

Ozzy’s son Jack Osbourne first told me they were working on a film about his dad’s life before Ozzy’s homecoming show back in July.

Jack said: “We do have the film on the way. We have a lot of good forward momentum on the Ozzy biopic.

“We have a director attached now and the script is done and Sony Studios is going to be producing it.

“We are really excited about it so maybe we will do the premiere here in Birmingham.

“If the evil overlords of Hollywood give us the green light we could be filming in the spring so maybe it will be out summer 2027 — fingers crossed.”

I’m sure Mickey will be crossing his toes, as well as his fingers, that he gets the part.

JAMIE LEE: IT’S FREAKIER ONLINE

HER long-awaited sequel to 2003’s Freaky Friday – imaginatively titled Freakier Friday – went down a storm with fans.

And Hollywood legend Jamie Lee Curtis says she knows exactly why we are seeing a resurgence in sequels and prequels.

Speaking to comedian Geoff Norcott on this Times Radio show, Jamie said: “Nostalgia is very hot right now.

“Because people are feeling so freaked out by what’s happening that you cling, you cling to nostalgia to make you feel safe.”

Jamie, whose new film Ella McCay is out now, went on to slam cancel culture and attacks on free speech.

She added: “We’re all trying to figure out, what can we say? What can’t we say?

“The echo chamber is awful. Social media is awful. You say something that you believe in, you get hammered for it. I mean, hardcore.

“It’s hard to hold on to both the frustration you’re feeling but the sense of optimism and hope.

“I feel hope because I believe that the hatred is imploding, and I think we’re seeing it.”

IT’S STAR SHREK

THE life of a Bizarre reporter isn’t all red carpets and bubbly – sometimes you end up in a swamp with an ogre and a talking donkey.

Our Jack was invited backstage at the latest adaptation of Shrek: The Musical at Colchester’s Charter Hall to meet the cast before they kicked off their near sold-out run at the venue.

With Red Dwarf’s Danny John Jules as Donkey and CITV’s Chris Edgerley as Lord Farquaad, the show is based on the hit 2001 film starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy.

Shrek and Princess Fiona are played by Joseph Rawlings and Rachel Jerram.

A refreshing change from the annual festive panto, the cast delivered a brilliant version of the big screen hit with a seriously impressive set to match.

Shout out to Ceris Hine as the perfectly executed Gingy, delivering our favourite Gingerbread Man performance of the year.

Chatting backstage about playing the pint-sized villain, Chris explained how spending the show on his knees left him in agony at times.

He said: “I’m a lot taller than Farquaad so I’m knee-padded up to the hilt but it’s worth it.

“Halfway through rehearsals we had to add extra padding as it was hurting too much.

“Hopefully the audience will have as much fun as we do.”

Unlike the fairytale dictator, this musical certainly doesn’t come up short.

JAMIE’S SO FESTIVE

Jamie Cullum: The Pianoman At Christmas @ Royal Albert Hall, London

★★★★★

THERE’S nothing more festive than a trip to London’s Royal Albert Hall at Christmas – although a Jamie Cullum show there beats anything else to get you in the spirit.

Inspired by his criminally underrated 2020 album The Pianoman At Christmas, his two-hour seasonal spectacle, backed by a big band – “this is what expensive musicians sound like,” he half-joked – was an absolute treat.

And soon there will be more. He said of himself and wife Sophie Dahl : “We are trying to write the film of the Pianoman At Christmas.

“I told her I was going to announce it tonight so now we have to finish it.”

His voice is as smooth as a pricey whiskey and sounded just as great doing his original numbers as it did with family favourites Frosty The Snowman and Jingle Bells.

And as for Hang Your Lights, it deserves to be a modern Christmas classic.

Forget the turkey and mistletoe, Jamie Cullum’s annual festive show should be a staple of everyone’s Christmas.

HOWELL DAVIES

LILY’S SKIT ON STRANGER FLINGS

DAVID HARBOUR has another TV show to avoid, after his ex-wife Lily Allen called up Dakota Johnson to bring her infamous “Madeline” to life on Saturday Night Live.

During the show, Lily performed her explosive track Tennis – with Dakoka playing the “other woman” Madeline.

At the end of Lily’s performance, Dakota brought Madeline to life and appeared to reveal for the first time what this other woman may have told Lily about allegedly getting with David behind her back.

Dakota said: “I hate that you’re in so much pain right now.

“I really don’t want to be the cause of any upset.

“He told me that you were aware this was going on and that he had your full consent.

“’If he’s lying about that, then please let me know.

“Because I have my own feelings about dishonesty. Lies are not something that I want to get caught up in.”

Dakota then planted a kiss on Lily’s cheek as she said: “Love and light, Madeline.”

’Tis the season of Top 10 lists. On occasion, being at the bottom of the list is a plus.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, wondering if you’ve felt that 1% decrease in traffic congestion this year. I had plenty of time to contemplate its veracity the other day while inching my way down the 405 Freeway on my drive home. Let’s just say I’m unconvinced.

Let’s think happier thoughts — the continued, sweeping success of the year’s best movie, “One Battle After Another.”

This week’s digital cover story

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

I spoke with the women of Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed epic, “One Battle After Another,” on a rainy day last month in the midst of that atmospheric river that washed through the city. You want to talk traffic congestion? Try going down San Vicente during rush hour on the way to a premiere at the Academy Museum.

The only movie worth that effort this year might be … “One Battle After Another.”

For our Envelope digital cover story, we gathered stars Regina Hall, Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor for a stunning photo shoot with Times contributor Bexx Francois, followed by a conversation accompanied by a slate of appetizers that evoked memories of the night before when Taylor’s French fries went missing at their Governors Awards table.

“I went to the bar during the dinner and came back,” Taylor says. “And Regina’s like, ‘Somebody took my plate.’ And I look down and say, ‘Somebody ate my fries.’” She motions at Hall. “Goldilocks over here.”

There were no beefs over the apps that day, just the kind of camaraderie evident by the care Infiniti showed her co-stars, helping them keep their immaculate outfits pristine. “One Battle After Another” feels like a lock for a Screen Actors Guild Award (now known as the Actors) ensemble nomination, in no small part due to the exemplary work of these three women, along with co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro.

Taylor won a supporting actor prize Sunday from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. for her portrayal of Perfidia Beverly Hills, the revolutionary leader of the French 75. The character dominates the movie’s 35-minute opening section, an extended prologue that ends with Perfidia betraying members of her group to avoid prison and abandoning her daughter in the haze of postpartum depression.

“Perfidia anchors this movie,” Taylor says. “We got a boat ride to the middle of the ocean and we gonna anchor this boat, and when we anchor this boat, I’m done.” She turns to Hall. “Then I need you to get on your jet ski and go.”

Taylor loves Perfidia, as do Infiniti and Hall. She’s protective of the character, admitting that, yes, Perfidia is selfish. But also: She has her reasons.

We talked about a scene that Anderson cut from the film featuring Perfidia and Hall’s steadfast Deandra, another member of the French 75. Perfidia calls Deandra from custody, Sean Penn’s Lockjaw lurking in the background, and tells Deandra, “Remember those baby socks I was telling you about? I need you to go out and get them.”

It’s code: Perfidia wants Deandra to make sure that she takes care of her baby, Willa, and get out of town.

“When people have certain opinions of Perfidia, that’s the part of her that they didn’t see,” Taylor says. “People write her off, but she made that phone call.”

“Perfidia and Deandra are best friends,” Hall says. “Watching the movie, you can feel that. But that scene made it clear.”

“But in hindsight,” Taylor says, “artistically that scene would not have made sense. We needed Perfidia to be selfish.”

“She’s not selfish,” Infniti, who plays Willa, interjects. “She was doing the only thing she felt she could do.”

“That’s true,” Taylor replies. “But she’s also selfish. That’s why I think Paul is a f— genius. He is a mad scientist. He really knew what to do with this movie to create a healthy dialogue. He got people talking.”

More coverage of ‘One Battle After Another’

There were only four days left of shooting on “Hamnet” when Chloé Zhao realized she didn’t have an ending. The filmmaker had led the cast through a week filming the pivotal climactic sequence inside the Globe Theatre, where William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is staging his opus “Hamlet,” but something was missing. The script had Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) witnessing the demise of Hamlet (Noah Jupe), a denouement that should have evoked a sense of release. But even though the moment was meant to tie Shakespeare’s masterpiece to the still-fresh death of Will and Agnes’ 11-year-old son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), neither Zhao nor Buckley could feel the necessary catharsis.

“Jessie and I avoided each other for the rest of the day because we both knew we had no film,” Zhao says. “We both went home feeling completely lost.”

“We were searching for this ending,” Buckley adds. “It was a daunting idea to try and pull together all the threads of the story we’d woven prior to this moment. I felt incredibly lost and a bit untethered.”

Zhao admits that she rarely preplans the endings of her films because she doesn’t tell stories linearly. She imagines the journey of her characters unfurling in a spiral, with the story extending downward into the darkness before rising back up.

“I’ve had to wait on every single film,” she says. “But this time I was going through the ending of a relationship, so I was terrified of losing love. I was holding on to it with dear life.”

Actors Jessie Buckley and Joe Alwyn with director Chloé Zhao on the set of “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska)

The morning after they filmed the scripted ending, Buckley sent Zhao Max Richter’s “This Bitter Earth,” a reimagining of his song “On the Nature of Daylight” with lyrics. The filmmaker played it in the car on her way to the set.

“I could feel the tears and the heart opening, and then I started reaching my hand out towards the window,” Zhao remembers. “I was trying to touch the rain outside of the car. I looked at my hand and I realized that I needed to become one with something bigger than me so I would no longer be afraid of losing my love. Because love doesn’t die, it transforms. When we’re one with everything around us, it’s the illusion of separation that makes us so afraid of impermanence.”

The true culmination of “Hamnet” occurred to Zhao as she reached for the rain. If Agnes reached her hand toward the dying Hamlet, he could then rest and she could let go of her grief over losing Hamnet. And if the audience joined her, the sensation of release would be even greater.

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“The thing I didn’t expect, the surprise of it, was the absolute communal surrender,” Buckley says. “The way the fourth wall was broken between the play and the audience, the need to reach out and touch the core of the play. Agnes’ compass has always been touch.”

Although the specifics didn’t come to life until those final days, Zhao always planned the production so the Globe scenes would be done last. Production designer Fiona Crombie re-created the historic open-air theater on the backlot at England’s Elstree Studios using real timber brought in from France. The set version, which took 14 weeks to build, is smaller than the original Globe to create a sense of intimacy.

Plans for the building of the Globe Theatre set in “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska)

“This is my version,” Crombie says. “Our footprint is a bit smaller overall, but the essential architecture of the tiers and the roofline and the shape and everything is accurate. By virtue of having real beams that are scarred and aged, it feels more realistic. We wanted the whole thing to feel completely authentic. You want to smell these sets and feel these textures off the screen.”

“I told Fiona I wanted it to feel like the inside of a tree,” Zhao says. “So, spiritually, it’s correct for this story. And the play is accurate. We didn’t change any lines.”

Historically, there would not have been a backdrop onstage. But for the thematic purposes of “Hamnet,” a backdrop was essential. “There was a whole conversation about not just the aesthetic but the importance of that motif,” Crombie says. “It’s also a wall that separates Will from Agnes.”

“Hamnet’s” Globe was constructed to have a working backstage so Mescal, Jupe and the players could move in and out of the wings. There were real prop tables and makeup stations, as well as a nod to other Shakespeare plays. “We had a horse from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ that was loaned from the real Globe,” Crombie says. “There were loads of details everywhere that honored theater.”

The actors learned significant portions of “Hamlet.” Mescal led the cast of players in rehearsals before filming. “We would rehearse later in the evenings as an ongoing part of the process,” Mescal says. “Once the camera came in, it was Chloé’s baby, but we rehearsed consistently throughout the production. It was so cool. I have a lot of sympathy for directors. What I loved about it wasn’t necessarily the act of directing. It was more so the part of the process in helping me to act. It felt weird to direct them as Paul, but I could direct them as Will.”

Paul Mescal backstage at the Globe in “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)

Mescal and the players acted out 30 to 40 minutes of “Hamlet” while filming. The actor describes the feeling of being on the Globe stage as “sacred,” both because of the physical space and because of the emotional quality of the scenes.

“It felt very charged,” he says. “Up until that point we knew we had made something very special, but we were also acutely aware that this is where you had to land the plane. And that came with its own pressure. There’s something very special about playing Shakespeare and hearing Shakespeare’s words spoken in that place. The film is talking about the collision of art and humanity, and there are no greater words to communicate that feeling than the words in ‘Hamlet.’”

Zhao enlisted 300 extras to be the theater’s crowd. Each day, Zhao and Kim Gillingham, a dream coach who worked on the film, led the cast and extras in a daily meditation or dream exercise. It was unlike anything many of the actors had previously experienced.

“Everyone dropped into this very deep place of connection to themselves and to what was happening in front of them on the stage,” Alwyn says. “It was this amazing collective feeling of catharsis and connection to something bigger than ourselves.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

“The performances from some of the supporting artists are extraordinary,” Mescal adds. “And that was intentional in terms of how Chloé constructed that feeling and by having Kim there.”

After Will notices Agnes in the audience, he goes backstage and finally breaks down, experiencing a long-awaited release of grief. Mescal prepared for the scene by listening to Bon Iver’s “Speyside.” Fittingly, it was the last thing he filmed.

“The play becomes something different because it’s being witnessed by Agnes,” Mescal says. “It comes alive for the audience because of this weird alchemy. Something feels different in the air. That moment felt like such relief, like he could just let go.”

“Hamnet” ends with Agnes reaching for Hamlet. In doing so, she gives herself permission to let her son go. It was a moment that had to be discovered rather than constructed.

“The scene became a holding of collective grief in a communal space where we were allowed to let it out,” Buckley says. “It was like a tsunami. I’ll never forget it.”

In Mescal’s mind, the film’s ending is really its beginning. He imagines the relationship between Will and Agnes will go on, continuing the spiral.

“I have no idea how a relationship survives the death of a child, but I do think there is a miraculous hope and they can see each other again in that moment,” Mescal says. “They’ve abandoned each other in certain moments, but now she understands where he went. And I think they will return to each other.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

The true story behind the family drama “Rosemead” may not be the saddest tale ever brought to the screen. But boy, it’s up there.

Inspired by a shattering 2017 Times article by then-staff writer Frank Shyong (and now the first narrative feature film from LA Times Studios), “Rosemead” has long been a passion project for its star, Lucy Liu, also a producer. It’s not hard to see why.

This powerful account of humble, terminally ill Taiwanese American widow Irene Chao (based on real-life Rosemead resident Lai Hang), who takes the fate of her schizophrenic teen son into her own hands, offers the transformational role of a lifetime for Liu. Best known for stylish, commanding turns in the “Charlie’s Angels” and “Kill Bill” movies and in TV series such as “Ally McBeal” and “Elementary,” she’s a revelation here.

But the narrative also shines a crucial spotlight on L.A.’s Asian American community and its sometimes insular approach to handling emotional trauma, particularly mental illness. Shame over the condition’s perceived stigma, language barriers and a general fear of expressing oneself add to this cultural dilemma, one that hasn’t been widely explored on the big screen.

Liu is tender and heartbreaking as Irene, who runs the local print shop that her husband (Orion Lee, seen in flashbacks) left behind several years ago. She also helps out in the herbal pharmacy run by childhood best friend Kai-Li (Jennifer Lim). Given that Irene displays a troubling cough from the start, it’s no surprise where her health is heading.

Of more immediate worry to Irene, though, is her only child, Joe (an excellent Lawrence Shou), a high school senior diagnosed with schizophrenia after his beloved dad’s untimely death — and it’s gotten worse. This downturn has impacted his grades, competitive swimming status and overall focus; he obsessively doodles eerie clusters of spiders and draws a disturbing map of his school’s floor plan.

Joe maintains a supportive circle of friends, but they, like Irene and other observers, are ever more alarmed by his bouts of extreme behavior. The boy’s abrupt, inexplicable disappearances are increasingly commonplace, as is a destructive streak.

If that wasn’t enough, Joe has secretly stopped taking his meds. He’s also seemingly become fixated on guns and the endless string of school shootings that make the news.

His deeply concerned therapist, Dr. Hsu (James Chen), assures Irene, who has kept herself at arm’s length, “Most people with schizophrenia don’t engage in violence.” But it’s cold comfort to a mother whose days are numbered by a dire diagnosis. She’s convinced that when she is no longer there to monitor and protect her son, he will hurt himself and others.

Something must be done. The result is an act so unthinkable that, if it hadn’t happened in real life, Marilyn Fu’s otherwise sensitively constructed screenplay might seem beyond repair. But, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction and viewers won’t soon forget the film’s devastating conclusion.

Eric Lin, who has served as cinematographer on such disparate indie films as “The Exploding Girl,” “My Blind Brother” and “Hearts Beat Loud,” makes a worthy feature directing debut here, even if the picture tends to unfold a bit more prosaically than its singular story might demand. Yet when Lin attempts to break out using strobe effects to reflect Joe’s schizophrenic episodes, it comes off more jarring than immersive.

Still, with an able assist from cinematographer Lyle Vincent (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”), Lin vividly captures the look and feel of life in and around Rosemead. This is a special achievement since only about a quarter of the movie was shot in L.A. The rest was filmed in Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island to take advantage of New York’s tax incentives. No matter: The final product, featuring an effective array of SoCal exteriors to tie things together, looks seamless.

Enough can’t be said about Liu’s astonishing, naturalistic turn. She’s a physical marvel here, making herself as small and inconspicuous — yet also as quietly resolute — as her complex character requires. Liu, who was raised in a Chinese-speaking New York household, proves a verbal wonder as well, impeccably toggling between Irene’s halting English and her fluent native Mandarin. Prizes may elude Liu this awards season, but she should be in the conversation.

Despite the film’s downbeat subject matter and its grim finale, watching “Rosemead” isn’t as wholly depressing as it may sound. Like many films and TV shows that have dealt with life’s most unimaginable trials, there are profound human and societal lessons to be gleaned. Moreover, at this moment in time, any truthful, heartfelt story about America’s immigrant experience deserves our attention. That the film contains one of the year’s finest performances may seal the deal for more serious viewers.

TV legend Bryan Fuller, known for his cult classics “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal,” just earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for first feature. It’s somehow a surprise that the well-known creator just directed his first movie, after spending almost three decades working in television on series like “Dead Like Me” and “American Gods.” Now he turns to the world of indie film, reuniting with actor Mads Mikkelsen, his Hannibal Lecter, on the dark fairy tale “Dust Bunny.”

Fuller has a thing for idioms, extending them to their most extreme ends (e.g., “pushing daisies”), and so in “Dust Bunny,” he imagines what those bits of fluff could be if our nightmares came to life. He also posits an outlandish notion: What if a kid hired an assassin to kill the monster under her bed?

Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is an imaginative young girl who hears things that roar and scream in the night. The dust bunny under her bed is a ravenous, monstrous thing. When her parents go missing, she’s convinced they’ve been eaten by the monster bunny, and seeks out the services of an “intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen, that’s how he’s credited) whom she has seen vanquishing dragons in the alley outside. With a fee that she purloins from a church collection plate, she implores him for help and he agrees, as he learns more about this young girl’s challenging childhood.

At first, “Dust Bunny” feels a little light, the story skittering across its densely designed surface, with very little dialogue in the first half. But it grows and grows, more bits and pieces accumulating as Fuller reveals this strange, heightened world. We meet Intriguing Neighbor’s handler, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), revealing the larger Wickian world of killers that he inhabits.Weaver chomps through her scenes like the monster bunny chomps through the floorboards — literally, as she consumes charcuterie, dumplings and “suckling pig tea sandwiches” with gusto. Some monsters grin at us from across the table.

The film is essentially “Leon: The Professional” meets “Amélie” (one of Fuller’s favorite films), but with his distinct wit and flair. That style also means that “Dust Bunny” is quite fussy and mannered and if you don’t buy in on the film’s arch humor and stylized world, you’re liable to bounce right off of it. As Fuller opens the world up, revealing a sly FBI agent (Sheila Atim) and more baddies (David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson), the plot becomes more intriguing beyond its unwieldy childhood-trauma metaphor, but there’s also not quite enough embroidered on this tapestry. It feels shallow, not fleshed out.

Fuller demonstrates a strong command over his visual domain but the pat allegory he presents about the monsters with whom we have to learn to live feels a bit muddled. Sloan and Mikkelsen are terrific together, but you feel that there is much more they could have sunk their teeth into here, and perhaps the limits of the tale reveal the limits of the budget, carefully wallpapered over with opulent production design — explosions of patterns and color crafted by Jeremy Reed, captured with shadowy but lush cinematography by Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.

It’s a first feature that feels like one — a bit of a surprise from someone so experienced. But the project has Fuller’s signature style, even if it doesn’t add up to much more than a neat kiddie-centric hard-R genre exercise.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

You often hear that short stories make the best movies, as if the notion is to take something compact and widen it with cinema’s scalability. But the reverse can also be true: Certain movies benefit from feeling pocket-sized and unfettered, as if you’ve curled up with a tight, evocative short story, filled with just enough humor, detail and feeling to evoke a warm glow.

Set over two days during the instant relationship between a desperate young man from New York and a lonely older Los Angeles street musician, the black-and-white micro-indie “Burt” from director and co-screenwriter Joe Burke is one such half-slice of heart and calories, neither too much nor undercooked. You could watch a lot of films made with its equivalent budget (think that of a used 2007 sedan) and sense an ambition straining against constraints or a deliberate attempt at slumming. Not so with “Burt,” the movie equivalent of a cherry sour drop on a day when you need something a little tart, a tad sweet and that won’t outstay its welcome.

“Burt” stars Burt Berger as, well, Burt Berger, a 69-year-old troubadour type whom we first see in a sparsely attended coffeehouse plucking away at his guitar and, as if the ’60s never went away, singing about freedom. (Via Berger’s earnest, aged voice, the concept sounds hard-won.) Watching him intently is Sammy (co-screenwriter Oliver Cooper), who asks for a moment of Burt’s time. Over a picnic table in a field, this kind-eyed, spindly musician, visibly dealing with Parkinson’s, is informed that Sammy is the son he never knew he had. To which you might think: Finally, a movie that doesn’t waste time getting straight to what we’re already thinking.

Burt is tickled by the news and very quickly wants Sammy to stay overnight in the modest North Hollywood house he shares with his live-in landlord Steve (Steven Levy), a suspicious, rules-obsessed crank with mad-prophet facial hair, a nascent vegetable garden and, he’d like this new visitor to know, a gun. The distrust is mutual for Sammy, but he’s trying to stay focused on getting to know Burt for reasons that soon become apparent and which give this quirky, Jarmusch-inflected scenario an extra dab of seriocomic urgency.

But “Burt” isn’t driven by narrative. Director Burke is way more invested in the interpersonal dynamics of oddballs than anything else and, to that end, a fair amount of humorous tension is maintained — from Sammy’s fearful accommodation of Steve’s peculiarities to some contentious phone calls with a haranguing aunt (Caitlin Adams) who lives in a trailer park, is behind on rent and apparently makes a fine soup. Meanwhile, one of the more endearingly amusing aspects of “Burt” is how spiritedly the title character takes to sudden dadhood, especially his immediate adopting of such phrases as “No son of mine is …” and “That’s my boy!”

There’s no way for a general moviegoer to know what the ratio of fiction to nonfiction in is a scruffy DIY object like “Burt,” with characters playing versions of themselves. (If Levy doesn’t have an agent, he should consider it.) And while you don’t expect things to get sentimental, there’s a quiet faith as “Burt” shuffles along — its jazz-tinged music score a little rough and the editing not always smooth — that the movie won’t ignore the feelings its director has efficiently triggered. Most notably, Berger, whose life inspired the film, is a natural, easy to root for and an ideal center for a movie with a warmhearted view of life as best appreciated when you can set aside your hang-ups and adopt the occasional stray.

Have you ever wondered what movie might draw praise from Jacob Elordi and Benicio Del Toro for its cinematic reverie?

When you gather six actors from some of this year’s most acclaimed films, a thoughtful discussion about their roles and the craft is to be expected. But in kicking off The Envelope’s 2025 Oscar Actors Roundtable, the talent reminded us that they’re movie fans like the rest of us, picking the films they wish they could experience again for the first time.

“I’d like to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ again in the exact same circumstance that I watched it,” Elordi said, referring to Christopher Nolan’s dark retelling of Batman’s battle with the Joker. “I was 11 and I was with my dad. I’d been told by my mother that I wasn’t allowed to see it because there’s a horrific sequence with a pencil and a magic trick. My dad — when my mum was away — took me to the cinema to see it. I remember the first time I saw Heath [Ledger, as the Joker] onscreen and really feeling just totally moved by something.”

Then Del Toro chimed in with his pick, “Papillon,” Franklin Schaffner’s 1973 prison film starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen: “I saw it when I was a kid. We got in late in the movie, and it was a scene where they’re trying to get a gator. And they’re running around the crocodile. I’ve always really enjoyed that film.”

“And you really see Steve McQueen do more in that movie than ever before,” Elordi says. “When he starts going mad in that cell.”

Jesse Plemons is more sheepish when coughing up his selection.

“Everyone’s listing serious movies. The movie that popped into my head was ‘Nacho Libre.’ In life, some things just give you simple pleasures that aren’t necessarily elevated or high art. But that movie makes me very happy, guys.”

There was no judgment. An atmosphere of friendly sharing and mutual understanding was felt throughout the conversation, which brought together Elordi, who portrays the misunderstood and abused Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”; Plemons, in his turn as Teddy, a conspiracy theorist who is convinced that aliens live among us in “Bugonia”; Benicio Del Toro, who plays Sergio St. Carlos, a karate sensei and revolutionary immigration activist in “One Battle After Another”; Will Arnett, who stars as Alex Novak, a middle-age suburbanite whose crumbling marriage inspires him to try stand-up comedy in “Is This Thing On?”; Wagner Moura, who portrays Marcelo Alves, a teacher trying to escape the Brazilian dictatorship in “The Secret Agent”; and Stellan Skarsgård, who plays Gustav Borg, a veteran film director and absentee father who decides to make a movie about his family in “Sentimental Value.” Read on for excerpts from our discussion.

These roles take you to intense places — emotionally, physically, mentally. But what’s the furthest you’ve gone to book a role because you really felt like it was something you were meant to play?

Moura: “Narcos” was a crazy adventure for me because I was cast to play that part that had nothing to do with me. I was a skinny Brazilian guy who didn’t speak Spanish at all. So I had to go through a very intense thing. I had to learn a language in order to play a character. That was crazy. That was the the furthest I’ve [gone] to play a part.

Plemons: Those early weeks are a lot of fun, right? The beginning. It’s like Christmas every day.

Moura: The beginning is always like, “What am I doing?” And you go to bed and go like, “Jesus Christ, this is … There’s no way I can pull this off.” At the same time, I remember going to bed and thinking, “Have I done everything I could?” And then I was like, “Yeah, go to bed. Sleep.”

Arnett: Did you ever think about quitting, about not doing it?

Moura: No. I had to go ahead and do it. That director trusted me, and he was like, “You can do it.” I didn’t want to disappoint him.

Have you gotten to that point, Will? Wanting to quit something because it felt like too much?

Arnett: All the time. Doing [“Is This Thing On?”], I felt like I was at the bottom of a mountain. Every day, I thought, “There’s no way I can do it.” I would come home and just think, “That was probably the worst day that anybody’s ever filmed a scene,” then just have to let it go.

With “Is This Thing On?,” you did a stand-up act in front of people, and they were tourists. Some of them didn’t know who you were. And you bombed a few times, right? Place me in that moment, and what does that do for your performance.

Arnett: I had them introduce me by my character name. So the people who did know who I was, we were saying that [they] thought I was probably having a midlife crisis or something, which I was, but for different reasons. I’d never done stand-up before, so going up and doing this in front of people and bombing was super vulnerable. There’s nowhere to hide, and you can’t just walk off. There was one time where I’d done a set at the Comedy Cellar, in the main room, and it was great. And went around the corner, like five minutes later, onto a different stage, with the same material, and it was dead silent. And the only person laughing was Bradley. I could see him laughing, and [I was] thinking, “Can I just walk off stage right now?” That was ego-stripping. It becomes kind of absurd. You end up kind of laughing at yourself, at the absurdity of it. It’s not out-of-body, but you separate yourself from the words as they’re coming out.

Stellan, “Sentimental Value” is, in some ways, about how the choices a parent makes in the service of their job or their art shape the lives of your children. How did it make you reflect on the choices you’ve made in your career and the impact it had on your family?

Skarsgård: I thought it had nothing to do with me. This was a good escape. But my second son, he called me and said, “You recognize yourself?” And I went, “Uh, no.” And of course I don’t recognize myself because he’s a different kind of man. He’s an old-fashioned man in a sense, a 20th century man. And I’m a 21st. [Laughs.] But it reminded me — since I stopped at the Royal Dramatic Theatre [in] 1989, I spent four months a year in front of the camera and eight months a year changing diapers and wiping asses. I don’t think I’ve been away a lot, but it made me think about, “Have you been present?” Not really. I have eight kids, which means there are eight different personalities, and some kids need a lot of attention and some don’t. You’re imperfect, but I’m sort of settled with that. My kids have to settle with it too. They’re not perfect either.

We often hear from the women who are mothers, how they balance their work with their careers. Many of you are fathers. How have you learned to navigate it?

Moura: For me, it’s the most difficult thing ever. I was thinking the other day, “What are the things that really define me as a human being?” Being a father is the strongest one, but being an artist is almost there. It’s hard because with our job, we have to travel a lot, and you’re not always able to bring your kids with you. They have school, and they have their own lives and their own things. I kind of think this is sort of an impossible perfect balance. But like Stellan said, it is what it is. And when I’m with them, I try to be with them. But being aware that, of course, there will be parts of their lives that I won’t be able to be there for them and sort of accept that.

Arnett: It’s funny, I’ve been traveling a lot doing this stuff. I’ve been back for a couple of days, but I’ve been busy. I’ve been going out all day, doing work and doing these things, and my 15-year-old said to me — I checked in on him. He’s doing his homework. I said, “How are you doing?” He said, “Good,” and he said, “I miss you.” And I was in the same place with him. I don’t even know if this is appropriate for this forum, but it really struck me. Him saying that stayed with me all day. And I woke up thinking about [that] this morning, and even this [round table], and saying, “Hey, we’re gonna have dinner tonight.” I had those moments of thinking, “Am I that guy?” Now I’m saying, “Let’s have dinner after … I gotta go do this thing.” It weighs on you. It is the most difficult balance.

Del Toro: I’ve tried to include my daughter in the process sometimes, you know? Sit her down, bounce lines with her, go see the movie when I’m done with the movie. Make her part of it too.

Jacob, so often when you’re talking to an actor, at least on my end, there’s curiosity about the research process and what you’ve had to learn to prepare for a role. But in playing the Creature in “Frankenstein,” this amalgamation of parts, your character’s really in a process of discovery. Did you have to unlearn things? How did you approach that?

Elordi: The nature of the character actually gives you an excuse to be absolutely free because he’s sort of the first man, in a lot of ways. You can really draw from everything and anything, like a smell or light, because he hasn’t felt the sun on his face. But there’s so many things that you can go back on and reconsider. A lot of the process was just closing the world off for the time of filming — not eating a cheeseburger when I wanted to eat a cheeseburger or just little stuff that made me feel Other. But strangely enough, because he’s made of so many different parts, and you get to go from being born to finding consciousness to the death of consciousness at the end, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. You can’t really miss because everything is happening to him all the time. It’s interesting because you say you want to ask someone about the process, but the process is so f— boring.

Plemons: You studied some form of Japanese dance or movement?

Elordi: Guillermo had this idea to study Butoh. It’s a movement thing, like you’re in drama school again where [the instructor]’s like, “Imagine fire in your fingertips and a hurricane in your lungs, and your foot is a steam train.” And then you walk around the room for 40 minutes … I remember being in drama school, and I had to carry a stick that was called my Intellikey for two hours. It was a piece of bamboo. And move around the room as if that stick was a part of my soul or something. Something completely f— absurd. It was a similar process to that, but it was actually helpful because I had something to apply it to that was sort of physically not so human.

Do any of you have a thing that really helped you find your way into a character? Jesse, I feel like you have gone to some dark places.

Plemons: I guess the most curious is I do dream work. There are symbols and whatnot that you are gifted with that may not make sense on a conscious level, or they may. That’s something that’s hard to talk about. Anything that makes me feel like I’m just following my curiosity and I’m not working; I’m just following some trail that I don’t necessarily know where it’s leading — it’s hard to describe because the way I like to work is where anything goes.

Elordi: You kind of know when you get onto that thing too. When a dot does connect. Something happens, then, all of a sudden, you’re six hours down this little road on this sound that you heard in a song or something like that. You also know when it’s not working. But to be conscious about it can mess it up as well, if you’re like, “I’m gonna do this kind of thing and this. And this is gonna go to this voice.”

Does the work need to feel hard in order for you to feel like you’re challenging yourself?

Skarsgård: No. [I need] to not be afraid and not to be blocked; I need to feel safe. And I need [for] everybody on the set, they want me to be good, and I feel it. Then I can be free. I’m with you [Jesse], you have to be in a state where anything is possible. I don’t do backstories for my characters, ever, because it reduces the possibilities. Then you have to follow the backstory — so he couldn’t do that. You, as an actor, say to the director, “No, my character wouldn’t do that.” “How do you know?” Your character might be more interesting than you are.

Plemons: And this thing doesn’t exist yet, this moment —

Moura: There’s no better thing than being in a scene with another actor, and you look at the other guy or the other actors, and you go, like, “This can go anywhere.” Because these other guys, or this other actor, she’s ready to do whatever, to take this wherever. This is the thing that really moves me in a scene. It’s really hard when you work with an actor or with a director that sticks with the thing that they want the scene to be, that thing they thought at home, that they prepared for, and you can’t really move into that space.

Benicio, you really know how to make a character memorable and leave a lasting impression. With Sensei Sergio and what we see onscreen, what were you working with on the page and how much came from you in collaboration with Paul [Thomas Anderson, the film’s director]?

Del Toro: I just asked questions. Paul wants to hear what the actors have to say. I just bombard him with questions. Paul was very flexible … He’s very quick, and if he likes something, he would jump on it. My character was introduced by killing someone in my dojo. So, I asked him, “OK, so I killed this guy in the dojo … I’m not gonna drive Leo anywhere. I have to get rid of the body. And we’re gonna have to clean the dojo or set it on fire. And why am I doing that?” So, from there, it evolved into, like, “We’re not killing anybody.” I approach it a little bit like that — common sense. Logic. But every character is different and every story is different, and every director is different. I’ve been in movies where you just have to find yourself in there. And those are challenging, and they make you better.

“The Secret Agent” really explores how brutal a dictatorship can be on regular people. Wagner, your character Marcelo is not trying to overthrow the government. He’s just a man who’s trying to stick with his values. Tell me about portraying a person in that situation.

Moura: The dictatorship in Brazil was from ’64 to ’85. I was born in ’76, so the echoes of the dictatorship were still there. I remember my parents speaking like [mimics whispering] because they didn’t want people to hear what were they talking about. It’s important that Brazilian cinema is going back there to look at that big scar in our country. I directed a film [2019’s “Marighella”] about a freedom fighter, a guy who wanted to overthrow the government. But this one is different. Like you said, it’s just someone who’s trying to stick with the values that he has. And I think that this is a reality in many different parts of the world, where just the fact that you are who you are makes your life difficult or puts your life in danger, just by the color of your skin or your sexual orientation. You see the dictatorship and and what a dictatorship can do, but not in a obvious way.

Do any of you read reviews?

Skarsgård: Yes, sometimes. I prefer to read the good ones.

Has there been a bad review that propelled you or motivated you or helped you?

Skarsgård: Once I read a theater review that was really bad and that pointed out a grave mistake I made in the show, so I corrected it afterwards. But otherwise —

Elordi: You took the advice?

Skarsgård: Yeah.

Arnett: I did this show for Netflix like 10 years ago, and this guy wrote this review, and I’m embarrassed to say I wrote a point-for-point rebuttal email. I sent it as a draft to Mark Chappell, my partner, and he said, “Oh, hold on. Don’t send it. I’m gonna come over. Let’s talk for a minute.” And I didn’t send it.

Plemons: I’ve got one journalist — I am not gonna say their name — but …

Arnett: Who’s got it out for you?

Plemons: In a way that wasn’t even that intense, but said it [a performance of mine] was “misguided” — which, is just like, “What?” And then I started reading more of his reviews, and everything’s “misguided” to this guy. It’s like, “What do you mean?” So, I’m trying to be less misguided.

Can I jump in with a question for anyone? Talking about that balance between preparation — in certain cases, it’s necessary — then your experience where you rethink all of that. Given the fact that we’re not machines, that on any given day there are a number of variables that influence your mood and influence your mind and influence your ability to relax and do the scene, I’ve thought a lot about that ideal baseline place of being fully relaxed and in your [element]. I wish acting teachers had told me that when I was younger, that that’s like over half of the battle. I’m curious if you have any —

Top row, from left to right: Will Arnett, Wagner Moura and Jesse Plemons. Bottom row, from left to right: Benicio Del Toro, Jacob Elordi and Stellan Skarsgård.

Skarsgård: Tips?

Plemons: No, routines or [an] approach, anything you do to get yourself into a place where you feel like you can leave the preparation and [just be].

Skarsgård: The preparation can serve that purpose. You feel that you’re doing something because it’s a f— strange business, what we’re doing. You don’t know what it is, really, but you feel that, “OK, I’ve done this preparation. I’ve done three months of baking because I’m [playing] a baker.” You feel that you’re prepared, so you feel safer. But, personally, I make sure that the set is safe. I’m first on set. I come in early and, while they’re setting up, I’m gonna see what they’re doing. I’m making sure that I know what all the sound guys, the prop guys, what they’re doing at the same time. So, I feel a part of the unit. That’s my way of feeling safe.

Plemons: Yeah, I find that too. Any time you try and block anything out, you’re missing it. I know that’s sort of a cliche, but the times when I’ve felt maybe the best, I wasn’t blacked out. I was aware of everything.

Elordi: Key to the whole thing is you practice.

Plemons: Yeah, I was looking at the DP I had.

Elordi: That’s when I feel, like, the most comfortable, is when you feel like you are in a dialogue with the operator and the lighting guard and your director, and you’re all in the scene working towards [the same thing]. It’s not like, “Everyone, shut the f— up now. I need complete silence.” Complete silences are unnerving to me on a set. It’s like you’re all trying to reach this point for cut, and then you’ve got that piece of the thing. That makes me feel comfortable when it’s technical and not actually getting lost in this thing of like, “I need complete silence. My body needs to be supple and ready.”

A San Francisco supervisor has proposed increasing the city’s film and television tax credit to lure more productions to the Bay Area.

Board President Rafael Mandelman introduced legislation Tuesday that would create a tiered rebate system based on local spending on items like San Francisco resident wages, services or goods.

To qualify, most productions must spend a minimum of $500,000 in the city and shoot at least five days of principal photography there. Those productions also get a 100% rebate on city agency fees, including permits and police services.

Then, under the new proposal, those projects could get 10% back on the first million dollars spent in San Francisco, then 20% on any qualified local spending beyond that, said Manijeh Fata, executive director of the San Francisco Film Commission.

“As localities across the state compete to attract more film production, San Francisco must stay in the game,” Mandelman said in a statement. “Strengthening our film incentive program will keep jobs in San Francisco and help ensure this important economic activity doesn’t bypass us.”

The legislation is expected to go to a committee hearing next month, with a final vote potentially at the end of January or early February, Fata said.

Though San Francisco’s production incentive was established in 2006, the program has been “underutilized,” said Supervisor Connie Chan, who is co-sponsoring the legislation.

“I support this legislative update so we can ensure the original intent and benefits of the program can be fully materialized,” she said in a statement. “I expect the film rebate program to deliver robust job opportunities for workers, creative promotion of our City through films that will boost tourism and increase sales tax revenue with film industry spending.”

San Francisco’s incentive proposal comes five months after California increased the cap on the state’s film and television tax credit program in an attempt to curb runaway production to other states and countries.

California now allocates $750 million annually to the program, up from $330 million. Legislators also broadened the type of productions eligible to apply for the credit.

Since then, more than three dozen TV shows, including a “Baywatch” reboot, and 52 films have been awarded tax credits.

SANTA FE, N.M. — A new conservation agreement will preserve land with breathtaking desert vistas that inspired the work of 20th century painter Georgia O’Keeffe and ensure visitors access to an adjacent educational retreat, several partners to the pact announced Tuesday.

Initial phases of the plan establish a conservation easement across about 10 square miles of land, owned by a charitable arm of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), on the outskirts of the village of Abiquiu.

That easement stretches across reservoir waterfront and native grasslands to the doorstep of a remote home owned by O’Keeffe’s estate, a few miles from her larger home and studio in Abiquiu. Both homes are outside the conservation area and owned and managed separately by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

The view from the rangeland should be familiar to even casual O’Keeffe afficionados — including desert washes, sandstone bluffs and the distant mountain silhouette of Cerro Pedernal.

“The stark colorful geology, the verdant grasslands going right down to the Chama River and Abiquiu lake — all that just makes it such a multifaceted place with tremendous conservation value,” said Jonathan Hayden, executive director of the New Mexico Land Conservancy that helped broker the conservation plan and will oversee easements.

Hayden said the voluntary plan guards against the potential encroachment of modern development that might subdivide and transform the property, though there are not any imminent proposals.

Land within an initial easement has been the backdrop to movie sets for decades, including a recreation of wartime Los Alamos in the hit 2024 film “Oppenheimer, ” on a temporary movie set that still stands.

The conservation agreement guarantees some continued access for film productions, as well as preserving traditional winter grazing for farmers who usher small herds down from the mountains as snow arrives.

The state of New Mexico is substantially underwriting the initiative though a trust created by state lawmakers in 2023.

An approved $920,000 state award is being set aside for easement surveys, transaction costs and a financial nest-egg that the Presbyterian Church Foundation will use — while retaining property ownership — to support programming at the adjacent Ghost Ranch Education & Retreat Center and its use of the conservation area.

The center attracts about 10,000 visitors a year to overnight spiritual, artistic and literary retreats for people of all faiths, with twice as many day visitors, said center CEO David Evans.

Two initial phases of the conservation plan are part of a broader plan to protect more than 30 square miles (78 square kilometers) of the area through conservation easements and public land transfers, with the support of at least one wildlife foundation. That would extend protections to the banks of the Chama River and preserve additional wildlife habitat.

Many Native American communities trace their ancestry to the area in northern New Mexico where O’Keeffe settled and explored the landscape in her work.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.