film

Elizabeth Holmes was once celebrated as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $4.5 billion. Today, the disgraced Theranos founder is serving a federal prison sentence for defrauding investors and owes hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution.

Suffice it to say, she has a complicated relationship with money.

That tension runs through “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s hit documentary about Holmes and her longtime partner, Billy Evans, an heir to a wealthy San Diego hotel family.

In the nearly three-hour, wildly unpredictable film, a reenactment staged by Fielder depicts Evans pushing for a share of the documentary’s profits, sparking a dispute with the filmmakers over whether paying their subjects would compromise the project’s integrity. Holmes, meanwhile, maintains that money has never been her primary motivation. As Fielder probes the couple’s finances, he struggles to determine how much Holmes knows about Evans’ dealings — and where their financial interests begin and end.

Here’s what “You Can See Everything” reveals about Holmes and Evans’ finances, and what it leaves unanswered. Warning: Major spoilers ahead.

Did Holmes and Evans get paid to participate in the documentary?

No. But for a time, compensation was on the table.

The film was financed by A24, which gave Fielder and Oppenheim unusual freedom to pursue the project without any deadline or obligation to turn what they captured into a finished film. As Fielder recalled during a Q&A following the film’s secret premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September, the studio told them that if nothing came of it, “you can just throw everything away.”

In one of the film’s pivotal sequences, Fielder stages a reenactment, based on his recollections, of a meeting with Evans, Holmes, Oppenheim and two A24 executives. Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for portraying Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout,” plays her again, while Christopher Abbott takes on the role of Evans. After Holmes leaves to check on the couple’s children, Evans raises the question of compensation.

“I do know that there is potential for this movie to also make a lot of money,” Evans says. “And I feel strongly that if this movie were to make money, that we should be entitled to some of it.”

Fielder objects, arguing that payment could cast doubt on the couple’s motives and suggest they had influence over the finished film. Evans insists that compensation is nonnegotiable.

According to Fielder, A24 ultimately agreed to a profit-sharing arrangement, though the documentary doesn’t disclose its terms.

Holmes works on a laptop at the rented beachfront home in Del Mar, Calif., where she lived with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two children before entering prison, in a scene from “You Can See Everything.”

(A24)

But shortly before entering prison, Holmes tells Fielder on camera, “Obviously I’m not making any money or having any economic interest in this whatsoever.” Fielder is left wondering whether she’s genuinely unaware of the deal Evans negotiated or merely pretending not to know.

The real Evans later acknowledges withholding some details from Holmes, explaining that she had enough on her mind.

In the end, a title card reveals that Evans decided to forgo compensation.

Is it unusual for documentary subjects to get paid?

Generally, yes — at least in documentaries that follow traditional journalistic standards.

Paying subjects can create conflicts of interest, raising questions about their motives and credibility. Those concerns are particularly acute with someone like Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors through an elaborate web of deception.

“The optics are terrible,” Fielder warns Evans.

Evans counters that documentary subjects have been paid before, citing reports of a lucrative Netflix deal involving Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Oppenheim dismisses the comparison, saying their series isn’t a conventional documentary.

The distinction isn’t always clear-cut. In 2019, competing documentaries about the disastrous Fyre Festival took different approaches to paying its disgraced organizer, Billy McFarland. The filmmakers behind Hulu’s “Fyre Fraud” acknowledged paying him for footage and other rights. But Chris Smith, director of Netflix’s “Fyre,” refused McFarland’s demand for payment, arguing that it would be unethical for him to profit after defrauding so many people.

Fielder says he considered abandoning the project rather than accepting Evans’ demands. Instead, he decided the negotiations might reveal something about how Holmes and Evans operate.

As Fielder later confides to Seyfried, “Either this is fully sincere and she actually has no clue about the deal Billy made, or she honestly might be the most manipulative person that’s ever lived.”

How much money does Holmes owe?

A lot.

In 2023, a federal judge ordered Holmes and former Theranos President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to pay more than $452 million in restitution to investors and companies defrauded by Theranos. The two are jointly responsible for the judgment, meaning the same losses cannot be collected twice. A federal appeals court upheld the order in 2025.

Holmes speaks at the Fortune Global Forum in 2015, when her blood-testing startup Theranos was valued at billions of dollars and she was celebrated as one of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Holmes has maintained that she has little money left. In a court appearance shown in the documentary, she insists, “I don’t have any money,” explaining she is deeply in debt from legal fees associated with her criminal case.

During Fielder’s prison visit, as reenacted in the film, she tells him, “I don’t have the option to care about money. I owe hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution. Every dollar I make, they take from me.”

Would any profits from the documentary have gone toward Holmes’ restitution?

Not necessarily.

Although Holmes and Evans have two children together and refer to each other as husband and wife, Holmes told People in 2025 that they were not legally married. Evans isn’t personally responsible for her restitution debt simply because they’re a couple.

The government can seek payment from assets belonging to Holmes, but the documentary doesn’t disclose who would have received money under the proposed profit-sharing deal or whether Holmes would have had any financial interest in it. So it’s unclear whether any proceeds could have gone toward her restitution.

The proposed profit-sharing arrangement could have been lucrative. “You Can See Everything” grossed $15.6 million in its opening weekend and more than $20 million in its first five days. Those figures represent ticket sales, not profits, but illustrate the potential value of such an arrangement. And with the film still expanding into more theaters and generating strong buzz, its box-office haul is poised to grow further.

How are Holmes and Evans supporting themselves?

The documentary doesn’t fully answer that question either.

Before Holmes entered prison, the couple lived with their two children — son William, now 5, and daughter Invicta, 3 — in a luxurious rented home near the beach in Del Mar, north of San Diego. Evans comes from a wealthy family whose hotel business includes the Bahia Resort Hotel, the Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa and the Lodge at Torrey Pines. But in an Oct. 1 statement, Evans Hotels said he is neither an employee nor a shareholder in the company.

In the film, Fielder asks Evans whether Holmes might have been attracted to his family’s money. Evans grows visibly uncomfortable and shuts down the conversation when Fielder presses him about the extent of the family’s wealth.

Evans also has a biotech start-up, Haemanthus, which is developing laser-based technology to analyze biological samples, an undertaking with echoes of Holmes’ failed blood-testing company. According to Wired, the company has reported raising as much as $20 million in funding but has yet to release a product.

How much Evans personally earns from the venture — or whether his family helps support the couple — remains unclear.

In a later scene, Seyfried asks Evans who’s bringing in money while Holmes is in prison. He says she earns 30 cents an hour at the federal prison in Texas where she’s serving her sentence.

And what about his own income?

“I’ve got my own business,” he replies.

Early in “Queen at Sea,” there’s a sex scene. It’s brief and shows little, but the fleeting moment will inform everything that happens in writer-director Lance Hammer’s crushing second feature. This movie about consent and dementia — and ultimately, far much more — hinges on a questionable act that provokes a hasty emotional reaction. In the process, a family tries to come to the aid of its ailing matriarch, presented with only a series of unappealing options, each more unbearable than the next.

Juliette Binoche is beautifully fragile as Amanda, the dutiful daughter of Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who herself has been married to second husband Martin (Tom Courtenay) for 18 years. Amanda and her teenage daughter Sarah (Florence Hunt) visit the older couple’s London home one morning, shocked to open their bedroom door to find Martin on top of Leslie, thrusting away. But embarrassment quickly gives way to anger for Amanda: Leslie has advanced dementia and her doctor has told Martin that he can no longer have sex with Leslie because she doesn’t possess the mental acuteness to give consent. Furious at her stepfather, Amanda phones the police, hoping the authorities can put a scare into him.

But Amanda’s call has unintended consequences. When the police arrive, they arrest Martin, advising Amanda that she take her mother for a “forensic medical examination” — or, as Amanda puts it bluntly, a rape exam — to ensure she has not been injured. Amanda’s rage quickly morphs into panic because she knows how dependent the childlike Leslie is on her husband, who functions as her primary caregiver. She just wanted to teach Martin a lesson, but soon, social services intervene to determine whether the elderly couple has to be separated for Leslie’s safety.

Even before the police becomes involved, Hammer hints at his film’s tense tenor. You can feel it in how he shoots the house’s severely winding stairs — dangerous for Leslie and Martin to navigate — from occasionally vertiginous angles. The camera rarely moves as we spy charged conversations from a distance, sometimes from another room or from a floor above the characters. We’re intruders, stealing glimpses of a private domestic drama not meant for our prying eyes.

Unlike previous terrific pictures about dementia (such as “The Father”), “Queen at Sea” is less about the crippling condition than it is the fulcrum for a troubling exploration of several topics: mortality, love, parenting and the grim futility of everything. Similarly, although Hammer takes seriously the question of consent, he widens his narrative’s lens to provide a thoughtful, complex view of the issue. Martin adores his wife, insisting that their doctor is wrong and that Leslie, in fact, does understand her sexual urges. To back up his argument, he informs Amanda that, frequently, it is her mother who initiates sex. But is that because dementia has robbed Leslie of the ability to modulate her urges? “Queen at Sea” offers no answers, leaving the viewer as uncertain as Amanda, who wants to protect her mother but cannot deny how drawn Leslie is to her kindly husband.

At the film’s heart is a terribly relatable family conflict in which each character assumes that they know best. Binoche plays Amanda with a surfeit of tenderness for her mother, who goes from being lucid to infantile without warning. (Calder-Marshall poignantly channels the silent helplessness that consumes those with dementia, making her an unstable chemical compound always on the verge of explosion.)

Just as fiercely loyal as Amanda, Martin vainly advocates for his beloved, knowing that Amanda has power of attorney and, therefore, the upper hand. Courtenay gives a marvelous performance suffused with simmering rage: To Martin’s way of thinking, it was Amanda’s foolish overreaction to seeing them have sex that led to all these problems. That feeling of betrayal resides on his face for the rest of “Queen at Sea,” even as he and his stepdaughter negotiate a wobbly truce concerning Leslie’s future, which includes an unexpectedly fraught trip to a care home.

Hammer has not made a film since 2008’s “Ballast,” another spare drama about brittle lives. Eighteen years later, his formal command remains formidable. Eventually, Hammer starts cutting away from the central narrative to focus on Sarah as she hangs out with friends and spends time with a cute boy, James (Cody Molko). At first, these carefree interludes seem to be a welcome respite from “Queen at Sea’s” choking anxiety. But as Leslie’s situation grows increasingly complicated, Sarah’s emerging love story proves to be a bittersweet, ironic counterpoint. Maybe Sarah will find love and great sex — like her parents and grandparents before her — but the shadow of despair that has descended on her family will someday come for her. She’s still too young to know how impossible aging can be.

If you’re a certain age — say, the generation most excited by the prospect of a “Rocky” origin story — you probably have spent a good few decades watching people imitate Sylvester Stallone. You might be able to pull it off yourself. Start with the gravely voice that rumbles and mumbles, make your eyes as heavy-lidded as possible, add a swaggering shoulder roll and then just brood, baby, brood.

Anthony Ippolito has the moves down pat in “I Play Rocky,” Peter Farrelly’s endearing crowd-pleaser, an underdog story about making the underdog movie that went on to win the Oscar for best picture in 1977. The title comes from Stallone’s repeated insistence that he portray the working-class fighter in the film that he wrote for himself. The studio wanted a star — Ryan O’Neal or Burt Reynolds, among others — and offered Stallone $360,000 for the script if he would just walk away. Stallone refused, even though his bank account was down to $106.

“I told my wife that I’d rather bury it in the backyard and let the caterpillars play Rocky,” he said shortly before the movie opened. “I would have hated myself for selling out, the way we hate most people for selling out.”

And that’s why the new film, written by Peter Gamble, has Ippolito say the title so many times that, by the end, you feel like you’ve gone a full 15 rounds with Apollo Creed and been pummeled into submission.

But as you’re watching this breezy movie as it slipstreams its way down memory lane, it starts to feel like Ippolito really is playing Rocky and not Stallone. The difference might be negligible, since “Rocky” was, in many respects, Stallone’s story: a sensitive palooka struggling for the chance to prove himself and earn a measure of self-respect, all the while supported by a woman who believes in his dream.

But the charming, softie Stallone we see in “I Am Rocky” seems like a character from mythology, a Hercules lacking the prickly complexities that Stallone himself detailed in his recent memoir. His tumultuous relationship with his father, Frank (Matt Dillon), is given little attention. Watching this movie, you might be reminded of the quote from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And while the facts of this oft-told story are, for the most part, accurate, “I Am Rocky” feels too neat, a movie that relies on our love for “Rocky,” the movie and the character.

The film’s first half wastes no time laying the groundwork. It’s 1974 and Stallone is living in squalor in a New York flophouse. When he can’t even afford that, he takes to the streets, sleeping in an alley and adopting a stray bullmastiff that he names Butkus, the same dog that would go on to appear with him in “Rocky.” Desperate for cash, he accepts a part in a softcore porn flick. He eventually takes a job at a movie theater, where he meets Sasha (a lovely AnnaSophia Robb), who, growing weary of his frustrations and their precarious finances, tells him he should write a screenplay with a meaty part for himself.

Stallone soon does just that, cranking out “Rocky” in three and a half days after watching longshot Chuck Wepner (a.k.a. “The Bayonne Bleeder”) go 15 rounds against Muhammad Ali in a heavyweight championship fight. Producers Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) love the script and take it to brusque studio exec Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts, gloriously cantankerous playing a composite character), who tells them to give Stallone $50,000 for the screenplay and send this complete unknown on his way. Stallone has a three-word rejoinder.

You don’t need a spoiler alert to know that he indeed does play Rocky, and the second half of the film re-creates the movie’s production, which, because of the shoestring budget, was arduous. The tight schedule forced Stallone to work even when he was sick and hurt. If he didn’t, he feared he’d be fired because the studio still wasn’t thrilled with him playing the lead.

There’s something for everyone in this section. Film nerds will glory in watching Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown (Michael Fuchs) sprinting up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, smoothly following Stallone, creating “Rocky’s” most famous scene with a fluidity that revolutionized moviemaking. Downtrodden directors will appreciate Jay Duplass’ knowing portrayal of John G. Avildsen, charged with making “Rocky” as quickly and frugally as possible. Avildsen brought the movie in on time and went on to win the Oscar for directing.

And longtime fans will appreciate that the film plays all the hits: the bare-knuckle beef pounding, the training sequences, the intimate ice rink scene with Talia Shire (Kiki Seto). Hollywood loves to celebrate its own scrappy mythmaking. (Ippolito’s biggest part prior to this was playing Al Pacino in “The Offer,” a limited series about the making of “The Godfather.”) Sure, it’s sentimental. And maybe you’d be better off just staying home and revisiting “Rocky.” What can I say? I put Bill Conti’s soaring “Gonna Fly Now” on repeat during the drive home. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

Tinto Brass, the avant-garde Italian director best known for 1970s erotic films “Caligula” and “Salon Kitty,” died Wednesday in Rome. He was 93.

His wife, Caterina Varzi, and children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass confirmed the director’s death to Italian press agency Ansa.

Brass was born in Milan in 1933 but grew up in Venice. The son of a criminal lawyer, Brass graduated from the University of Padua in Northern Italy with a law degree in 1957, but he never felt the vocation suited him and instead packed his bags for Paris, where he followed his passion for cinema. In Paris, he worked as an editor and assistant at the Cinémathèque Française, an acclaimed film archive that doubled as a school for cinephiles founded by Henri Langlois and three friends.

When he returned to Italy, Brass worked under prominent Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini as an editor and assistant director.

In 1963, Brass made his feature directorial debut with “Who Works Is Lost,” a day in the life of an unmoored designer in Venice who questions the societal expectation of labor, which screened at the 1963 Venice International Film Festival. The decade cemented Brass’ reputation as an experimental director with a rebellious spirit, and in the late ’60s, he was approached by Warner Bros to direct the film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel, “A Clockwork Orange.” The deal fell through due to scheduling conflicts, but Brass would go on to work with the film’s title star, Malcolm McDowell, in his most famous film, “Caligula,” which was written by Gore Vidal and produced by Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione.

McDowell starred as the sexually deviant emperor, alongside Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. Brass was fired from the project and nixed as an editor over creative clashes with Guccione, who wanted to amp up the raunchy scenes, Penthouse-style. After Guccione took control, he added pornographic scenes to the final cut, which prompted Brass and Vidal to sue to have their names scrubbed from the film. Naturally, the movie has gained a cult following since its release more than four decades ago.

Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren starred in 1979’s “Caligula,” directed by Tinto Brass.

(Drafthouse Films)

While Brass decried Guccione’s hardcore take on sex in cinema, he celebrated eroticism and pivoted to the genre with “Salon Kitty” (1976), “The Key” (1983), “Paprika” (1991), “All Ladies Do It” (1992), “Frivolous Lola” (1998) and “Cheeky” (2000).

“I made so many erotic films because I believed eroticism to be a fundamental key to human expression and, above all, the key to portraying women,” he told La Repubblica newspaper. “That was what interested me most.”

Brass also directed the Western “Yankee” (1966) and the murder mystery “I Am What I Am” (1967).

Brass is survived by his wife, Caterina, whom he married in 2017, and his children.

Matt Damon revealed that his wife of more than 20 years, Luciana “Lucy” Barroso, suffered a brain aneurysm.

The revelation came during an interview with GQ, when “The Odyssey” star opened up about a time he felt a tinge of FOMO watching the Oscars from bed with his wife and then-newborn baby.

It was the 79th Academy Awards in 2007 and Martin Scorsese was nominated for best director for “The Departed,” which was also up for best picture. Damon portrays a corrupt police officer in the film.

“Lucy and I were laying in bed watching it and so nervous for Marty,” he told the magazine. “And then when he won, I was jumping up and down in the bedroom and I remember being really excited. And then the next category was best picture, and The Departed won. And I realized in that moment I hadn’t even considered that that could happen. And I turned to Lucy and I was like, ‘S—, we should be there!’ … I totally blew it.”

After the experience, Damon said his wife wouldn’t let him miss out again, even in the wake of serious medical trauma.

In 2024, “Oppenheimer” was up for best picture. In the movie, Damon plays Col. Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. The film won the award, and this time, Barroso had a surprise in store, an Oscar-worthy dress ready to go for the big night even though she’d just had surgery after suffering a brain aneurysm.

“She’s totally fine, thank God,” he said. “But [she] had this brain surgery the week before the Oscars. But it was the first night she felt good enough to get up and had her energy back. And she surprised me and got a dress and we went out to the after-party, because she remembered that the last time it happened, I didn’t do it. And she was like, ‘This time we’re going out.’ And it was pretty f— heroic of her to do that and really meaningful.”

The Argentine-born Barroso and Damon tied the knot back in 2005. They had met two years earlier, and during a 2011 appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Damon said that meeting his wife was a complete stroke of luck.

He was filming “Stuck on You” in 2002, with the Farrelly brothers at the helm. “We were supposed to shoot in Hawaii, and then the movie got moved to Miami . . . and I’d never really hung out in Miami,” he told DeGeneres, adding that in the middle of the shoot a couple of the guys from the crew invited him to grab a beer at a local watering hole. “They kind of dragged me along, and we ended up at a bar where my wife was the bartender, and I literally saw her across a crowded room, literally.

“And eight years and four kids later, that’s my life,” he joked. “I don’t know how else our paths would have crossed if that didn’t happen.”

Film student Angela Henderson was collecting her thoughts, resting on the patio of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts on a recent sunny afternoon while listening to music on her headphones as she stared into the sky. Henderson was taking a short break after applying for dozens of Hollywood jobs.

The 22-year-old cinema and media studies student graduates in December, and she’s admittedly “a little freaked out” by what awaits her.

“What if one day, I am one of those people that ends up losing a job?” Henderson said.

She isn’t wrong to wonder.

Partly fueled by media consolidation, waves of layoffs have swept across the industry, bringing job cuts to Netflix, Walt Disney and Warner Bros., recently acquired by Paramount-Skydance.

Productions keep leaving the state and artificial intelligence and vertical video are reshaping what gets made and who makes it.

Yet aspiring actors, screenwriters and directors, many of them film school students like Henderson, are still making the pilgrimage to Los Angeles. The Times spoke with some of these students about how they plan to navigate today’s Hollywood. Most are clear-eyed about the odds, and none of them are planning to quit.

“Some of us can see a lot of doom and gloom,” said Miranda Banks, a professor of film, television and media studies at Loyola Marymount University. “But this generation has their eye on the power of human creativity in a way that I’m not sure any of us in other generations have been so attuned to.”

She thinks many of her students have a good chance at making it if they are “savvy and strategic” about where the industry is headed.

“We’ve had a lot of unprecedented years, a lot of years with strange things that have impacted the industry and made things particularly challenging,” Banks added. “That has happened before. It will continue to happen.”

Gianna Jordano, a freshman film and television production major at Loyola Marymount University, is photographed on a film stage inside the Wil and Mary Jane Von der Ahe Communication Arts Building, which houses LMU’s School of Film and Television.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Gianna Jordano, Loyola Marymount University, 19

When Gianna Jordano first applied to film schools, she said she knew the industry was in a bit of a “slump stage.” With fewer movies being made, the impact of AI and an overall lack of jobs, the Huntington Beach native said she was nervous about pursuing a career in the film business.

But after seeing movies like “Primetime,” “The Odyssey” and “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in theaters this year, Jordano is more inspired than ever.

“My friends and I’ve all been watching all of these new movies, and we’re saying, ‘This is what we want to do. This is what I want to pursue in the future and be able to achieve,’” said the film and TV production major. “I feel less nervous now.”

After graduation, she plans to work her way up to directing — even if that means taking other jobs such as teaching and working in a restaurant to achieve her dream.

“The more open-minded you are, and the more willing you are to work, the easier it is to find a job, even if you’re maybe not always on the best set or doing the job that you want to do,” Jordano said.

Teddy Abularach, left, and Mitch Linebaugh, both 18, visit the Herbert E. Farmer Motion Picture Technology Collection at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Teddy Abularach and Mitch Linebaugh, USC, 18

Freshman screenwriting majors Teddy Abularach and Mitch Linebaugh had recently moved to L.A. from New York City and Des Moines, respectively, to pursue careers in screenwriting.

Despite shared concerns about landing jobs after graduation, both are determined to succeed in the business.
.

“We’re just gonna have to work that much harder to get a job. I’m already preparing myself for a brutal postgrad life,” Abularach said. “I wouldn’t be happy if I were in another job. … Even if there’s a small chance for me to succeed and be able to pay the bills and do something that I love, it’s worth it.”

They aren’t blind to the challenges of being a screenwriter.

But Linebaugh said he worries that “everything is just going to become so uniform,” as the industry seems to lean too heavily on algorithms and audiences’ preferences.

“I don’t think people in this industry will let that happen — everyone from the writers to even the executives,” Linebaugh said. “I know the stereotype is that they like to keep their jobs, but I remain hopeful that they want to make good movies too.”

The two 18-year-olds moved to the city with every intention of staying, even as the industry’s local footprint hollows out.

Linebaugh said he’s going to give screenwriting his all, and if it doesn’t work out, he will consider graduate school or entertainment law.

Abularach said there’s no “plan B outside of entertainment.”

He’s already preparing for the life.

“I still can’t get the stereotype out of my head of the L.A. writer who does all the things in L.A., like taking pitch meetings, getting coffee and being in writers’ rooms,” added Abularach.

UCLA film student Tomas Carrasco, center, has makeup applied by UCLA student Song Diqiong, right, before performing in his short film, “D-Facer, Reality Break,” on the set inside Melnitz Hall on the UCLA campus. He wrote, produced, starred in and directed his short film.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Tomas Carrasco, UCLA, 25

In a hallway lined with movie posters in UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, Tomas Carrasco was in the middle of preparing to shoot his senior capstone film: a surreal horror comedy. The senior, who’s on the director’s track of UCLA’s film and television program, said he isn’t “afraid necessarily about where the industry’s heading because there’s always going to be space for artists.”

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Carrasco was always fascinated by moviemaking. His father worked as a soap opera editor and would sometimes bring him to set, where he learned to love the “feeling of being around people making stuff.”

He started his film education at Santa Monica College, where he took every film class offered. Now, he has his sights set on production design.

For all his artistic leanings, he said he’s well aware that movies are products that need to make money. Because of that, he sees more of the industry turning toward technology instead of taking art-centered risks.

“I see the mergers that are happening and all the AI stuff sucks. I don’t like it,” Carrasco said. “But I still have to come into class every day and do my homework. I’m thinking about where the industry is heading, but it takes up as much space as a movie idea.”

As he prepares for an uncertain future, Carrasco plans to keep working at his family’s Northridge cafe, Mate Conmigo, where he can pursue his creative ambitions while maintaining a stable job.

“I do want it as a career path, and I don’t want to be naive,” he said. “But you have to kind of be naive. You have to be delusional about wanting to have a career in the arts.”

USC film student Angela Henderson, 22, stands next to a photo of director Orson Welles at the Herbert E. Farmer Motion Picture Technology Collection at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Angela Henderson, USC, 22

For Henderson, part of the job-induced anxiety is simple math.

“Unfortunately, it’s so hard to be able to separate myself from it,” she said. “There are hundreds of people in film programs here who all want to have the same jobs and careers.”

Raised in Eagle Rock by two musician parents, Henderson always had the world of entertainment within reach. At 10, she took up acting and started doing theater and commercials. She began college at UC Berkeley, where she realized she didn’t want to be only in front of the camera, but also to study the medium from behind it. She transferred to USC with dreams of following filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, who got their start in writing and directing their own projects.

If it takes a while for Henderson to break into the industry, so be it. She said she’s open to any kind of job, including assistant work and food service.

But Henderson said her generation of filmmakers doesn’t feel discouraged, so much as eager to incite change. They’re largely tired, she said, of watching Hollywood “recycle the same material over and over again,” and want to bring new stories to the table.

“It does feel like we’re on the verge of something new. There’s a breakthrough that’s about to happen,” Henderson said. “With all the verticals happening, and the AI slop stuff happening on social media, there’s also like this huge renaissance in indie movies … there’s still this hope that there’s something new that’s going to come.”

Audiences who saw Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s hit documentary “You Can See Everything” may have left the theater with a few questions about Elizabeth Holmes and her longtime partner Billy Evans. While the former Theranos CEO is serving time in a Texas federal prison, Evans is active on X and fielding burning questions inspired by the documentary.

If you’ve haven’t yet seen the film, spoilers ahead.

Evans, 34, comes from a wealthy family who owns a luxury resort in San Diego. He and Holmes have two children, a 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, and while Holmes serves an 11-year prison sentence, Evans is raising their kids, pursuing a new biotech venture and running the couple’s X accounts.

In “You Can See Everything,” Evans bares it all for the cameras, revealing everything from his nude body in the shower to his intense personality, among other questionable traits that have been widely discussed since the film hit theaters last month.

On Monday afternoon, he participated in an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything), and fans of the film flooded the comments.

Holmes’ parents, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV (a former vice president at Enron’s Clean Energy Solutions Group) and Noel Anne Holmes (née Daoust), both appear in the film, but as Fielder attempts to interview Holmes’ father, Evans becomes increasingly agitated.

On X, @kalmiavtuber asks, “My biggest question is, Billy, why did you stop Nathan from speaking to Liz’s father? Both Nathan and the audience saw it as integral to the documentary to truly ‘see everything.’ It felt like a missed opportunity that could have continued to give Liz more light.”

Evans replied, “She was going to prison. We had 3 days [together] at the time. I wanted to spend that time together. He interviewed her parents after she went in. They chose not to include that in the film. I didn’t control the edit. If there was something the directors wanted from them they had multiple opportunities to get it.”

One question popped up again and again, in various iterations: “Why did you keep sniffing throughout the documentary?”

And according to Evans, it wasn’t drug-induced sinus issues but, rather, germ- and Texas-induced. He said being a single dad to two toddlers makes him sick “approx 75% of days.” And, “Allergies in Austin TX are no joke. I take Claritin daily. Much less sniffling.”

And as for the blood testing device that Holmes spread out onto the kitchen table — the one that Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz said was not the same device that sent Holmes to prison but, rather, a future version of the Theranos product that was never used and never completed — @insistent_dw asked, “If the Theranos machine really worked as Liz said it did, why did it have to be dug out of storage containers in multiple pieces? I’d expect something like that to be locked in a safe and protected if it’s the prized machine behind a once billion dollar company.”

Evans replied, “Fair question. Theranos had been shut down for years, so naturally the hardware was in storage. We deliberately showed a disassembled device to show its internal components, not because that was all that remained. To my knowledge, 16 complete, functioning devices still exist. And Liz wasn’t reading a script. She was reading directly from the trial transcript. The litigation was still ongoing when we filmed.”

Farther down into the thread, one X user asks, “Have you ever told a lie?” To which Evans replies, “Yes.”

And @alexandraandnyc asked Evans to dispel one misconception from the film: “That I somehow control Liz,” Evans replied. “Anyone who actually knows her would find that idea hilarious.”

“She’s fiercely independent, strongwilled, and my best friend. We are partners in every sense. We challenge each other, disagree, and face the world together. Her closest friends are also some of my closest friends. If I ever mistreated her, they’d have my head.”

While it may have surprised audiences, “You Can See Everything,” landed an R-rating for its graphic nudity. One scene in particular features a full-frontal of Evans, and the dad of two has since said that he wasn’t thrilled with the shower scene making it into the film. When X users pressed him on allowing the cameras into the room, he pointed to a People article that featured anonymous sources saying Evans felt exploited and thought the scene would be kept PG.

“Trust the sources,” he said, alongside a link to the story.

Oppenheim, however, told Vulture last month that Evans seemed to initiate the scene: “It seems like he really had something he wanted to show to us and to the world.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday called for a significant expansion of the state’s film and TV tax incentives in the face of mounting evidence that producers are fleeing California in search of cheaper locales.

Newsom said in a statement Monday that he favors expanding California’s current Film and Television Tax Credit Program from $750 million to at least $1 billion annually.

Notably, Newsom’s proposal would include credits for actors and other above-the-line talent and extend the tax credit through 2040, according to the statement. That would make California’s program more competitive with those of other states such as Georgia and New York that allow tax credits to offset the cost of actors’ salaries.

If approved by the state Legislature, the credit would be the country’s largest capped film and TV tax credit, Newsom’s office said.

“We’re the capital of entertainment and we’re going to keep it here,” Newsom said in the statement. “Through this expansion, we will maintain the momentum and success of our historic expansion last year.”

Newsom’s announcement comes as the outgoing California governor and possible presidential candidate is looking to burnish his image as a champion of Hollywood as the state is increasingly losing production to other hubs in the U.S. and abroad, where tax incentives are higher and production costs lower.

The proposal puts pressure on fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra, who is widely expected to be California’s next governor, to take up the mantle of helping Hollywood at a time when the state faces rising financial pressures.

Newsom expanded the program last year, when the annual credit was raised from $330 million to $750 million through 2030. Since then, the credit has generated more than $8 billion in direct production spending and over 43,000 jobs, according to the governor’s office.

Newsom also recently signed California’s first stand-alone postproduction credit to bring back jobs for the industry’s editors, sound mixers, composers and visual effects artists.

With a budget of $10 million, the program will allow a 35% to 50% credit on qualified expenses related specifically to postproduction work done in California, even for productions that don’t shoot in the state.

Despite the expanded incentives, local film and TV production in the Los Angeles area continues on a downward trend.

On-location shoot days in the Los Angeles area fell nearly 5% between July and September from the same period a year earlier, and were 29% below the five-year average, according to FilmLA, the nonprofit group that handles film permits for city and county.

Newsom said the expanded credits would address some of California’s limitations.

For example, the new incentives would allow companies that commit to shooting two different productions in California to get a 5% boost in credits. Independent productions would be eligible for $100 million in annual funding, up from $26 million.

Steve Kang, president and chief film liaison for the city’s Board of Public Works, welcomed the proposed enhancements.

“This is a huge win because the current expanded program is helpful, but there were a lot of exceptions and caveats, which limited its full potential,” Kang said.

Others welcomed Newsom’s proposal as “a good start,” but said more was needed to keep the industry in Southern California.

Many productions that shoot locally still face logistical and operational problems with permitting and specific shoot requirements, said Cale Thomas, policy legislative director for Stay in L.A., a grassroots coalition.

“We just need to make it cheaper and easier to shoot here,” Thomas said. “A multifaceted problem takes multifaceted solutions.”

Scott Budnick, a producer of the successful “The Hangover” franchise who lobbied for the state’s enhanced film tax credits last year, also praised Newsom’s proposal, but said the state needs to remove a cap on funding that has created significant hurdles for filmmakers.

“I feel very strongly that the biggest problem with the current credit is because we have a cap,” Budnick said. “It makes every piece of the credit 10 times harder.”

The effort in California comes after congressional leaders introduced the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act in September. The bill would establish a 20% federal tax credit on U.S. labor for eligible film and TV productions, including postproduction and visual effects work.

If the federal incentive passes, the hope is for U.S. productions to stack incentives and make the U.S. more attractive for major studio shoots. The federal incentive, however, also is likely to raise the competitive stakes for California as other states compete for Hollywood’s business.

“This is about protecting the future of an industry that has helped define California for generations,” Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) said in response to Newsom’s proposal. It would ensure “the next generation of creative workers and small business owners can raise their families right here at home,” he said.

Newsom has faced tense relations with Hollywood. Many in the industry remain angry with Newsom over his role in the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Newsom was instrumental in behind-the-scenes lobbying to get state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to abandon the court fight challenging Paramount-Skydance’s takeover of the legacy studio, which is expected to lead to widespread layoffs.

Newsom’s support for the deal came after Paramount threatened to move operations to Tennessee or Texas, placing more pressure on Bonta to come to an agreement and blunt efforts to lose California’s signature industry.

Michael Mann, the acclaimed filmmaker behind crime thrillers including “Heat” (1995) and “Collateral” (2004), accidentally shot himself in the leg Saturday at a Los Angeles gun range, suffering a minor injury.

“On Saturday, at a gun range, a weapon accidentally discharged while holstered, resulting in a superficial injury to film director Michael Mann,” his representative said in a statement Sunday. “He was treated and is being released.”

Mann, 83, was engaged in target practice at a sanctioned shooting range when the accident occurred. The director has been an experienced target shooter for decades, according to a person familiar with the circumstances, who described the injury as minor and subcutaneous.

The shooting occurred around 4 p.m. Saturday at the Range LA, according to TMZ, which first reported the incident. Police and paramedics responded, and Mann was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

Mann is known for his painstaking attention to detail and realistic depictions of gun violence, perhaps most famously in the elaborate bank robbery shootout in “Heat,” in which Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer’s heavily armed crew exchange gunfire with police on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. He is developing a sequel to the film, which is expected to begin shooting early next year.

Mann also helped define the look and feel of the influential 1980s television series “Miami Vice,” serving as executive producer before directing a 2006 film adaptation. His other credits include “Thief” (1981), “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992), “The Insider” (1999), which earned seven Oscar nominations, “Ali” (2001) and “Ferrari” (2023).

Classics like Halloween, The Omen and Nightmare on Elm Street are nowhere to be seen.

Everyone has their own opinion when it comes to the scariest film ever made. What we find terrifying depends on a whole host of factors, whether it’s the “found footage” format of The Blair Witch Project, the blood-soaked slashing of Nightmare on Elm Street, or the supernatural dread of The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Yet one film has been officially crowned the most frightening of them all, based on scientific evidence. The Science of Scare ranking of 2026 gauged people’s physiological reactions to horror films by monitoring their heart rate, heart rate variability and peak heart rate. Researchers put together a list of English-language horror films and screened them to 250 participants, recording their physical responses using heart monitors.

After gathering each film’s average heart rate increase, largest heart rate spike and heart rate drop, the figures were combined to produce a Science of Scare Score out of 100. This year’s top film achieved a score of 96. For context, Shrek holds a Scare Score of just 3, reports the Express.

However, it’s unlikely to be the film that immediately jumps to mind for most people when they think about the scariest movie of all time. Many will instinctively think of iconic classics such as The Evil Dead, The Omen, Halloween or Don’t Look Now, while others might lean towards more recent offerings like The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Paranormal Activity.

The scariest film of all time

This year’s winner, with a score of 96 out of 100, was the 2012 film Sinister. It pushed viewers’ average heart rate up by 34%. The supernatural horror film establishes its dark and menacing atmosphere from the outset, opening with old home video footage depicting a family of four standing beneath a tree with sacks over their heads and nooses around their necks. It goes on to follow the story of a true crime writer, played by Ethan Hawke, whose family relocates to a new house and uncovers a box of terrifying home movies in the attic. The film was directed by Scott Derrickson.

Séance horror Host came in second place with a score of 95, while Skinamarink claimed third with 91. The scariest new releases, meaning those that came out in 2026, were Undertone and Obsession, both of which scored just 63.

However, the biggest jump scare of all belonged to this year’s Resident Evil, which sent viewers’ heart rates soaring to 134 BPM — a staggering 70 BPM spike, the highest surge ever recorded in the project’s history. Despite this, the film failed to crack the overall top 50 scariest films.

What critics say about Sinister

Sinister may well be the most terrifying film ever made according to this experiment, yet it divided critics sharply. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, legendary film critic Roger Ebert described it as “an undeniably scary movie, with performances adding enough human interest to give depth to the basic building blocks of horror”.

Meanwhile, Mark Olsen, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said: “As the best horror stories so often do, Sinister makes clear that we are our own boogeymen, the worst monsters of all.”

Yet not everyone was won over. In the Toronto Star, Peter Howell claimed Sinister is “more stupid than scary” and “can’t even figure out who its real demon is”, while Michael O’Sullivan in the Washington Post wrote: “The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.”

The Science of Scare 2026 ranking

Here are the scariest films ever according to The Science of Scare 2026 study, with their “scare score” out of 100.

1. Sinister: 96

2. Host: 95

3. Skinamarink: 91

4. Insidious: 90

5. The Conjuring : 88

6. Hereditary: 81

7. Smile 2: 79

8. Smile: 78

9. The Exorcism of Emily Rose: 76

10=. Talk to Me: 75

10=. Hell House LLC: 75

BACK in 1988, this actor found fame as a child in one of the most terrifying horror films of the decade.

Fast forward 38 years, the movie star, who is now 45, looks completely unrecognisable – but can you guess who it is?

The star in question is Alex Vincent, who played Andy from Child’s Play, which was the first ever Chucky film.

Now all grown up, he looks a far cry from his horror movie days as a kid, as he promoted a recent fan event on Instagram.

The actor was just six years old when he starred in the terrifying movie about a doll that comes to life and goes on a killing spree.

Alex went on to star in all three of the Child’s Play films which ran until 1991.

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The film star then appeared in the 2013 film, Curse of Chucky, and six years later he starred in the TV show reboot.

These days Alex can often be found doing horror movie conventions, where he gets to meet fans of the famous franchise.

The original Child’s Play movie was released in 1988 and it went on to become a series with six sequels.

The plot centres around Chucky, a serial killer called the Lakeshore Strangler, who performs a voodoo ritual to transfer his soul into a toy doll.

Alex’s character Andy is relentlessly terrorised by Chucky throughout the Child’s Play franchise, with the doll framing him for his murders.

Speaking about being the main star in such a terrifying film at a very young age, the actor told Indiemacuser.com: “The content didn’t matter much to me, in terms of scaring me.

“I was a bright kid… And nothing about being on that set was scary.”

The former child star added: “It was an incredibly fun and exciting experience for me at six-years-old.

“I got to leave school for a couple months and go work with a super cool electrical puppet in Chicago and LA.”

However, despite being known for one of the most famous scary films ever made, Alex made a surprising revelation.

“I’m not the biggest horror fan!” the star admitted.

However, Alex added: “But I know a lot of horror icons personally, so I am familiar with their films.”

A screenwriter is suing director Alexander Payne, alleging that the Oscar winner rewrote his script “Frisco” to become “The Holdovers.”

Simon Stephenson, a screenwriter behind “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” and “Luca,” is accusing Payne of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in a California federal court. In court documents obtained by The Times, Stephenson alleges that he wrote “Frisco” based on his experiences as a pediatrician and uploaded it to the industry platform “The Black List,” where it was ranked the third-best unproduced screenplay in 2013.

The same year, the suit alleges agents for Stephenson sent the script to Payne, who declined the project. They sent it a second time in 2019, and Payne passed again, according to the civil complaint.

“But in 2022, he finally made Stephenson’s screenplay,” the lawsuit reads. “Under Payne’s direction, Stephenson’s children’s hospital became a boarding school, the cynical pediatrician became a cynical teacher, and the precocious patient became a precocious pupil. The film earned its credited screenwriter career-defining Academy Award and BAFTA nominations, and the Writers Guild Award for Original Screenplay. Unfortunately, that credited screenwriter was not Stephenson, and the film was not called Frisco. It was called The Holdovers.”

David Hemingson, the creator of ABC’s “Whiskey Cavalier” and a veteran television writer for shows including “Kitchen Confidential” and “How I Met Your Mother,” was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

“The Holdovers” is Hemingson’s first produced feature film.

Representatives for Payne, Hemingson and Focus Features did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, Payne told The Times that a pilot written by Hemingson, as well as the 1935 French film “Merlusse,” written and directed by Marcel Pagnol, served as inspiration for “The Holdovers.” Both were set at a boarding school. During a 2023 post-screening Q&A interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, Payne was asked how he came up with the idea for the script, and he said it had come to him a decade before.

“I had the idea for the movie for about 10 years, but didn’t have either the discipline to research it, or I hadn’t gotten around to it,” he said. “And out of the blue, about four or five years ago, I was sent a pilot, set in a prep school and a boarding school, and I called the writer and I said, ‘You’ve written a very fine pilot, which I don’t wish to direct, but would you consider taking on an idea I have that takes place in that same world?’ And he did, and this is what worked out.”

Hemingson has the sole screenwriting credit on the film. Before “The Holdovers,” Payne is credited with penning most of the scripts that became his acclaimed films. He won Academy Awards for the adapted screenplays of “Sideways” (written with Jim Taylor) and “The Descendants” (written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash), but he told The Times that he took a more supervisory role on “The Holdovers.”

Alexander Payne

(Frankie Alduino / For The Times)

“He would run two, three, four different scenarios by me, and I would put the kibosh on him until we finally said, ‘Yes, this one,’ ” Payne said in a 2023 interview.

In March 2024, Variety reported that Stephenson exchanged emails and calls with the Writers Guild of America’s senior director of credits Lesley Mackey, alleging he needed to discuss a “credits-related issue” on a high-profile film. In one email, Stephenson wrote, “the evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from frisco is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen.’”

About a month after the accusations made headlines, Hemingson won the 2024 Writers Guild Award for original screenplay for “The Holdovers.” In his acceptance speech, Hemingson said he’d been a “proud member of the Writers Guild for 28 years” and thanked his wife and sons “who supported me for the six grueling years it took to conceive of and write ‘The Holdovers’ and for it to go from from page to screen.” He also thanked the cast for bringing his characters to life and accepted the award in memory of his mother, and his father “who gave me my love of the written word and taught me the value of integrity.”

“I believe that in life, things often arrive right on time. It took 28 years of reflection and experience and ups and downs for me to be able to tell this deeply personal love story,” he said. “Took a brilliant cast and a brilliant director to bring it to life at this time when we’re all so in need of connection.”

At the 2024 Sarajevo Film Festival, Payne shot down allegations that he’d lifted major elements of the script from Stephenson’s “Frisco,” calling the accusation “the stupidest thing in the world.”

Ian McKellen is saying goodbye to his dear friend Patrick Stewart.

Stewart, the storied actor whose performances spanned comic book films, Shakespearean stage productions and sci-fi TV, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was 86. While tributes from former co-stars across the “X-Men” films and “Star Trek” franchise poured in, fans of Stewart were keeping a close eye out for McKellen’s remarks, as the two had a famously close friendship, often on full display with red-carpet smooches and pally interviews.

On Thursday, McKellen posted a tribute to Stewart.

“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end,” McKellen’s statement began. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”

Although the two had known each other since they were young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s, Stewart said he initially was too shy to approach McKellen, but was “impressed.” Stewart said the two had “X-Men” to thank for their close bond. On set, the two had trailers that were next door to each other, and with time to kill between filming, they would head next door and chat for hours.

“It was a delight for me to find that the enthusiasms and passions that I’d had all my life were shared by Ian,” the late actor said in a 2014 interview. When asked to write a hashtag that summed up their bromance, Stewart wrote #Aren’twelucky, and McKellen wrote #eternal.

In addition to playing rivals across multiple “X-Men” films, Patrick and McKellen starred together in “Waiting for Godot” and “No Man’s Land” on Broadway and London’s West End.

“We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions,” McKellen’s tribute continued. “My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in ‘Star Trek.’”

McKellen recalled saying, “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”

“Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes (‘X-Men’ of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.”

In 2014, Stewart admitted to Broadway.com that he was envious of McKellen for both his university education and his hair.

“Ian knows and he thinks I’m foolish to feel this way,” he said. “Ian went to Cambridge and my formal schooling ended when I was 15. I envy that, but I also envy your head of hair. If only because in the two plays you don’t wear a wig and yet you manage to make your hairstyle look completely different … I envy that whereas I have to stick on a wig.”

McKellen responded by telling Stewart that he was gorgeous with and without the wig.

In 2013, Stewart married longtime girlfriend Sunny Ozell in a Lake Tahoe ceremony that McKellen officiated.

“America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.”

McKellen and Stewart star together again in the forthcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” which hits theaters Dec. 18.

WHEN crusading journalist Chris Hansen told his guests to “have a seat” they really did need to sit down – because they were men who’d been caught discussing having sex with children.

His hit US TV show To Catch a Predator spawned hundreds of copycats across the globe, where online vigilante groups snare alleged paedophiles in similar stings.

Now Hansen is considering suing Robert Pattinson for the way the British actor has portrayed him in a controversial new movie called Primetime.

That’s because the Batman star’s Oscar-tipped film makes the reporter, who confronted potential child sex offenders in front of the cameras, the bad guy rather than the abusers his ground-breaking program exposed.

In the mid-2000s Hansen’s show To Catch a Predator worked with law enforcement and an online vigilante group to reveal the depraved men thinking of having sex with under 16s.

Nearly 200 men were arrested, including an agent for the Department of Homeland Security, a teacher and a firefighter.

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The NBC show ended in 2007 after a district attorney with an interest in teenage boys shot himself before Hansen could quiz him.

To many predator hunters Hansen is a hero.

But Batman star Pattinson depicts the 67-year-old journalist as an ego driven prima donna chiefly interested in ratings and getting To Catch a Predator onto prime time telly.

Emmy award winner Hansen, who is still bringing alleged child abusers to book on a different show, is angry about Primetime, which is in UK cinemas now.

He raged: “I think it’s an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators. 

“They turn something that is very positive, very challenging and not without risk into what is essentially a horror film.

“I guess it’s not surprising that a Hollywood studio would act in such an exploitative or predatory manner. 

“We’re talking about an industry that was led by perhaps one of the biggest predators to walk the planet, Harvey Weinstein.”

In 2004 when To Catch a Predator set its first trap, Hansen didn’t even know if any child abusers would fall into it.

Back then social media was still in its infancy, with Facebook only available to university students.

But an US online vigilante group called Perverted Justice realised that depraved men were using chat rooms on sites such as AOL and Yahoo to contact minors.

Hansen decided to link up with them to expose this danger. 

Perverted Justice used adult males and females who looked like children to set up profiles as under 15s in the chat rooms.

They then waited for the men to make the first move, with many of the digital deviants quickly sending explicit questions.

Perverted Justice’s decoys strung them along, hoping they would ask to visit them.

Rather than going to the ‘children’s’ homes, though, they were turning up at a suburban house filled with hidden cameras.

The decoy greeted them at the door, led them to the kitchen and made an excuse to leave the room.

At that point Hansen would walk in and ask them to “have a seat.”

He recalled: “In the first investigation, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We had partnered with Perverted Justice and I didn’t know if we were going to get anybody showing up. 

“Yet, there we were over two and a half days in Long Island and 17 guys surfaced, including a New York City firefighter.”

Even more potential sex offenders turned up for the next sting in the capital Washington DC.

One of them was rabbi David Kaye, who was later jailed for six and a half years for trying to solicit sex from a 13-year-old boy over the internet.

Wishing to make sure more of these men were brought to book, the NBC show teamed up with the police.

Cops in Harris County, Texas were waiting to arrest the men after Hansen confronted them in 2006.

This was dangerous work for all involved, because two of the alleged offenders were serving soldiers.

When one of the men did a runner he was tasered.

Hansen was praised in Congress for his work, with the show leading the House of Representatives to investigate the threat of online predators.

As To Catch a Predator’s ratings climbed and climbed, human rights lawyers started to question its ethics.

In many parts of the US it was an offence to attempt to entice a minor to have sex, but there were suggestions of entrapment. 

There were calls for catching criminals to be left to the professionals.

That’s exactly what Hansen’s show appeared to do when Perverted Justice realised that Texan prosecutor Bill Conradt was the man messaging someone pretending to be aged 13.

When Conradt wouldn’t go to the To Catch a Predator house in Murphy, Texas in November 2006 the police chief decided to go to him.

With Hansen’s TV crew following them, the armed officers smashed their way into his home.

But when they arrived Conradt shot himself dead.

The prosecutor’s relatives sued NBC, winning a £75million out of court settlement.

Charges against 23 other men in Murphy, Texas were dropped because the online chats had not taken place in the county.

To Catch a Predator was scrapped.

It is the build up to Conradt’s death that forms the tense finale to Primetime, which has been a hit at the US box office.

It depicts Hansen as desperate to snare the powerful district attorney at all costs.

Pattinson’s version of the veteran journalist sneers, snarls and shouts at his team.

Variety magazine described the actor’s portrait of Hansen “as a horror villain” and Hansen thinks it is “unhinged.”

Primetime shows little interest in the sex offenders and focuses more on the journalist’s alleged affair with a younger woman.

In 2011 the paparazzi caught the married father-of-two meeting TV news reporter Kristyn Caddell, who was 21 years his junior.

Hansen denied cheating on his wife Mary Joan, who divorced him seven years later.

He has talked about suing the film’s producers, which include Pattinson, but isn’t keen to get caught up in a legal case.

The actor defended his movie, commenting: “The fact that people are still discussing the ethics of it, of a 20-year-old TV show, it’s absolutely insane.” 

The reason the ethics of To Catch a Predator are being discussed so keenly is that predator hunting is even more relevant today than it was two decades ago.

According to the children’s charity the NSPCC over 9,000 child sex abuse offences in the UK a year “involved an online element.” 

Hansen continues to name and shame such offenders on an online TV channel called TruBlu.

It is estimated that 140 vigilante groups in the UK are also trying to snare paedophiles online.

Cambridge University academic Mark de Rond, who last year appeared in a documentary titled Predators about the impact of Hansen’s show, spent time working with these secretive organisations.

He questions the way that To Catch a Predator “commercialised” the “public humiliation” of the men the show caught.

But he defends the groups which are trying to expose online sexual offenders, telling The Sun: “Paedophilia is a crime, it’s kind of the lowest of the low and it’s the kind of crime that really almost any means can justify when you are trying to stop it.

”Because what can be more important to keep a kid safe?”

That, though, is not the perspective of Primetime.

Near the end of the film, Pattinson says to one of his doubters “your definition of bad and my definition of bad are vastly different.”

Many cinemagoers watching the movie are likely to think the same thing, but for different reasons.

Horror fans say the film based on a classic short story is one of the goriest they’ve ever seen

Another gruesome adaptation is now available for free.

The ‘brutal’ horror film is leaving viewers unsure whether or not they should laugh or cry. Either way it is leaving many audience members in tears.

It comes as the movie The Monkey has been made available on BBC iPlayer in time for Halloween. The film was written and directed for the screen by Oz Perkins, who also helmed the 2024 horror release Longlegs, which coincidentally is also keeping BBC viewers gripped this spooky season.

The Monkey is actually based on a short story written by acclaimed author Stephen King, the same writer behind original stories that served as inspiration for hit adaptations such as Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Long Walk, The Running Man and IT just to name a few.

Perkins actually features in the cast himself as Uncle Chip, alongside Downton Abbey and The Gentlemen star Theo James in a dual role as twins Bill and Hal. The stacked line-up also included Black Orphan’s Tatiana Maslany, Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood and Severance star Adam Scott.

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According to its synopsis, when twin brothers find a mysterious wind-up monkey, a series of outrageous deaths tears their family apart. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree, forcing the estranged siblings to confront the cursed toy.

Upon its original cinema release back in 2025, it mostly impressed critics, earning a respectable 77% score on website Rotten Tomatoes. One critic underlined the film’s central performance and shock value as they said: “A riotous hoot that’s delightfully wicked, especially thanks to a gloriously unhinged Theo James.”

Many fans were also just as impressed and many called out the gruesomeness of the film. One person posted online: “I can’t fully articulate why this is the best movie I’ve seen in a decade, but it just is.

“The movie combines the seriousness and light-heartedness of life and death. It shows how life has so much meaning and is simultaneously so meaningless. The movie leaves me feeling comforted in knowing that I’m not alone in wondering whether or not I should laugh or cry at it all.”

Another admitted: “My mouth was agape, and even more so after looking at how little the estimated budget was. This movie was probably one of the goriest movies I’ve seen, and if I’m honest the gore was a little over the top however that played into the comedy elements perfectly.”

Someone else added: “It reminded me very much of the Final Destination movies and that just made me love this movie even more. I don’t think there was a single moment of this movie I didn’t enjoy in either the comedy or horror aspects. Was definitely worth my time and money to go see. 10/10.”

The Monkey is streaming on BBC iPlayer.

The epic war drama is based on a true story and viewers have hailed it an ‘outstanding masterpiece’ that’s ‘as good as Saving Private Ryan’ – it’s leaving Netflix on November 5.

For most film fans when the subject of war films arises a handful of reliable titles dominate the conversation and establish the standard. Movies such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and The Hurt Locker have long been regarded as masterworks in the genre, with discussions inevitably returning to these films.

However, audiences are now claiming there’s another war movie by a legendary actor and director that rivals, if not surpasses, the Holy Trinity referenced above.

Viewers have just a few more days remaining to watch the ‘masterpiece’ war drama, though, as the film is departing the Netflix library on November 5.

Featuring an outstanding Bradley Cooper in the central role – who has received endless praise for his titular performance in the picture – this 2014 war drama has been helmed by acting icon Clint Eastwood.

American Sniper is presently streaming on Netflix – and audiences simply cannot get enough of the war drama, reports the Express.

The picture’s official synopsis states: “Navy S.E.A.L. sniper Chris Kyle’s pinpoint accuracy saves countless lives on the battlefield and turns him into a legend. Back home with his family after four tours of duty, however, Chris finds that it is the war he can’t leave behind.”

Sienna Miller plays the female lead of the picture alongside Cooper, and the leading duo are supported by Luke Grimes, Jake McDorman, Cory Hardrict, Kevin Lacz, Navid Negahban, and Keir O’Donnell in additional roles. American Sniper draws from the 2012 memoir of the same title written by war veteran Chris Kyle alongside Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice.

The war drama proved a colossal box office triumph, raking in $547 million against a production budget of roughly $59 million.

Beyond its commercial triumph, the picture garnered critical acclaim, securing six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Cooper, while ultimately claiming an Oscar for Best Sound Editing.

Audiences are completely taken with the war drama, as one fan writes on Rotten Tomatoes: “Powerful, emotional and very gritty. Directed to a tee by Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper excels as usual exceptionally well in character. Top class cinematography and writing. Succeeds in gripping you to the point where you can almost experience the settings physically. Outstanding on absolutely every level. Truly a memorable movie about a memorable man.”

Another viewer said of the film: “I can’t remember a movie in the last decade, that was as riveting and captivating as “American Sniper.” I kept seeing the trailer on TV and when I finally went to see it, I was already jacked-up…and it delivered. A+ Script A+ Director A+ Lead Actor A+ Supporting Actors A+ Cinematographer. Eastwood, Cooper and the screenwriter made a great team…which eventually became a great film.”

While another audience review reads: “One of the best war movies of our time. The character is really in focus and has a lot of development which makes it stand out in the sea of meaningless war stories. Really emotional and intense throughout. Amazing performance from Bradley Cooper too.”

Critics have been left equally bowled over, as one writes: “… a mature film of the toll war takes on its warriors, and you should see it, regardless of your politics.”

While another reviewer noted: “What a surprise that rather than an uncritical testament to the might of the armed forces, Eastwood delivers this complex, conflicted and profoundly moving look at the military machine, and the toll it takes on the soldiers.”

A third critic added: “American Sniper is devastating on the emotional level, especially with a very buffed-up Bradley Cooper in the lead role.”

American Sniper is available to stream on Netflix till November 4.

It tells the remarkable true story of a resistance hero and his courage in the face of terror during World War Two

There is no shortage of films about the Second World War, but this “masterpiece”, now streaming on Netflix, tells the long-forgotten tale of one man’s extraordinary bravery in the face of unimaginable terror.

The Norwegian film draws on the real-life experiences of resistance fighter Gunnar Sønsteby during the conflict. Starring Sjur Vatne Brean in the lead role and helmed by director John Andreas Andersen, Number 24 charts Sønsteby’s journey from 1940 through to the end of the Second World War.

Taking its title from Sønsteby’s most frequently used code name, Number 24 delves into how the Oslo Group carried out sabotage operations and assassinations throughout the war. The film is narrated by an elderly Sønsteby as he recounts his remarkable experiences to a group of students.

Both film fans and critics alike are utterly captivated by this raw and gritty war film, which currently holds a perfect score on the film review site Rotten Tomatoes.

One critic wrote: “Based on the real-life story of Norwegian hero Gunnar Sønsteby, director John Andreas Andersen delivers a gripping, often violent thriller that highlights the best and worst of humankind.”, reports Wales Online.

Another said: “This biopic about Gunnar Sønsteby, the most highly decorated citizen in Norway, explores the moral grey areas during war under brutal invading forces. Switching between the past and the present, the film sensitively contrasts justice and necessity.”

Meanwhile a third added: “The director crafts a mostly patriotic picture of a man solely dedicated to duty. It’s an uncompromising approach that often makes for a stirring watch even through a narrow lens.”

Fans were equally effusive in their praise. One wrote: “The lead actor is phenomenal. As a man of laser focus and few words, Gunnar commands the screen through the smallest, most restrained expressions and every one of them lands. It’s a masterclass in subtlety, and he delivers a gripping, believable performance.”

Another said: “Well worth watching! Makes me want to go and learn more about this incredible person. You will need a tissue at the ending. You will also need to use your pause button to read the subtitles at the end – they do contain useful information.”

While a third contributed: “Important WWII story of resistance in Norway. Thought provoking and moving. Different points of view from being in different positions when war comes into your life, your family and your country.”

And another wrote: “WOW! WOW! ! . Fantastic in every way My wife and I loved this. So realistic and well acted, directed,etc. Watch,enjoy and respect the Norwegian patriots.”

Number 24 is streaming now on Netflix.

Actor Barbara Barrie, best known for films in which she elevated the role of Mom — including her Oscar-nominated turn in “Breaking Away” (1979) — died Wednesday in her Manhattan home. She was 95.

Barrie’s death was confirmed to the L.A. Times by the actor’s representatives, who said it was medically assisted. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the New York Times that her mother’s death followed a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Barrie’s representatives said in a statement to the L.A. Times that the actor was a proponent and advocate of New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act, a law that took effect on Aug. 5.

Born Barbara Berman in Chicago in 1931, Barrie and her family moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where she attended Del Mar College. She would later transfer to the University of Texas, where she received multiple awards for drama.

After graduation, she took her acting dreams to the Big Apple, where she made her Broadway debut in the 1955 play “The Wooden Dish.” Throughout her career, Barrie starred in various Broadway productions, among them “The Selling of the President” (1972), “California Suite” (1976) and, most notably, the 1970 musical “Company,” by Stephen Sondheim, for which she received a Tony Award nomination for featured actress in a musical.

Her last Broadway stint was in 2017 in the original role of Helene Berman in the Joshua Harmon play “Significant Other.”

Barrie extended her acting expertise beyond the stage, however, making her first television appearance on “Kraft Television Theater” in 1955. A year later, she made her film debut, albeit uncredited, in the western epic “Giant” while she was in Texas visiting her family.

With more than 120 credits to her name, Barrie began appearing in popular TV shows in the 1950s and ’60s, such as “Naked City,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “The Nurses” and more. Later TV credits included “Barney Miller” and “Suddenly Susan,” where she played an on-screen grandmother to Brooke Shields.

Her first major film role came in 1964, when she played divorcée Julie Cullen Richards in “One Potato, Two Potato.” She portrayed a white woman who falls in love with a Black man, Frank Richards (played by Bernie Hamilton). The film was released during a time when interracial marriage was not yet legalized nationwide. Barrie earned a Cannes Film Festival Award for the performance.

The actor went on to star as the mom Evelyn Stroller in the 1979 coming-of-age comedy-drama “Breaking Away,” which earned her an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress, and later an Emmy nomination when she reprised the role for the 1980 television series.

Other film credits include 1980’s “Private Benjamin,” 1997’s “Hercules” (where she voiced Alcmene, Hercules’ mortal mother) and 1999’s “Judy Berlin.” According to her IMDb profile, her last credit was in 2025 for the queer romantic comedy “Things Like This.”

In 1994, Barrie was diagnosed with rectal cancer, prompting her to raise awareness about the disease. She published two books on the matter, including “Second Act,” a 1997 memoir about resolute optimism and acceptance, and “Don’t Die of Embarrassment: Life After Colostomy and Other Adventures,” a 1999 memoir where she dives deep into her diagnosis and experience with a colostomy procedure.

Barrie married actor, director and producer Jay Harnick in 1964. He died in 2007. The two are survived by their children, Jane and Aaron.

Actor and singer Cheyenne Jackson, who has starred on Broadway and held roles on dozens of television series including “American Horror Story,” “30 Rock” and “Glee,” had never considered that he might lose his health insurance.

But in a grim moment last year, he realized he was several thousand dollars short of the roughly $28,000-annual minimum to qualify for healthcare through actors union SAG-AFTRA. Otherwise, he would lose the plan that also covered his husband and their 11-year-old twins.

“Auditions weren’t coming in. It was just a really lean, lean time,” Jackson said. “I think I just took my insurance for granted. I thought it would always happen.”

Jackson and other actors are speaking openly about struggles qualifying for SAG-AFTRA healthcare amid declines in film and television production in Hollywood, an exodus of film jobs abroad, job loss from industry consolidation and concerns of AI incursions.

Jackson reflected on the experience while on a layover Sunday in Atlanta’s airport for his one-man musical act, “Midlife Torso Tour.” He decided to offer to spotlight other union members on social media who were short on their earnings. Within 24 hours of posting about the project idea on Instagram, he had received hundreds of messages, he said.

Jackson credited his friend Kathy Bates, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actor he worked with on four seasons of “American Horror Story,” for helping him pull through last year. He had texted her describing his plight. She called him back within five minutes and told him, “I have good news and bad news,” he recalled.

The good news, she explained, was that she got him a part on “Matlock,” the CBS reimagining of an ’80s legal drama where she stars as a brilliant criminal defense attorney. The bad news was that he would have only four lines and his character wouldn’t have a name.

“I was like, ‘Sign me up!’” Jackson said. “I was grateful, and I showed up and did my four lines.”

Bates had “really paid it forward,” he said.

Actors’ health insurance plans are typically managed by performing arts unions rather than dispensed by a single corporate employer. Producers and studios contribute to a shared health fund based on union contracts, wages and hours worked. If workers accumulate a preset number of hours or pay, they can qualify for up to a year of coverage.

But dry spells and uncertainty in the industry because of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and industry strikes have shed light on actors’ struggles to keep insurance as work dwindles. Several years ago, stories proliferated of performers losing health insurance as they contended with heart problems or underwent cancer treatment, and in recent months, actors have again aired concerns.

“I Saw the TV Glow” star Jack Haven posted a video on YouTube in September saying they were “in a bit of an emergency situation.” Haven said they needed to earn $4,000 by the end of the month to keep their insurance. In the video, Haven said they would do “pretty much any job.”

This month, former Nickelodeon star Drake Bell of “Drake & Josh” posted a screenshot of SAG-AFTRA’s health plan website showing that he needed to earn about $11,450 more to qualify.

“Do not become an actor. Do not join SAG,” Bell wrote, using a middle finger emoji and tagging the union’s president, Sean Astin, in the post.

SAG-AFTRA spokesperson Pamela Greenwalt did not respond to a request for comment. But the union has long been open about the financial effects of the pandemic and other industry headwinds that have led to lower employer contributions.

In December 2020, a group of SAG-AFTRA members sued the union’s board of trustees over changes to the health plan. Actors 65 years and older who vested their pensions could no longer count their earnings from residuals in the annual threshold. A provision allowing actors older than 40 with a decade of credits to qualify for coverage at a reduced level of $13,000 in annual earnings was also eliminated.

The union acknowledged renewed challenges during the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023. The union’s national executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, told The Times that year that earning enough to qualify for health coverage had become a “real source of anxiety and concern for many members.”

At a meeting of the union’s national board over the weekend at its Miracle Mile office, Astin in a recorded speech addressed members’ frustrations about economic pressures, saying that the union is using “every bit of leverage we have to make sure working performers have a place in whatever this industry becomes.”

It can take years for members to build up enough union work to qualify for the health insurance. Some who have worked in the industry for years never do. Reportedly only about 14% of the union’s 160,000 members qualify for the union’s healthcare. Of SAG-AFTRA’s membership, which also includes dancers, DJs, journalists and radio program hosts, more than 100,000 members are actors and performers.

Miller Tai, a voice actor on the new Paramount+ animated film “Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender,” said he joined the union in 2017 and had not struggled in recent years to meet the earnings minimum, having qualified for the last seven years. He feels that the noise on social media obscures the actual problem: a broken healthcare industry that is hurting people beyond just actors.

“We have a greedy system raising prices by the second,” Tai said. “This is a problem for any sector where we rely on our employers for healthcare.”

In 2027, the earnings minimum will rise to $28,933. Quarterly premiums will rise from $375 to $390 for one participant, with higher amounts for added dependents. Actors with certain credits who lose their eligibility can temporarily keep their health coverage at a reduced rate for up to 18 months through the federal program known as COBRA, according to the union’s website.

Jackson said starting over every year is tough and unpredictable even for people like him who have been in many television shows and make “OK money on residuals.” He said that although one year he might make $300,000 from acting, the next he might make closer to 5% of that amount. He said that he scraped together his minimum earnings this year by taking on more commercial gigs and acting in a vertically filmed microdrama.

“I ended up doing a few things that I have never done before and never thought I would,” Jackson said.

Jackson’s social media project now has a home on Instagram called One Job Away, and he began posting Tuesday morning. His manager’s assistants and others on his team are combing through requests, he said. More than a dozen photos of actors have already been posted, with captions listing the amount they need to make to hit their earnings minimum and describing their past credits.

“To me, it didn’t seem that big of a deal to say I’m struggling and I need to find that next gig,” he said. “But I understand why for a lot of people they don’t want to say that. They don’t want to look needy or look whatever. I do get it, but I think the more we talk about it, the less shame and the less stigma there will be around it, because it just is happening.”

The L.A. City Council took modest steps Tuesday to help the homegrown film industry as it struggles to keep production in California.

The City Council passed two film-friendly measures, one that creates free permits for so-called micro-shoot productions and another that limits parking fees on city-owned lots, yards and civic properties and staging areas to $1 a day, regardless of the size of the project.

The city currently charges $450 a day for base camp parking at city-owned parks and $100 to $300 a day for crew parking, according to FilmLA.

“Both efforts advanced today aim to support independent shoots and attract aspiring storytellers to our city,” Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, who introduced the initiatives, said in a statement. “As we work to protect established productions, we must also uphold Los Angeles’ reputation as a hub for the next generation of filmmakers. People need to believe that this is still the town to turn their filmmaking dreams into reality.”

Micro-shoot permits refer to sets with up to 10 filmmakers on site that have a minimal community impact. Under this new ordinance, student filmmakers, documentary crews and ultra-low-budget projects will be able to obtain free permits. City departments soon will report back to the Council on how they plan to implement this.

The idea behind the $1 permits is to turn more areas of L.A. into homes for all kinds of productions.

Nazarian is chairman of the Council’s recently formed Ad Hoc Committee on Film, Entertainment and the Creative Industry, aimed at making filming in L.A. more accessible.

The steps come as film and TV production in the area continues on a downward trend. FilmLA, the nonprofit group that handles film permits for the region, recently reported that shoot days between July and September were down 4.8% from the same period last year and nearly 29% below the five-year average.

“The stark reality is that California is on the brink of losing its position as the nation’s premier destination for production spending,” Nazarian said during a City Council meeting this month. “While we retain the Hollywood name, the data makes it urgently clear, crisis-level clear, that Los Angeles is fast losing its footing as the center of film and television production.”

THE dreary Coronation Street cobbles were left behind on Tuesday as soap star Ryan Prescott prepared for a new role in a Hollywood film.

The actor, best known for playing Ryan Connor in the long-running ITV show, has won a part in director Rocky Rodriguez Jr.’s forthcoming comedy drama, Waif.

Currently filming on location in London, Ryan, 37, shared a selfie with established co-stars Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher during a break between scenes.

Sharing the photos with Instagram followers, he wrote: “We are rollllliiiing, first week in to the WAIF shoot and loving it, thank you all for the amazing energy on set!” [sic]

The Mancunian actor will play ‘a drifting art collector living life on his own terms amid the skateparks, guitar shops and art openings of east London.’

Actress Helen Foster has been cast as Prescott’s romantic interest in the new film, writer-director Rodriguez Jr.’s third feature.

READ MORE ABOUT RYAN HERE

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Commenting on the post, one enthusiastic follower wrote: “Love this!!!!!!”

A second added: “Love it .. smash it Ryan. Can’t wait to see it.”

While a third shared: “Top drawer actor my favourite on the cobbles at the moment.”

Ryan broke into acting with a short-lived role as Flynn Buchanan on ITV soap Emmerdale before winning a prominent role on Coronation Street in 2018.

Drafted in to play the returning Ryan Connor, a role previously played by Ben Thompson, and later, Sol Heras, the actor has tackled a series of turbulent storylines on the hit soap – among them a bitter feud with gangster Ronald Truman.

In 2023, Ryan was central to a harrowing new storyline that saw his character bear the brunt of a vicious acid attack.

Connor was left with horrific burns to his face and neck after protecting intended target Daisy Midgely from the attack, orchestrated by crazed stalker Justin Rutherford.

Discussing the storyline on This Morning shortly after the episode aired, Ryan said Coronation Street would be focusing on his character’s slow recovery long into the future.

“That’s one thing we wanted to include was to have some longevity within the parameters of soap, which obviously moves very quickly,” he confirmed.

“We wanted to have some kind of longevity in the aftermath.

“Acid attack survivors go through hundreds of operations, multiple skin grafts and quite often a lifetime of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We want to show the different stages of his recovery.”

A New York City man is facing charges after allegedly pulling out a knife near the set of the latest “Miami Vice” reboot.

On Friday around 11 p.m., the New York Police Department received a call about a man brandishing a knife near the intersection of Avenue N and McDonald Avenue in the borough of Brooklyn.

The caller, identified only as a 42-year-old man, told police that he had been in a verbal dispute with an “unidentified individual” when the man took out a knife, according to a police spokesperson.

The suspect was identified as Brooklyn resident Alex Perez, 23. The police spokesperson said Perez was taken into custody without incident and charged with menacing and criminal possession of a weapon. There were no reported injuries, she said.

In a video obtained by TMZ, a man the outlet identified as Perez is shown taking out a large butcher’s knife from his black sweatshirt pocket.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night. It was not immediately clear whether Perez has a lawyer.

NBC New York reported that “Miami Vice ‘85” had been filming nearby along Bay Parkway and McDonald Avenue, near Washington Cemetery.

Universal, the studio behind the film, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Joseph Kosinski, the director behind “F1” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” is directing “Miami Vice ’85.” The movie, which according to Universal was in production as of Oct. 12, features Michael B. Jordan as Tubbs and Austin Butler as Crockett, according to the company’s social media posts.

The movie is based on Anthony Yerkovich’s iconic 1980s TV cop show. A movie adaptation directed by Michael Mann, also called “Miami Vice,” came out in 2006 but was a box-office flop, The Times reported at the time.