movie

Renate Reinsve is the new face of Scandinavia: depression with a smile. Standing 5 feet 10 with open, friendly features, the Norwegian talent has a grin that makes her appear at once like an endearing everywoman and a large, unpredictable child. Reinsve zoomed to international acclaim with her Cannes-winning performance in Joachim Trier’s 2021 “The Worst Person in the World,” a dramedy tailor-made to her lanky, likable style of self-loathing. Now, Trier has written his muse another showcase, “Sentimental Value,” where Reinsve plays an emotionally avoidant theater actor who bounces along in pretty much the same bittersweet key.

“Sentimental Value” gets misty about a few things — families, filmmaking, real estate — all while circling a handsome Oslo house where the Borg clan has lived for four generations. It’s a dream home with red trim on the window frames and pink roses in the yard. Yet, sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) aren’t fighting to keep it, perhaps due to memories of their parents’ hostile divorce or maybe because they don’t want to deal with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård, wonderful), who grew up there himself and still owns the place, even though he’s moved to Sweden.

Trier opens the film with a symbolically laden camera pan across Oslo that ends on a cemetery. He wants to make sure we understand that while Norway looks idyllic to outsiders jealous that all four Scandinavian countries rank among the globe’s happiest, it can still be as gloomy as during the era of Henrik Ibsen.

More impressively, Trier shifts to a fabulous, time-bending historical montage of the house itself over the century-plus it’s belonged to the Borgs. There’s a crack in it that seems to represent the fissures in the family, the flaws in their facade. Over these images, Reinsve’s Nora recites a 6th-grade school essay she wrote about her deep identification with her childhood home. Having grown up to become terrified of intimacy, today she’s more like a detached garage.

Nora and Agnes were young when their father, a modestly well-regarded art-house filmmaker, decamped to a different country. At a retrospective of his work, Gustav refers to his crew as his “family,” which would irritate his kids if they’d bothered to attend. Agnes, a former child actor, might note that she, too, deserves some credit. Played in her youth by the compelling Ida Atlanta Kyllingmark Giertsen, Agnes was fantastic in the final shot of Gustav’s masterpiece and Trier takes a teasingly long time to suggest why she retired from the business decades ago, while her older sister keeps hammering at it.

Gustav hasn’t made a picture in 15 years. He’s in that liminal state of renown that I’m guessing Trier has encountered many times: a faded director who’s burned through his money and clout, but still keeps a tuxedo just in case he makes it back to Cannes. Like Reinsve’s Nora, Gustav acts younger than his age and is at his most charming in small doses, particularly with strangers. Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt have made him a tad delusional, someone who wouldn’t instantly recognize his graying reflection in a mirror. Sitting down at a cafe with Nora, Gustav jokes that the waitress thinks that they’re a couple on a date. (She almost certainly doesn’t.)

But the tension between Gustav and Nora is real, if blurry. He’s invited her to coffee not as father and daughter, but as a has-been angling to cast Nora as the lead of his next film, which he claims he’s written for her. His script climaxes with a nod to the day his own mother, Karin (Vilde Søyland), died by suicide in their house back when he was just a towheaded boy of 7. Furthering the sickly mojo, Gustav wants to stage his version of the hanging in the very room where it happened.

His awkward pitch is a terrific scene. Gustav and Nora are stiff with each other, both anxious to prove they don’t need the other’s help. But Trier suggests, somewhat mystically, that Gustav has an insight into his daughter’s gloom that making the movie will help them understand. Both would rather express themselves through art than confess how they feel.

When Gustav offers his daughter career advice, it comes off like an insult. She’s miffed when her dad claims his small indie would be her big break. Doesn’t he know she’d be doing him the favor? She’s the lead of Oslo’s National Theatre with enough of a social media following to get the film financed. (With 10 production companies listed in the credits of this very film, Trier himself could probably calculate Nora’s worth to the krone.)

But Gustav also has a lucky encounter with a dewy Hollywood starlet named Rachel (Elle Fanning) who sees him as an old-world bulldog who can give her resume some class. Frustrated by her coterie of assistants glued to their cellphones, Rachel gazes at him with the glowy admiration he can’t get from his own girls. Their dynamic proves to be just as complex as if they were blood-related. If Rachel makes his film, she’ll become a combo platter of his mother, his daughter, his protégée and his cash cow. Nora merely merits the financing for a low-budget Euro drama; Rachel can make it a major Netflix production (something “Sentimental Value” most adamantly is not).

It takes money to make a movie. Trier’s itchiness to get into that unsentimental fact isn’t fully scratched. He seems very aware that the audience for his kind of niche hit wants to sniffle at delicate emotions. When Gustav’s longtime producer Michael (Jesper Christensen) advises him to keep making films “his way” — as in antiquated — or when Gustav takes a swipe at Nora’s career as “old plays for old people,” the frustration in those lines, those doubts whether to stay the course or chase modernity, makes you curious if Trier himself is feeling a bit hemmed in.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

I’ve got no evidence for Trier’s restlessness other than an observation that “Sentimental Value” is most vibrant when the dialogue is snide and the visuals are snappy. There’s a stunning image of Gustav, Nora and Agnes’ faces melting together that doesn’t match a single other frame of the movie, but I’m awful glad cinematographer Kasper Tuxen Andersen got it in there.

The film never quite settles on a theme, shifting from the relationship between Nora and Agnes, Nora and Gustav, and Gustav and Rachel like a gambler spreading their bets, hoping one of those moments will earn a tear. Nora herself gets lost in the shuffle. Is she jealous of her father’s attention to Rachel? Does she care about her married lover who pops up to expose her issues? Does she even like acting?

Reinsve’s skyrocketing career is Trier’s most successful wager and he gives her enough crying scenes to earn an Oscar nomination. Skarsgård is certainly getting one too. But Fanning delivers the best performance in the film. She’s not only hiding depression under a smile, she’s layering Rachel’s megawatt charisma under her eagerness to please, allowing her insecurity at being Gustav’s second pick to poke through in rehearsals where she’s almost — but not quite — up to the task.

Rachel could have been some Hollywood cliché, but Fanning keeps us rooting for this golden girl who hopes she’ll be taken seriously by playing a Nordic depressive. Eventually, she slaps on a silly Norwegian accent in desperation and wills herself to cry in character. And when she does, Fanning has calibrated her sobs to have a hint of hamminess. It’s a marvelous detail that makes this whole type of movie look a little forced.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” didn’t exactly wow audiences and critics when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and when it landed at the Telluride Film Festival a day later for a pair of late-night screenings, the response was even more muted. Leaving Colorado, the airport gate was full of hushed conversations between people registering their disappointment with the movie.

“Frankenstein,” the talk went, had three strikes against it — a plodding story, computer-generated imagery that looked appalling and was employed to often ridiculous effect and, outside of Jacob Elordi’s affecting turn as the monster, acting that seemed wildly excessive (Oscar Isaac) or hopelessly lost (Mia Goth). In short: a mess.

But then “Frankenstein” traveled to the Toronto, a city Del Toro regards as his “second home,” and finished as runner-up to “Hamnet” for the festival’s People’s Choice Award. Now playing in a theatrical limited release ahead of its Nov. 7 Netflix premiere, the movie has found favor with the filmmaker’s devoted fan base, selling out theaters, including dates at Netflix’s renovated Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, where admission lines wrapped around the block. And some prominent critics, including my colleague Amy Nicholson, have written some thoughtful reviews of the movie, praising Del Toro’s lifelong passion project. Amy calls it the “best movie of his career.”

So in this update to my post-festival Oscar power rankings for best picture, you’ll find “Frankenstein,” a movie that’s hard to place on this list but harder still to ignore. Previous rankings are parenthetically noted.

Falling out of the rankings since September: “A House of Dynamite,” “Jay Kelly”

10. ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ (Unranked)

A scene from 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

(20th Century Studios)

The last “Avatar” movie grossed $2.3 billion and, yes, earned an Oscar nomination for best picture. Yet I’m hard-pressed to find anyone who’s truly excited about devoting half a day to see the next installment, which clocks in at 3 hours and 12 minutes. Just because the first two movies were nominated doesn’t mean this one will be. But underestimating James Cameron’s ability to connect with audiences — and awards voters — seems dumb. So here we are, No. 10, sight (still) unseen.

9. ‘Bugonia’ (10)

Emma Stone in “Bugonia.”

(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)

Better than “Kinds of Kindness” but not nearly the triumph of “Poor Things,” this is mid Yorgos Lanthimos — off-putting, punishing and misanthropic but also featuring another showcase for Emma Stone’s bold, creative energy. There are a number of movies that could displace it as a nominee. Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” offers a more humane — and funnier — look at ugly things people can do when desperate. But I’ll stick with “Bugonia” for now. After all, how many movies inspire people to shave their heads for a ticket?

8. “Frankenstein” (Unranked)

Oscar Isaac in “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

Netflix has four movies arriving during the awards season window — the meditative stunner “Train Dreams,” Katherine Bigelow’s riveting, ticking-clock thriller “A House of Dynamite,” the George Clooney meta-charmer “Jay Kelly” and “Frankenstein.” (That’s how I’d rank them in terms of quality.) One of these movies will be nominated. Maybe two. At this moment, nobody, including the awards team at Netflix, knows which one(s) it will be.

7. ‘It Was Just an Accident’ (7)

Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, left, Madj Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten in “It Was Just an Accident.”

(Neon)

Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning thriller possesses a withering critique of the cruelty and corruption of an authoritarian regime, combined with a blistering sense of humor. Panahi (“The Circle,” “Taxi”) has been imprisoned by the Iranian government many times for criticizing the government, and his courage has been celebrated for its spirit of artistic resistance. He has been a ubiquitous presence on the festival and awards circuit this year, eager to share both the movie and his story. As the Oscars have thoroughly embraced international movies the last several years, “It Was Just an Accident” feels like it’s on solid ground.

6. ‘Wicked: For Good’ (6)

Ariana Grande, left, and Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked: For Good.”

(Giles Keyte / Universal Pictures)

An academy member recently expressed some reservations about this movie to me — not about the sequel itself, but about the prospect of seeing stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande embark on another tear-soaked promotional tour. Whatevs. The first “Wicked” movie earned 10 Oscar nominations, winning for production design and costumes. With the added casting category, the sequel might just surpass that number.

5. ‘Marty Supreme’ (8)

Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme.”

(A24)

Josh Safdie’s wildly entertaining, over-caffeinated portrait of a single-minded ping-pong player premiered on its home turf at the New York Film Festival and people left the Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall caught up in the rapture of the movie’s delirium. It might be the movie that wins Timothée Chalamet his Oscar, though he’ll have to go through Leonardo DiCaprio to collect the trophy.

4. ‘Sentimental Value’ (3)

Stellan Skarsgård, left, and Renate Reinsve in “Sentimental Value.”

(Kasper Tuxen / Neon)

Neon won best picture last year with Sean Baker’s “Anora,” and it’s not unreasonable to think it could run it back with “Sentimental Value,” Joachim Trier’s piercing drama about a family reckoning with the past and wondering if reconciliation is possible — or even desired. The three actors cast in familial roles — Stellan Skarsgård, playing a legendary director angling for a comeback, and Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as his daughters — are excellent, and Elle Fanning has a choice role as an A-list actor who becomes entangled in the family drama. And like “Anora,” this movie ends on a perfect, transcendent note. That counts for a lot.

3. ‘Sinners’ (4)

Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners.”

(Eli Ade / Warner Bros. Pictures)

“Sinners” made a lot of noise when it was released in April and, months later, belongs in any conversation about the year’s best movie. The job now is to remind voters of its worth at events like the American Cinematheque’s upcoming “Sinners” screening with filmmaker Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan. With the level of its craft, it could score a dozen or more nominations, with only “One Battle After Another” as a threat to best that count.

2. ‘Hamnet’ (2)

Paul Mescal in “Hamnet.”

(Focus Features)

Since its tear-inducing Telluride premiere, Chloé Zhao’s tender portrait of love and loss and the cathartic power of art has been hitting regional film festivals, racking up audience awards and proving that people love a good cry. Stock up on tissues now for the film’s theatrical release later this month.

1. ‘One Battle After Another’ (1)

Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

The Gotham Awards did away with its budget cap a couple of years ago, allowing indie-spirited studio movies like “One Battle After Another” to clean up and, one supposes, the show’s sales team to move more tables at its ceremony. It was no secret that Paul Thomas Anderson’s angry, urgent epic would score well with film critics groups. (Panels of critics vote for the Gothams.) It’s just a question of how many dinners Anderson will have to eventually attend for a movie that has easily become the most widely seen film of his career.

You may not know Eliot Mack’s name, but if a small robot has ever crept around your kitchen, you know his work.

Before he turned his MIT-trained mind to filmmaking, Mack helped lead a small team of engineers trying to solve a deeply relatable problem: how to avoid vacuuming. Whether it was figuring out how to get around furniture legs or unclog the brushes after a run-in with long hair, Mack designed everything onscreen first with software, troubleshooting virtually and getting 80% of the way there before a single part was ever manufactured.

The result was the Roomba.

When Mack pivoted to filmmaking in the early 2000s, he was struck by how chaotic Hollywood’s process felt. “You pitch the script, get the green light and you’re flying into production,” he says, sounding both amused and baffled. “There’s no CAD template, no centralized database. I was like, how do movies even get made?”

That question sent Mack down a new path, trading dust bunnies for the creative bottlenecks that slow Hollywood down.

In 2004 he founded Lightcraft Technology, a startup developing what would later be known as virtual production tools, born out of his belief that if you could design a robot in software, you should be able to design a shot the same way. The company’s early system, Previzion, sold for $180,000 and was used on sci-fi and fantasy shows like “V” and “Once Upon a Time.” But Jetset, its latest AI-assisted tool set, runs on an iPhone and offers a free tier, with pro features topping out at just $80 a month. It lets filmmakers scan a location, drop it into virtual space and block out scenes with camera moves, lighting and characters. They can preview shots, overlay elements and organize footage for editing — all from a phone. No soundstage, no big crew, no gatekeepers. Lightcraft’s pitch: “a movie studio in your pocket.”

A series on how the AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood — from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.

The goal, Mack says, is to put more power in the hands of the people making the work. “One of the big problems is how siloed Hollywood is,” he says. “We talked to an Oscar-winning editor who said, ‘I’m never going to get to make my movie’ — he was pigeonholed as just an editor. Same with an animator we know who has two Oscars.”

Eliot Mack, CEO of Lightcraft, an AI-powered virtual-production startup, wants to give creators the power and freedom to bring their ideas to life.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

To Mack, the revolution of Jetset recalls the scrappy, guerrilla spirit of Roger Corman’s low-budget productions, which launched the early careers of directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. For generations of creatives stuck waiting on permission or funding, he sees this moment as a reset button.

“The things you got good at — writing, directing, acting, creating, storytelling — they’re still crazy useful,” he says. “What’s changing is the amount of schlepping you have to do before you get to do the fun stuff. Your 20s are a gift. You want to be creating at the absolute speed of sound. We’re trying to get to a place where you don’t have to ask anyone. You can just make the thing.”

AI is reshaping nearly every part of the filmmaking pipeline. Storyboards can now be generated from a script draft. Lighting and camera angles can be tested before anyone touches a piece of gear. Rough cuts, placeholder VFX, even digital costume mock-ups can all be created before the first shot is filmed. What once took a full crew, a soundstage and a six-figure budget can now happen in minutes, sometimes at the hands of a single person with a laptop.

This wave of automation is arriving just as Hollywood is gripped by existential anxiety. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes brought the industry to a standstill and put AI at the center of a fight over its future. Since then, production has slowed, crew sizes have shrunk and the streaming boom has given way to consolidation and cost-cutting.

According to FilmLA, on-location filming in Greater Los Angeles dropped 22.4% in early 2025 compared with the year before. For many of the crew members and craftspeople still competing for those jobs, AI doesn’t feel like an innovation. It feels like a new way to justify doing more with less, only to end up with work that’s less original or creative.

“AI scrapes everything we artists have made off the internet and creates a completely static, banal world that can never imagine anything that hasn’t happened before,” documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis warned during a directors panel at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, held in the midst of the strikes. “That’s the real weakness of the AI dream — it’s stuck with the ghosts. And I think we’ll get fed up with that.”

How you feel about these changes often depends on where you sit and how far along you are in your career. For people just starting out, AI can offer a way to experiment, move faster and bypass the usual barriers to entry. For veterans behind the scenes, it often feels like a threat to the expertise they’ve spent decades honing.

Past technological shifts — the arrival of sound, the rise of digital cameras, the advancement of CGI — changed how movies were made, but not necessarily who made them. Each wave brought new roles: boom operators and dialogue coaches, color consultants and digital compositors. Innovation usually meant more jobs, not fewer.

But AI doesn’t just change the tools. It threatens to erase the people who once used the old ones.

Diego Mariscal has seen first hand as AI has cut potential jobs for grips.

(Jennifer Rose Clasen)

Diego Mariscal, 43, a veteran dolly grip who has worked on “The Mandalorian” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” saw the writing on the wall during a recent shoot. A visual effects supervisor opened his laptop to show off a reel of high-end commercials and something was missing. “There were no blue screens — none,” Mariscal recalls. “That’s what we do. We put up blues as grips. You’d normally hire an extra 10 people and have an extra three days of pre-rigging, setting up all these blue screens. He was like, ‘We don’t need it anymore. I just use AI to clip it out.’”

Mariscal runs Crew Stories, a private Facebook group with nearly 100,000 members, where working crew members share job leads, trade tips and voice their growing fears. He tries to keep up with the steady drip of AI news. “I read about AI all day, every day,” he says. “At least 20 posts a day.”

His fear isn’t just about fewer jobs — it’s about what comes next. “I’ve been doing this since I was 19,” Mariscal says of his specialized dolly work, which involves setting up heavy equipment and guiding the camera smoothly through complex shots. “I can push a cart in a parking lot. I can push a lawnmower. What else can I do?”

Who wins, who loses and what does James Cameron think?

Before AI and digital doubles, Mike Marino learned the craft of transformation the human way: through hands-on work and a fascination that bordered on obsession.

Marino was 5 years old when he first saw “The Elephant Man” on HBO. Horrified yet transfixed, he became fixated on prosthetics and the emotional power they could carry. As a teenager in New York, he pored over issues of Fangoria, studied monsters and makeup effects and experimented with sculpting his own latex masks on his bedroom floor.

Prosthetics artist Mike Marino asks a big question related to generative AI: What role do the human creatives play?

(Sean Dougherty / For The Times)

Decades later, Marino, 48, has become one of Hollywood’s leading makeup artists, earning Oscar nominations for “Coming 2 America,” “The Batman” and last year’s dark comedy “A Different Man,” in which he helped transform Sebastian Stan into a disfigured actor.

His is the kind of tactile, handcrafted work that once seemed irreplaceable. But today AI tools are increasingly capable of achieving similar effects digitally: de-aging actors, altering faces, even generating entire performances. What used to take weeks of experimentation and hours in a makeup trailer can now be approximated with a few prompts and a trained model. To Marino, AI is more than a new set of tools. It’s a fundamental change in what it means to create.

“If AI is so good it can replace a human, then why have any human beings?” he says. “This is about taste. It’s about choice. I’m a human being. I’m an artist. I have my own ideas — mine. Just because you can make 10,000 spaceships in a movie, should you?”

Marino is no technophobe. His team regularly uses 3D scanning and printing. But he draws the line at outsourcing creative judgment to a machine. “I’m hoping there are artists who want to work with humans and not machines,” he says. “If we let AI just run amok with no taste, no choice, no morality behind it, then we’re gone.”

Not everyone sees AI’s rise in film production as a zero-sum game. Some technologists imagine a middle path. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and one of the world’s leading AI researchers, believes the future of filmmaking lies in a “human-machine partnership.”

AI, Rus argues, can take on time-consuming tasks like animating background extras, color correction or previsualizing effects, freeing up people to focus on what requires intuition and taste. “AI can help with the routine work,” she says. “But the human touch and emotional authenticity are essential.”

Few directors have spent more time grappling with the dangers and potential of artificial intelligence than James Cameron. Nearly 40 years before generative tools entered Hollywood’s workflow, he imagined a rogue AI triggering global apocalypse in 1984’s “The Terminator,” giving the world Skynet — now a cultural shorthand for the dark side of machine intelligence. Today, he continues to straddle that line, using AI behind the scenes on the upcoming “Avatar: Fire and Ash” to optimize visual effects and performance-capture, while keeping creative decisions in human hands. The latest sequel, due Dec. 19, promises to push the franchise’s spectacle and scale even further; a newly released trailer reveals volcanic eruptions, aerial battles and a new clan of Na’vi.

A scene from “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Director James Cameron differentiates between using machine-learning to reduce monotonous movie-making work and generative AI.

(Courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

“You can automate a lot of processes that right now tie up a lot of artists doing mundane tasks,” Cameron told The Times in 2023 at a Beyond Fest screening of his 1989 film “The Abyss.” “So if we could accelerate the postproduction pipeline, then we can make more movies. Then those artists will get to do more exciting things.”

For Cameron, the promise of AI lies in efficiency, not elimination. “I think in our particular industry, it’s not going to replace people; it’s going to free them to do other things,” he believes. “It’s going to accelerate the process and bring the price down, which would be good because, you know, some movies are a little more expensive than others. And a lot of that has to do with human energy.”

Cameron himself directed five films between 1984 and 1994 and only three in the three decades since, though each one has grown increasingly complex and ambitious.

That said, Cameron has never been one to chase shortcuts for their own sake. “I think you can make pre-viz and design easier, but I don’t know if it makes it better,” he says. “I mean, if easy is your thing. Easy has never been my thing.”

He draws a line between the machine-learning techniques his team has used since the first “Avatar” to help automate tedious tasks and the newer wave of generative AI models making headlines today.

“The big explosion has been around image-based generative models that use everything from every image that’s ever been created,” he says. “We’d never use any of them. The images we make are computer-created, but they’re not AI-created.”

In his view, nothing synthetic can replace the instincts of a flesh-and-blood artist. “We have human artists that do all the designs,” he says. “We don’t need AI. We’ve got meat-I. And I’m one of the meat-artists that come up with all that stuff. We don’t need a computer. Maybe other people need it. We don’t.”

Reshaping creativity — and creative labor

Rick Carter didn’t go looking for AI as a tool. He discovered it as a lifeline.

The two-time Oscar-winning production designer, who worked with Cameron on “Avatar” and whose credits include “Jurassic Park” and “Forrest Gump,” began experimenting with generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway during the pandemic, looking for a way to keep his creative instincts sharp while the industry was on pause. A longtime painter, he was drawn to the freedom the programs offered.

“I saw that there was an opportunity to create images where I didn’t have to go to anybody else for approval, which is the way I would paint,” Carter says by phone from Paris. “None of the gatekeeping would matter. I have a whole lot of stories on my own that I’ve tried to get into the world in various ways and suddenly there was a way to visualize them.”

Midjourney and Runway can create richly detailed images — and in Runway’s case, short video clips — from a text prompt or a combination of text and visuals. Trained on billions of images and audiovisual materials scraped from the internet, these systems learn to mimic style, lighting, composition and form, often with eerie precision. In a production pipeline, these tools can help concept artists visualize characters or sets, let directors generate shot ideas or give costume designers and makeup artists a fast way to test looks, long before physical production begins.

But as these tools gain traction in Hollywood, a deeper legal and creative dilemma is coming into focus: Who owns the work they produce? And what about the copyrighted material used to train them?

In June, Disney and Universal filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the company of generating unauthorized replicas of characters such as Spider-Man, Darth Vader and Shrek using AI models trained on copyrighted material: what the suit calls a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” It’s the most high-profile of several legal challenges now putting copyright law to the test in the age of generative AI.

“Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis, left, with production designer Rick Carter at an art installation of the movie’s famed bench. (Carter family)

(Carter family)

Working with generative models, Carter began crafting what he calls “riffs of consciousness,” embracing AI as a kind of collaborative partner, one he could play off of intuitively. The process reminded him of the loose, improvisational early stages of filmmaking, a space he knows well from decades of working with directors like Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg.

“I’ll just start with a visual or a word prompt and see how it iterates from there and what it triggers in my mind,” Carter says. “Then I incorporate that so it builds on its own in an almost free-associative way. But it’s still based upon my own intuitive, emotional, artistic, even spiritual needs at that moment.”

He describes the experience as a dialogue between two minds, one digital and one human: “One AI is artificial intelligence. The other AI is authentic intelligence — that’s us. We’ve earned it over this whole span of time on the planet.”

Sometimes, Carter says, the most evocative results come from mistakes. While sketching out a story about a hippie detective searching for a missing woman in the Himalayas, he accidentally typed “womb” into ChatGPT instead of “woman.” The AI ran with it, returning three pages of wild plot ideas involving gurus, seekers and a bizarre mystery set in motion by the disappearance.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I would never have taken it that far. The AI is so precocious. It is trying so much to please that it will literally make something out of the mistake you make.”

Carter hasn’t used generative AI on a film yet; most of his creations are shared only with friends. But he says the technology is already slipping into creative workflows in covert ways. “There are issues with copyrights with most of the studios so for now, it’s going to be mostly underground,” he says. “People will use it but they won’t acknowledge that they’re using it — they’ll have an illustrator do something over it, or take a photo so there’s no digital trail.”

Carter has lived through a major technological shift before. “I remember when we went from analog to digital, from ‘Jurassic Park’ on,” he says. “There were a lot of wonderful artists who could draw and paint in ways that were just fantastic but they couldn’t adapt. They didn’t want to — even the idea of it felt like the wrong way to make art. And, of course, most of them suffered because they didn’t make it from the Rolodex to the database in terms of people calling them up.”

He worries that some artists may approach the technology with a rigid sense of authorship. “Early on, I found that the less I used my own ego as a barometer for whether something was artistic, the more I leaned into the process of collaboratively making something bigger than the sum of its parts — and the bigger and better the movies became.”

Others, like storyboard artist Sam Tung, are bracing against the same wave with a quiet but unshakable defiance.

Tung, whose credits include “Twisters” and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey,” has spent the last two years tracking the rise of generative tools, not just their capabilities but their implications. As co-chair of the Animation Guild’s AI Committee, he has been on the front lines of conversations about how these technologies could reshape creative labor.

To artists like Tung, the rise of generative tools feels deeply personal. “If you are an illustrator or a writer or whatever, you had to give up other things to take time to develop those skills,” he says. “Nobody comes out of the womb being able to draw or write or act. Anybody who does that professionally spent years honing those skills.”

Tung has no interest in handing that over to a machine. “It’s not that I’m scared of it — I just don’t need it,” he says. “If I want to draw something or paint something, I’ll do it myself. That way it’s exactly what I want and I actually enjoy the process. When people tell me they responded to a drawing I did or a short film I made with friends, it feels great. But anything I’ve made with AI, I’ve quickly forgotten about. There’s basically nothing I get from putting it on social media, other than the ire of my peers.”

What unsettles him isn’t just the slickness of AI’s output but how that polish is being used to justify smaller crews and faster turnarounds. “If this is left unchecked, it’s very easy to imagine a worst-case scenario where team sizes and contract durations shrink,” Tung says. “A producer who barely understands how it works might say, ‘Don’t you have AI to do 70% of this? Why do you need a whole week to turn around a sequence? Just press the button that says: MAKE MOVIE.’ ”

At 73, Carter isn’t chasing jobs. His legacy is secure. “If they don’t hire me again, that’s OK,” he says. “I’m not in that game anymore.” He grew up in Hollywood — his father was Jack Lemmon’s longtime publicist and producing partner — and has spent his life watching the industry evolve. Now, he’s witnessing a reckoning unlike any he, or anyone else, has ever imagined.

“I do have concerns about who is developing AI and what their values are,” he says. “What they use all this for is not necessarily something I would approve of — politically, socially, emotionally. But I don’t think I’m in a position to approve or not.”

Earlier this year, the Palisades fire destroyed Carter’s home, taking with it years of paintings and personal artwork. AI, he says, has given him a way to keep creating through the upheaval. “It saved me through the pandemic, and now it’s saving me through the fire,” he says, as if daring the universe to test him again. “It’s like, go ahead, throw something else at me.”

‘Prompt and pray?’ Not so fast

Many in the industry may still be dipping a toe into the waters of AI. Verena Puhm dove in.

The Austrian-born filmmaker studied acting and directing in Munich and Salzburg before moving to Los Angeles, where she built a globe-spanning career producing, writing and developing content for international networks and streamers. Her credits range from CNN’s docuseries “History of the Sitcom” to the German reboot of the cult anthology “Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction” and a naval documentary available on Tubi. More recently, she has channeled that same creative range into a deepening exploration of generative tools.

Puhm first began dabbling with AI while using Midjourney to design a pitch deck, but it wasn’t until she entered a timed generative AI filmmaking challenge at the 2024 AI on the Lot conference — informally dubbed a “gen battle” — that the creative potential of the medium hit her.

“In two hours, I made a little mock commercial,” she remembers, proudly. “It was actually pretty well received and fun. And I was like, Oh, wow, I did this in two hours. What could I do in two days or two weeks?”

What started as experimentation soon became a second act. This summer, Puhm was named head of studio for Dream Lab LA, a new creative arm of Luma AI, which develops generative video tools for filmmakers and creators. There, she’s helping shape new storytelling formats and supporting emerging creators working at the intersection of cinema and technology. She may not be a household name, but in the world of experimental storytelling, she’s fast becoming a key figure.

Verena Puhm, a director, writer and producer, has used generative AI in a number of her projects, says it’s breaking down barriers to entry.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Some critics dismiss AI filmmaking as little more than “prompt and pray”: typing in a few words and hoping something usable comes out. Puhm bristles at the phrase.

“Anybody that says that tells me they’ve never tried it at all, because it is not that easy and simple,” she says. “You can buy a paintbrush at Home Depot for, what, $2? That doesn’t make you a painter. When smartphones first came out, there was a lot of content being made but that didn’t mean everyone was a filmmaker.”

What excites her most is how AI is breaking down the barriers that once kept ambitious ideas out of reach. Luma’s new Modify Video tool lets filmmakers tweak footage after it’s shot, changing wardrobe, aging a character, shifting the time of day, all without reshoots or traditional VFX. It can turn a garage into a spaceship, swap a cloudy sky for the aurora borealis or morph an actor into a six-eyed alien, no green screen required.

“It’s such a relief as an artist,” Puhm says. “If there’s a project I’ve been sitting on for six years because I didn’t have a $5 million budget — suddenly there’s no limit. I remember shopping projects around and being told by producers, ‘This scene has to go, that has to go,’ just to keep the budget low. Now everything is open.”

That sense of access resonates far beyond Los Angeles. At a panel during AI on the Lot, “Blue Beetle” director Ángel Manuel Soto reflected on how transformative AI might have been when he was first starting out. “I wish tools like this existed when I wanted to make movies in Puerto Rico, because nobody would lend me a camera,” he said. “Access to equipment is a privilege we sometimes take for granted. I see this helping kids like me from the projects tell stories without going bankrupt — or stealing, which I don’t condone.”

Puhm welcomes criticism of AI but only when it’s informed. “If you hate AI and you’ve actually tested the tools and educated yourself, I’ll be your biggest supporter,” she says. “But if you’re just speaking out of fear, with no understanding, then what are you even basing your opinion on?”

She understands why some filmmakers feel rattled, especially those who, like her, grew up dreaming of seeing their work on the big screen. “I still want to make features and TV series — that’s what I set out to do,” she says. “I hope movie theaters don’t go away. But if the same story I want to tell reaches millions of people on a phone and they’re excited about it, will I really care that it wasn’t in a theater?”

“I just feel like we have to adapt to the reality of things,” she continues. “That might sometimes be uncomfortable, but there is so much opportunity if you lean in. Right now any filmmaker can suddenly tell a story at a high production value that they could have never done before, and that is beautiful and empowering.”

For many, embracing AI boils down to a simple choice: adapt or get cut from the frame.

Hal Watmough, a BAFTA-winning British editor with two decades of experience, first began experimenting with AI out of a mix of curiosity and dread. “I was scared,” he admits. “This thing was coming into the industry and threatening our jobs and was going to make us obsolete.” But once he started playing with tools like Midjourney and Runway, he quickly saw how they could not only speed up the process but allow him to rethink what his career could be.

For an editor used to working only with what he was given, the ability to generate footage on the fly, cut with it immediately and experiment endlessly without waiting on a crew or a shoot was a revelation. “It was still pretty janky at that stage, but I could see the potential,” he says. “It was kind of intoxicating. I started to think, I’d like to start making things that I haven’t seen before.”

After honing his skills with various AI tools, Watmough created a wistful, vibrant five-minute animated short called “LATE,” about an aging artist passing his wisdom to a young office worker. Over two weeks, he generated 2,181 images using AI, then curated and refined them frame by frame to shape the story.

Earlier this year, he submitted “LATE” to what was billed as the world’s first AI animation contest, hosted by Curious Refuge, an online education hub for creative technologists — and, to his delight, he won. The prize included $10,000, a pitch meeting with production company Promise Studios and, as an absurd bonus, his face printed on a potato. But for Watmough, the real reward was the sense that he had found a new creative identity.

“There’s something to the fact that the winner of the first AI animation competition was an editor,” Watmough says. “With the advent of AI, yes, you could call yourself a filmmaker but essentially I’d say most people are editors. You’re curating, selecting, picking what you like — relying on your taste.”

Thanks to AI, he says he’s made more personal passion projects in the past year and a half than during his entire previous career. “I’ll be walking or running and ideas just come. Now I can go home that night and try them,” he says. “None of that would exist without AI. So either something exists within AI or it never exists at all. And all the happiness and fulfillment that comes with it for the creator doesn’t exist either.”

Watmough hasn’t entirely lost his fear of what AI might do to the creative workforce, even as he is energized by what it makes possible. “A lot of people I speak to in film and TV are worried about losing their jobs and I’m not saying the infrastructure roles won’t radically change,” he says. “But I don’t think AI is going to replace that many — if any — creative people.”

What it will do, he says, is raise the bar. “If anyone can create anything, then average work will basically become extinct or pointless. AI can churn out remakes until the cows come home. You’ll have to pioneer to exist.”

He likens the current moment to the birth of cinema more than a century ago — specifically the Lumière brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” the 1896 short that famously startled early audiences. In the silent one-minute film, a steam train rumbles toward the camera, growing larger. Some viewers reportedly leaped from their seats, convinced it was about to crash into them.

“People ran out of the theater screaming,” Watmough says. “Now we don’t even think about it. With AI, we’re at that stage again. We’re watching the steam train come into the station and people are either really excited or they’re running out of the theater in fear. That’s where we are, right at the start. And the potential is limitless.”

Then again, he adds with a dry laugh, “I’m an eternal optimist, so take what I say with a grain of salt.”

BRIDGERTON’S Simone Ashley is in pole position to feature in the sequel to Brad Pitt’s movie F1.

The 30-year-old, who starred with Jonathan ­Bailey in the Netflix romance, was cast in this year’s flick but her scenes were cut.

A source said: “A script is already in the works with early plans to go into production next year.”

As well as appearing in Sex Education, Ashley has also lent her acting chops to suspense drama Thriller.

She shot to fame after starring in the hit Netflix show Sex Education.

The star developed her acting skills at the Arts Ed school in Chiswick, which specializes in Musical Theatre & Acting degrees.

FANCY UNDRESS

Celebs’ sexiest Halloween outfits ever from Maura Higgins to Ashley Roberts

SWEET GESTURE

How Justin Trudeau made ‘subtle nod’ to Katy Perry romance

Simone has spoken about coming from a traditional Indian family, who finds her acting career “quite scary and unsettling”.

She told Veylex: “My parents are incredibly protective over me, and sometimes I found it quite stifling.

“It made me want to escape and do things my own way. I’ve always been a bit rebellious in that sense.”

“I am incredibly privileged to be apart of a generation where young women from all over the world have more opportunity than ever before, where we are being less stereotyped and walls and being broken down slowly.”

Decades since it’s release fans continue to hail this 90s sci-fi movie as both ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘breathtaking’ and they can watch it once again on ITV tonight

Film fans have dubbed this 1991 movie as the “best action movie of all time”, scoring it an impressive 91% on the review site Rotten Tomatoes – and it’s on ITV for free tonight.

The classic American science-fiction movie is set to appear on TV tonight,for the perfect slice of nostalgia as you gear up for the Halloween weekend. Terminator 2: Judgement Day is the second instalment in the famed Terminator series, with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the leading role, in what viewers are calling the best sequel to exist.

In the film, directed by James Cameron, the malevolent artificial intelligence network, known as Skynet, sends a highly advanced killing machine, The Terminator, back in time. It finds itself in 1995, on a mission to kill the future leader of the human resistance while he is still a child in order to protect the future of humanity.

One fan of the film wrote on Rotten Tomatoes: “This is one of those stellar classic action movies, and it was the best action movie of the 1990s. It was significantly ahead of its time! Groundbreaking special effects, a relentless and threateningly powerful villain, humorous and awesome moments, and entertaining action set pieces and sequences that looked convincingly real!”

Another viewer simply says: “In my opinion, this is the greatest action movie of all time. And the greatest movie sequel of all time.” Meanwhile, someone else wrote: “My favourite movie of all time, no notes.”

The film went on to be an instant classic, as a box office boom and critical success, grossing $519–520.9 million. It went on to become the highest-grossing film of 1991 across the globe and the third-highest-grossing film of its time.

Decades later, Terminator 2 is still considered to be one of the best science fiction films ever made, as a trailblazer for visual effects and computer-generated imagery. Not to mention, it has an all-star cast made up of Edward Furlong, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick and Dean Norris.

A viewer praised the cast’s performances in the sequel, writing: “Judgment Day elevates the franchise with groundbreaking visual effects and breathtaking action. Arnold delivers one of his most iconic performances, while Linda Hamilton’s transformation into a fierce and determined Sarah Connor is unforgettable.”

If viewers’ raving reviews aren’t a convincing enough reason to kick back tonight and have a movie night in, the film’s numerous accolades may prove it worthy. Terminator 2 went on to receive an impressive six Academy Awards, as well as a BAFTA Award and four Saturn Awards, honouring its visual effects, hair and makeup and, of course, the best sound effects.

A review says: “Best Terminator movie, period. This is the one that all others are judged on, and it’s a high bar.” If you’re looking for something to watch tonight, flick over to ITV4 tonight at 9pm to see an all-time classic movie from the comfort of your sofa.

When Charlie Sheen needed his then-13-year-old daughter taken to a hair appointment because he was too drunk to drive, he turned to his sober friend, Tony Todd.

When Sheen wanted to meet Carlos Estévez because the major league pitcher shared Sheen’s given name, he turned to his connected friend, Tony Todd.

When Sheen was in the throes of a crack addiction, fired from his starring role on “Two and a Half Men” and in need of an unwavering voice of encouragement, he turned to his non-judgmental friend Tony Todd.

“There are so many fake friends in Charlie’s life,” Todd said. “I’ve been there for him since we were little kids. The cool thing is, we’ve never had an argument.”

Thanks to the recent Netflix documentary “aka Charlie Sheen” and publication of “The Book of Sheen” memoir, Todd’s 50-year friendship with the mercurial actor has been revealed to the world. Todd’s social media accounts have since been flooded with praise from viewers far and wide.

“I had to reach out immediately to say you were and remain an angel from heaven.”

“You are the friend we would all like to have man, greetings from Spain!”

“Dear Tony, If you ever visit Istanbul, it would be our honor to host you in our hotel…. You are not only a great actor but also a true friend.”

“You … are a stellar human being [heart emoji].”

Todd and Sheen have been pals since they bonded through baseball, first on Little League fields in Malibu, then on the Santa Monica High School team, then while taking batting practice in Sheen’s posh indoor batting cage, then while putting on power-hitting displays at local high school fields and even Dodger Stadium.

And their friendship spread into their private lives, with Todd serving as best man at the first two of Sheen’s three marriages and serving as a drug-free wingman even when Sheen descended into a chaotic, self-destructive morass of cocaine, alcohol and reckless sex.

“There’s never been a call he hasn’t answered, there’s never been a crisis he didn’t help solve,” Sheen said in a phone interview. “Tony Todd has always been a friend, and a true one.”

The documentary “aka Charlie Sheen” is a first-person tell-all, with the narrative helped along by Sheen’s oldest brother, Ramon, childhood neighbor Sean Penn, “Two and a Half Men” co-star Jon Cryer and executive producer Chuck Lorre, drug dealer Marco Abeyta and ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller.

And, of course, Todd. He laughs. He cries. He exudes honesty and empathy.

“He’s just one of my favorite people to have around in any situation,” Sheen said.

All of it certainly has made Todd — not to be confused with the actor of the same name who starred in “Candyman” and died a year ago — fame-adjacent.

Although he has enjoyed a career that includes acting/stuntman roles in both “Black Panther” movies and acting roles in the movie “Little Big League,” the TV show “Anger Management” and more than two dozen national commercials, Todd is best known in Santa Monica as the dude who can’t say no to volunteer fundraisers and sports a vanity license plate that reads “NVR KWT.”

Just this summer he helped raise $10,000 for Santa Monica Little League by hosting an outdoor screening of “Little Big League” and tapping into his vast contact list of pro athletes and A-list entertainers to attract silent-auction items.

And Todd was hailed as a “real hero” by authorities after he gave $700 to a family of five who had been robbed of their rent money in Lancaster in 2018. He was “so moved by the family’s story” that he jumped in his car and drove from Santa Monica to the high desert to hand-deliver the money.

His friendship with Sheen resonates with many, in part because Todd professes never to have taken a drug or a drink. Sheen, of course, was the poster man-child of substance abuse until becoming sober in December 2017, the day he relinquished his car keys to Todd to drive his daughter Sami to a hair salon appointment in Moorpark.

When Sheen was addicted to crack, Todd moved into his friend’s Mulholland Estates house in Beverly Hills. Even then, Sheen wouldn’t smoke the drug in Todd’s presence, and they often would end evenings watching MLB Network or ESPN’s “Sports Center.”

“I didn’t do hard stuff in front of him, just out of respect,” Sheen said.

Todd wept in “aka Charlie Sheen” when he explained why he continued to live with his friend knowing the actor was often smoking crack in the next room.

“I just can’t leave him to die,” he said.

Happier times occurred when they would head to a ball field to hit. Years earlier, after suffering a shoulder injury, Sheen had learned to bat left-handed, taking a hundred or so swings a day off an Iron Mike pitching machine in his indoor batting cage.

While filming a DirecTV commercial at Dodger Stadium in 2007, Sheen stepped into the batter’s box during a lunch break and crushed a pitch over the right-field wall. Todd whooped and hollered, in no small part because he had bet a Dodgers employee that his buddy would go deep.

“I knew it was going to happen because of all the [batting practice] we’d been taking,” Todd said.

Sheen also increased his strength by taking massive doses of testosterone, which he mentions in the documentary and alluded to in a 2015 interview when he said his HIV-positive diagnosis wasn’t the reason for his epic meltdown in 2011 after he was fired from “Two and a Half Men.”

“I wish I could blame it on that, but that was more of a ’roid rage,” said Sheen, who earlier had admitted he took steroids ahead of filming the 1989 hit movie “Major League,” in which he played pitcher Ricky (Wild Thing) Vaughn.

Todd had a video shot of batting sessions at Oak Park and Santa Clarita Hart high schools around 2008. Sheen hit a home run Todd estimated traveled 445 feet at Oak Park and hit a barrage of homers at Hart in the presence of Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Murray and the Hart High team.

Todd followed Sheen’s power display at Hart with a home run of his own. Todd was a talented-enough baseball and football player to earn a double scholarship to USC, although a serious injury his senior year in high school cost him the free ride.

His baseball ability landed him the role of Mickey Scales in “Little Big League” and his astonishing speed delighted Sheen even into their 40s. During one of their batting sessions at Oak Park High, Todd was challenged to a race around the bases by an onlooker.

Sheen told the man to start the race at second base while Todd started at home plate.

“By the time they rounded third, Tony had passed him, and after touching the plate he grabbed a glove and pretended to tag the guy when he reached the plate,” Sheen said, laughing.

Todd served as a baseball coach at Santa Monica High for several years, and in 2013 he lobbied for the school to award Sheen his diploma — the actor had been 1½ credits short 30 years earlier and hadn’t graduated.

Todd reached out to his friend Ross Mark, who handled bookings for “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and they concocted a plan to have Sheen on as a guest and for Leno to surprise him with the diploma.

Todd walked on stage with the diploma and Sheen — who had quickly donned a cap and gown — gave him a hug, his lifelong friend having effectively smoothed over one more rough patch in his life.

“Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc,” the Japanese anime from Crunchyroll and Sony, claimed the top spot at the domestic box office this weekend, taking in an estimated $17.25 million, according to Comscore.

The R-rated movie, based on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s popular manga series, follows teen demon hunter Denji, who is betrayed by the yakuza and killed as he attempts to pay off the debts he inherited from his parents. His beloved chainsaw-powered dog Pochita makes a deal and sacrifices his life, fusing with Denji who is reborn with the ability to transform parts of his body into chainsaws.

“Chainsaw Man,” already a global hit, delivered a blow to Disney and 20th Century’s biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” starring Jeremy Allen White, which came in a disappointing fourth place with an estimated $9.1 million.

Based on the 2023 Warren Zanes book of the same name, the film plumbs Springsteen’s life and career through the creative process, during the making of his 1982 acoustic album “Nebraska.”

The Times described the movie as a “thoughtful exploration of the creative process” that runs out of steam by the end, “meandering aimlessly into a depressive period of Springsteen’s, and it never quite regains its footing.”

In its second week out, the horror sequel “Black Phone 2” took the No. 2 slot, earning an estimated $13 million over the weekend, giving the Universal and Blumhouse movie a domestic total of $49.1 million.

Rounding out the third spot is Paramount’s romantic drama “Regretting You,” the latest film adaptation of novelist Colleen Hoover (“It Ends With Us”). Starring Allison Williams and Dave Franco, it opened to an estimated $12.5 million domestically.

His father says it all the time.

Anthony Frias II will suffer a setback, like those scary months when the UCLA running back was stuck in transfer portal limbo, unsure if his college career was over, and he’ll hear those familiar words.

It’s part of the movie.

He’ll strain in anonymity, police repeatedly coming to the door of his home at 2:30 a.m. because neighbors kept complaining about the sound of weights slamming onto the floor of the garage after another sweaty deadlift, and here comes his father’s favorite phrase again.

UCLA running back Anthony Frias II’s family gathers for a photo in front of the Rose Bowl before cheering for him and the Bruins.

(The Frias family)

It’s part of the movie.

Then there’s moments like last weekend, when something happens that makes this whole improbable journey feel like it’s just getting started, like there’s so much left to do and so many people to inspire for the kid from a tiny town in the San Joaquin Valley who once had no college scholarship offers.

Having been made a bigger part of the offensive game plan against Maryland, Frias bolted for his first career touchdown run. Later, with the Bruins needing to reach field-goal range in the game’s final moments, he chugged ahead for 35 yards, dragging defenders with him to set up the winning score.

When Frias emerged from the tunnel inside the Rose Bowl afterward to reconnect with his family, having starred inside the stadium where he once stood as a teenager with a sign proclaiming that he would play there one day, it was only a matter of time before he heard that refrain once more.

“Every time something happens, he mentions it,” the namesake son said of his father, “and it gives me a little bit more belief each time that he’s right.”

For many years, the genre of Anthony Frias II’s story seemed uncertain.

Would it be a hero’s tale? A drama about unfulfilled dreams?

The only sure thing was the conviction of the boy and his father who believed their journey would take them well beyond the confines of Le Grand, Calif., population 1,592.

Little Anthony wanted to play football so badly growing up that after suffering a hairline fracture in his knee that was supposed to sideline him for the rest of the season, he made his own rehabilitation plan.

He was only 9.

Setting his alarm for 5:30 in the morning, he’d wake his father and they would go for a 1½-mile run to a relative’s home for workouts before running back. With his team on the verge of its championship game, Anthony needed a doctor’s clearance to return ahead of schedule.

One morning, he took a crumpled piece of paper to his mom in bed. When she awoke unexpectedly, he ran away nervously. Sabrina Frias looked at the paper, which outlined his recovery and mentioned that he had been waiting for this moment his whole life.

Anthony Frias II was in high school when he stood in front of the Rose Bowl while holding up a sign that read, “One day I will play here!” and featured the Stanford logo. He realized his dream of playing in the Rose Bowl, although it was for UCLA.

(The Frias family)

Anthony left his fate in his mother’s hands, asking her to make a choice — circle the “Yes” he had written alongside a happy face or the “No” alongside a sad face.

Her heart breaking at the thought of denying her son, she circled “Yes.” Anthony went on to score every point in his team’s 20-19 victory.

By the time he was 13, Anthony had modeled his playing style after Christian McCaffrey, the dynamic Stanford running back who was making a strong push for the Heisman Trophy. That made the Christmas present he received that year — tickets to see Stanford play Iowa in the Rose Bowl — an all-time favorite.

Before the game, Anthony’s father painted a giant red “S” on his son’s bare chest. Together, they made a sign that Anthony held above his head while standing outside the stadium. It read, “One day I will play here!”

Looking back, Anthony said the sign was mostly his father’s idea.

“He just knew,” Anthony said, “that I was gonna be so special.”

Few shared that belief when Anthony was coming out of high school.

Starring for Turlock High, which was not known for producing high-level college prospects, wasn’t enough to draw interest beyond a few Division II schools. What was the recruiters’ biggest hang up?

“When they looked at him,” Anthony’s father said of someone who now stands 5-foot-10 and weighs 225 pounds, “he wasn’t the guy they wanted.”

Enrolling at Modesto Junior College, Anthony quickly rose from fourth-stringer to featured tailback during the 2021 season, topping 100 yards rushing three times and leading all California junior college players with 17 rushing touchdowns.

It was enough to earn him a scholarship offer at Kansas State.

Kansas State running back Anthony Frias II catches the ball during a game against Tulane on Sept. 17, 2022, in Manhattan, Kan.

(Colin E Braley / Associated Press)

Buried on the depth chart, he redshirted during his first season with the Wildcats. The next season, playing mostly on special teams, Anthony rarely got more than a carry or two in any game. As confident as he was in his ability, it was impossible to keep out the doubt.

He forged ahead, bolstered by his religious faith and conversations with the father who also happened to be his therapist and best friend, telling him not to worry, that things would eventually pay off.

“You know, we talk it through, I’m there for him all the time,” the elder Frias said. “I’ve been there through the tears, I’ve been there through the needing to hold my son, through the questioning, ‘What more can I do, dad?’ But he never faltered, never quit.”

He did seek a new football home.

Kansas State running back Anthony Frias II carries the ball while running into the Central Florida defense on Sept. 23, 2023, in Manhattan, Kan.

(Travis Heying / Associated Press)

Before Kansas State played its bowl game at the end of the 2023 season, Frias entered the transfer portal. Then he waited. And waited. Months went by without a new offer to play elsewhere.

“Nobody was coming, nobody was calling, there was a moment where we were just like, ‘Man, what are we going to do?’” Anthony’s father said. “We just prayed and had faith, like it’s going to work out, don’t worry.”

Sure enough, the new coaching staff at Arizona, which had pursued Anthony when it was at San José State, offered a spot as a preferred walk-on. That meant Anthony was going to have to take out student loans and pay for his own apartment in Tucson.

About a week before he was scheduled to move in, Anthony received a call from Marcus Thomas, UCLA’s running backs coach. How would you like to become a Bruin? Anthony told him that he’d need to be more than a preferred walk-on because otherwise he was just going to go to Arizona.

Less than five minutes later, UCLA offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy called. The team agreed to cover his tuition and living expenses through name, image and likeness funds, even though he wouldn’t be on scholarship.

Done.

When Anthony giddily walked into the Rose Bowl for the first time as a player, during a practice before the 2024 season opener, he FaceTimed his parents, even going over to the seat where he and his father had watched that Rose Bowl game.

“That,” Anthony said, “was like the first full-circle moment that I had.”

Anthony’s first season as a Bruin largely mirrored his final season as a Wildcat. There was a lot of special teams work and only a few carries before an expanded role in the season finale against Fresno State.

Entering what’s likely to be his final college season, the redshirt senior earned a scholarship but no guarantee of emerging from the shadows.

As usual, his father wore his son’s No. 22 jersey last weekend when he settled into his seat in the family section inside the Rose Bowl, never imagining the name on the back would be one of the most talked about inside the stadium.

When Anthony took a handoff early in the second quarter, cutting one way and then the other before breaking a tackle on the way to a 55-yard touchdown run, his every movement was accompanied by his father’s voice in the stands.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, oh dang, oh dang!’ ” the elder Frias said. “And then I stand up, like, ‘Oh!’ and I see that [defender] chase him and I’m like, ‘Come on, Ant, turn it up!’ and then he beats the guy out to score the touchdown and I just went crazy.”

With fellow running backs Anthony Woods and Jaivian Thomas later sidelined by injuries, Anthony Frias got a few more carries. His last one, on the game’s final offensive play, captured the essence of someone who refused to quit.

Running away from one defender who tried to grab him by the shoulders, he spun away from another before finally getting dragged down at the five-yard line to set up the winning field goal on the next play.

“Just all the pain, all the suffering, all the longing, all the workouts, all the late nights, all the no-love, no-opportunity, that run signified the release of that,” his father said. “And when he came out of there, he let out his roar. He was like, ‘I won’t be denied any more.’ ”

In one game and only four carries, Anthony had piled up 97 rushing yards — exceeding the 91 yards he had tallied in the three previous seasons combined.

“He made the most of the situation,” UCLA interim coach Tim Skipper said. “He made critical plays — I mean, we’re not just talking he got some first down or something, he made critical, impact, explosive plays that changed that game and for that to happen for him, it couldn’t have happened to a better person.”

Later, emerging from the tunnel leading to the same spot outside the Rose Bowl where he had held that sign over his head almost a decade earlier, Anthony flashed a smile that his father had never seen before when he reached a jubilant throng of family and friends.

“It just was all the years of the grinding and the behind-the-scenes stuff that I’ve been going through,” Anthony said, “and you know, getting opportunities here and there doing different things and showing that I could do more.”

Everyone shouting his name, waiting their turn for a hug, the only thing missing was a climactic score and rolling credits.

You know what his father would say about that.

Netflix on Tuesday said its third-quarter revenue jumped 17% to $11.5 billion, powered by the hit animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.”

The Los Gatos-based streamer reported a net income of $2.5 billion during the third quarter, up 8% from the same period a year ago but well below the $3 billion analysts had projected, according to FactSet.

Revenue was in line with analyst estimates and was boosted by increased subscriptions, pricing adjustments and more ad revenue.

The company said it incurred a $619-million expense related to a dispute with Brazilian tax authorities.

“Absent this expense, we would have exceeded our Q3’25 operating margin forecast,” Netflix said in a letter to shareholders on Tuesday. “We don’t expect this matter to have a material impact on future results.”

Netflix shares, which closed Tuesday at $1,241.35, fell 5% in after-hours trading.

As it continues to dominate the streaming market with more than 301 million subscribers, Netflix has been investing in a diverse slate of content, including new movies rolling out in the fourth quarter such as Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” as well as the final season of sci-fi hit “Stranger Things” and family-friendly games for the TV such as Boggle.

“KPop Demon Hunters” has garnered more than 325 million views in its first 91 days on the service. The movie, about a trio of powerful singers who hunt demons, was released in June.

It bested 2021 action film “Red Notice,” which had been previously its most watched film in its first 91 days on Netflix with 230.9 million views.

On Tuesday, Netflix also announced a licensing deal with toymakers Hasbro Inc. and Mattel Inc. to make toys including dolls, action figures, youth electronics and other items related to “KPop Demon Hunters.”

Popular TV shows launched in the third quarter include the second season of the Addams family spinoff series “Wednesday” and the second season of drama “My Life With the Walter Boys.”

“When you have a hit the size of ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ it stirs the imagination of where you can take this,” said Ted Sarandos, co-chief executive of Netflix, in an earnings presentation.

He said the film benefited from Netflix’s platform, allowing superfans to repeat view it and make it appealing for audiences to watch in theaters as well. “We believe this film, ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ actually worked because it was released on Netflix first,” Sarandos added.

The company said in the fourth quarter it expects revenue to grow another 17% due to growth in subscriptions, pricing and ad revenue.

For the full year, Netflix is forecasting revenue of $45.1 billion, up 16%, and said it is on track to more than double it ad revenue in 2025.

Like other entertainment companies, Netflix has been taking steps to diversify its business in a challenging landscape, as production costs for TV and movies increases and studios consolidate.

“With entertainment industry employment becoming more precarious, Netflix is slyly pivoting its content strategy to rely more on live sports, YouTubers, creators and podcasters,” said Ross Benes, a senior analyst with research firm Emarketer in a statement.

But some investors still remain skeptical about the future of subscription streaming services, as the technology behind video generation tools powered by AI get more sophisticated, making it easier to replicate visual effects and customize content to viewers.

“Netflix’s core lay-back easy-to-watch scripted content is potentially most at risk by the emergence of generative AI compared to peers,” said John Conca, analyst with investment research firm Third Bridge. “Netflix will need to channel its earlier days and find a way to remain nimble, even though it’s now the 800-pound gorilla in this space to deal with this threat.”

On Tuesday, Netflix said it is using generative AI to improve the quality of its recommendations and content discovery on its platform. Creators on Netflix are also using AI tools for their projects, including filmmakers for comedy “Happy Gilmore 2” using generative AI and volumetric capture technology to de-age characters.

Netflix is looking to capitalize on the popularity of its animated movie “KPop Demon Hunters” — and continue its foray into the retail space.

Netflix on Tuesday announced a licensing deal with toy makers Mattel Inc. and Hasbro Inc. to make dolls, action figures, plushies, youth electronics and other items based on “KPop Demon Hunters,” a movie about a trio of powerful singers and demon hunters who protect the world from dangerous demons.

“KPop Demon Hunters” has been a worldwide hit since its release in June, becoming Netflix’s most-watched film with more than 325 million views in its first 91 days on the streaming service.

The licensing deals come as Netflix has been aggressively partnering with brands to expand the fandom of its shows and movies.

Next month, Netflix will open the first of several planned physical locations called Netflix House where it will host experiences based on its programs and sell food and merchandise.

“KPop Demon Hunters unleashed a global fan frenzy,” said Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, in a statement. “Netflix, Mattel and Hasbro joining forces on this first-of-its-kind collaboration means fans can finally get their hands on the best dolls, games, and merchandise they’ve been not-so-subtly demanding on every social platform known to humanity.”

Under the partnership, Hasbro and Mattel will both become global co-master toy licensee to “KPop Demon Hunters.”

Netflix has had other partnerships with other toy makers, including Squishmallows for shows like sci-fi series “Stranger Things” and Lego sets based on pirates tale “One Piece.”

The Los Gatos, Calif., company has also launched in-person experiences such as balls based on the Regency era romance series “Bridgerton.”

“KPop Demon Hunters is a powerful pop culture phenomenon with global resonance—one that aligns seamlessly with our portfolio of iconic brands and our commitment to innovation,” said Tim Kilpin, Hasbro’s president of toy, licensing, and entertainment, in a statement.

ONE of Yorkshire’s prettiest towns is set for superstardom this December, as it stars in a new Christmas film featuring some of Hollywood’s top actors.

Earlier this year, Hollywood stars like Kiefer Sutherland, Rebel Wilson and EastEnders‘ Danny Dyer descended on Knaresborough for the upcoming movie, Tinsel Town.

Between January and February 2025, cast and crew were spotted in the Yorkshire town, in areas like Castlegate, Riverside, and Green Dragon Yard.

Filming of the Sky Original Christmas movie meant that the festive decorations were up for months longer than usual.

The film, set to be released n November 28, will see Kiefer Sutherland play Bradley Mack, a failed Hollywood action star ending up in a small, snow-dusted village to star in the town’s eccentric production of Cinderella.

It’s here that he encounters a number of oddball locals, one of whom is no-nonsense choreographer Jill, played by Rebel Wilson.

YULE DO

Travel expert reveals cheap UK holiday parks with Xmas breaks from £9pp a night

CHRIMBO WIN

Enter these travel comps before Xmas to win £2k holidays, ski trips & spa stays

It’s no wonder Knaresborough was picked as a filming location, as The Sun’s Katrina Turrill, who hails from the town, reckons it’s the “most beautiful town in the country” and “picture perfect”.

Knaresborough has pretty waterfront cafes and the opportunity to canoe down the river, while watching steam trains travel over the viaduct.

Katrina said: “If you venture down by the river from either Bond End or walking down the steps at the castle you’ll stand at the foot of the iconic viaduct. 

“Amongst the cafes and houses are two boat hire places – Blenkhorn’s and Marigold Cafe & Boating.  Both are open daily, weather permitting, and are a great way to soak up the stunning scenery.

“No visit to Knaresborough is complete without heading to Knaresborough Castle for the best view of the viaduct. 

“You don’t need to pay to enter the castle grounds, and I recommend seeing the view during the day and at night time, with the viaduct all lit up.”

Katrina also suggested checking out the many pubs in the area from Blind Jack’s in the market square, to Carriages.

As for attractions, there’s Mother Shipton’s Cave which is named after the Yorkshire prophetess who predicted many things, including the great fire of London and the black death.

It’s also the oldest tourist attraction to charge a fee in England, and has been open to visitors since 1630.

The town is also lobbying for cash to buy a tourist land train, which would mean visitors could easily go exploring without having to climb steep hills and steps.

A previous grant to get a land train was rejected due to “concerns over the scheme’s viability”, as reported by the BBC.

Now, the Knaresborough & District Chamber, which submitted the bid, is looking for alternative funding to get the service started.

The hope is that the land train would increase the number of visitors to all of Knaresborough, from the river to the main town.

One of the local council members told the BBC that visitors who visit usually wander around the castle and marketplace but don’t go down to the river because of the steep hill and steps.

If the land train becomes a reality, it would join other UK towns which run services generally during the summer.

Weymouth has its very own land train which runs across the promenade, meanwhile Bridlington has two trains, one which heads north, and the other, south.

Other popular destinations with land trains include Hull, Torquay, Hunstanton and Scarborough – each charges between £2-£6 per journey.

mae day

Molly-Mae’s new show seriously concerns me… making Bambi centre stage will backfire

SCHOOL’S OUT

London’s best free indoor attractions for families – perfect for rainy days

And another Yorkshire destination to add to your To Do list…

Hutton-Le-Hole is said to be one of the last unspoiled villages in the UK, thanks to its very quaint houses and attractions.

Home to just 400 locals, it has been named one of Yorkshire‘s “best looking villages” by Lonely Planet, as well as one of the UK’s prettiest by Conde Nast Traveller.

Jane Austen fans will recognise it, having featured in the Death Comes To Pemberley BBC drama.

In the summer, locals sit on the village green, with the sloped grass leading into the river to cool off.

But the village is just as beautiful in autumn with the trees turning bright orange.

Most of the sheep are free-roaming, so expect to see a few munching on the grass.

If you fancy some retail therapy, The Chocolate Factory, which opened 20 years ago, is one of the top attractions.

Despite being small, there are a number of places you can stay like The Crown Inn and The Barn Guesthouse or a number of small B&Bs.

Here’s another Yorkshire village that looks like it is from the 18th century – where every front door is the same colour.

Plus, the pretty English town that attracts thousands of tourists a year with iconic shops and cosy barn stays.

Toy Story graced the movie screens all the way back in 1995, but people are only just realising one hidden detail in the first film which shaped the entire Pixar universe

It’s been 30 years since the first Toy Story movie was released back in 1995. The adventure comedy, which features the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen and more, follows a group of toys who prepare to move into a new house with their young owner Andy.

But trouble arises when Sheriff Woody, the leader of the pack, fears Andy will soon replace him when he receives a new toy, Buzz Lightyear, on his sixth birthday. Then things escalate further during a family trip for dinner at Pizza Planet where Woody accidentally knocks Buzz out of the window, making the others believe he killed him.

Buzz confronts Woody leading to a brawl and a fall out of the car where the two are left behind, fending for themselves. Since the first iconic instalment in the 90s, Toy Story returned for four sequels with the fifth set for release in 2026.

Now one movie fan couldn’t help but notice a tiny detail in the first film which shaped the rest of the sequels and even the entire Pixar universe.

Ivan Mars, known as the ‘Movie Detective’, boasts 962,000 followers on Instagram where he spots hidden details in films. And most recently, he was mind-blown after noticing one Toy Story detail.

He said: “It took me 20 years to notice something hidden in Pixar movies… something that started in Pixar’s very first work: Toy Story. In that movie, Woody and Buzz are lost and their only chance to get back to Andy is to the Pizza Planet truck.

“Without it, the story might have ended right there and because of this, the Pizza Planet truck became a symbol appearing in every Pixar movie from Ratatouille to Cars.

“In Wall-E, it’s the only abandoned vehicle on Earth. And more recently in Elio, it appears in a blink and you’ll miss it scene. So this means it actually became Pixar’s secret thread because it saved the very first characters giving birth to the entire Pixar universe. Mind-blowing…”

People were equally floored by the revelation as the post garnered a lot of attention pretty quickly. One said: “WHAAATTTT!” Another added: “Omg so cool.” A third pointed out: “Yes it’s one of the common Easter egg of Pixar movies!”

Others claimed there were other hidden details as someone commented: “The Pixar lamp is in every movie also I believe.”

Toy Story 5 is set to be released on June 19, 2026. Buzz, Woody and the rest of the gang’s job will get harder when they go head-to-head with a new threat to playtime.

Sea otters love to play, play, play, play, play and they also have to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat — at least that’s what people say — so the Monterey Bay Aquarium is tapping Taylor Swift fans for help.

The Central Coast aquarium launched a fundraising campaign Thursday involving a re-release of one of its classic T-shirt designs to support its sea otter program and other marine conservation efforts after noticing a curious flood of $13 donations it could attribute only to Taylor Swift fans.

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter is seen sporting a vintage 1993 Monterey Bay Aquarium shirt with sea otter art in “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” her movie celebrating the release of her latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Swift’s fiancé, Travis Kelce, a tight end with the Kansas City Chiefs, is a known sea otter fan, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium had previously invited the couple for a special visit.

“Swifties, you truly walk the talk,” the aquarium said in a post on its website announcing the new campaign. “We tracked down the original artwork — first printed in the 1990s — and are bringing it back to say thank you, sustainably.”

The limited-time fundraiser, which offers the new eco-conscious reprints of the shirt in adult and kids sizes to those who donate $65.13, hit its initial goal in a mere seven hours, according to an update posted Thursday by the aquarium. When this story was published Friday, the total was approaching $2.2 million and the shirts were available on back order only.

“Intentional or not, by putting our sea otter conservation work in the spotlight, this has brought a new era of support and awareness to the Aquarium’s long history of ocean conservation,” the Monterey Bay Aquarium said on its website, which also features some fun Swift and sea otter crossover facts.

In addition to debuting the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift’s “Release Party” movie included behind-the-scenes footage and commentary from the artist about her songs. The 89-minute movie made $34 million at the box office over its one weekend in theaters.

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

When news broke last weekend that Diane Keaton had died at age 79, it came as an extraordinary shock because so much of Keaton’s screen presence and persona was rooted in a vitality, a sense of of being very much alive and open to everything.

Revisiting Keaton’s Oscar-winning performance in “Annie Hall” this week, I was struck by how much humor she mined from a hyperawareness of self, often commenting on her own dialogue and behavior as she was still in the act of doing it. She brought a tremendous charge to everything she did.

Jessica Gelt took on winnowing Keaton’s career down to just 10 films, including “Reds,” “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” and the first two parts of “The Godfather.”

Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in the movie “Something’s Gotta Give.”

(Bob Marshak / Columbia Pictures)

In her appreciation of Keaton, Amy Nicholson called her “the icon who feels like a friend,” adding, “The contradiction of her career is that the things we in the audience loved about her — the breezy humor, the self-deprecating charm, the iconic threads — were Keaton’s attempts to mask her own insecurities. She struggled to love herself. Even after success, Keaton remained iffy about her looks, her talent and her achievements. In interviews, she openly admitted to feeling inadequate in her signature halting, circular stammers.”

There was a very genuine wave of emotion and affection after the news of Keaton’s death. One of the most heartfelt and moving tributes came from screenwriter and director Nancy Meyers, who worked with Keaton on four films, from “Baby Boom” to “Something’s Gotta Give.”

As Meyers said, “She made everything better. Every set up, every day, in every movie, I watched her give it her all.”

Meyers added, “She was fearless. She was like nobody ever. She was born to be a movie star. Her laugh could make your day and for me, knowing her and working with her changed my life.”

AMC Theaters have already announced limited showings of both “Annie Hall” and “Something’s Gotta Give.” Other screenings will certainly happen shortly.

Crispin Glover, still doing his own thing

Crispin Glover in “No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance.”

(Volcanic Eruptions)

Still best known for the eccentric screen presence he brought to movies such as “River’s Edge,” “Wild at Heart,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Back to the Future” and countless others, Crispin Glover is also extremely dedicated to his own filmmaking practice.

His latest project, the creatively punctuated “No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance,” will have its West Coast premiere Saturday and Sunday at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre, with Glover in person and a book signing. Tallulah H. Schwab’s “Mr. K,” a mystery starring Glover, will have its L.A. premiere at the Los Feliz 3 on Tuesday with the actor again appearing in person.

“No! YOU’RE WRONG” is the third feature Glover has made himself. He began developing the screenplay in 2007, started building the sets in 2010, began shooting in 2013 and didn’t commence editing until 2018. He goes at his own pace, though Glover is self-excoriating.

“None of this is acceptable,” he tells me during a recent video call from New York City following the film’s world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art. “I’m not happy that this has taken as long as it’s taken. Every step of this film just took ridiculously long.”

While Glover enjoys talking about the film, he struggles to explain what it’s actually about. Set across five time periods — 1868, 1888, 1918, 1948 and right now — Glover shot for the first time on 35mm and, for some scenes, used a hand-cranked camera that belonged to the Czech animator Karel Zeman. The negative was hand-processed, which can alter how it looks, with some sections then colored by hand to replicate early film techniques.

“It’s almost better for me to talk about the technical aspects because by talking about the the technical aspects, it sort of reveals things about the film itself,” Glover says. “All of my films on some level deal with surrealism in one aspect or another. And part of the way surrealism operates is to have either disparate pieces of information or withholding information so that the audience can make the correlations themselves and become a participant in the art.”

Bruce Glover in the movie “No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance,” directed by his son Crispin Glover.

(Volcanic Eruptions)

Aside from Glover himself, the film includes his father, character actor Bruce Glover, who died in March 2025, as well as his mother, dancer Betty Glover, who died in 2016. Following the death of his father, Glover had to make some changes.

“I don’t want to say too much,” says Glover as he catches himself starting to clarify an aspect of the story. “You’d have to see the film. It’s not good for me to talk about it because the way the film is made and layered, it’s something that people will have different interpretations of. And if I say too much, then it will sway the interpretation. They’ll think, ‘Oh, it’s wrong because the filmmaker said this,’ but it isn’t wrong. What they’re thinking is what’s right for them.”

Points of interest

Cronenberg movies at Brain Dead

Léa Seydoux, left, Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart in the movie “Crimes of the Future.”

(Nikos Nikolopoulos)

Brain Dead Studios has been running a program of David Cronenberg films through October and still has a few titles left to go. And while his films may not fit everyone’s strict definition of Halloween-style spooky, they are reliably unsettling in their examinations of the darker aspects of human existence.

Friday will see a screening of 2022’s “Crimes of the Future,” starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux, Monday will be Cronenberg’s 1991’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” Thursday brings 1979’s low-budget horror film “The Brood” and Saturday, Oct. 25 will have 1996’s controversial “Crash.”

I spoke to Cronenberg around the release of “Crimes of the Future,” which at the time felt like something of a summation of the director’s ongoing interests in technology and the body, though he claimed it wasn’t intentional.

“It’s not a self-referential film because I’m not thinking that when I’m writing it or directing it,” Cronenberg said. “But the connections are there because my nervous system, such as it is including my brain, is the substrate of everything I’m doing. So I might even say in the Burroughsian way that all of my work and all of my life is one thing. In which case, it now makes perfect sense that there should be these connections.”

David Fincher’s ‘The Game’

Michael Douglas in the movie “The Game.”

(Tony Friedkin / Polygram Films)

David Fincher’s 1997 thriller “The Game” is somewhat easy to overlook in his filmography, landing between the provocations of “Seven” and “Fight Club” and before fully-formed works like “Zodiac” and “The Social Network.” However, the movie, in which a wealthy man (Michael Douglas) finds his life turned upside in what may be a live-action role-playing game, is strange and unpredictable and among Fincher’s most purely pleasurable movies. It plays at the New Beverly on Friday — a rare chance to catch it in a theater on 35mm.

In his review of the film, Jack Matthews wrote, “Douglas is perfectly cast. Who else can blend moneyed arrogance, power and rank narcissism with enough romantic flair, intelligence and self-deflating humor to make you enjoy his defeats and his victories? What other major star is as much fun to watch when he’s cornered?”

It’s clear from the existence and execution of “Black Phone 2” that Universal and Blumhouse never expected 2021’s “The Black Phone” to be a hit. If there was ever an inkling that the first film might have been more than a quick and dirty ’70s-style riff on a boogeyman tale, there’s no way those in charge would have let their big baddie, the Grabber, be killed off at the end of the movie.

But a hit it was and so, for a sequel, supernatural elements must be spun out and ’80s slasher classics consulted, especially since it’s now four years later, in 1982. Masked serial killer the Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke (we never really see his face, though we do hear his voice), continues to haunt, torment and maim children, despite the inconvenience of death.

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill co-wrote both films, with Derrickson behind the camera as director. The first was based on a short story by Joe Hill (the son of Stephen King) and is set in 1978 Denver, where plucky Finney Blake (Mason Thames) had to escape the clutches of kidnapper the Grabber while fielding phone calls from the ghosts of his previous victims, offering tips and tricks. What distinguished “The Black Phone” was its shocking approach to violence with its young characters, who all sported entertainingly profane potty mouths. While it was daring in its hard-R riskiness and played on our basest fears, it didn’t reinvent the wheel, or even try to. However, the film’s phone conceit played well enough and young star Thames was outstanding.

In “Black Phone 2,” Finney’s now a high school student, drowning his trauma in weed and schoolyard fights, sometimes the bully himself. He’s protective of his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who has the gift of psychic sight, but mostly he just wants to check out from his own brain. The sequel is primarily Gwen’s movie. She starts lucid dreaming and sleepwalking, receiving phone calls from beyond — like from their dead mother when she was a teenager beyond.

The messages bring Gwen, Finney and her crush, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), to a winter retreat for Christian youth, Camp Alpine, now run by Mando (Demián Bichir) and his niece, Mustang (Arianna Rivas). As it turns out, this camp is rife with the ghosts of young dead boys — the phone keeps ringing and it won’t stop until Finney picks it up.

If “The Black Phone” dabbles in crimes that are taboo and is even unforgivable in its depiction of brutality against innocent children, “Black Phone 2” commits its own unforgivable crime of being dreadfully boring. This movie is a snooze, not just because all of the action takes place entirely during Gwen’s dreams.

The film can’t shake its lingering scent of “Stranger Things,” but the filmmakers have also turned for inspiration to another iconic ’80s-set property: The whole movie is a “Nightmare on Elm Street” ripoff, with a disfigured killer stalking his prey through their subconscious. Those sequences are fine, action-packed if not entirely scary, but at least it’s something more rousing than the awake scenes, where the characters stand in one place and make speeches to each other about their trauma and backstories. The entire affair is monotonously one-note and dour, with only a few pops of unintentional humor.

You realize almost immediately what the deal is with these ghost boys, but the film takes its sweet time explaining it all. It’s a fairly simple story, so you do understand why Derrickson gussies it up with grainy dream sequences and shaky 8mm flashbacks, and a pretty terrific electronic score composed by his son, Atticus Derrickson.

It’s also a bit surprising that “Black Phone 2” turns out to be so pious and deeply Christian, which is a bit of an odd mix. For a film about Jesus and the power of prayer, it also features a scene in which a kid’s face gets sliced in half by a windowpane. Then again, horror’s trend toward the faith-based isn’t a surprise when you take a look at the success of the Bible-thumping “Conjuring” franchise.

However, it seems like this might be the Grabber’s last hurrah. You’ll root for the characters to vanquish him only because then the drudgery might finally end. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a hit and they’ll figure out another way to reanimate this utterly uninspiring horror villain. Personally, I’ve had my fill of the Grabber’s grabbing.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

“Frankenstein” has haunted Guillermo del Toro since he was a kid who barely reached the Creature’s knees. Back in 2011, the writer-director was already tinkering with a version of the monster that resembled a blend of Iggy Pop and Boris Karloff with jagged sutures, gaunt wrinkles and a crushed nose. Since then, Del Toro has made changes. The 2025 model is played by Jacob Elordi, a 6-foot-5 actor often cast as the ideal human specimen in movies like “Saltburn” and who here howls to life with handsome features and rock star swagger. But your eyes keep staring at his pale, smooth seams. He doesn’t look hand-stitched — he looks a little like a modern android.

Of course he does. The decades have given Del Toro time to think about what truly scares him. It’s not monsters. He loves all disfigured nasties, be they swamp creatures, eyeball-less ogres or bolt-headed Hellboys. It’s tech bros, like the ones weaseling into Hollywood, who give their every innovation a sterile sheen.

“Frankenstein” is the director’s lifelong passion project: He doesn’t just want to make a “Frankenstein” but the “Frankenstein,” so he’s faithfully set his adaptation in the past. But he’s adjusted the wiring so that 1850s Europe reminds us of Silicon Valley. The result is the best movie of his career.

This Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is a short-sighted egomaniac who barks over his critics while jabbing the air with his fingers. “I fail to see why modesty is considered a virtue,” he says with a snort.

And Del Toro has written Victor an enabler: a deep-pocketed investor named Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who struts into Victor’s science lecture hunting for a whizkid to crack the code to immortality. With his gold-heeled shoes and a confidence that he’s too rich to die, Waltz’s wealthy arms dealer is a 19th century take on venture capitalists like Bryan Johnson and Peter Thiel who’ve been poking into the feasibility of pumping their veins with young blood.

“Don’t be a reasonable man,” Henrich advises Victor. The assumption is — and remains — that tycoons and geniuses deserve to run rampant. Great success demands an indifference to the rules. And if you’re wondering whether money or brains has more power, there’s a scene in which Henrich uses a chamber pot and smugly orders Victor to “flush that for me.”

Del Toro is wired into the outrage in Mary Shelley’s sly 1818 novel, a nightmarish satire about men who care only about yelling “first!” without asking what horrors come next. Centuries ago, she warned of man’s ill-considered rush to create artificial intelligence. Today, Dr. Frankenstein’s descendants keep promising that AI won’t destroy civilization while ignoring Shelley’s point, that the inventor is more dangerous than his monster.

Victor, a stunted man-child who drinks milk served by a sommelier, is frozen in the I’ll-show-him stage of growing up with an abusive father (Charles Dance) who whipped him when he got a wrong answer on his schoolwork. Victor’s name, we’re reminded, means “winner,” a symbol of the pressure he’s under to excel.

Isaac plays him with a pitchman’s exuberance that sags as the corners of his mouth wrench down in disappointment. He’s hacked how to make a disembodied head moan in agony. But having rarely felt affection, Victor doesn’t know how to generate that emotion at all. Worse, it hasn’t occurred to him to think past the triumph of his product launch, that his Creature can’t be readily unplugged. The only kind characters in the movie are a rural blind man (David Bradley) and the moth-like Mia Goth, double-cast as Victor’s mother, Claire, and his brother’s fiancee, Elizabeth. A convent girl with a creepy streak, Elizabeth sees beauty in biology, leaning over a corpse’s flayed back to appreciate the intricacy of its ventricles. But the more she studies Victor, the less impressed she gets.

Because Shelley came up with “Frankenstein” as an 18-year-old newlywed who’d just lost a baby, her message gets boiled down to gender: Women birth life, men mimic it. Really, the feminine strength of the book lies in its foxy, shifting narration that opens with a prologue from an Arctic explorer who’s gotten his sailors trapped in the ice, before transitioning to Victor’s story and then the Creature’s. Like a hostess who secretly loathes her guests, Shelley encourages her characters to flatter themselves and expose their braggadocio.

Del Toro has kept that tactic and he’s kept the book’s structure. But within that framework, he’s changed nearly everything else to make Victor more culpable. Unlike the 1931 film, there’s no Igor and no excuse of accidentally using the wrong brain. This Victor does his own dirty work and what goes wrong is his fault. Meanwhile, Del Toro amps up the action, starting the film off with a ghastly great sequence in which Elordi’s Creature punches a sailor so hard his spine snaps into a backward somersault.

“What manner of devil made him?” the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) exclaims. Victor guiltily explains why he played God.

Being a futurist isn’t bad. Henrich, an early adopter of daguerreotype cameras, shoots photographs of women posing with skulls like he’s paving the way for Del Toro’s whole filmography. But pompous Henrich and Victor don’t appreciate that their accomplishments are built on other’s sacrifices. When the cinematographer Dan Laustsen pans across a battlefield of dead soldiers, it feels like a silent scream. Henrich made his fortune killing these men; now, Victor will salvage their body parts.

Del Toro delights in the kinetic gusto of the tale, the grotesquerie of cracking limbs and blood sloshing about Victor’s shoes. In the laboratory, dead leaves and buzzing flies whirl through the air as if to keep up with the inventor’s wild ambitions and Alexandre Desplat’s swirling orchestral score. The production design by Tamara Deverell is superb as are the costumes by Kate Hawley, who shrouds Goth in dramatic chiffon layers and dresses laced to highlight her vertebrae. (This movie loves bones as much as Sir Mix-A-Lot loved backs.)

As Victor rudely flings around torsos and limbs, it’s clear that he only values life if it’s branded with his name. So yes, of course, Elordi’s Creature looks good. He’s been assembled from the choicest bits of man flesh to show off the talent of his creator, not so different from Steve Jobs caressing samples of brushed aluminum. When Elordi’s Creature pleads for a companion, a sliver of sculpted abs peeking out from under five hulking layers of wool and fur, you expect half the audience’s hands to shoot up and volunteer.

Elordi has adopted one or two of Karloff’s mannerisms: the arms outstretched in search of warmth, the lurching walk. You can see that he’s a tad lopsided on the left side, presumably because Victor couldn’t find matching femurs. Mostly, he’s his own monster, neither the calculating serial murderer of the book nor Karloff’s reactive, animalistic killer, but a scapegoat who finally starts leveling his foes with bone-breaking efficiency.

Towering over Victor by almost a foot, Elordi’s Creature dwarfs his creator physically, morally and emotionally. There’s anguish in his eyes, and when Del Toro shows us the world through his perspective, humanity itself appears anti-life, a pestilence that destroys without hesitation.

There’s a pack of digital wolves that just looks silly. Otherwise, you trust how intensely Del Toro has doted upon every detail. I was flummoxed by a row of servants flanking young Victor (Christian Convery) who appeared to be wearing gauzy bags over their heads. What are those for? My theory is it’s a tribute to the veil Karloff sported during lunch breaks, so as not to frighten any pregnant secretaries on the Universal lot.

Eschewing mobs of pitchfork-wielding villagers, Del Toro focuses on Victor’s inability to parent his unholy son. And while the end stretch gets a bit too stiff and speechy, particularly with a line that Victor is the “true monster,” I loved the moment when the Creature, venting on behalf of all frustrated children however big they‘ve grown, growls, “The miracle is not that I should speak but that you would listen.”

This deservedly anticipated “Frankenstein” transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.

Diane Keaton died in Los Angeles on Saturday at age 79, and her family says the cause was pneumonia.

Family members of the Oscar-winning actress shared a statement with People confirming Keaton’s cause of death and saying they were “very grateful for the extraordinary messages of love and support” they had received in recent days.

The outlet first reported the news of the screen icon’s death Saturday, saying the Los Angeles Fire Department had responded to her home that morning and transported a 79-year-old woman to an area hospital. Initially, the family did not disclose the cause of death and asked for privacy as they processed their grief.

In Wednesday’s statement, Keaton’s family members said the star had a deep love for animals and was passionate about supporting the unhoused community. They encouraged people to honor her memory by donating to a food bank or animal shelter.

Keaton was known for her powerful performances in iconic pictures such as Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” movies and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” which earned her the 1978 Academy Award for lead actress. She was also nominated for lead actress for her roles in “Reds” (1981), “Marvin’s Room” (1996) and “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003).

Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Keaton rose to fame through her late 1960s New York stage career, earning a Tony nomination at age 25 for her role in Allen’s 1969 theatrical production of “Play It Again, Sam.”

Later in her career, she became a muse for writer-director-producer Nancy Meyers and starred in four of her movies. She was a noted trendsetter known for her fabulous on-screen outfits and, more recently, for sharing her style on Instagram, where she amassed 2.6 million followers.

Keaton’s death was widely mourned by theater, movie and fashion lovers alike.

“She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star,” wrote actor Bette Midler on Instagram. “What you saw was who she was.”

“Diane Keaton wasn’t just an actress: she was a force,” wrote actor Octavia Spencer on Instagram, “a woman who showed us that being yourself is the most powerful thing you can be. From Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give, she made every role unforgettable.”

Times film editor Joshua Rothkopf contributed to this report.

“KPop Demon Hunters” creator Maggie Kang thinks there’s potential for more Huntr/x stories in the future, but only in animation.

In a recent interview with the BBC, the co-director of the Netflix phenomenon said there is nothing officially in the works, but she thinks “there’s definitely more we can do with these characters in this world.” Kang and her co-director Chris Appelhans also assured fans that if another “KPop Demon Hunters” were to happen, “it will be a story that deserves to be a sequel, and it will be something that we want to see.”

Produced by Sony Pictures Animation, the movie follows a popular K-pop girl group whose members use their music and dance moves (and magical powers) to fight demons and protect the world. But Huntr/x’s leader Rumi is keeping a secret from her bandmates Mira and Zoey that could lead to their downfall.

Since its June debut, “KPop Demon Hunters” and its catchy soundtrack have smashed numerous records on Netflix as well as the Billboard charts. The movie’s massive popularity led to a limited theatrical run for sing-along screenings as well as live performances of its songs.

With Hollywood’s current trend of sequels and remakes, it’s easy to believe that “KPop Demon Hunters” could spawn its own franchise. But Kang and Appelhans both insist that a live-action adaptation should be off the table.

“It’s really hard to imagine these characters in a live action world,” Kang told the BBC, pointing to the tone and comedic elements in “KPop.” “It would feel too grounded. So totally it wouldn’t work for me.”

Appelhans agreed that the characters in “KPop Demon Hunters” are best suited for animation and worried a live-action version of them could feel too “stilted.”

“One of the great things about animation is that you make these composites of impossibly great attributes,” Appelhans told the BBC. “Rumi can be this goofy comedian and then singing and doing a spinning back-kick a second later and then free-falling through the sky. The joy of animation is how far you can push and elevate what’s possible.”

For now, it seems that Huntr/x will keep shining only in the medium they were born to be — in animation.

When Diane Keaton was 11, her father told her she was growing into a pretty young woman and someday, a boy would make her happy. She was horrified. One boy? Keaton — then going by her birth name of Diane Hall — needed to be loved by everyone. It was an early sign that she was meant to be an actor.

“Intimacy meant only one person loved you, not thousands, not millions,” Keaton wrote decades later in her 2011 memoir “Then Again.” Like drinking and smoking, she added, intimacy should be handled with caution.

“I wanted to be Warren Beatty, not date him,” Keaton confessed, romancing fellow artists as long as their relationship was mutually stimulating and then after that, remaining friends. “I collect men,” she jokingly told me when I interviewed her a decade ago, referring to a photo wall in her Los Angeles home of fellows she admired, including Morgan Freeman, Abraham Lincoln, Gary Cooper and John Wayne. She wanted an excuse to add Ryan Gosling and Channing Tatum, so I suggested a love-triangle comedy as a twofer. “No! Not one movie!” Keaton exclaimed. “I want to keep my career going.”

Just as she hoped, millions of us did fall in love with Keaton, who died Saturday at age 79. She captivated us for over 50 years, from awards heavy-hitters to a late-career string of hangout comedies that weren’t about anything more than the joy of spending time with Diane Keaton, or in the case of her 2022 body swap movie “Mack & Rita,” the thrill of becoming Diane Keaton.

In her final films, including “Summer Camp” and the “Book Club” franchise, Keaton pretty much only played variations of herself, providing reason enough to watch. I looked forward to the moment her character fully embraced looking like Diane Keaton, writing in my otherwise middling review of “Mack & Rita” that the sequence in which she “picks up a kooky blazer and wide belt is presented with the anticipation of Bruce Wayne reaching for his cowl.”

I wanted to be Diane Keaton, even if she wanted to be Warren Beatty.

The contradiction of her career is that the things we in the audience loved about her — the breezy humor, the self-deprecating charm, the iconic threads — were Keaton’s attempts to mask her own insecurities. She struggled to love herself. Even after success, Keaton remained iffy about her looks, her talent and her achievements. In interviews, she openly admitted to feeling inadequate in her signature halting, circular stammers. That is, when she’d consent to be interviewed at all, which in the first decade of her career was so rare that Keaton, loping across Central Park in baggy pants to the white-on-white apartment where she lived alone, was essentially a movie star Sasquatch.

Journalists described her as a modern Garbo. “Her habit is to clutch privacy about her like a shawl,” Time Magazine wrote in 1977, the year that “Annie Hall” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” established Keaton as a kooky sweetheart with serious range. I love that simile because she did refer to her wardrobe as an “impenetrable fortress.” The more bizarre the ensemble — jackets over skirts over pants over boots — the less anyone would notice the person wearing it.

Odd ducks like myself adored the whole package, including her relatable candor. She showed us how to charge through the world with aplomb, even when you’re nervous as heck.

Once young Keaton decided she wanted to perform, she set about auditioning for everything from the church choir and the cheerleading squad to the class play. But her school had a traditionally beautiful ingenue who landed the leads. This was Orange County, after all. Keaton would go home, stare at the mirror and feel disappointed by her reflection. She dreamed of looking like perky, platinum blond Doris Day. Instead, she saw a miniature Amelia Earhart. (She’d eventually get a Golden Globe nomination for playing Earhart on television in 1994.)

Keaton stuck a clothespin on the tip of her nose to make it smaller, and acted the part of an extrovert: big laugh, big hair and, when she stopped liking her hair, big hats. By age 15, she was assembling the bold, black and white wardrobe she’d wear forever and her taste for monochrome clothes was already so entrenched that she wrote Judy Garland a fan letter wondering why Dorothy had to leave Kansas for garish Oz. She might have been the only person to ever ask that question.

Not too long after that, Keaton flew across the country to New York where several things happened in short succession that would have puffed up anyone else’s ego. The drama coach Sanford Meisner gave her his blessing. The Broadway hit “Hair” gave her the main part (and agreed she could stay fully clothed). And “The Godfather,” the No. 1 box office hit of 1972, plucked Keaton from stage obscurity to give the fledgling screen actor its crucial final shot, a close-up.

Keaton made $6,000 for “The Godfather,” less than a quarter of her salary for the national deodorant commercial she’d shot a year earlier. Her memories from the set of the first film were uncharacteristically terse. Her wig was heavy, her part was “background music” and the one time Marlon Brando spoke to her, he said, “Nice tits.”

Nevertheless, Keaton’s Kay is so soft, friendly and assured when she first meets the Corleone clan at a wedding, sweetly refusing to let her boyfriend Michael dodge how the family knows the pop singer Johnny Fontane, that it’s heartbreaking (and impressive) to watch her become smaller and harder across her few scenes. But Keaton says she never saw the finished movie. “I couldn’t stand looking at myself,” she wrote in “Then Again.”

Woody Allen put the Keaton he adored front and center when he wrote “Annie Hall.” He wanted audiences to fall in love with the singular daffiness of his former girlfriend and it worked like gangbusters. It’s my favorite of his movies and my favorite of hers, and there’s just no use in pretending otherwise, as obvious of a pick as it is. Even now that I know the Annie Hall I worship is a shy woman putting on a show of being herself, the “la-di-dah” confidence she projects makes her the most precious of screen presences: the icon who feels like friend.

But I wonder if Allen also made “Annie Hall” so that Diane Keaton could fall in love with Diane Keaton just as he had. Maybe if she saw herself through his eyes, it could convince her that she really was sexy, sparkling and hilarious. But Keaton only watched “Annie Hall” once, in an ordinary theater well after it opened, and she found the experience of staring at herself miserable. She never absorbed her lead actress Oscar win. “I knew I didn’t deserve it,” she said. “I’d won an Academy Award for playing an affable version of myself.”

Nearly herself, that is. The onscreen version of Keaton is stumped when Alvy Singer brings her a copy of the philosophical tome “Death and Western Thought.” But a decade later, Keaton directed “Heaven,” an entire documentary about the subject, in which she asked street preachers and Don King and her 94-year-old grandmother how they imagined the afterlife. (As in Allen’s movie, her grandmother actually was named Grammy Hall.)

“Heaven” is an experimental film that’s heavy on dramatic shadows and surreal old movie footage, the sort of thing that would play best on an art gallery wall. It flopped, as test screenings warned it would, cautioning Keaton that her directorial debut only appealed to female weirdos — people like her. Keaton isn’t a voice in the film. Yet, that she made it at all makes every frame feel personal, and you hear her affection for the cadence of her occasionally tongue-tied subjects. Her first interviewee stutters, “Uh, heaven, heaven is, uh, um, let me see.” Exactly how Annie Hall would have put it.

Today more than ever, I’m wishing Keaton had been comfortable turning her camera on herself. I’d have liked to watch her explain where she thinks she’s gone, however adorably flustered the answer. But in her four memoirs, she safely bared all in print, openly confronting her harsh inner critic, her battle with bulimia, and — yes, Alvy — her musings on death.

“I don’t know if I have the courage to stare into the spectacle of the great unknown,” Keaton wrote in 2014’s “Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty,” sounding as apprehensive as ever. “I don’t know if I will make bold mistakes, go out on a blaze of glory unbroken by my losses, defy complacency, and refuse to face the unknown like the coward I know myself to be.”

At last, a sliver of confidence peeks out. “But I hope so.”

On behalf of her millions of fans, I hope so too.

Diane Keaton, the beloved star of “Annie Hall,” “The Godfather” and “The First Wives Club,” wooed audiences as much as she did her multiple Hollywood boyfriends. It seems that much remains true for ex-lovers Woody Allen and Al Pacino, whose high-profile romances with the Los Angeles native are back in the spotlight in the wake of her death over the weekend.

“Her face and laugh illuminated any space she entered,” Allen, Keaton’s “Annie Hall” director and co-star, wrote Sunday.

The acclaimed and controversial filmmaker reminisced on his dating relationship with Keaton for the Free Press, recalling how they first met in Manhattan in the late 1960s for his stage production of “Play It Again, Sam.” Allen’s first impression of the eventual Oscar winner was, he explained, as “if Huckleberry Finn was a gorgeous young woman.”

“The upshot is that she was so charming, so beautiful, so magical, that I questioned my sanity. I thought: Could I be in love so quickly?” he wrote, later describing their evolution from collaborators to romantic partners.

Keaton and Allen collaborated on eight movies, also including “Stardust Memories,” “Sleeper” and “Love and Death.” The 89-year-old director wrote that he “made movies for an audience of one, Diane Keaton,” and heavily valued her opinions on his work. As Allen praised Keaton’s radiating personality (“She was a million laughs to be around”) he recalled learning about her struggles with bulimia and spending Thanksgiving with her family in Orange County.

“Why we parted only God and Freud might be able to figure out,” Allen wrote.

Pacino, who shared the screen with Keaton in three “Godfather” films and dated Keaton throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, is also thinking about what could have been. “Looking back, Al admits the love of his life was Diane who he’s always called an ‘amazing woman,’ ” a source close to the 85-year-old actor told the Daily Mail.

“I know he will forever regret he didn’t make his move when he had the chance,” the source added. “For years after he and Diane split, Al used to say, ‘If it’s meant to be, it’s never too late for a do-over. But sadly, now it is.’ ”

After news of Keaton’s death spread Saturday, stars including Bette Midler, Steve Martin, Viola Davis and Kate Hudson paid tribute on social media. “What you saw was who she was,” Midler said of her “First Wives Club” co-star. Keaton never married and is survived by two adopted children, Duke and Dexter Keaton.

Allen closed his essay emphasizing the significance of Keaton’s death: “A few days ago the world was a place that included Diane Keaton. Now it’s a world that does not. Hence it’s a drearier world.”

“Still there are her movies,” he wrote. “And her great laugh still echoes in my head.”