Film

You’re HBO, and your newest release is an explosive documentary about one of the most controversial sectors of the United States government: the Border Patrol. What do you do to get it as much attention as possible?

We’re seeing their strategy play out right now.

“Critical Incident: Death at the Border” recounts the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, a 42-year-old undocumented immigrant who died in 2010 days after immigration agents handcuffed, beat and Tasered him near the San Ysidro Port of Entry after trying to deport him to Mexico. Border Patrol at the time said they used force after Hernández Rojas, who had lived in this country since he was 15, resisted them.

The case drew international attention and Hernández Rojas’ family received a $1-million settlement from the federal government, which declined to file criminal charges against those involved in his death even though the San Diego County coroner’s office ruled it a homicide. Enter John Carlos Frey, a reporter who has pursued the story for nearly 15 years and who is one of the protagonists in “Critical Incident.”

He knocks on the doors of agents who were there when Hernández Rojas died, discovers footage that contradicts the Border Patrol’s official account and uncovers a secretive Border Patrol unit tasked with the “mitigation” of use-of-force incidents that was disbanded in 2022. The documentary includes an interview with a whistleblower who claimed bosses told him to doctor evidence to exculpate the agency in the death of Hernández Rojas. It also alleges the cover-up went all the way up to Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott, who was Border Patrol deputy chief for the San Diego region when Hernández Rojas died.

Scott appears near the end of “Critical Incident” to dismiss those “allegations” and declines to comment about any culpability those involved may have had, citing ongoing litigation. “This case from over a decade ago was thoroughly investigated and resolved by the Department of Justice and local law enforcement,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Times in a statement when I asked for comment about the documentary’s findings. “Efforts to malign CBP and ICE officers as lawbreakers are slanderous, irresponsible, and only reveal the media’s eagerness to mislead the American people.”

“Critical Incident” is taut, disturbing, timely and a brisk hour and a half. It deserves as many viewers as possible and a publicity campaign as ubiquitous as what HBO is currently pushing for its hit hockey romance, “Heated Rivalry.”

Instead, the network released “Critical Incident” on Dec. 29, when most Americans were lost in a haze of Christmas leftovers, “Avengers: Endgame” reruns and college football bowl games. It’s not listed alongside other recently released documentaries on HBO’s website, and I wasn’t able to find it on the network’s streaming app’s “Just Added” tab.

Director Rick Rowley was diplomatic about his documentary’s “difficult” release date, saying he has “limited insight” into HBO’s decision. He’s nevertheless confident “this film is going to have a long life because these [Border Patrol] issues are only more pressing as the days pass.”

Frey wasn’t as polite: “If I was an executive and released it on that date, I would be fired.”

Rodney Scott, then-nominee for commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, arrives for a Senate confirmation hearing in April 2025.

(Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

An HBO spokesperson pushed back on Frey’s criticism, stating, “The documentary was actually released during one of the highest usage times on the platform and we are proud to say the film is doing very well, even showing up in the top 10 rail.”

In development for four years, Frey said “Critical Incident” was supposed to air just before the 2024 election. He showed me a text message from a senior producer attesting to that. But HBO held on to it even as a Senate committee grilled Scott about Hernández Rojas’ death during his confirmation hearing last April, which isn’t included in the documentary. The documentary didn’t air even as the Border Patrol’s invasion of cities far from the U.S.-Mexico border throughout last year made the story “Critical Incident” told more relevant than ever.

HBO “buried it on purpose,” Frey, 56, told me over breakfast in Boyle Heights. He blames the current political environment — specifically, Netflix’s proposed $82.7-billion bid to acquire HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros., which federal regulators would have to approve. The last thing executives wants to do right now, Frey argued, is anger President Trump by promoting a documentary that attacks his deportation deluge.

“They buried it on the worst day of the year when no one is watching, and of course, they’re going to deny it,” Frey said.

“That is, of course, not true,” the HBO spokesperson said .

Covering la migra is personal for Frey, who grew up in Tijuana and Imperial Beach with views of the U.S.-Mexico border fence. When he was 12, a Border Patrol agent approached his mother — then a green card holder — while her son was playing outside.

“He wouldn’t believe anything she would say and wouldn’t let her go to our house to get her documents,” Frey said. He’s of average height, deep-voiced and barrel-chested and tends to respond to questions with questions. “Why would he? The agent deported her.”

As an adult, Frey began to cover the Border Patrol in a post-9/11 era. Much like today, it was rapidly expanding, and aggressive tactics like breaking car windows when the occupants weren’t resisting and agent-involved shootings were endemic. The Hernández Rojas case entered his scope after someone reached out claiming they had footage of his death.

“The original narrative was Anastasio became belligerent, they subdued him and he died,” Frey said. “The case was closed, the Border Patrol had written it off.”

The source was initially too scared to share their recording, but Frey eventually convinced them after forwarding his stories about repeated Border Patrol abuses of power. What he saw — about a dozen Border Patrol agents circling a prone, moaning Hernández Rojas, Tasering and punching him while onlookers scream at them to stop — left the reporter “disgusted.”

The footage eventually aired on a 2012 PBS program, which made the story go national. Frey’s continued work on the case eventually caught the attention of Rowley, whose documentaries on neo-Nazi groups, the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the War on Terror have earned him Emmy wins and an Oscar nomination.

The documentarian wanted to examine the Border Patrol’s impunity, and, he said, “Anastasio’s story is one of the only stories that takes you all the way to the top. And you have to work with John if you’re going to do the Anastasio case. He’s fearless.”

Rowley is proud of his final product but admitted that he’s “used to having more press around a film release, especially about a film about … the most important domestic issue in the country, especially in the last year.”

That’s what angers Frey the most about the release of “Critical Incident.”

“The stories I used to hear — ‘Border Patrol broke my windows, left me bloodied, grabbed me without asking any questions’ — it’s now in neighborhoods,” he said. He twisted a napkin, tossed it into the pile of twisted napkins next to his coffee cup.

“It’s a deliberate choice when you’re going to release a documentary and how. If I were HBO and I had evidence of a murder by the feds, I would’ve led with that inmy promotion. I would think that’s a selling point, especially with the [immigration] raids. Instead, they have me hugging someone in the trailer.”

Frey shook his head. “We made a good film, but half the battle is getting people to see it.”

In the last episode of The Envelope video podcast before the 2026 Oscar nominations, Joel Edgerton describes the transformative experience of making “Train Dreams.” Plus, our hosts share the names they’d like to hear called on nominations morning.

Kelvin Washington: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Envelope. Kelvin Washington, Yvonne Villarreal, Mark Olsen, and it’s great to have you both here as usual and especially when this is our last episode before Oscar nominations. So I’ll start with you, Yvonne. It could be a movie, a director, or some rising star or just anything that you hope once they read those nominations that morning, you’re gonna hear.

Yvonne Villarreal: I’m not going to say the usual suspects because that’s covered. I really want to see Chase Infiniti get nominated for her role in “One Battle After Another.” I just think she’s been such a revelation for me as somebody who watched “Presumed Innocent.” Seeing her in this role — and I don’t want to spoil anything, but she really finds herself in a hairy situation in this film and the way she sort of rises to the occasion and really has a moment of triumph for herself, I think it was just striking to watch. And she’ll be in “The Handmaid’s Tale” spin-off “The Testaments.” I’m really looking forward to see what she does there. But also I’ll say, as somebody who got thrown into the bandwagon of “KPop Demon Hunters” because of my 6-year-old niece, I wanna see that get some love in the animated category.

Mark Olsen: And in the music categories. Best song.

Washington: It better! Do you know how much I have to hear that song in my house with three daughters, 9, 7 and 4 [years old]? Like, I’m going to be “Golden.”

Villarreal: Are they memorized?

Washington: That’s an understatement. It’s to the point I got concerned. Is it like some robotic AI that’s taking over my daughter’s brain? Instantly. That and 6-7. I have to deal with that every day.

All right. Mark, swing it to you. What do you have?

Olsen: Well, you know, the actress Rose Byrne for the movie “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” She won a lot of critics’ prizes leading up to the nominations. And I think it’d be so exciting if the filmmaker on that, Mary Bronstein, also got recognized either for the screenplay or as director. You know, Mary’s someone that she made her first film, “Yeast,” more than 15 years ago and had not gotten a second project going and had sort of been living a life and doing other things. And to see her sort of reemerge with this project in particular, which is so powerful and so specific, it would be really exciting — as great as it is to see Rose being rightfully recognized — to see Mary get some attention as well.

Washington: So I’m gonna jump in with a couple. One, because she’s been on the radar for years as just a multitude of things, she’s multifaceted: Teyana Taylor can dance, she can sing, she’s just all of that and now acting alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. Very impressive for her. And not a debut, but maybe for those who aren’t familiar. So I’d be interested to see, I have a feeling we’re gonna hear her name. And then I’m going super popcorn, Raisinets, Junior Mints, going to the theater. “F1,” for me, I know it was kind of —

Villarreal: Whoa, that’s a throwback.

Washington: I know, but hear me out. It was fun. It was just fun. And it’s kind of one of those movies like, you know, you forget that you go to the movies, it’s gonna be a little fun, maybe a little cheesy, but dang it, I’m here. I’ve got my popcorn. All of that. That for me was another one that was like, “Oh man, that’s kind of the moviegoing experience sometimes we’ve forgotten.”

Olsen: And it’s always good to see the Oscars recognize a film like that as well. I mean, it helps just for attracting audience to the telecast. But I think it is important that the Oscars recognize a breadth of filmmaking styles and one of the things that’s so exciting about the movies is that it can be so many different things, from like a really small personal story to some big high-tech film like “F1: The Movie.” And so I think, yeah, to see that recognized in some of the major categories would be really exciting.

Washington: You know why I like Mark? Because he tried to legitimize my choice. And I’m OK with that.

Olsen: There’s no try. You don’t need the help.

Washington: Look at how I look in the camera. You know, why? Because I know someone’s going to be highbrowin’ me right now. And I get it. And I am with you. However, as we know, we can get all the types of mergers and some things will happen. Are people going to be going into movies anymore? And I was sitting in it going, “Oh, yeah, this is kind of what that feels like.” So ha! Take that.

Villarreal: My reaction was more, it had been a while since I heard the title.

Washington: It felt the same.

Villarreal: Sorry!

Washington: I like what I like, OK? I enjoyed it. That’s all I have to say about that.

All right, Mark, coming to you now. We’re talking about Oscar buzz, and just buzz and a lot of traction that someone can get from a role. Talk about Joel Edgerton playing a logger in Netflix’s “Train Dreams.” What was that conversation like?

Olsen: It was a really terrific conversation. This is a movie that premiered at Sundance last year and was picked up by Netflix there. And even though it has that machinery behind it, there is still something that feels very organic about the success of this movie. It genuinely feels like it’s word of mouth that people have been discovering the film. And it has just a really quiet power too. And a lot of that comes from Joel’s performance. You know, he originally pursued the rights to this book himself and wasn’t able to get it, the rights were already taken. And so he sort of like thought, “Oh, well, that’s that.” And then years go by and the project comes back around and he’s offered this role that he’d been so interested in playing. And he feels like it’s hit him at a very specific time in his life.

The [story] is set in the early part of the 20th century. He plays a logger in the Pacific Northwest. And it really is just a portrait of a life. And the story deals with grief and family, and Joel, in the subsequent years, has become a father himself. And he said how, if he’d have played this a few years ago, he thinks it’d be totally different than the way that [he’s] playing it now. Also he is a guy who’s been in the business for a few years now. He has, I think, some really sharp opinions, views on like what this business is, what the industry is like right now and where it’s going. So it was a really terrific conversation to have with him.

Washington: It sounds like it. Let’s get straight to it. Here is Mark and Joel right now.

Joel Edgerton in “Train Dreams.”

(Netflix)

Mark Olsen: As we’re talking, the movie has been building this sense of momentum around it with reviews and awards. And while there is an awards campaign around the movie, there is something about it that feels very organic. This movie seems to be catching on through word of mouth, just people seeing it and responding to it. How do you feel about the response to the movie?

Joel Edgerton: It feels very good. Coming from an independent film background, I love it when small movies make a lot of noise. And I can’t really analyze or diagnose why, but I get this feeling with “Train Dreams” that it means different things for different people and it holds up a bit of a mirror to their own experience, being that the film is really this celebration of an ordinary life and shows the majesty in that. What my character goes through, they’re universal experiences and so people find something of their own experience in it and I think that’s part of the reason why. It’s a small movie but it’s also a very big movie.

Olsen: The other side of that, in a way, you were recently on a red carpet and you were asked about some comments that James Cameron had made regarding movies on streaming services and the awards race. And I don’t know if you want to say anything more about that, but also do you feel like people do somehow hold it against “Train Dreams” that it’s on Netflix?

Edgerton: Look, the world we live in now is so in the hands of the audiences because of social media. I feel like in the old days, well before I was born, we were told who our movie stars were. The studios would make those decisions for us, and things were very narrow. And now people have the power to choose what they want to watch, who they want to watch, they choose the movie stars. They speak about the movies, and Letterboxd, for example, is such a big thing. And in that same vein, it’s really interesting to hear what people, regular people, moviegoers think of how movies should be exhibited, how they feel, regardless of whether they know about the business side of things or not, or why things are the way they are. They have feelings, sometimes very passionate points of view on where and how we should watch movies. And of course, for all of the business side, if we put it aside, I do believe people want to go to the cinema and watch movies.

My comments come from understanding now where I am in my life. I’m all about creativity and all about story, but I do understand business, and I feel like I emerged out of my bubble in Sydney and felt like the whole world of cinema had suddenly changed. My views on streaming had started to evolve just after we showed a movie at Cannes called “The Stranger.” Another very small movie we made down in Adelaide and Netflix picked up the movie and I remember thinking, “Should we go with them?” So many people saw that movie because it was on a streamer. And so my feelings are very mixed and they’re very much tailored to what the movie is — and therefore according to what the movie is and how big or small it is, where it should live. I’m all for pushing to fight for keeping cinema alive and I believe a younger generation feels the same thing. But I also feel like there are chances that some people have that are narrow as they get their start in the business, which means sometimes the first things you can do, you’re not necessarily going to get a 2,000-screen release on your very first movie. So I have many, many opinions about it. But I feel like we all need to fight for cinema. We also sort of hopefully don’t allow streaming, as great as it can be, to take over everything. That’s my feeling.

Olsen: You’re also a producer as well. This feels like we’re in the middle of a transformative moment for the industry. What is it like for you as a person in the middle of that tide, just trying to navigate that for yourself?

Edgerton: Again, it’s all about what is the story and where should it live. My feeling always is that if I ever get behind making something, I want as many people as possible to see it. I also want to have an exchange at the cinema. One of the great things about “Train Dreams” is I’ve done about 50 Q&As so far — I haven’t counted them up, but around that, and we’ll do a bunch more. We’ve been to a number of festivals and we have an exchange with the audience. We get to watch and see people’s reaction to the film in like an analog way. Sometimes the feeling with letting a movie go on streamer without any fanfare is that it feels like it disappears with a whisper, and you don’t get to have that exchange. And I think that’s very important.

My dream would be to make a film exhibited at the cinema, knowing that at some point it will end up on TV screens and in people’s lounge rooms all over the world. And finding the right way to get a balance of both. There’s nothing better than sitting in the cinema and watching a movie with a bunch of other people. The sad thing at the moment [is] it seems — and again, I don’t know the full diagnostics of it — you get a cinema release and you’re there for like two weeks and then you’re replaced by something else. I’m old enough to remember the days where a movie would sit in the cinema for six, seven, eight weeks if it was good.

Olsen: I don’t want to belabor the point, but I’m so curious about this. I’m assuming when you went to the Gotham Awards you were not thinking “I’m going to give James Cameron a piece of my mind tonight.” Do you find in the time that you’ve been doing this, now you may show up to something and you have no idea what someone’s going to ask you, you have to be ready to talk about just about anything?

Edgerton: You’re right, and I never expect a red carpet is a mine field. I do go home sometimes and think, “What did I say?” I knew what I said. And I also stand by what I said. What I don’t love is the process of reduction of someone’s comments. Someone had sent me this thing that said that I “lashed out” or used a word that was quite a violent one, like I was lashing back at James Cameron. I was like, “No, I wasn’t doing that at all.” I actually had a fair and balanced opinion about the fact that James is, excuse the semi-pun, a titan. He is a pioneer and an inventor and we’ve seen that he’s created technology that has made movies better. He can exhibit movies in this broad scale because he’s dared to dream big. And I feel like there’s a world where there are people who are never going to get their first film on 2,000 screens because it’s a small story, movies like “Sorry, Baby.” They’re not 2,000-screen release movies. There’s a world where they live somewhere, whether it’s in small art house cinemas or whatever. So I was like, “All right, don’t make it feel like I’m putting the gloves on and have a fight with James Cameron, because he’s probably going to win if that’s the case.” And that’s certainly not what I was doing at all. Just saying my point of view is slightly different. And I also understand his point of view. But [comedic wrestler voice] “I’ll meet you on the top oval, James. Let’s do it.” I’m not trying to start a fight. I’m a lover, not a fighter.

Olsen: To start talking about “Train Dreams,” you’ve talked a lot about how you read the book around 2018 or so and the rights weren’t available so you set that idea aside —

Edgerton: Sulked a bit.

Olsen: What do you feel like you were responding to then in that book?

Edgerton: I’ve heard the term neo-western, which I understand now, but it didn’t really make sense to me at the time. When I first read the book, we come into the story with this violent act towards the Chinese worker, for anyone who’s seen the film. And I didn’t know Denis Johnson’s work at all at the time. The book had been gifted to me as a wrap gift on “Boy Erased.” I thought, “If someone gives you a book, it means they think there’s some meaning in it for you, that it will resonate with you,” and it did. But I thought, “Oh, this is a western.” And then within a handful of pages, I realized it was a different kind of western. It would look and feel like a western, but it was a rumination on a life itself. Not that it was going to answer the big elusive question of the meaning of life, but swirling questions of what is the purpose of a life and what is in the extraordinary details of a life we may never care to remember because the person is not the great inventor, the great general, the great president or superhero. I love the ordinariness, I love the idea that it resonated with something that my parents had always instilled in me, which is that every single human being has a great story to tell and that we all shouldn’t be considered insignificant. And I just was so moved by the sort of glimpses of one man’s entire life. Wanted to get my hands on it, couldn’t, and I’m happy to say that it’s good that I didn’t get my big fat lumberjack hands on it then. Mostly because I think [director and co-writer] Clint [Bentley] is a remarkably sensitive, excellent filmmaker [and] has done a much better job than I ever would if I was in control of things. And because in the four years since he reached out to me to be in the film, I’d become a dad. And that was like everything to me. And if you’ve seen the film and you know what’s inside of the film, I really believe that my performance, I don’t know what my performance would have been like pre-Joel the Dad, but now that I am a dad, it’s like there’s stuff inside of me that makes this performance possible.

Olsen: But when it came back to you, do you feel like you responded to it differently? Did you recognize that difference right away?

Edgerton: One hundred percent. And I know it, there was a significant moment. Clint came to meet me in Chicago, I was shooting “Dark Matter” and I was very excited that this had somehow come around to me, knowing that I loved the book and the character so much. Then I watched “Jockey” and knew that he was a really solid filmmaker. His adaptation was extraordinary. And then when I met him, I realized as a filmmaker he was like a director version of the central character of the film — kind, honest, generous, a really great observer. And I went home and I spoke to my wife, and she obviously, her two big questions every time I want to do a project [are] when and where. Because it means moving us around, uprooting our family. I told her and Spokane didn’t exactly make her click her heels, because her life is about being plugged into big cities. She said, what’s the story about? And I started trying to tell her the story, and when I got to the stuff that happens to Robert in the middle of the film, and my 1 1/2-year-old twins are in the other room, I couldn’t even finish telling her the story. And I realized then how much the story now kind of terrified me. But also was so much more connected for me. And she watched me, my chin was quivering and and she was like, “All right, I guess we’re going to Spokane.”

Olsen: Have you done a project that felt this personal before? And did that have its own kind of anxiety attached? Did you have any reluctance to do this for the reason that you were connecting to it so strongly?

Edgerton: I feel like I learn something about myself on every job and every time I approach a new job, I always describe it in rudimentary terms, like a toolkit. What aspects of myself do I bring to this? Which parts do I leave behind? And how would I approach this? For example, “Gatsby” for me felt like, “This is about me turning myself up to 11 out of 10, bringing something bigger.” And with “Train Dreams” what I’ve really learned was how much in the past I’ve tried to hide from myself. And I feel like it’s a trap a lot of actors fall into, is thinking they’re not enough and you have to adorn a performance to be really seen or heard or impress. And I realized how much I’ve avoided playing characters that are very much like me. And though Robert’s a lumberjack, I’m putting all the trappings of it aside on an emotional level. How much is a character like you? And I’m constantly trying to play dress ups and really interested in being people that I’m not and I think that my favorite actors have often been transformative character actors. So I felt like my task in my mind was always to do something different and run away from the idea of just showing my own self really. And I realized that as a husband, as a father and as a guy who’s constantly guilty and struggling with the idea of being away from my family for work, these are all things that Robert is [dealing with], just doing a different job. A contract worker, which I am too except I’m not chopping down trees. And I have my greatest fears around my kids and the safety of my kids. So it felt to me like this was a chance to be very open about my own feelings and bring that to the work without feeling like I had to put too much garnish on things. And that’s a bit scary for me. But it now makes me realize it’s probably a better path in the future to do a bit more of that, just be a bit more open rather than hiding who I am, if that makes any sense.

Olsen: Completely. Because a lot of reviews of the movie, I sort of said this myself, have noted how it feels almost as if your career has been building to this performance, leading to it somehow. Does it feel like that to you?

Edgerton: I know that in decades to come I’ll look back and say always that “Train Dreams” is one of the great experiences I’ve ever had. The process and the result. I think the movie’s fantastic, but what I got out of it personally, it was extraordinary. Look, I hope that I’m building towards something else extraordinary in the future, and it’s like a new mission with each film and each story and each character. But this one definitely feels special for me, and it feels like I use the word “suitable,” which feels so boring. But I played characters that are not suitable for me in the past, and I’ve really challenged myself to bend into shapes that are different from who I am, rhythms that are different from what I’m like, successfully or relatively unsuccessfully. I can’t really judge it for myself. But this felt really suitable. It felt like it belonged to me.

Olsen: You’re also a director, writer, producer. What is it like for you when you show up to a project and you’re just an actor? Does it allow you to focus more on your performance? Or are you always like, “I was thinking you could put the camera over there.”

Edgerton: It’s such a relief. I think directing is the best job in the world, but I wouldn’t want to be doing it every time I went to work, because there’s a lot of stress, a lot of responsibility. Many times I’ve described the difference between acting and directing. An actor is like a child. Literally you could turn up to work in your pajamas, somebody will put makeup on you, dress you, you have one — well, I don’t want to be reductive about it — but you have one job, to play your character and fit into the story, serve the story. As a director you’re running the household. You’ve got to do everything. You’ve got to stock the fridge, you’ve got to make all the decisions about everything in the household, and there’s so much responsibility to that.

I was curious after I directed my first film, how I would be walking onto another director’s set. And it would just be a sin to walk onto someone else’s set and start to look over their shoulder and check their homework and sort of impose yourself on that process. I realized the two things that fascinated me the most were what lens was being put on the camera according to what the shot was. So I just became like really quietly observant. Actors who direct get this sort of great luxury of visiting so many sets and watching other directors and learning from them, good and bad things. And behavioral stuff. It’s not just about how their craft works or how they apply themselves as filmmakers, but how they conduct themselves as people, how they treat their crew, how they elicit the best out of their heads of department and give them freedom or not. Like Clint, for example, on “Train Dreams” is amazing at deputizing his heads of department, giving them freedom, and I think that’s the greatest show of power as a director, the confidence of relinquishing control because you hired the great people and you’re trusting them to collaborate with you. So as an actor I love the freedom of just being there to serve the story. And then watching and putting little things in my ideas bag for next time if I’m lucky enough to be the director again.

Olsen: You were recently on [“Late Night With Seth Meyers”] and he said that he thought it was a very wonderful performance and he noted how you don’t have very much dialogue in the movie and you said you think it’s wonderful because there isn’t much dialogue. And you were kidding, but I wonder if you could unravel that a little bit. How do you think the lack of dialogue in the movie impacted your performance?

Edgerton: Words are there to confuse us in the world. There’s the things we say, what they actually mean, there’s so many layers to any conversation you have with any person. There’s something really interesting about people who don’t speak very much. There’s a mystery often to them. I think there’s a lot of mystery to men that I grew up with in my life. I find myself drawn to people that don’t speak very much because I’m wondering what they think, what do they think of me, what’s going on in their mind. As an actor, I guess I really cut my teeth on “Loving” with Jeff Nichols. He’s a character, again, a very good man who had a lot of feelings and a lot to say, but for whatever reason or for different reasons, with Richard Loving and with Robert, chooses not to say things or doesn’t know if he has the right to say certain things. As an actor I think what becomes the focus is knowing that the camera sees, is looking into your soul. The thought is the imperative, to put the thoughts in the right place, to just be present, knowing that the camera will read those things. And of course the story’s job is to help guide us along and we have a narration. But I was always hoping that the camera will see what’s on my mind and for me to then fill that with words would actually kind of be counter to what the character is, which is one of these very stoic nonverbal men that I think we can all identify with or that we’ve met in our lives. So it’s just putting the right thoughts in my head.

Olsen: It is remarkable how often in the movie it’s as if we’re just watching you feel, you’re sort of taking in your surroundings, you’re not really saying much, but it does feel like we’re in your head, that we can understand what the character is thinking and what you’re conveying as a performer.

Edgerton: Thank you. I was smiling because I was remembering the square root of eight. Do you know what I’m talking about? There’s an episode of “Friends” — is it Joey who’s the actor? — he’s like, “When you’ve got to act and you’ve got to look like you’re really trying to work something out, you’ve just got to think of the square root of eight.” It actually works. But I wasn’t using it in “Train Dreams.”

Olsen: The story does build to this scene with Kerry Condon where your character actually does explain himself. What was it like to flip the switch and have to be verbal and emotional in a more conventional way?

Edgerton: Talking about emotion was one of the tricky things with “Train Dreams.” Clint and I had many conversations, very cerebral conversations, theoretical conversations about story — and emotion was one of them. So Robert’s a character, one of these men who is not really willing to show his emotions. And when he does he’s very quick to put them down, or in the case of the film he apologizes for showing his grief. But it’s all building to this moment, and this is one of the things I love about the film, is that it illuminates the importance of human connection. Robert meets this character Claire that the audience feels like maybe there’s a romance about to happen, which I love that it doesn’t steer in that direction. These chance encounters with strangers that we maybe don’t know that we need to have met on our journey, that are a chance for us to express ourselves. And he has a chance to, whether he knows it or not, he’s going to tell her about his feelings of strange complicity in something he had no responsibility for. And we knew that we were building towards this and yet at the same time we’re still trying to keep a lid on the emotions, but finally Robert gets to speak and it makes so much more sense of his silence up until that point if he we finally hear him string more than a sentence together to try and talk about what’s inside of him and those scenes we shot them in a short one-and-a-half hour window of magic hour with Kerry, who’s just extraordinary. And it felt like time was standing still, even though you would think that there would be a sense that we were rushing. It felt like we had hours.

Olsen: As you’re making the movie, are you talking with Clint or William H. Macy or Felicity Jones, having these kind of big picture, thematic conversations? Because the movie invites these questions of, what makes a life? How do you define being a man? Are you having those conversations while you’re making the movie?

Edgerton: There’s something fascinating about “Train Dreams.” Something I say is so special about Clint is, I know this because I read so many screenplays and I think about story all the time, is this draw to tell an audience what to feel all the time. Whether it’s through words, the story itself, music. “Train Dreams” does this thing that as much as I can speak about it objectively, and it’s the same in the novella, these moments that aren’t telling you what to feel, they’re just layering on top of each other, and I feel like there’s some compression of all these things. It pulls something out of people in their own way. They find their own experience out of it, which can be quite emotional and quite cathartic in a good way. Particularly anyone who’s been through moments where they’re being knocked down in life. I think there’s some sort of hopefulness in watching Robert’s story. It’s hard to define, but there’s a confidence in the way Clint’s rendered it. It’s not telling you each time what to feel. Robert’s not telling you, it’s not screaming to the heavens. There’s nothing sort of overly melodramatic or cathartic about it. And yet these layers build and compress. I had a very similar experience watching “Into the Wild,” Sean Penn’s film. It’s another character isolating himself in in nature. The credits roll and something in me just was like it was like, “I needed to feel something.” I call them a happy cry movie. You know, you’re crying but also happy at the same time.

Olsen: There’s a a moment in the film that I find so haunting and I’ve been trying to unravel it for myself. It’s late in the film, it’s the 1960s, you’re portraying the character as an old man. And in the voice-over the narrator Will Patton says something like, “He never spoke on a telephone.” And there’s something about that I just find deeply moving and really haunting. And I’m struggling to even define for myself what it is about that idea that really gets me.

Edgerton: Because there’s these great things in the movie that I call little sidecars or whatever, this idea that the world is sort of moving so quickly it’s going to leave us behind. It reminded me of my grandmother, who when I pointed a video camera at her for the first time, she didn’t move because she was thinking I was taking a photo of her. And I was saying “It’s OK, this is a camera that’s gonna capture you moving.” She was like Robert. She never saw some of these things. She never experienced a lot of things. I think she went on an airplane, like a jumbo jet, once in her life. And there’s a great thing in the book actually, about Robert and his point of view on the world and as he’s aging, and it talks about his body and his spine and the way his shoulders moved. For example, that scene where Robert goes up to the window and realizes he’s staring at a man walking on the moon and he’s looking up at the sky, wondering, “How is that even possible?” There’s this sense of his physical dilapidation as he moves. It’s this guy that every time he turns his head has to move his entire body from all the hard work. But all this is sort of just a general sense of wonderment that I remember in my grandmother’s eyes when she would look at new things. But this sort of awe and childlike wonder at the world, which I found very special.

Olsen: Part of the story also deals with just how to know when your time has past. And you and I are about the same age and it’s something I grapple with a lot, wanting to be sure that I still have something meaningful to contribute. Do you worry about that for yourself? In a way it comes back to where we started this conversation, that there are people who would tell you that movies are on the way out.

Edgerton: Relevance is a weird thing. I always saw myself as the youngest person in the room. I started very young. I was young at drama school. I was always young, and now I’m not. The beauty of being an actor if we’re allowed to keep doing what we’re doing, if AI doesn’t mess everything up, as long as my brain keeps working, I can keep learning about the new versions of myself as I get older. You know, “Train Dreams” is a good chance for me to see myself in the middle of my life. But I wonder about relevance. I wonder about my character staring at a chainsaw in the movie and wondering how it’s going to affect his world. I wonder at that for myself, as I’ve never downloaded ChatGPT. I’m sort of terrified, but I also feel like I need to not turn a blind eye to it. I have young kids. I’ve got to accept this thing. But I do worry about what it’s going to do to movies. What I feel optimistic about [is] — I always evoke Jonathan Glazer’s film, “Zone of Interest.” Because I think the genius of that film is the beautiful human thought behind the point of view of setting a Holocaust film in the general’s house over the wall in an opulent setting. And I keep thinking, “I don’t think AI is going to come up with an idea like that, think outside the box.” I think it pushes us into more of a challenge of the unique thought, the unique piece of art, doing things that are bespoke. I don’t think we’ll ever want to stop watching human beings or listening to human stories told by humans, starring humans, music made by humans, paintings painted by humans. I hope. Yes, we can enjoy the wildness of what computers create for us. But I don’t think zeros and ones are going to entirely ruin our lives. But then I can be pessimistic too. I won’t rant on that.

Not to offend Larry David by saying it as late as Jan. 7, but: Happy New Year!

The turning of the calendar also signals that Phase I of awards season is coming to a close. With the Golden Globes and a big weekend of parties on the horizon, I’m proud to share our last issue — and my last letter from the editor — until after the Oscar nominations.

I’ll be back in February to unveil our three issues in Phase II. And be sure to keep an eye out Friday for Glenn Whipp’s newsletter, which will have more on our Jan. 8 cover subject, George Clooney.

Digital cover story: ‘Bugonia’

(JSquared Photography / For The Times)

Fans of Yorgos Lanthimos’ misanthropic comedies will forgive the Michael Haneke pun in my coverline for Michael Ordoña’s story on “Bugonia,” starring Emma Stone as a healthcare CEO and Jesse Plemons as the conspiracy theorist who believes she’s an alien invader. And not simply because Haneke’s own brand of bleak absurdism seems to have rubbed off on Lanthimos. Funny games — well, ‘silly games’ — are at the core of Lanthimos’ distinct creative process.

“It makes it light,” the filmmaker explained. “You don’t take yourself too seriously. You don’t take the material seriously. You’re gargling and doing lines, whatever. It’s a way of the actors getting the dialogue in them in an unconscious way, not fixed with a kind of intellectual baggage, so it’s freer and it has more possibilities. And they feel comfortable with each other.”

Small roles, big performances

(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; photos by Dania Maxwell / For The Times; Warner Bros. Pictures; Tatum Mangus)

Envelope copy chief Blake Hennon sent up a cheer when Lisa Rosen’s recurring spotlight on the brilliant-but-unheralded turns that we love in movies came across his desk, and rightly so. In a flash, a film can make an indelible impression, and it’s often thanks to those who fall outside the usual pundit predictions.

This year’s participants include real-life siblings Jacobi and Noah Jupe (“Hamnet”), Paul Thomas Anderson stalwart April Grace (“One Battle After Another”) and one-scene wonder Hadley Robinson (“The History of Sound”).

The shot of the season

Thanks to contributor Daron James, the back page of every Envelope features an unforgettable frame from a film or TV series, accompanied by an explanation from the artists behind it. And while all are striking, I’m glad to say we’re ending Phase I on my favorite.

Perhaps it’s that “Breathless” was one of the first movies that made me fall in love with movies. Perhaps it’s Richard Linklater’s courageous decision to have his protagonist wear dark sunglasses throughout the movie. Perhaps it’s the charm of actors Guillaume Marbeck and Zoey Deutch. It’s probably all of the above. But whatever the reason, the final shot of “Nouvelle Vague” is, for my money, the best single shot I saw in 2025.

More stories from our Jan. 8 issue

It’s official: The X-Men are making their big screen return in “Avengers: Doomsday.”

Marvel’s third teaser for its massive superhero crossover, released Tuesday, spotlights Ian McKellen’s Magneto, Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier and James Marsden’s Cyclops. It’s the latest “Doomsday” teaser that has been playing in theaters in front of Disney’s billion-dollar blockbuster “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

The short and somber clip starts with a look at some wreckage within the abandoned halls of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters — the home base of the X-Men. The teaser also includes footage of Xavier and Magneto sharing what seems to be a tender moment as well as an emotional Cyclops unleashing a massive optic blast as what appear to be large legs possibly belonging to Sentinels lumber along in the background.

“Death comes for us all,” Magneto says in the voice-over. “It’s all I know for sure. The question isn’t ‘are you prepared to die?’ The question is ‘who would you be when you close your eyes?’”

The clip concludes with text promising the X-Men will return in “Avengers: Doomsday” before fading into the countdown to the film’s release. The countdown was also featured in the previous “Doomsday” teasers spotlighting Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.

“Doomsday” will mark McKellen and Marsden’s Marvel Cinematic Universe debuts. Prior to Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019, the iconic mutant superhero team headlined its own franchise, which kicked off with the 2000 film “X-Men.”

Stewart previously appeared in the 2022 MCU installment “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” playing a different version of the fan-favorite X-Men leader. Other X-Men characters who have already appeared in MCU films include Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, who starred alongside the Merc with a Mouth in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, who had a cameo in one of “The Marvels” post-credits scenes.

Other X-Men characters expected to appear in “Doomsday” include Beast, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn).

“Doomsday,” directed by MCU veterans Anthony and Joe Russo, will feature “Iron Man” actor Robert Downey Jr. as the masked villain Doctor Doom. The massive superhero crossover will also feature fellow “Avengers” alums Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Captain America), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man) and Tom Hiddleston (Loki); the “Thunderbolts*” antiheroes played by Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian), Lewis Pullman (Bob Reynolds), Wyatt Russell (John Walker) and Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr/Ghost); and “Fantastic Four: First Steps” stars Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm).

“Avengers: Doomsday” will hit theaters Dec. 18.

In Jafar Panahi’s acclaimed thriller “It Was Just an Accident,” it’s a distinct sound that alerts Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a mechanic, that the man who tortured him in prison might be dangerously close.

After hearing it, he embarks on a rage-fueled mission to kidnap and kill the interrogator. But Vahid is not certain he has the right man, so he enlists a group of other victims to help identify him. What ensues is a brilliantly taut ensemble piece.

The latest from the Iranian master earned the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is now a major contender this awards season, representing France at the Oscars in the international feature category. Iran would not submit the politically charged film.

“Because the auditory sense of prisoners is usually strongest above all the other senses, I thought that I would begin the film with a sound,” a stoic Panahi says via an interpreter in a hotel room in Santa Monica. “In prison, you keep trying to guess if this voice that you hear belongs to an older person, a younger person, what he looks like and what he does in life.”

A scene from “It Was Just an Accident.”

(Neon)

Panahi is no stranger to being deprived of his freedom. Arrested in 2022 for his outspokenness against the regime’s practices, he spent seven months in prison. It wasn’t until he went on a hunger strike that his right to legal representation was granted.

Without an attorney present, Panahi explains, interrogators blindfold detainees and stand behind them, either asking questions directly or writing them on a piece of paper and handing it to the detained, who lifts their blindfold just enough to read it. An interrogation nearly identical to that description plays out in last year’s Oscar-nominated film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” by Mohammad Rasoulof, one of Panahi’s longtime collaborators.

“I had not actually seen Rasoulof’s film because when we make films clandestinely, we don’t talk about them, even with our close friends,” he explains. “I didn’t even know what his film was about. Only when I got to France to mix [‘It Was Just an Accident’], and Rasoulof’s film was out in theaters there, that’s when I saw it.”

Making films on the outskirts of legality under an authoritarian regime entails high-stakes discretion. The script for “It Was Just an Accident” never left Panahi’s sight when casting.

“To all of the actors, I gave the script in my own apartment,” he recalls. “I told them, ‘Read it here, don’t take it with you. Go and think about it for 24 hours, and then tell me whether you want to be a part of it.’” Everyone in the stellar cast, composed of dissident artists with varying degrees of experience in front of the camera, was aware of the risks it entailed.

Jafar Panahi.

(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)

Mobasseri had appeared in Panahi’s previous effort, “No Bears,” while Majid Panahi, who plays a groom swept up in the scheme by his vengeful bride, is the director’s nephew. Mariam Afshari, as a photographer who also joins the plot, had minimal acting experience, but had been involved in other productions in below-the-line roles. Panahi says he casts actors based on how their physical traits resemble the character he has in mind.

That was the case with the tall and lean Ebrahim Azizi, who appears as Eghbal, the man the group believes was their ruthless captor. For a scene near the end where Eghbal breaks down, thinking he’s about to be killed, Panahi placed his trust in Azizi — who only acts in underground films, not state-approved projects — to convey the tempestuous humanity of a presumed villain.

“I felt a huge burden on my shoulders when I left prison that made me feel I owed something to my fellow prisoners who were left behind,” Panahi says. “I said this to Ebrahim Azizi, ‘Now the entire burden of this film is on your shoulders with your acting, and you have to put that burden down with utmost commitment.’”

The first time Panahi shot that searing scene, he sensed it wasn’t coming together. After all, his only experience with real-life interrogators was from the receiving end of their questioning. “I went to one of my friends, Mehdi Mahmoudian, who has spent one-fourth of his life in prison,” he says. “I told him, ‘Because you know these personality types very well, come and tell this actor what to do.’ He guided [Azizi] and we took two or three more takes and it was done.”

Amid the hard-hitting moral drama of “It Was Just an Accident,” moments that warrant a chuckle for their realistic absurdity might surprise some viewers. However, a touch of sardonic levity has always been part of Panahi’s storytelling.

“Humor just flows through life. You cannot stop it,” he says.

To make his point, Panahi recalls a morbid memory from when he was around 10 years old. One of his friends had lost his father. Disturbed, the boy threatened to take his own life. Panahi and his other friends followed him to try to stop him if he did in fact attempt to hurt himself.

Determined, the boy announced he would stand in the middle of the road and throw himself in front of a large vehicle. “We were lucky because we were in a very isolated part of town and there were no real big cars passing by,” he says. “Two hours later we were all sitting in a movie theater. Humor is always there. It’s not really in my hands.”

On Saturday, Guillermo del Toro revealed that his older brother, Federico del Toro Gómez, had died last week.

The “Pan’s Labyrinth” director shared the news while receiving the Visionary Award at the Palm Springs International Film Awards alongside Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth — the stars of his latest project, “Frankenstein.”

“I’ve come to believe that everybody’s born with one or two songs to sing,” Del Toro told the crowd at the Palm Springs Convention Center. “That’s it, and we keep repeating them and repeating them until we get them sort of right. And Frankenstein was the song I was born to sing.”

Del Toro spoke of his brother when touching on his recent film’s themes of fatherhood, forgiving and being forgiven.

“Three days ago, I lost my older brother, but I’m here because the film speaks about a condition that is purely human, that is proved by the final phase in the film, which says the heart may break and the broken live on,” he said. “Even a broken heart pumps the blood and keeps you going.”

The 61-year-old filmmaker would go on to note that there were several occasions when he and his brother played out the dynamics of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature in their own lives, and that they “granted each other love and granted each other peace” many years ago.

Del Toro did not share any details regarding his brother’s death and said that he may take time off during awards season due to his family’s loss.

“I may be absent at a few functions this [awards] season, but not this one,” he said. “I’m here because [the cast and crew of ‘Frankenstein’] is family. Life gives you a family on the way.”

The governor of Del Toro’s home state of Jalisco, Pablo Lemus Navarro, shared a message on X about the elder Del Toro’s death.

“I send my condolences to the Jalisco filmmaker @RealGDT
for the passing of his brother, Federico del Toro Gómez,” Lemus Navarro wrote. “To his family and loved ones, I hope that they soon find consolation. From the bottom of my heart, I’m sending a warm and strong hug. Rest in peace.”

The director’s alma mater, the University of Guadalajara, also paid their respects to Federico on X.

“We lament the passing of Federico del Toro Gómez, brother of Guillermo del Toro, the Tapatío filmmaker and alumnus of our academic institution,” the post read. “We extend our condolences to his family and friends. Rest in peace.”

Elsewhere in his speech, the Oscar-winning director spoke of the importance of believing in and making art in deeply political times.

“At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism,” Del Toro said. “When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a f— app can do art, if it’s that easy, that unimportant, why the f— do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human.”

Political realities were also front and center at the awards show during Leonardo DiCaprio’s acceptance speech for his performance in “One Battle After Another.”

The 51-year-old actor was forced to accept his award via Zoom call because he was unable to leave the Caribbean island St. Barts due to air restrictions in the area after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and amid the increasingly turbulent political situation in Venezuela.

“Leonardo DiCaprio is unable to join us in person tonight due to unexpected travel disruptions and restricted airspace,” a spokesperson for the Palm Springs International Film Festival told Variety. “While we will miss celebrating with him in person, we are honored to recognize his exceptional work and lasting contributions to cinema. His talent and dedication to the craft continue to inspire, and we are delighted to celebrate him with the Desert Palm Achievement Award this evening.”

During Oscar season, The Envelope also likes to celebrate actors in roles that might not otherwise garner awards attention. You can sense a whole life behind these portrayals; they draw you in and make you want to know more.

April Grace as Sister Rochelle, ‘One Battle After Another’

Amid the controlled chaos that is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” young Willa (Chase Infiniti) is brought to a nunnery that used to be part of her parents’ revolutionary group French 75. What Willa doesn’t know is that her mother (Teyana Taylor) betrayed the group in order to save herself from prison, and is still alive.

Sister Rochelle, played by April Grace with seething intensity, sets her straight. “Your mother was a rat, and that makes you a baby rat,” she spits, and Willa’s world crumbles further.

Grace will be familiar to eagle-eyed PTA fans; in “Magnolia,” she played Gwenovier, the reporter who calmly destroyed Tom Cruise’s character. When the offer of Sister Rochelle came, “I didn’t need to look at the role, I trust Paul implicitly,” she says. “He is there for the actor, whatever you need.”

Grace has worked in film and television for over 30 years, “but I started out in theater, so character development is really important to me.” She created a backstory for Sister Rochelle, building up the reasons she was so hostile to Willa. “Sister Rochelle is all about community, and you don’t betray your community.”

Of Infiniti, Grace notes, “She was just lovely, and she made my job really easy, just looking at her” trying to act tough, “like you don’t even know you’re a baby.”

Jacobi and Noah Jupe as Hamnet and Hamlet, ‘Hamnet’

(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)

Jacobi Jupe plays the title role in “Hamnet,” as the ill-fated son of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley). He was thrown into the deep end on his first day, when his father leaves the family for London. “I didn’t really know Paul, and I had to get so intimate and so upset but hold it together, and I was a bit nervous,” Jacobi recalls. “But Paul is such a lovely person, and I instantly trusted him, so it was really easy to do that scene.”

His big brother Noah adds, “And it’s what spurs on your entire character, the courage from that scene, so it’s a big thing to start with.”

It gets harder from there. Jacobi depended on his mother (actor Katy Cavanagh), Buckley and director and co-writer Chloé Zhao — “they were my three mums on that shoot” — to help him process his own death scene. “It was shocking, really, because I spent so long being Hamnet and feeling his emotions, and having to let him go was really hard.”

Noah was hired to play the actor playing Hamlet just before the part was to be shot. “That is an opportunity you cannot turn down,” he says, even though he only had a week to prepare the most famous soliloquies in the Western canon. “I learned the sword fight in eight hours.”

During rehearsals onstage, there was no Globe audience before him except for Buckley. “I just found myself performing to her, which then made all of the scenes I was doing like a conversation between me and Jessie.”

Zhao showed Noah his brother’s scenes so that his Hamlet would carry echoes of the lost child. “It was like watching yourself without all of the self-consciousness or the criticism,” he says of seeing Jacobi’s portrayal, “and just truly marveling at a performance by someone that is literally part of your heart.”

Hadley Robinson as Belle, ‘The History of Sound’

With one glance at Hadley Robinson’s Belle, you can feel the weight of the baby in her arms, the sorrow in her eyes, and the exhaustion in her soul. The film, directed by Oliver Hermanus and written by Ben Shattuck, centers on Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), secret lovers who travel the American countryside to record folk music after World War I. After they part, Lionel writes David for years without hearing back, and finally travels to his home to see him again.

Unknown to him, David had married Belle, and died several years earlier. Lionel instead meets Belle, now remarried and with a baby.

In a powerful scene, Belle tells Lionel her own love story — meeting David, falling for him, losing him — fully aware that she’s talking about her great love to David’s great love. But her loneliness is so thorough, she’s almost grateful to have someone to share David with. Lionel barely speaks as he absorbs the information.

“It was absolutely a monologue,” says Robinson. “But I found that to be so much easier to prepare, because there was so much in there that the character couldn’t help but be specific, because I was given an exact template.” She journaled as Belle for a week before her one day on set. “I’ve never had a role that was that devastating before.”

Though Lionel says nothing, Robinson praises Mescal as a scene partner. “I have found listening to be extremely difficult, and the way Paul listens is like a superpower. He was so incredibly present in that room.” He stayed on set all day, even when he was offscreen, “and rehearsed with me as well. He really showed up in a way that not all actors do.”

The new courtroom drama has been hailed as a ‘must watch’ for Netflix viewers.

A ‘brilliant’ new film has landed on Netflix, with viewers hailing it as “one of the most powerful and emotionally charged films of 2025”. The courtroom drama, based on a genuine landmark case that film enthusiasts are already dubbing essential viewing, has garnered rave reviews from both critics and audiences.

Helmed by director Suparn Varma, the film Haq boasts an impressive 83% critics’ score and a stellar 92% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The cast features Yami Gautam portraying Shazia Bano, Emraan Hashmi as Abbas Khan, and Sheeba Chaddha in the role of Bela Jain.

Netflix’s official synopsis states: “After her husband abandons her, Shazia Bano takes him to court, fueling a national debate on women’s rights and justice. Inspired by a landmark judgment.”

The film draws inspiration from the actual case of Mohd Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, involving a 62-year-old woman from Indore who sought maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code following her divorce by her lawyer husband through Islamic law (triple talaq).

The couple had shared over four decades of marriage, and when she requested modest monthly support post-divorce, he refused, arguing his obligations extended only to roughly three months during the ‘iddat’ period according to Islamic law. The legal battle reached the Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark decision that forms the heart of the film’s narrative, reports the Express.

Cinema enthusiasts have already heaped praise on the ‘compelling’ drama, with one viewer declaring on Rotten Tomatoes: “Phenomenal film! ! ! A great movie, after a long time! ! ! Must watch! !”

Another echoed the sentiment: “Class. Amazing biopic. The challenge of religious law and civil law coexisting. Landmark case that ensured all women get protection and rights from a divorce. She almost loses everything but keeps her faith. Amazing acting. Yami steals the show and her final monologue is something else. Definitely watch.”

A third hailed the production as ‘beautiful’ and an ‘absolute must see’, whilst another praised: “Haq is a riveting courtroom drama that blends fearless storytelling with exceptional performances.”

One enthusiastic reviewer gushed: “10/10 A powerful and beautiful film highlighting women’s rights. Both Yami and Imran delivered outstanding performances, but Yami was exceptional… She absolutely owned the screen.”

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However, not all critics were equally impressed, with The Hollywood Reporter India describing it as “well-intentioned but reductive”. Despite this, the overwhelming response to the picture has been tremendously positive.

On IMDb, one viewer gushed: “Masterpiece of Truth, Courage, and Justice. Haq isn’t just a movie – it’s an experience, a statement, and a revolution in storytelling. Directed by Suparn Varma, this courtroom drama shines as one of the most powerful and emotionally charged films of 2025.”

Another agreed, stating: “Must Watch Movie. I really loved this movie…The story is strong and the film keeps you hooked from start to end. Yami Gautam is the highlight of the movie… Her acting is so powerful that she even overshadows Emraan Hashmi. Every dialogue she delivered gave me goosebumps. She truly deserves a National Award for this performance.”

Yet another person labelled the film as “superb”, penning: “Haq delivers a powerful cinematic experience with its gripping story and heartfelt performances.”

They further added: “What makes Haq special is its bold message about truth and integrity, leaving the audience inspired and thoughtful. It is one of the most compelling films of the year.”

Haq is available to stream now on Netflix.

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

Fried chicken and a $45 bottle of sparkling wine?

What were you doing on New Year’s Eve?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope newsletter and the guy wondering how many New Year’s resolutions you’ve broken so far this year.

Let’s take a look back — and a look forward — because that’s what we’re contractually obligated to do this time of year.

Three films I’m looking forward to in 2026

Every year, some editor at The Times buzzes my inbox with a request to gather my hopes and dreams into a purely speculative list of movies I’m looking forward to seeing in the coming 12 months. That email serves as a marker that the Earth has orbited the sun once again and it’s time to buy a new planner — because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Google Calendar know what I’m doing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

I was asked to contribute two movies to the list last year, and I chose “One Battle After Another” and “Materialists.” So … one masterpiece that should go on to win the Oscar for best picture and the movie that seems to be the most hated film of 2025. Seriously, people will approach me at parties and say, unprompted, “You know what movie I despised? ‘Materialists.’” And then, after unloading on how much they loathed the characters in Celine Song’s romantic drama, they’ll shift gears and go on a diatribe about late-stage capitalism.

(My New Year’s resolution: find better parties.)

You could say, then, that I got one right and one wrong, though I was partly looking forward to “Materialists” because Song had regaled me with tales of her Manhattan matchmaking days over a couple glasses of wine one night and I wanted to see how she’d weave these stories into a movie. And it turned out that was the best part of the film. So there. No more emails about “Materialists,” please.

At least Song’s film saw the light of day. Looking back on our 2025 list, there are still movies that haven’t made it to theaters. The “Untitled Trey Parker/Matt Stone Film,” once scheduled for July 4, now has a title, “Whitney Springs,” but no new release date. Neither does Terrence Malick’s biblical drama, “The Way of the Wind,” which Malick has reportedly been editing for a good six years now. That movie didn’t make our 2026 list, but, fingers crossed, it might resurface sometime in the next decade when we throw together another of these.

So what movies am I looking forward to seeing when it stops raining (talk about biblical drama) and we start turning the calendar’s pages? I raised my hand for three, and I’m confident this trio will satisfy, mostly because of their directors’ track record. To see everyone else’s picks — including a few I would have chosen myself — read the full list here.

“Disclosure Day”: I liked it better when this was simply known as “Untitled Steven Spielberg UFO movie.” What more do you need to know beyond that description and a prime summer release date? That’s enough to sell a few hundred million dollars in tickets and make me giddy with anticipation. We don’t know much at the moment, other than that Spielberg is working again with “Jurassic Park” and “War of the Worlds” screenwriter David Koepp. There’s an eye-catching billboard with an image that looks alien and kind of birdlike … unless you study it while standing on your head and then it looks … human? Who knows? ALL WILL BE DISCLOSED, the tagline promises, hence the title. So we’ll just have to wait. But from all appearances, we’re not in “E.T.” territory with this one.

“The Adventures of Cliff Booth”: Do we need a stand-alone Cliff Booth movie? Quentin Tarantino thinks so, though not enough to direct the sequel he wrote to his hit 2019 film “Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood.” That’s OK, as Brad Pitt, who won an Oscar for playing Booth, the ass-kicking stuntman, enlisted David Fincher to sub in. It’ll be their fourth collaboration, following “Se7en,” “Fight Club” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a track record that offers some optimism that a film elevating Booth from Rick Dalton’s loyal sidekick to a leading character is an idea worth pursuing. (Leonardo DiCaprio apparently turned down an offer to reprise Dalton in a cameo.) If nothing else, the movie’s 1977 setting, eight years after the events in “Once Upon a Time,” will give us the chance to revel in another glorious L.A. time capsule.

“Werwulf”: Robert Eggers calls his upcoming medieval werewolf movie the “darkest thing I have ever written, by far.” Let that sink in for a moment. Eggers’ filmography includes the suffocating madness found in “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” and the chilling terror of a malevolent, shape-shifting, lustful vampire in “Nosferatu.” These are not light movies. So what are we in store for here? Apparently a member of Eggers’ sound team said he needed a hug after reading the “Werwulf” script. I couldn’t verify this, but I want this to be true. There will be blood — and fog. One other thing we know is the setting, 13th century England, which means that the film’s dialogue will be in Middle English. How fareth thoue with that? I’m sure the cast, which includes Eggers regulars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson, had fun, verraily.

There you have it: Spielberg, Fincher, Eggers. A sci-fi thriller, a sequel I still can’t believe exists and a monster movie. All three of these might miss the mark. And, honestly, any list missing the guaranteed pleasures of “Practical Magic 2” is immediately suspect.

But that’s the folly of blindly looking ahead. You never know.

Happy New Year! And, as always, thanks for reading.

Are you wondering, like Alixandra Kupcik, where did all the feel-good movies go?

She must have written that story before “Song Sung Blue” came out. Because Hugh Jackman passionately describing the greatness of Neil Diamond’s “Soolaimon” and then demonstrating that song’s grandeur by performing it in the new film “Song Sung Blue” is the definition of corny, feel-good comfort.

Which leads me to my question to you this day: Have you seen “Marty Supreme”? And what feelings — good, bad, uneasy, elated — did that movie arouse in you?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Time to wipe down the ping-pong table?

Inside the reactions to ‘Marty Supreme’

He summited the Sphere, exhorting us to “dream big.” He shot a rap music video to debunk the conspiracy theory that he is a popular British rapper. He has popped up at screenings flanked by bodyguards sporting giant orange ping-pong balls for heads.

Leading up to the Christmas Day premiere of his new movie, “Marty Supreme,” Timothée Chalamet was front and center in a promotional tour that was unhinged, delightful and, judging from the weekend’s box office, quite successful.

“Marty Supreme,” the wildly entertaining, over-caffeinated portrait of a single-minded ping-pong player, took in $27 million over the four-day Christmas weekend, the best opening in distributor A24’s history. The numbers surpassed the opening of “A Complete Unknown,” last year’s Chalamet Christmas release that featured the actor playing Bob Dylan in his formative years.

Not everyone was on board with “Marty.” Moviegoers gave the movie a B+ rating with market research company CinemaScore. That’s good, but not great. (“A Complete Unknown,” by comparison, earned an A.)

Podcaster Claira Curtis’ experience seeing the movie at the Grove feels like an accurate representation of the “Marty Supreme” adventure: “Packed ‘Marty Supreme theater had the full range of reactions. There were people walking out halfway through. There were people clapping. There was someone coming out of it saying, ‘Eh, it was fine’ & then their friend went, ‘Are you insane? It was peak!’”

The disparate responses reflect a couple of things.

One, not everyone embraces the Safdie brand of anxiety-inducing cinema. Josh Safdie directed “Marty.” His brother, Benny, made “The Smashing Machine,” released earlier this year. Together, they made “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time,” movies that, take your pick, were exhilarating or excruciating. Or both! (Exclamation point intended. These are exclamation-point films.)

And two, the title character in “Marty Supreme” is a lot — an undeniably talented, relentless self-promoter careening toward his goals of fame and fortune with little regard to the damage he is inflicting on others. He’s despicable, but also, as played by Chalamet, winningly charming. Unless you find Chalamet annoying. Then you’re probably best-served listening to Hugh Jackman sing Neil Diamond songs.

Chalamet has channeled Marty’s earnest energy in his promotional appearances for the film.

“This is a movie about sacrifice in pursuit of a dream,” he told Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” “And it’s something I can relate to deeply. And we live in a bleak time, especially for young people, so this film is an attempted antidote to that.”

Chalamet then pivoted to the camera, the better to look into viewers’ eyes.

“And to continue to believe in yourself and to continue to dream big and to follow your dreams and not take no for an answer. That’s the spirit of ‘Marty Supreme,’ out on Christmas Day.”

Judging from the box office, Chalamet has pushed across the message. Will it work on awards voters, giving Chalamet the first Oscar of his career? As we head into the new year, the next phase of the “Marty” tour promises to be the season’s most interesting storyline. Gas up the blimp!

More coverage of ‘Marty Supreme’

IN just a few weeks Guy Ritchie and Jason ­Statham will start work on their new movie, Viva La ­Madness.

And I can exclusively reveal the gangster flick is getting a very special supporting character — in the form of Vinnie Jones.

The trio last worked together in the amazing 2000 film Snatch and now former footballer Vinnie is going to be front and centre in the new movie alongside Jason.

A source said: “Viva La Madness is writer J.J. Connolly’s sequel to Layer Cake but the film is going to be a standalone production.

“Guy is thrilled to be back at the helm. And to have Jason on board, as well as Vinnie, is going to make for cinematic gold.

“This project feels so brilliantly British. It’s going to be loud, fast and unapologetically patriotic.

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“Jason and Vinnie are so brilliant together on screen and everyone working on the film was thrilled to hear that Vinnie had signed up.”

‘Come a long way’

I’m told the exact details of the plot are being kept under wraps but it’s expected to closely follow J.J.’s novel.

The book returns to the story of the shady anonymous drug dealer — played by Daniel Craig in the film of Layer Cake — who is pulled back into the criminal underworld after hoping to retire.

But this time, the deals get more risky — with high-level electronic fraud and a bit of money laundering for good measure.

It’s not surprising that Guy has brought Vinnie on board for the film, after casting him in the next series of his Netflix hit, The Gentleman.

Guy previously admitted he and Jason credited ­Vinnie for helping them when times were tough — before they made it big with Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels in 1998.

He said: “Vinnie was ­forever paying for taxis when Statham and I had no money.”

“We’ve come a long way since Lock, Stock.”

I absolutely loved Layer Cake so I cannot wait to watch Viva La Madness.

SEQUIN WHEN YOU’RE WINNING

MARIAH CAREY went into 2026 on Cloud Nine after her performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve went off without a hitch.

Nine years ago, the superstar was on the very same stage when she was hit by technical difficulties, meaning she was off-beat when lip syncing.

It got so bad that Mariah stopped pretending to sing, and said: “It is what it is. It just don’t get any better,” before stomping off stage.

This time around, fans watching in New York had a far better time, with Mariah – who wore a tiny pink dress adorned with sequins – sailing through her performance of her 2009 song, Obsessed.

Host Rita Ora stayed cosy in a leopard print coat as temperatures plunged to -2C in the Big Apple, while over in Las Vegas, Demi Lovato was on top form for Dick Clark’s Sin City gig.

She took to the stage in a shimmering sheer jumpsuit alongside stars including Diana Ross, Post Malone and 50 Cent.

BUSY SIAN: I’M NOT WEDDY YET

THIS Morning and Capital Breakfast DJ Sian Welby got engaged to radio producer Jake Beckett two years ago, but they are still no closer to walking down the aisle.

When asked her if she has made any headway with preparations, Sian – who gave birth to daughter Ruby in June 2024 – admitted: “No, it’s an absolute shambles. I’ve honestly not got any brain capacity for wedding planning.

“I think what we’re doing: having a baby who’s waking up in the night, teething, the 4am alarms . . .  combine that with trying to see friends and family up in the Midlands and the thought of trying to plan a wedding is quite daunting.

“I don’t want to be that person that’s engaged for years and years and I would love a big wedding, but it’s everything. Even the guest list fills me with anxiety.”

BACK IN THE PINK AFTER OP

THE brilliant Pink has told fans she spent New Year’s Eve in hospital having surgery on her neck.

Sharing a snap of herself from her hospital bed on Instagram, the So What singer, below, said: “I end the year giving reverence to, paying attention to, and to fixing my body.

“It may not be a fancy face lift, but I am getting two new shiny discs in my neck.

“A new scar – a reminder that I appreciate this vessel that I have and use it for all it’s worth.

“Rock ’n’ roll is a contact sport. And as I sit here by myself on New Year’s Eve in a hospital room while my family is happily snowboarding, I know that 2026 is going to be better because that is the choice that I have made.”

AFTER I revealed the Rolling Stones had cancelled their plans for a UK and European tour this year, Ronnie WOod says he just won’t be sitting at home and ­twiddling his thumbs.

Speaking at Jools Holland‘s Hootenanny, the guitar whizz said: “I just wanna play all the time, or paint. I have a big exhibition planned for the end of 2026 in Germany.”

NEW PIRATES? IT DEPPENDS

THE fate of the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise now rests in Johnny Depp‘s hands, it seems.

Talk of a sixth film has been swirling for years since the last instalment, Dead Men Tell No Tales, in 2017.

Now, actor Kevin McNally, who played seaman Joshamee Gibbs, has revealed the script is with Johnny, who starred as Jack Sparrow.

In an exclusive chat, Kevin said: “I would love to do a new Pirates movie. The only problem is that there are two realities in the world. There is reality, and there is social media.

“As far as social media is concerned, I started filming yesterday. As far as reality is concerned, tumbleweed, but I would love to be part of that again.

“The last two films weren’t great, but for me, if Johnny thinks it’s good enough and wants to do it, I will be there.”

While Kevin waits for the call, he is busy directing and starring in new sitcom Ketchup.

The series is based on author Joe Cawley’s More Ketchup Than Salsa memoirs and will follow a hapless British couple who attempt to run a bar on the Costa del Sol.

Last year, women made up just 13% of directors working on the top 250 films.

That level represents a 3-percentage-point decline from 2024, when women led 16% of the top-grossing movies, according to a San Diego State University study released Thursday.

The troubling tabulation comes as Hollywood seeks to turn the page from a gut-punching year that included the Los Angeles wildfires, ongoing declines of local film and television production and the deaths of beloved filmmakers.

“Hamnet,” directed by Chloé Zhao; “Freakier Friday,” helmed by Nisha Ganatra; and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” led by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, were among the few notable exceptions.

The university’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film and its founder Martha M. Lauzen have tracked employment of women in behind-the-scenes decision-making jobs for nearly three decades. Roles included in the study are: directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors and cinematographers. Data from more than 3,500 credits on top-grossing films were used to compile the report.

Lauzen launched her effort in 1998, assuming that pointing out the imbalance would cause doors to swing open for women in Hollywood. But despite countless calls for action, and a high-profile but short-lived federal investigation, the picture has stayed largely the same.

“The numbers are remarkably stable,” Lauzen said in an interview. “They’ve been remarkably stable for more than a quarter of a century.”

Overall, women made up 23% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and directors of photography on the 250 top-grossing films in 2025, according to Lauzen’s report: “The Celluloid Ceiling: Employment of Behind-the-Scenes Women on Top Grossing U.S. Films.” In 2024 and 2020, the percentage was the same.

Her study found that, in 2025, women constituted 28% of film producers and 23% of the executive producers.

Among the ranks of screenwriters, only 20% were women.

Women also made up 20% of editors, matching the level in 1998, when Lauzen began her study.

“There’s been absolutely no change,” she said.

Among cinematographers, women occupied just 7% of those influential roles on the 250 top-grossing films.

The cinematographer serves as the director of photography, greatly shaping the look and the feel of a film. Last year marked a stark decline from 2024, when women constituted 12% of cinematographers.

There has been movement in the number of female directors since 1998. That year, only 7% of the top-grossing films were directed by women. Last year’s total represented a 6 percentage-point improvement.

Lauzen’s most recent report comes a decade after the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began looking at alleged gender discrimination in Hollywood. But the 2015 review, which was sparked by a request from the American Civil Liberties Union, failed to get traction. A little more than a year later, President Obama left office and President Trump ushered in a sea change in attitudes.

Hollywood employment also has become more unstable in recent years because of a pullback in production by the major studios during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes.

Despite years of industry leaders vocalizing a need for greater diversity in executive suites and decision-making roles, and the chronic inequity remaining a punchline for award show jokes, the climate has changed.

Trump returned to office less than a year ago and immediately called for the end of diversity and inclusion programs.

Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, abolished diversity programs within his agency and launched investigations into Walt Disney Co.’s and Comcast’s internal hiring programs. Carr wants to end programs he sees as disadvantaging white people.

Paramount, led by tech scion David Ellison, agreed to dismantle all diversity and inclusion programs at the company, which includes CBS and Comedy Central, as a condition for winning FCC approval for the Ellison family’s takeover of Paramount. That merger was finalized in August.

Lauzen said she’s unsure what her future studies may find.

Corporate consolidation has added to the uncertainty.

Warner Bros., a signature Hollywood studio for more than a century, is on the auction block.

Last month, Warner Bros. Discovery’s board agreed to sell the film and television studios, HBO and HBO Max to Netflix in an $82.7-billion deal. However, the Ellisons’ Paramount is contesting Warner’s choice and has launched a hostile takeover bid, asking investors to tender their Warner shares to Paramount.

“Consolidation now hangs over the film industry like a guillotine, with job losses likely and the future of the theatrical movie-going experience in question,” Lauzen wrote in her report.

“Add the current political war on diversity, and women in the film industry now find themselves in uncharted territory,” Lauzen wrote. “Hollywood has never needed permission to exclude or diminish women, but the industry now has it.”

Amid stacks of cash and liquor bottles, Tony Montana and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán sit together inside a painting. One fictional and the other real, the drug lords look nonchalant.

“That’s us!” says filmmaker Raúl “RJ” Sanchez with joyful mischief when I point out the centerpiece on the main wall of their office in Downtown L.A. Sanchez’s partner in artistic crime, Pasqual Gutiérrez, tells me they got the frame nearby at Santee Alley.

Located on a street corner in the Fashion District, their space, which doubles as a man cave, reflects their creative influences, their ties to L.A. and their offbeat sense of humor. Before they moved in 2021, the place was a shoe store called Latino Fashion — the storefront sign remains.

Walk in and you’ll find the bottom half of a mannequin flaunting male genitalia (“That was our stunt penis from [the short film] ‘Shut Up and Fish,’” says Sanchez laughing). There’s also a bulky metal structure that resembles a torture device, a teal green couch (which they got for under $100), photography books and keepsakes on shelves that once displayed footwear. It’s a mini museum to their history so far. Or, as Sanchez calls it, it’s “a living brain.”

Known artistically as Cliqua, the in-demand duo has already worked with some of the music industry’s biggest names. Their resume includes directing videos for Bad Bunny (“La Difícil”), the Weeknd (“Save Your Tears”), J Balvin (“Reggaeton”) and Rosalía (“Yo x Ti, Tu x Mi”).

This year, Gutiérrez crossed over into feature filmmaking with his docufiction debut “Serious People,” a deeply personal “cringe comedy” that he co-directed with longtime friend Ben Mullinkosson. Following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the film had a theatrical release in November and is now available to stream on multiple VOD platforms.

On screen, Gutiérrez and Sanchez play versions of themselves: music video directors in an industry that takes itself too seriously. While expecting his first child with partner Christine Yuan, also a filmmaker, Gutiérrez found himself caught between his commitment to his partnership with Sanchez and his responsibility as a soon-to-be father. The Gutiérrez in “Serious People” hires a doppelganger to replace him in his professional commitments.

“There were some things coming our way where if both Raúl and I weren’t available to do it, they would go away. Clients would be uninterested if it wasn’t the Cliqua brand,” Gutiérrez says. “That was deeply frustrating and haunting for me because it was like, ‘Raúl isn’t choosing to have a baby, but I am. And this is affecting us, because he can’t do everything on his own because people aren’t letting him do it.’”

Though both Gutiérrez and Sanchez fit under the generic identity umbrella of “Mexican American,” each of them knowingly embodies a distinct “flavor of Mexican.”

“I definitely identify with Chicano a lot,” says Gutiérrez. “I am second-generation and growing up I knew about lowriders and East L.A. barrio s—.” Raised between East Los Angeles and Pomona, Gutiérrez believes his Latino identity is unique to L.A.

Sanchez, on the other hand, is the child of immigrants from Mexico City and Jalisco. As a first-generation kid in the South Bay city of Gardena, his worldview was shaped differently.

“We’ve always had that split. You represent more what it is to be in this country for more generations, and I feel like I’m new. The culture I associate with more is Mexican but more rancho s—,” Sanchez explains. A vivid memory for Sanchez is his grandfather slaughtering a pig and driving around South Central on his pickup truck selling it. “The Chicano heritage wasn’t a thing for me, it was more the immigrant experience,” he says.

“I grew up speaking more Spanglish,” says Gutiérrez. “But Spanish was Raúl’s first language.”

Their artistic alliance is an amalgamation of what each brings to their friendship. Sanchez got Gutiérrez into Los Tigres del Norte and corridos, while Gutiérrez introduced him to Lil Rob’s “Summer Nights” and the 1993 movie “Blood In Blood Out,” which Gutiérrez considers a foundational cultural artifact in his life.

“Both of us have crossed towards the other’s side a little more,” says Sanchez. The two met through their then-girlfriends (now their wives and mothers of their respective children) almost a decade ago. At that point they each were already directing music videos.

“We really bonded over that shared experience of, ‘What’s it like trying to navigate this industry as a Latino?’” adds Sanchez.

For Gutiérrez, one of five siblings, his interest in filmmaking is linked to one of his older brothers who had a bit of a double life. “He was a gang member, but he was also a low-key cinephile,” he says. “He used to work in art house theaters, and we used to just watch weird stuff for a little kid to watch. A lot of ‘Blood In Blood Out,’ but also stuff like ‘Amélie.’”

With his father’s support, Gutiérrez attended Chapman University to study film production.

“My pops said, ‘Growing up no one ever asked me what I wanted to do. That wasn’t even an option for me,’” Gutiérrez recalls. “‘And the fact that you got accepted to this school, we’ll just find a way. We’ll take all the loans out. Go try and see how it is.’ My father empowered me to follow my dreams for sure.”

Sanchez had a less linear path into filmmaking. He graduated from UC Berkley with a degree in ancient history with the intent of going to law school. Instead, he returned to L.A. to try his hand at film, an interest that evolved from his enjoyment of video games growing up and film studies courses in college.

But how does one break into making music videos?

“In the beginning, a lot of times you’re shooting videos for your friends,” says Gutiérrez. “If you are creative in L.A., you know other creatives and one of them is a music artist or one of them is a rapper or in a rock band. And you start that way.”

“My sister was dating a rapper, so I was shooting his videos,” adds Sanchez.

Still, they both aspired to make feature films.

“Even when we were at the beginnings of Cliqua, the language we have always used to even talk about music videos has always been film-centric,” says Sanchez. “Those are the influences. We speak in movies.”

After meeting and hanging out for a while, Gutiérrez and Sanchez were eager to work together. That opportunity came with the video for J Balvin’s “Reggaeton,” which they had to sign on to do without being able to do much preparation. In the aftermath of that positive experience, they decided to create Cliqua, which originally also included music artist Milkman (MLKMN).

The name comes from the book “Varrio” by Gusmano Cesaretti, an Italian photographer who documented East L.A. culture in the 1970s, including the Klique Car Club.

The video for J Balvin kick-started their careers. They soon found themselves a niche as reggaeton became globally popular and a new crop of artists revitalized its aesthetic. But even as they eventually crossed over to other corners of the industry and landed consistent work with the Weeknd, they were aware of the limits to their creative freedom.

“Music videos are funny because they’re obviously not truly our work either; we’re at the service of another artist,” explains Sanchez. “We’re executing someone else’s vision even if the brief is generally open. It’s not truly us, but we’re in there.”

“Music videos are hard, man,” adds Gutiérrez. “The difficult thing about music videos that’s different from feature filmmaking is that it’s so fast. You get a concept, and you maybe have two days to come up with an idea and write a treatment for it. Then from there, you have a shoot date, but the shoot date can get pushed and it can get pulled depending on the artist.”

In 2023, Gutiérrez and Sanchez released their first narrative short film, “Shut Up and Fish,” about four “Edgars” (young Latino men with bowl cuts) on a boat. Their impetus was to subvert the expectations of stories involving characters from their community.

“We wanted to make it feel like an [Ingmar] Bergman film, because we’d never seen that, especially with these kids,” says Gutiérrez. One of the actors they cast in the short, Miguel Huerta, plays Gutiérrez’s chaotic doppelganger in “Serious People.”

For “Serious People,” Gutiérrez and Mullinkosson invoked arthouse references, such as the vignettes in the films of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson, or the surveillance feel of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” Gutiérrez makes a point of mentioning these inspirations in Q&As and interviews in hopes of igniting the curiosity of those watching “Serious People.”

“Making [that culture] accessible has always been a goal, whether that’s conscious or unconscious,” says Gutiérrez.

It was an anxiety-induced dream that first inspired Gutiérrez to write “Serious People” to satirize the entertainment industry. In the dream, Gutiérrez went on Craigslist to hire a look-alike in order to balance his personal and professional commitments. As soon as he woke up, he told his dream in detail to Yuan, who suggested he turn it into a film.

Gutiérrez brought Mullinkosson on board given his background in documentary, and because he thought co-directing it with Sanchez might make it too meta for comfort.

“This industry is so competitive and so demanding that every single director has a fear that if you say no to a single project, you’re never going to get hit up again,” says Mullinkosson on Zoom from Chengdu, China, where he lives. “At the end of the day, we’re just making movies — like, this isn’t that serious.”

Sanchez hesitated at first about the idea of being on camera, but his loyalty to Gutiérrez proved stronger than the reservations. “I actually got a kick out of seeing myself on screen,” Sanchez says. “When you see yourself projected that big, you start to understand what you feel like to other people in the world, which was a very interesting out-of-body experience.”

“Vulnerabilities are what make movies special, especially this one because Pasqual, Raúl and Christine opened their real lives to being on camera, and it’s very personal,” says Mullinkosson. “When you can be as brave as them to share your real life, something beautiful happens.”

Gutiérrez and Sanchez, who also became a father soon after our interview, are currently developing a new feature film, “Golden Boy,” which they describe as a “Stand by Me”-type of story about four Edgars. One of them thinks former boxer Oscar De La Hoya is his long-lost father. They go on a journey across California to confront De La Hoya.

“Music is where we started, but the goal has always been to do long-form, to do features,” says Gutiérrez. “And now with ‘Serious People,’ one is out there.”

Welcome to Screen Gab, the newsletter for everyone who is mindlessly scrolling on their phones before the futile New Year’s resolution to curb the habit begins.

In our annual year-end edition, we expand our usual “ICYMI” feature, highlighting 2025’s most-read stories about film and television. It’s a hearty mix of celebrity profiles, insightful criticism and deep dives into the most talked-about pop culture that defined the year.

And we couldn’t do it without the support of our subscribers. We know there’s an endless stream of TikToks, Reels, articles and, ahem, other newsletters competing for your attention in any given minute — not to mention, TV and movies! — so we’re incredibly thankful for the time you choose to give this newsletter each week. We hope to continue guiding you through all the exciting film and television that greets us in 2026.

Until then, happy reading and happy watching! See you in the new year!

Take care,

Yvonne Villarreal

(The writer who tries to pull this whole thing together each week, with the help of my tag-team partner Maira Garcia.)

P.S.: Shout out to my amazing colleagues who never make me grovel for contributions, even with their demanding work loads. And to the copy editors who remain the true heroes of this place.

Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk in “Cunk on Life.”

(Netflix / BBC / Broke & Bones)

How far will Philomena Cunk go to get a laugh? ‘If he breaks my nose, it’ll heal’: Diane Morgan, the actor who plays know-nothing TV pundit Philomena Cunk, explains how series like ‘Cunk on Life’ come together. (Jan. 2)

Billy Bob Thornton unpacks ‘Landman’ finale, details his hopes for Season 2: The actor, who stars as the fixer for a Texas oil company in the hit Taylor Sheridan drama, breaks down the season finale and discusses the prospects for Season 2. (Jan. 12)

Laura Dern’s letter to David Lynch: You wove L.A. into our dreams: The Oscar-winning actor reflects on a lifetime of work with the filmmaker, with whom she collaborated on ‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Inland Empire.’ (Jan. 22)

In deathbed audio, Paul Reubens recalled pain of being falsely labeled a pedophile: The recording is featured in HBO Documentary Films’ ‘Pee-wee as Himself,’ which premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival. (Jan. 23)

Sundance is moving to one of 3 cities. Here’s what we know about their bids: Boulder, Cincinnati and a combined Salt Lake City and Park City are competing to become the new home of the Sundance Film Festival. (Jan. 24)

How Karla Sofía Gascón turned a historic Oscars first into a historic Oscars nightmare: With a series of resurfaced tweets, the lead actress nominee for ‘Emilia Pérez’ has caused an awards season uproar — and plenty of culture war confusion. (Feb. 4)

(Stephanie Jones / Los Angeles Times; Getty / JB Lacroix)

Justin Baldoni’s tumultuous road to the center of a Hollywood scandal: The actor-director built a career blending his Bahai values and storytelling. Now allegations involving Blake Lively and ‘It Ends With Us’ threaten his image. (March 5)

‘Severance’ stars explain Season 2’s harrowing finale and the ‘love hexagon’: Actors Adam Scott, Britt Lower and Dichen Lachman, director Ben Stiller and series creator Dan Erickson discuss “Cold Harbor,” the mind-blowing Season 2 finale. (March 21)

What happened on the shocking ‘White Lotus’ Season 3 finale: Who died? Did Gaitok shoot? What happened to the lorazepam? As Mike White’s HBO anthology wraps up it’s third season, we’re here to explain it all. (April 7)

Two new mysteries show the tariff-proof resilience of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie: “Sherlock and Daughter,” a paternal twist on the Holmes legend and a new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Towards Zero” debut on the CW and BritBox, respectively. (April 16)

Natasha Lyonne portrays Charlie Cale in Peacock’s “Poker Face.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Natasha Lyonne remains unconventional as a sleuth in ‘Poker Face’ and in her career: The actor is back as Charlie Cale in ‘Poker Face,’ Peacock’s murder mystery series, and for Season 2, Lyonne is adding director to her list of duties on the show. (May 8)

‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ CNN live broadcast brings George Clooney’s play to the masses: The actor’s Broadway play, based on his 2005 film, allowed viewers at home to see the actor’s much-hyped turn as Edward R. Murrow through CNN’s live television event. (June 7)

‘And Just Like That…’ seems determined to insult women over 50. And under 50: The reboot of HBO’s groundbreaking series ‘Sex and the City’ has failed to mature the women at the center of the show, or their relationships, much to this viewer’s dismay. (July 3)

Up, up and … eh? A rebooted ‘Superman’ gives the Man of Steel a mind of marshmallow: Director James Gunn launches his DC Extended Universe with a high-energy Superman played by David Corenswet, joined by co-stars Nicholas Hoult and Rachel Brosnahan. (July 8)

Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ is canceled, but he won’t go quietly into that goodnight: CBS announced that ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ would end in 2026. (July 18)

How ‘The Fantastic Four’ post-credits scene brings us one step closer to ‘Doomsday’: Yes, ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ includes two post-credits scenes. Here’s how that big reveal sets up what’s coming in Phase 6 of the MCU. (July 24)

“The Wizard of Oz,” as presented in the Las Vegas venue Sphere.

(Rich Fury / Sphere Entertainment)

‘Wizard of Oz’ at Las Vegas’ Sphere feels more like a ride than a movie (with Disneyland-level pricing): The cherished 1939 fantasy has been expanded by generative AI to fit the giant parameters of the Las Vegas immersive venue. Has too much creative license been taken? (Sept. 3)

After 15 years of ‘Downton Abbey,’ Hugh Bonneville and Michelle Dockery can’t quite say goodbye: The actors reflect on their father-daughter roles in ‘Downton Abbey,’ the end of an era and honoring Maggie Smith’s legacy in ‘The Grand Finale.’ (Sept. 5)

How an O.C. teen joined Kanye West’s inner circle and filmed him unfiltered for six years: Director Nico Ballesteros followed Ye at close range, capturing the artist’s rawest highs and lowest lows in the new documentary “In Whose Name?” (Sept. 10)

Shutdown of Corp. for Public Broadcasting, recipient of Governors Award, elicits boos at Emmys: The Corp. for Public Broadcasting, which last month announced it would be shutting down after federal funding cuts, received the 2025 Governors Award at an earlier ceremony. (Sept. 14)

Jenny Han on ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ series finale and why Belly had to go to Paris: The author, producer and showrunner knows fans are restless about how her hit Prime Video series might end, but she says she “loves surprising people.” (Sept. 15)

A look at the scene outside the El Capitan Entertainment Centre, where the late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is staged, in the wake of the show getting pulled from ABC.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

ABC’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s show has echoes and contrasts of Roseanne Barr firing: The news that ABC would be pulling ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ indefinitely was reminiscent of the cancellation of Roseanne Barr’s eponymous sitcom, which had been rebooted in 2018, but had significant differences. (Sept. 18)

What Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers said about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension: The four late-night hosts weighed in on ABC’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s show indefinitely in their monologues and in other segments. (Sept. 18)

Jimmy Kimmel returns to ABC with emotional monologue defending free speech: ‘We have to stand up’: The host returned Tuesday to his late-night show on ABC, where he addressed his comments on Charlie Kirk’s death and thanked those who have supported him in the past week. (Sept. 23)

‘South Park’ quietly ended Season 27, jumping into Season 28 with new episode roasting Peter Thiel: The adult animated comedy series returns Wednesday to Comedy Central with a new episode that also marks a new season. (Oct. 15)

It was abundantly clear to actor-director Bradley Cooper that if “Is This Thing On?,” his comedy-drama set in New York’s stand-up scene, lacked authenticity, the film would fail. With the iconic Comedy Cellar at its heart, he found the key to unlocking that — by casting several of the real-life comedians who regularly take the stage there. Among them were two women at the top of their game right now with sold-out shows and substantial social media followings: Chloe Radcliffe and Jordan Jensen.

“Bradley fell in love with the Comedy Cellar and the relationships that go on there,” Jensen recalls.

“Is This Thing On?” is based on an anecdote from the life of British comedian John Bishop, whose career started when he stumbled into an open-mic night in Manchester, England, while temporarily separated from his wife. In the film, Will Arnett plays a fictionalized version of Bishop, Alex Novak, a finance guy, and the narrative shifts to New York.

“The idea was, ‘If we use people who aren’t comics to play comics, there’s not going to be a juxtaposition between Arnett and this super-tight group of people,’” Jensen says. “His character is this stuffy, bored guy, and he enters into this world of people who have day jobs just like him, but they step into this room, and it’s all dirty humor and busting each other’s balls.”

Radcliffe realized early on that Cooper, who also produced and co-wrote the film, understood the level of commitment required to portray the stand-up world realistically. She saw the first signs of him getting it when he screened 10 minutes of test footage for the comedians at his home, just a few blocks from the Greenwich Village club.

Comedian Chloe Radcliffe on stage as her character, Nina, in “Is This Thing On?”

(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)

“The second the test footage started, I immediately felt so confident that we are in the right hands,” she recalls. “Any lingering doubt or trepidation was totally washed away immediately, because Bradley just has such clarity of vision and taste. It was clear that he and Will had both embedded themselves deeply in the world of stand-up. Bradley wanted to capture what is real, and he was like, ‘If that means going off script, do it. If that means going to a weird place, do it.’”

Jensen adds, “I don’t think I said one actual line from the script. I would improvise something, and along the way, as I got the point across, it was OK. He might occasionally tell us to say a line, but it was in between 100% moments of improvisation, and he would be rolling camera.

“When I saw the movie, it was really moving. The way he showed it reintroduced me to it and made me be like, ‘Oh yeah, this place is f— magical.’”

Cooper wanted to capture what goes on offstage as well as on, and a significant part of that happened around a particular table at the Olive Tree Cafe, which sits above the underground comedy club. It’s where the acts gather before, after and in between their sets.

“We shot a scene around the comics’ table on the very first day,” Radcliffe says. “About a week or 10 days later, Bradley wanted to reshoot it because he looked at the footage and realized that it looked like a movie. He wanted to make something that looked like the real environment. I admire that so much. Not only is he willing to ask us for our input, but he’s also willing to go back and make new decisions based on new information.”

According to Jensen, in another scene in the cafe, the filmmaker asked whether the comedian’s coats, which PAs had removed from the shot, would be there, and when he was told they would, ordered them to be put back. The level of detail even extended to whether the comics would share fries from a single plate or have their own. It all mattered.

Comedian Jordan Jensen was used to riffing through her scenes on camera while playing her character, Jill, in “Is This Thing On?”

(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)

Radcliffe describes Cooper’s reverence for the Comedy Cellar and the comics as an appreciated display of “humility and willing” that extended to both the filmmaker and Arnett, asking for their input on techniques that would improve Novak’s set.

“We wound up chatting about things like where the funny idea is in a punch line, so you might rearrange the sentence so that the most surprising part of it comes at the end. That’s an unnatural way of delivering that sentence,” she reveals. “I would see Will running the set at the Cellar before the shoot, and he is so naturally funny that even if he went off script and started riffing, he instinctively hits punch lines. He has this natural sense of rhythm.”

However, neither the actor nor the director, who also plays Novak’s best friend, Balls, rested on their laurels. To gauge real audiences’ reactions to the material, they ran it multiple times in rooms for months before filming started. It’s something Jensen calls “the ballsiest thing I’ve ever seen a person do.”

“I would be on a show months before the movie was happening,” she says. “They’d be like, ‘Here’s Alex Novak,’ and I was like, ‘Who is that?’ I would see that it was Will Arnett and then I’d be like, ‘F—, he’s bombing. Oh, this is the movie.’”

However, the bombing was intentional, and things would change as the set progressed. She continues, “What I realized is they had written it so that the first chunk in the movie, he doesn’t do so great, the second chunk he does a little better, and the last chunk he does the best, which is how comedy works. I can’t imagine in a million years doing that and not breaking at some point, and being like, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m actually doing this for a movie.’”

While Arnett was on stage, Cooper would stand in the back of the room, taking notes, making changes and doing research. However, Jensen says watching Arnett tank, even on purpose, was “brutal.”

Will Arnett with director Bradley Cooper on the set of “Is This Thing On?”

(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)

“These were not open mic nights; they were real shows. It was Will Arnett’s reputation, and he was bombing on purpose, but it totally worked out in the long run. He was operating like a real comic up there.”

There were also little things that Arnett did, sometimes by accident, that made his delivery next-level. One example is when he breathes into the microphone.

“It was totally an improvised thing,” Jensen enthuses. “It was this moment of awkwardness that is so authentic that it makes you immediately empathize with him. You’re like, ‘Oh, man, I know that feeling of the air leaving your mouth, hitting the mic, and now everybody has heard that you’ve let out a sigh of grief.’”

Radcliffe, who plays Nina, and Jensen, who plays Jill, are close friends in real life and read for each other’s roles. Aside from being able to take Cooper and Arnett behind the curtain of the comedy scene, their relationship added an extra level of authenticity to the film and to each other’s performances.

“We’ve been really close since pre-pandemic, and she and I have a lot of similar energies,” Radcliffe muses. “We can both be trashy little gremlins. She has a level of aggression that I don’t quite step into, and I think I have a level of exasperation that she doesn’t quite step into. We play off each other really well. She’s so subversive and transgressive, and she’s got such a magnetism in where she is willing to go on stage that I think is unmatched in a lot of other comics working right now.”

Jensen, who is a big fan of Cooper’s work, recalls being starstruck when he first opened the door to his home when the cast came over to read the script for the film. “He opened the door and said, ‘Hi, I’m Bradley.’ I just looked at Chloe over his shoulder, beelined right to her, and snuggled up next to her on the couch, because I was so intimidated,” she said. “It would have still been great if she weren’t there, but having her there was the best. It’s one of those things where when I’m really old, I’ll tell people, and they won’t believe me.”

As “Avatar: Fire and Ash” headed to the big screen this month, theater owners held their breath.

In an uneven year that saw two billion-dollar hits and a viral “chicken jockey” craze, but also a disastrous first quarter and a nearly 30-year-low at the October box office, the end of December was the last chance for theaters to make up ground.

But even James Cameron and the Na’vi — the latest “Avatar” film has already grossed more than $472 million globally — couldn’t save 2025 from a disappointing conclusion.

Box-office revenue in the U.S. and Canada is expected to total $8.87 billion for the year, up just 1.5% from last year’s disappointing $8.74 billion tally, according to movie data firm Comscore. More troubling is that 2025’s domestic box-office haul is projected to be down more than 20% compared with 2019, before the pandemic changed audiences’ movie-going habits and turbocharged streaming in ways that the exhibition industry is still grappling with.

The problem: Fewer people are buying movie tickets. Theatrical attendance is running below last year’s levels, with an estimated 760 million tickets sold as of Dec. 25, according to media and entertainment data firm EntTelligence. Last year, total ticket sales for 2024 exceeded 800 million.

Part of the explanation for the falloff in cinema revenue and admissions lies in the movies themselves.

Industry experts and theater owners say the quality and frequency of releases led to dips in the calendar that put extra pressure on the other movies to perform. Once-reliable genres such as comedies and dramas are facing a much tougher time in theaters, and female moviegoers — who came out in droves in 2023 for “Barbie” — were underserved in a year that largely skewed toward male-leaning blockbusters.

“It’s fair to say that 2025 didn’t quite reach the levels many of us expected at the start of the year,” Eduardo Acuna, chief executive of Regal Cineworld, said in a statement. “A big part of that comes down to a lack of depth in the release schedule, and the struggle of many smaller titles to break through.”

Even big-name stars such as Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Dwayne Johnson and Sydney Sweeney couldn’t prop up attendance for films such as Sony Pictures’ “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” A24’s “The Smashing Machine” and Black Bear Pictures’ “Christy,” all of which flopped.

And despite the critical acclaim and stacked cast list for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” the film has stalled domestically at $71 million, with a global total of $205 million.

“One Battle After Another” had a budget of about $130 million, while “The Smashing Machine” reportedly cost $50 million and has grossed just $21 million worldwide.

“The challenge facing Hollywood is how to reconcile the budgets of these films with how much they can earn in theaters and down the road, eventually, in streaming,” said Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Comscore.

Universal Pictures’ “Wicked: For Good” hauled in more than $324 million, but it was one of few big blockbusters targeted to women. (Taylor Swift’s “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” which brought in $50 million globally, was another.)

Though the summer was marked by a number of big films, including Warner Bros.-owned DC Studios’ “Superman,” Universal’s “Jurassic World Rebirth” and Apple’s “F1 The Movie,” most were geared toward male audiences.

Female-focused films are “are few and far between,” said Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, an entertainment data and research firm. “There should be something for everyone playing most of the time, and that isn’t the case.”

To be sure, there were some bright spots for the industry, including success from young audiences.

Warner Bros. Pictures’ “A Minecraft Movie” was the highest-grossing domestic film this year, with $423.9 million. Close behind was Walt Disney Co.’s live-action adaptation “Lilo & Stitch,” which collected $423.8 million in the U.S. and Canada and a total of $1 billion worldwide.

Counting those two, five of the year’s top 10 domestic-grossing films had PG ratings, including “Wicked: For Good,” Disney’s animated “Zootopia 2” and Universal’s live-action “How to Train Your Dragon.”

“In general, the good news about the year is that most of the big hits involved young audiences,” said Tom Rothman, chair and CEO chief executive of Sony Pictures’ motion picture group. “There is a bit of a youth-quake.”

Disney capitalized on the big year for family-friendly fare.

The Burbank entertainment giant recently crossed $6 billion at the global box office for the year, powered by billion-dollar hits such as “Lilo & Stitch” and “Zootopia 2,” and marking the company’s biggest year since 2019. (Though it wasn’t all sunny for Disney this year, as Pixar’s original animated film “Elio” misfired, as did the live-action film, “Snow White,” which was mired in controversy.)

Another notable youth driver was “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” from Sony Pictures in partnership with its anime banner, Crunchyroll. The film had a massive opening weekend haul of $70 million in July on its way to a domestic gross of $134 million and a global total of $715 million, highlighting the increasing popularity of anime.

“The mainstreaming of anime at the theatrical box office is a really significant part of what happened this year and a really good sign,” Rothman said. “You’re bringing in young audiences.”

Not surprisingly, established intellectual property — whether video games, known franchises, novels or comic books — still topped the charts this year, with nine of the top 10 domestic films tied to an existing title.

That familiarity at the box office counts when moviegoers, particularly families, are looking for movies to watch. Viewers can be choosy about how they spend their cash and time, and may not always want to gamble on a movie they’ve never heard of.

“Meaningful IP still has an advantage in getting people to come to the theater, though it’s not the only way to do it,” said Adam Fogelson, chair of Lionsgate’s motion picture group, which saw success this year with an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “The Long Walk,” as well as franchise film “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.”

Horror flicks also scared up plenty of business in 2025. Warner Bros., in particular, had a string of wins in fearful films, including Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” and “Final Destination Bloodlines.”

In one notable exception, Blumhouse had a rare miss with “M3GAN 2.0,” the follow-up to the 2022 cult favorite. In an interview on “The Town” podcast, Blumhouse Productions Chief Executive Jason Blum blamed the sequel’s shortcomings on a change in genre from the original.

As 2025 draws to a close, industry insiders and theater owners are more optimistic about next year’s box office prospects.

Several big films are set to release in 2026, including Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated “The Odyssey,” Disney and Marvel Studios’ “Avengers: Doomsday,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three,” as well as Disney and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” and “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” from Universal, Nintendo and Illumination Entertainment.

That anticipation is also clouded by the uncertainty of the impending Warner Bros. deal and what that will mean for movie releases.

Many cinema owners fear that a takeover by Netflix will limit or eliminate the theatrical exclusivity of Warner Bros. films, though Netflix executives have said they will honor the company’s current and future commitments to the big screen. And if Paramount were to buy the company, theatrical exhibitors fear that the number of films would decrease, leaving them with less content to show. (Paramount CEO David Ellison has said the company did not plan to release fewer movies.)

Any deal is expected to take at least a year to complete.

In the meantime, Hollywood will wait to see how strong the 2026 slate truly is.

“There are a lot of great titles out there, and that’s why people have been calling 2026 a return to form,” said Bock of Exhibitor Relations. “Even though 2026 is very promising, can Hollywood keep delivering year-in and year-out?”

The French star reshaped post-war cinema before retreating from global fame into animal rights activism and, later, far-right politics.

Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became a global sensation before reinventing herself as an animal protection campaigner and outspoken supporter of the far right, has died aged 91.

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announced her death on Sunday, saying “with immense sadness” that its founder and president had died.

In a statement sent to the AFP news agency, the foundation described Bardot as “a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation”. It did not give details about when or where she died.

Bardot rose to international fame in 1956 with her role in And God Created Woman, a film that sought to project female sexuality on screen. She went on to appear in about 50 films, becoming one of the most recognisable faces of post-war French cinema.

In the early 1970s, Bardot quit acting at the height of her fame, turning her attention to animal protection. While her campaigning earned admiration from supporters, her public life grew increasingly controversial as she embraced far-right politics and made repeated racist and inflammatory remarks.

Her activism hardened into open support for France’s far-right National Front, now known as National Rally, and the party’s longtime leader Marine Le Pen. Over the years, French courts convicted Bardot multiple times for inciting racial hatred.

In 2022, a court fined her 40,000 euros ($47,000) after she described people from Reunion, a French overseas territory, as “degenerates” who had “kept their savage genes”. It marked the sixth time authorities had sanctioned her for racist and hate speech. Muslims and immigrants were among her frequent targets.

Born in Paris in 1934, Bardot grew up in a conservative Catholic household and trained as a ballet dancer at the Conservatoire de Paris. She began modelling as a teenager, appearing on the cover of Elle at 15, which led to early film roles and her marriage to director Roger Vadim.

Despite later being hailed by some as a trailblazer for women in cinema, Bardot dismissed complaints about sexual harassment in the film industry.

“Many actresses flirt with producers to get a role. Then when they tell the story afterwards, they say they have been harassed. … In actual fact, rather than benefit them, it only harms them,” she said.

“I thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a pretty little a**. This kind of compliment is nice.”

A funny thing about this year’s best films: Half of them are adaptations. As a movie lover who’s always hunting for new talent, new ideas and new stimuli, I used to view that as creative inertia. But 2025 has changed my mind.

Now I see artists drawing inspiration from the past to show that Hollywood should trust the sturdy bones that have kept it running for over a century: good yarns, bold casting, films that don’t feel made by focus groups or doomsaying bean-counters (or, God help us, AI), but by blood and sweat.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

From original tales to radical reworkings of classics both high-falutin’ and raucously lowbrow, these 10 filmmakers all know that the most vital part of the storytelling business has stayed exactly the same. They have to wow an audience. And they did.

1. ‘Sinners’

Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack in the movie “Sinners.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

A period-piece-vampire-musical mashup could have been discordant, but writer-director Ryan Coogler confidently makes all three genres harmonize. In “Sinners,” Coogler double-casts his longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan as twin bootleggers Smoke and Stack, then pits them against a pack of banjo-picking bloodsuckers helmed by a roguish Jack O’Connell. We’re expecting a big, bloody brouhaha and we get it. Underneath the playful carnage, however, the question at stake is: Why suffer the daily indignities of the Jim Crow-era South when you could outlive — and eat — your oppressors? “Sinners” is the most exciting film of 2025, both for what it is and for what it proves: that fresh blockbusters still exist and people are eager to gobble them up.

(“Sinners” is available on multiple platforms.)

2. ‘Hedda’

Tessa Thompson in the movie “Hedda.”

(Prime Video)

The stage’s iconic mean girl glides from 1890s Norway to 1950s England in this vibrant and venomous adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler.” Tessa Thompson stars as the restless housewife who needs to secure her milquetoast husband (Tom Bateman) a promotion and has a nasty habit of playing with guns. Keeping pace with her manipulative anti-heroine, writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”) makes a few calculated moves of her own, including gender-swapping Hedda’s ex into a curvaceous career woman (a haughty Nina Hoss) whose drab and geeky new girlfriend (Imogen Poots) irritates their hostess’ insecurities. As a capper, “Hedda” stages its brutal showdown at an all-night vodka-and-cocaine-fueled mansion shebang with a live jazz band, a lake for skinny-dippers and a hedge maze where former lovers are tempted to canoodle. The original play is over a century old, but every scene feels screamingly alive.

(“Hedda” is available on Prime Video.)

3. ‘Eddington’

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington.”

(A24)

No film was more polarizing than Ari Aster’s COVID-set satire about a mask-hating sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix), a sanctimonious mayor (Pedro Pascal) and the high-tech cabal that benefits when these two modern cowboys come to blows. “Eddington” immortalizes the bleak humor and lingo of May 2020 (think murder hornets, Antifa and toilet paper hoarders). More stingingly, it captures the mental delirium of a small town — make that an entire planet — that hasn’t yet realized that there’s a second sickness seeping in through their smartphones. Everyone’s got a device in their hand pretty much all the time, aiming their cameras at each other like pistols in a Wild West standoff. Yet no character grasps what’s really going on. (I have a theory, but when I explain the larger conspiracy, I sound cuckoo too.) This is the movie that will explain pandemic brain to future generations. With distance, I’m pretty sure the haters will come around.

(“Eddington” is available on multiple platforms.)

4. ‘One Battle After Another’

Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “One Battle After Another.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Every shot in Paul Thomas Anderson’s invigorating nail-biter is a banger: sentinels skateboarding over rooftops, caged kids playing catch with a crumpled foil blanket, Teyana Taylor’s militant Perfidia Beverly Hills blasting an automatic rifle while nine months pregnant. It’s the rare film that instantly imprints itself on the viewer. On my second watch, I was shocked by how much of “One Battle After Another” already felt tattooed on my brain, down to the shudder I got from Sean Penn’s loathsome Col. Lockjaw licking his comb to tidy his bangs. Riffing from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the central drama follows flunky anarchist Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) fumblingly attempting to rescue his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from Lockjaw’s clutches. But he’s not much help to her, and as the title implies, this is merely one skirmish in humanity’s sprawling struggle for freedom that has, and will, drag on forever. Anderson’s knack for ensemble work stretches back as far as “Boogie Nights,” yet here, even his unnamed characters have crucial roles to play. His world-building has never before felt this holistic and inspirational.

(“One Battle After Another” is now playing in theaters.)

5. ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’

Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

(Roadside Attractions)

The backstory behind this stunner couldn’t be more baroque: Director Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls”) boldly revamped a Broadway musical of an Oscar-winning drama (itself taken from an experimental novel) about two inmates in an Argentine cell who mentally escape into the movies. Each incarnation has doubled down on the sensorial overload of what came before. If you know “Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” lineage, you’ll be impressed by how Condon ups the fantasy and stokes the revolutionary glamour with more Technicolor dance showcases for Jennifer Lopez’. (She’s doing her best Cyd Charisse, which turns out to be darned good.) If this is your first taste of the tale, give yourself over to the prickly but tender relationship between prisoners Luis and Valentin, played by feisty new talent Tonatiuh and a red-blooded Diego Luna. This is go-for-broke filmmaking with a wallop. As Luis says of his own version of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” playing in his head, “Call it kitsch, call it camp — I don’t care, I love it.”

(“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is available on multiple platforms.)

6. ‘A Useful Ghost’

A scene from the movie “A Useful Ghost.”

(TIFF)

Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes Grand Prix winner opens with a haunted vacuum cleaner. From there, it gets even more surprising. Ghosts have infested a wealthy widow’s factory and are possessing appliances, seducing her son and cozying up to the prime minister for favors. Some of these people have died by accident, some by corporate neglect or worse. This droll spook show bleeds into romance and politics and, to our shock, becomes genuinely emotional. (It helps to remember that the military killed over 80 Bangkok protesters in 2010.) But why vacuum cleaners, you ask? The conceit is more than a sticky idea. Ordinary people can get crushed but the anger they leave behind lingers like fine dust.

(“A Useful Ghost” opens Jan. 16, 2026, in theaters.)

7. ‘The Roses’

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the movie “The Roses.”

(Jaap Buitendijk / Searchlight Pictures)

Technically, “The Roses” is rooted in the 1980s hit novel and subsequent blockbuster “The War of the Roses,” which starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as an estranged couple who attack each other with lawyers, poison and chandeliers. In spirit, however, this redo is pure 1930s screwball comedy. Leads Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman are skilled verbal ninjas who hurl razor-sharp insults at each other’s egos, and although their characters’ divorce happens in California, director Jay Roach lets the actors keep their snippy British accents. The script by two-time Oscar nominee Tony McNamara (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things”) adds a cruel twist to the original: This time around, the marrieds truly do try their damnedest to love and support each other. And still, their walls come tumbling down.

(“The Roses” is available on multiple platforms.)

8. ‘In Whose Name?’

Ye and Elon Musk in the documentary “In Whose Name?”

(AMSI Entertainment)

Nico Ballesteros was a high schooler with an iPhone when he entered Kanye West’s orbit in 2018. Over the next six years, the Orange County kid shot over 3,000 hours of footage as Ye (as the artist legally became known in 2021) jetted from Paris to Uganda, Calabasas to the White House, meeting everyone from Kenny G to Elon Musk on a quest to fulfill his creative and spiritual goals while incinerating his personal life and public reputation. Ye gave the documentarian full access with no editorial oversight, besides one moment in which he tells the camera that he wants the film to be about mental health. This riveting tragedy definitely is. We see an egomaniac whose fear of being beholden to anything motivates him to go off his meds, a billionaire provocateur who believes he can afford the consequences of his bigotry and, above all, a deeply flawed man who nukes his entire world to insist he’s right.

(“In Whose Name?” is available on multiple platforms.)

9. ‘Sirāt’

An image from the movie “Sirāt,” directed by Oliver Laxe.

(Festival de Cannes)

The techno soundtrack of Oliver Laxe’s desolate road thriller has rattled my house for months. Lately, I’ve spent just as much time contemplating the movie’s silence — those hushed stretches in which this caravan of bohemians speeds across the Moroccan desert looking like the only free people left on Earth. A father, Luis (“Pan’s Labyrinth’s” Sergi López), and his 12-year-old son team up with this band of tattooed burnouts in the hope of finding the boy’s runaway sister. Before long, Luis is just hoping to make it to safety, assuming anywhere safe still exists. Static on the radio warns that World War III might be underway. These outsiders click off the news and crank up the music. The paradox of “Sirāt” is that I’m dying to talk about it more but I’ve got to keep my mouth shut until people experience its dramatic twists for themselves.

(“Sirāt” returns to theaters on Feb. 6, 2026.)

10. ‘The Naked Gun’

Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in the movie “The Naked Gun.”

(Frank Masi / Paramount Pictures)

Liam Neeson needed this pummeling pun-fest. So did everyone else in 2025. Director Akiva Schaffer’s continuation of the “Police Squad!” franchise let the 73-year-old “Taken” star poke fun at his own bruising gravitas. Playing the son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, Neeson kept us in hysterics with a stupid-brilliant barrage of surreal wordplay and daffy slapstick. The casting was as odd — and perfect — as rumors that he and his co-star Pamela Anderson started dating on set. This fourth sequel didn’t try to outsmart the classic Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker template. It simply told the same old story: Cop meets babe, cop and babe canoodle with a magical snowman, cop drops his trousers on live TV, this time minus the blimp. Goodyear? No, the worst — which made Neeson our hero.

(“The Naked Gun” is available on multiple platforms.)

Since I’m all jazzed-up about great movies, here are 10 honorable mentions very much worth a watch.

“The Ballad of Wallis Island”
A kooky millionaire strong-arms his favorite mid-aughts folk duo into playing a reunion show on his Welsh island. Sounds cutesy, but it’s the movie I recommended most — to everyone from my mailman to my mother. They all loved it. Join the fan club.

“Bunny”
This East Village indie by debut director Ben Jacobson is a scummy gem. A gigolo’s birthday goes very wrong. But all the characters racing up and down the stairs of his uber-New York walk-up hovel are a howl.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Rose Byrne excels equally at comedy and drama. This audit of a breakdown smashes both together and cranks the tension up to eleven. Playing a high-stress working mom of an ill child, her try-hard heroine leans in so harrowingly far, she goes kamikaze.

“Lurker”
Today’s celebrity might be viral on Instagram and unknown everywhere else. Alex Russell’s stomach-churning psychodrama stars Archie Madekwe as an L.A.-based singer on the brink of genuine fame and Théodore Pellerin as the hanger-on who endures — and exploits — the fledgling star’s power moves and hazy boundaries.

“Magic Farm”
Filmmaker Amalia Ulman’s rascally farce stars Chloë Sevigny and Alex Wolff as clickbait journalists who fly to Argentina to shoot a viral video about a singer in a bunny costume and wind up looking twice as ridiculous.

Keke Palmer, left, and SZA in the movie “One of Them Days.”

(Anne Marie Fox / Sony Pictures)

“One of Them Days”
Keke Palmer and SZA play broke Baldwin Hills roommates who have nine hours to make rent. I’d happily watch their stoner high jinks in real time.

“The Perfect Neighbor”
Pieced together primarily from police body-camera footage, Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary unfurls in a Florida cul-de-sac where a community — adults, kids and cops — agrees that one woman is an entitled pill. The problem is she thinks they’re the problem. And she has a gun.

“Sisu: Road to Revenge”
If Buster Keaton were alive, he’d hail this grisly, mostly mute Finnish action flick as a worthy successor to “The General.” It even boasts a thrilling sequence on a train, although director Jalmari Helander also brazenly poaches from “Die Hard” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

“Train Dreams”
Trees fall in the woods and a 20th-century logger (Joel Edgerton) plays an unheard, unthanked but beautiful role in the building of America.

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”
Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) teams up with a soul-searching priest (Josh O’Connor) to solve a perplexing church stabbing. From deft plot twists to provocative Catholic theology, Rian Johnson’s crowd-pleasing murder mystery is marvelously executed.

A ping-pong ball at top speed travels over 70 miles an hour — so fast it could zip across Manhattan in less than two minutes. Director Josh Safdie’s hyperactive, head-spinning “Marty Supreme” keeps pace. Set in 1952 New York, this deranged caper races after a money-grubbing table tennis hustler (he prefers “professional athlete”) named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) who argues like he plays, swatting away protests and annoying his adversaries to exhaustion.

Hounding his shoe-store co-worker to give him $700 from the safe, Marty hammers the poor sap with every trick he’s got — emotional pressure, physical violence, bribery, humiliation, revenge — until he hits one that wins. The high-strung kid is pure nerve and he looks like one, too; he’s the embodiment of a twitch. But with a paddle in his hands, Marty turns into Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” He could win a match swinging an umbrella.

The character’s inspiration is Marty Reisman, one of the so-called “bad boys of ping-pong,” according to a U.S. Table Tennis Assn. official in 1972, explaining why the rascal wasn’t invited to the USA versus China exhibition games referred to as “ping-pong diplomacy.” You may remember those matches from “Forrest Gump,” but Tom Hanks’ guileless sweetheart would never use the sport to smuggle gold bars out of Hong Kong, as the real Reisman once did.

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Reisman’s exploits, immortalized in his 1974 memoir “The Money Player,” are too outrageous to squeeze into one film, even for a chaos-feeding filmmaker such as Safdie, going solo after co-directing “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” with his brother Benny. (A trilogy, maybe.) Reisman’s biography opened with him fleeing French-occupied Hanoi, Vietnam, the day before it fell to the Viet Minh and detoured to a meeting with the Pope in Rome before drunkenly landing a plane in Brazil. The book was optioned shortly after publication. He felt it should star Robert De Niro.

That movie never happened and Reisman died in 2012 at the age of 82, still insisting he deserved to bask in the spotlight. He’d be happy to see Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” which time-travels audiences back seven decades to when American table tennis players were certain bright days were ahead.

As an athlete, Chalamet seems to have lost muscle for the role. Yet as funny as it is to see a guy this scrawny carry himself like Hercules, he leaps and strikes with conviction. His Marty yearns for prestige. Safdie even concocts a subplot in which he invents his signature orange ball solely so he can wear all-white like the posh jocks of Wimbledon. He starts the film desperate to fly to a tournament in London, in part to escape the walk-up apartment where he’s always squabbling with his mother (Fran Drescher) and uncle (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) and a nosy neighbor (Sandra Bernhard). Perilously, Marty’s secret lover (a simmering Odessa A’zion) lives with her jealous husband (Emory Cohen) in an apartment one floor below.

Marty and A’zion’s Rachel belong together, if only to quarantine their equally manipulative genes from the general population. Before the opening credits, the couple improvises a lie to get some privacy to mate. Cinematographer Darius Khondji sends the camera inside her body to see Marty’s most aggressive sperm wriggle to the finish line. Rachel’s egg becomes the moon; the moon becomes a ping-pong ball. Game on.

From this scene forward, Marty will dash around the city and the globe, chasing his dreams and out-running his parental responsibilities. Along the way, he trips over a gun-toting gangster named Ezra (Abel Ferrara), a faded movie star, Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow, sullen and aloof), and her callous husband Milton (“Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary), the chief executive of a pen corporation who thinks Marty can make him a mint in ping-pong-crazed Asia. O’Leary, a first-time actor, easily embodies the face of capitalism.

Flaunting that he can turn anyone into an actor, Safdie crowds his New York with bit parts played by big personalities: magician Penn Jillette, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, basketball player George “The Iceman” Gervin, highwire artist Philippe Petit, playwright David Mamet, journalist Naomi Fry and grocery tycoon John Catsimatidis. The musician Tyler Okonma, better known as the Tyler, the Creator, is great in his feature film acting debut as Willy, Marty’s gambling wingman. He was previously seen onscreen getting electrocuted by a piano in “Jackass Forever.” Okonma brings that same energy here and it’s perfect.

Marty’s main foe — and personality opposite — is a Japanese player named Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) who lost his hearing in the Tokyo airstrikes that happened seven years before and uses a deadly quiet foam-backed paddle. Marty’s friendliest rival, Béla (Géza Röhrig), survived Auschwitz, and in a jaw-dropper of a scene, shares a story of endurance that actually happened to the Polish player Alex Ehrlich. Imprisoned in the camps shortly after winning silver at the World Championships in 1939, Ehrlich was renowned for a record-breaking competitive volley that lasted over two hours, a back-and-forth so relentless that the referee quit with a sore neck. The rhythm of it could be a metronome for this movie’s plot — it whips us around to the point of delighted collapse.

The soundtrack is an unexpected backbeat of synth hits by Tears for Fears and New Order that bleeds into a Tangerine Dream-esque score by Daniel Lopatin — a startling choice for an era where people act like World War II happened yesterday. But to our modern ears, the music has its own vintage: It’s the sound of the greed-is-good 1980s, when movies rooted for ruthless strivers such as “Risky Business’” Tom Cruise, who opened a brothel in his parents’ bedroom.

Safdie’s script, co-written by Ronald Bronstein, is even structured like an ’80s movie that builds up to the big showdown, be it a ski race, a car-washing competition or a frat house decathlon à la “Revenge of the Nerds.” The catch is that Marty — not Endo — may be the bully who deserves to lose. How loudly are we willing to cheer for a callow guy who thinks of WWII as an opportunity for trash talk, boasting he’ll “drop a third bomb” on Endo’s fans? (In fairness, Tokyo promotes their rematch with a poster of Marty that looks uncomfortably close to antisemitic Nazi propaganda, a pointed choice by Safdie and the production designer Jack Fisk.)

Marty is convinced he’s a self-made success who doesn’t need anyone’s help; the people we see him squeeze and squash would disagree. He’s similar to Adam Sandler’s rapacious jeweler in “Uncut Gems,” except that scoundrel contained his damage to the Diamond District and people as shady as him. Safdie sends Marty out to bedevil the world, shipping him to Paris where he gets snippy with a maître d’ who doesn’t speak English and then to Cairo where he steals a chunk of the Great Pyramids.

Listening to a Japanese newsreel describe him as a villain referred to only as “the American,” you realize that “Marty Supreme” is more than a caricature of Reisman. It’s a biography of our national ego, with Marty brashly lecturing the British head of the International Table Tennis Assn. that a champion from the United States would boost the sport’s global reputation. After the commissioner makes this conceited Yank grovel, Marty simply replies: “It’s every man for himself where I come from.”

Like Marty, Chalamet was raised in New York City, and since he arrived on the scene, there’s never been a doubt he’ll win an Oscar. The only question is, when? To Chalamet’s credit, he’s doing it the hard way, avoiding sentimental pictures for pricklier roles about his own naked ambitions. For “A Complete Unknown,” he taught himself to play guitar like Bob Dylan while revealing that the bard was a rat, and in the even-better “Dune: Part Two,” played a naif radicalized into a galaxy-destroying messiah.

Here, Chalamet again fuses his personal drive into his performance, claiming that he spent seven years training to play ping-pong like Reisman, and unlike Tom Hanks in “Gump,” he’s doing his own stunts. Voters seem content to let the young talent dangle, trusting that he’ll continue flogging himself to make more great pictures like this.

The movie’s moxie makes it impossible not to get caught up in Marty’s crusade. We’re giddy even when he’s miserable. Performing with the Harlem Globetrotters in some of the most war-scarred, joy-desperate corners of the planet, his own shame prevents him from appreciating how much he’s entertaining the crowd. When you weigh his selfish desires against any other character’s needs, Marty is as hollow as a ping-pong ball. It really is all about his balls. Their embossing reads: “Marty Supreme — Made in America.”

Cynthia Erivo’s aggressively feathered Balenciaga at the “Wicked: For Good” New York premiere. Alexander Skarsgård’s Ludovic de Saint Sernin halter top and snug leather pants at the London premiere of the BDSM dramedy “Pillion.” Jacob Elordi’s Celine suit — in monster green, no less — at the Newport Beach Film Festival as the actor promoted “Frankenstein.”

If these recent outings haven’t convinced you that Hollywood is in its method dressing era, well, where in the Law Roach have you been?

From left: “Pillion’s” Alexander Skarsgård, “Marty Supreme’s” Timothée Chalamet and “Frankenstein’s” Jacob Elordi.

(Photos by Getty Images)

For those not familiar, method dressing is when stars wear looks on a press tour inspired by the movie they’re promoting. The practice has been around since the days of Old Hollywood, when actors like Audrey Hepburn, in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Sabrina,” melded their star personas with their characters. More recently, Geena Davis and Gwyneth Paltrow channeled their projects with their premiere fits in the 1990s, and the casts of 2015’s “Cinderella” and 2018’s “Black Panther” did the same.

But experts say the current method dressing trend — exemplified by Margot Robbie’s Andrew Mukamal-styled candy-colored juggernaut for “Barbie,” Zendaya’s dystopian desert and tennis chic in her Law Roach-styled appearances for “Dune 2” and “Challengers,” and the relentless, two-year press tour for the “Wicked” movies — is a different animal.

“Method dressing often becomes prologue to the film itself — it sets the tone and the context of the film and makes you curious about it,” says Ross Martin, president of marketing agency Known. “[But it’s also] a signal that the actor you like really is deeply invested in this film. They’re not just showing up, they’re actually embodying the character in the world of the film.”

‘Wicked’ stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

(Photos by Getty Images)

Martin cites Timothée Chalamet’s orange-hued campaign for “Marty Supreme” as a particularly skillful deployment of the trend. “If your favorite actor keeps showing up in the same way over and over again, that used to be rewarded,” he says. “Now there’s this pressure on Hollywood stars to define and then redefine themselves … [you] don’t want to see the same Chalamet that [you] just saw playing Bob Dylan. What you’re seeing is really modern marketing tools applied in very strategic ways to the traditional medium of films. It’s really necessary because 90% of the movies that are released don’t get the marketing dollars they need to launch. So this is innovation by necessity.”

Savvy stylists are also driving the red carpet cosplay. “Previously, stylists were responsible for making sure that stars appeared on trend,” says Raissa Bretaña, fashion historian and lecturer at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. “As they gained more prominence in the movie industry, it was less about making sure the stars were on trend and more about making sure the stars were setting the trends.”

Setting trends and creating meme-worthy, TikTok- and Instagram-friendly moments that often reach more eyeballs than the films themselves. An image of “a star wearing a beautiful gown isn’t enough anymore,” says Bretaña. “It is meant to engage with the algorithm. How do we get people talking more about this movie? How do we get more eyes on it by having a different manifestation of it in our real life?”

Indeed, during the “Challengers” press tour, online chatter peaked each time Zendaya stepped out in a new tennis-centric look. “I’m a storyteller, and the clothes are my words,” Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach recently said to Variety. As for his work with the actor on “Dune: Part Two” — including Thierry Mugler’s sartorial mic drop — Roach told Vogue the “looks served as an extension of the wardrobe from the movie; it was intentional and purposeful.”

Zendaya in outfits inspired by her movie “Challengers”

(Photos by Getty Images)

Pop culture commentator Blakely Thornton has been following method dressing closely, posting frequently on press tour fashions. “Maybe [Zendaya] walked so Cynthia and Ariana could run,” he says. “The stars are taking it upon themselves to be like, ‘I have to invest in myself in this capacity to get what I need out of it.’” It’s an important distinction, he notes, as film execs aren’t always footing the bill for stylists. “The studios are pretending that it’s not something they have to pay for when it’s something in the internet era you must require. Because if these people came out wearing a turtleneck to every premiere, you wouldn’t be happy.”

Enrique Melendez, the stylist behind Jenna Ortega’s viral red carpet looks for the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” press tour, believes his work was key in boosting interest for new demographics. “Jenna being of a newer generation, wearing pieces and looks celebrating the original film had a whole new wave of young people researching the references and Easter eggs with their parents who understood exactly what they meant.”

Still, you can’t guarantee virality: There’s a fine line between a “Spider-Man” triumph and a “Madame Web” tragedy. Some of it can be attributed to an actor’s commitment, says Martin, contrasting Chalamet’s enthusiastic campaign with Dakota Johnson’s reluctant “Madame Web” tour. It also depends on the film itself. Bretaña says method dressing tends to work best with sci-fi or fantasy projects because of the inherent drama in their costuming.

She’s excited by an upcoming period film, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” starring on-theme veterans Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. “I think ‘Wuthering Heights’ will be our litmus test to see if method dressing will spill over into historically inspired garments,” says Bretaña. “In the past, whenever actors promoted period films, they try to look as contemporary as possible in order to distance themselves.”

Actors actually looking like themselves on the red carpet? Groundbreaking.

Following a $1-billion-grossing, Oscar-winning smash could have left writer and director Jared Bush and director Byron Howard feeling like rabbits in the headlights, but they seem to have outfoxed the challenge. “Zootopia 2” has already stampeded past $1 billion to surpass its predecessor, and the awards nominations have just begun slithering in. But how did the sequel survive such high expectations, stay as socially relevant as the original and navigate the peril of too many cooks in the kitchen?

“Animation’s a team sport,” says Howard, referring to the sheer number of people who worked on the film over five years. “It’s 700 in the crew, but in this building, it’s about 1,000 and another 300 in Vancouver. So it’s everyone’s collective ideas, saying, ‘Here’s where we can do better.’ So everyone has skin in the game and they all want these movies to be great. It’s an emotional investment.”

The creative team screened “Zootopia 2” for all of Disney Animation multiple times in various stages of development. A feedback system enabled every employee to respond.

Bush says Disney regularly seeks internal reactions after screenings, “but we asked way more direct questions for this one, like at an audience preview. Then we shared that feedback, unfiltered, with the entire building. That allowed people to see that their feedback mattered because you could actually see ideas that came in [manifest] from screening to screening.”

Bush and Howard acknowledge that having that many collaborators keeps the inspiration flowing but also allows fragments of the colossal group brain to sneak into the film unnoticed. Even they aren’t sure where all the in-jokes are planted.

A “story jam” — reminiscent of a TV writers room — was just one of many avenues for collaboration in the making of “Zootopia 2.”

(Disney)

Like its predecessor, the sequel is packed with movie references and animal puns — “A Moose Bouche”; “Gnu Jersey” — and the directors are quick to spread the credit (or blame). “ ‘A Moose Bouche’ — we’ve gotten emails about that one,” says Howard. “Cory Loftis, our production designer, came up with it.”

There’s a “Star Wars” cantina bit, a soupçon of James Bond in the score at a fancy gala and dashes of Steven Spielberg in the camerawork. It’s easy to spot “Ratatouille” when an animal chef is revealed to have a rat under its hat, but Bush asserts there’s a second reference in that moment — the animal declaring “I knew it!” isn’t just any raccoon, but “Raccacoonie” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” That character is itself a “Ratatouille” reference (and, Bush points out, “EEAAO’s” Oscar-winning supporting actor Ke Huy Quan voices “Zootopia 2’s” lead snake, Gary). So it’s a reference coupled with another reference to another film’s reference to the first reference. Whew.

Those Easter eggs, including an extended callback to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” — the realization of which they credit to animator Louaye Moulayess, a “Shining” superfan — speak to a willingness to cater to audiences beyond kids. Presumably, most children attending “Zootopia 2” haven’t watched Kubrick’s film. That’s a shoutout to the grown-ups for bringing the kids and, hopefully, discussing the historical practice of redlining with them after the show.

Byron Howard, left, and Jared Bush.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The first “Zootopia” was not notable just for funny talking animals but also the fact that the funny animals were talking about bigotry and stereotyping. Perceptive viewers may have noticed a mammalian bias in the original — there were no reptiles to be found in its near-perfect society. It turns out they were discriminated against as a class and denied their rightful place as residents, as we learn in “Zootopia 2.” Bush said that concept fit right in with “continuing this discussion about how we as human beings have a hard time looking past each other’s differences.”

Howard says the diversity-as-strength theme plays out not just in grand terms but also in the dynamic between the two protagonists, Judy (a rabbit, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick (a fox, voiced by Jason Bateman): “Nick and Judy are such different, contrast[ing] characters that are really stronger [together] because of those differences, and that speaks to something we really value, which is differences between each other as a working pair,” he gestures to Bush and himself. “We continue to thrive in that way.”

Howard agrees with the comparison of him and Bush to conductors of a giant orchestra, listening for notes being played just right. He thinks of composer Michael Giacchino “onstage with those virtuosos at their respective instruments; we work with masters all around us, so we have a lot of trust in them.”

However, he admits with all those voices, “Writers have a tough time here because we scrutinize these movies and redo them over and over and over again. Jared is a great example of someone who thrives in this environment.”

Bush, explaining he came from the culture of TV sitcoms and all their constant revisions in writers rooms, says, “We have this amazing luxury of being able to rewrite and rethink and absorb these better ideas over years. It is an extreme luxury.

“There’s nothing else like this in Hollywood that I’ve seen — that level of deep collaboration and iteration. There’s no place I’m ever going to be that I will love as much as this.”

Welcome to Screen Gab, the newsletter for everyone who would rather reflect on the year in pop culture than look at their current bank statement.

Santa wasn’t the only one making lists this year. As the final days of the year come to a close, we’ve gathered several of our key year-end TV and film lists for 2025 in one handy place for easy browsing while you wait in return lines, prepare to board flights or zone out on the couch.

We also threw in some other recent lists, unbound to 2025 but still useful this time of year when our brains need all the help they can get to winnow down viewing choices.

Enjoy!

From left, Tessa Thompson in “Hedda”; Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in “The Roses”; Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton in “Sinners.”

(Photo illustration by Josep Prat Sorolla / For The Times; photos from Amazon Prime, Searchlight Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures )

The 10 best movies of 2025 — and where to find them: The best movies of 2025 include “Sinners,” “Hedda,” “One Battle After Another,” “Eddington” and “The Naked Gun,” according to our critic Amy Nicholson.

The 12 best needle drops of 2025: These songs made their scenes indelible, from classic rock and dance pop to old-timey blues and thrash. There’s even a former Beatle on here.

34 movies and shows to watch on a plane — or trapped at the airport — this holiday season: In addition to getting you where you want to go, those hours spent on a plane — or trapped at the airport — are a guilt-free opportunity to catch up on or revisit great movies and shows.

10 on-screen political thrillers that stood out in a year of upheaval and partisanship: At a time of political unrest, the political thriller on television and film is both a reflection of, and an escape from, turbulent times.

Ho-ho-rror for the holidays: 15 scary watches for the dead of winter: Ghost stories have long been a holiday tradition, so gather ‘round the electronic hearth and watch some (or all) of these.

Best of 2025: Television — from left, Anna Lambe in “North of North,” Ethan Hawke and Michael Hitchcock in “The Lowdown,” “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads.”

(Photo illustration by Josep Prat Sorolla / For The Times; photos by Netflix, FX and Warner Bros.)

The best TV shows of 2025: The TV series on this list delivered real surprises with new directions and original formats, while others just had good old-fashioned storytelling, according to our critic Robert Lloyd.

The 16 best documentaries of 2025: The documentary films and series that captured our attention this year feature famous people and ordinary people, as well as new ideas and perspectives.

The 12 unforgettable TV moments of 2025: Some of the year’s most memorable TV moments and episodes

The best reality TV of 2025: Scandals, competitions and breakups are par for the course on reality shows, but this year also brought some tender moments that made for must-see TV.

The 33 best comedy specials of 2025: Specials by Frankie Quiñones, Andrew Schulz, Jordan Jensen, Sebastian Maniscalco, Bill Burr, Atsuko Okatsuka and Gabriel Iglesias make our list.

15 must-watch British crime drama series: Whether with an old-fashioned one-case-per-episode or a more sprawling multistrand story, quaint or violent, historic or modern, the birthplace of Agatha Christie understands that we all need stories that make sense of seemingly senseless acts.

The 7 best Netflix holiday movies to watch, from a secret Santa con to a crime caper: “My Secret Santa” starring Alexandra Breckenridge is the latest holiday film to be released on the streamer, which has several new offerings and recent classics worth revisiting.