movie

Inside an office in Hollywood, not far from the Walk of Fame and the Sunset Bronson Studios, Netflix executive Alain Tascan revealed new content coming soon to the platform — but it’s not a TV show or a movie. It’s a new game where U.S. viewers compete to win thousands of dollars.

The game show, called “Best Guess Live,” will run on weekdays at 5 p.m. PT, where hosts Howie Mandel and Hunter March will unveil a set of five clues. Mobile game players tune in to make their best guesses. The earlier they can guess correctly with fewer clues, the higher the chances they can win more of the prize money. The show, filmed in Van Nuys, is Netflix’s attempt at appointment gaming for its audience of more than 700 million viewers.

“Can you imagine where you not only can go and play a game, but you could win a life-changing amount of money each and every day, and it takes no time, it’s easy, and you just have your phone?” said Mandel, widely known for his hosting turns on NBC’s “Deal or No Deal” and “America’s Got Talent.”

The goal is to make playing games on Netflix “as simple as streaming a movie on a Friday, using the same innovative mindset that led Netflix to transform itself from a company shipping DVDs to streaming movies, shows and now games,” Tascan said.

Netflix has been investing in its games vertical for the last four years, with mixed results. Last month, the streamer’s co-CEO Greg Peters gave the company’s gaming efforts a B- grade. Under Tascan’s leadership, the division has focused on some key areas, including narratives based on Netflix programs, games for children, social party games and mainstream titles like “Grand Theft Auto.”

The changes appear to be working. The number of downloads for Netflix games has increased 17% to 74.8 million from January to October of this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to data from app analytics firm Appfigures. The company is also releasing fewer games, adding 16 titles this year compared to 35 last year, Appfigures said.

Netflix declined to comment on the Appfigures data.

The company has also removed games in part due to low customer engagement. Netflix has released 142 games, with 78 of them still active as of October, according to Appfigures.

Its two most popular mobile games were released on Netflix in the last two years, including “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” which came on the platform in December 2023 and achieved 44 million downloads. The streamer released an original, the multiplayer party royale title “Squid Game: Unleashed,” last year with 21 million downloads. The game had tie-ins to the popular series’ second season where players could earn cash or wild tokens in the game if they watched a certain number of episodes.

Some analysts say there is still room for improvement.

Journalists participate in a games demo at a Netflix office on Wednesday.

(Netflix)

“It still seems pretty experimental,” said Ross Benes, senior analyst at research firm Emarketer. “I don’t get the impression that they are on gamers’ list of their go-to sources of entertainment.”

On Thursday, Netflix said its first slate of five games for the TV, including Tetris Time Warp, Boggle Party, Pictionary: Game Night and LEGO Party! are now available. Prior to the new slate, subscribers could only play Netflix games on their mobile devices.

When consumers load up the TV games, they will see a QR code they can scan on their devices and use them as controllers in the game. For example in Netflix’s version of Pictionary, users draw on their phones.

“A big switch in the strategy is really to make sure that we are eliminating any friction that somebody can encounter when they want to play,” Tascan said in an interview. “We believe that on TV, in particular, where people enjoy their different shows, is the best place to offer something very easily approachable.”

The TV games are the latest iteration in Netflix’s effort that began four years ago. The company had beefed up its staff after acquiring four gaming businesses — Glendale-based Night School, Boss Fight Entertainment out of Allen, Texas, Finland-based Next Games and Spry Fox based in Seattle.

Netflix shut down Boss Fight Entertainment last month.

The gaming division efforts were first led by Mike Verdu, a former Facebook and Electronic Arts executive. He later transitioned to a role focusing on transforming game development and player experiences with generative AI in November 2024 and left Netflix earlier this year. Tascan, a former executive at Epic Games, was named Netflix’s president of games in July 2024.

Games has been an attractive area of investment for some companies, as younger audiences spend a lot of time playing titles like Roblox, Fortnite and Call of Duty. Tascan estimates there are 3 billion gamers in the world and with Netflix having an audience of more than 700 million people, “the Venn diagram is pretty large.”

The streamer on Thursday also announced new mobile games for kids, including digital coloring book “Barbie Color Creations” and a hairstyling game, “Toca Boca Hair Salon 4.”

It can be challenging for companies to get into the space. For example, in 2023, Google shut down its gaming service Stadia after it failed to gain traction with users.

Tascan said Netflix is not competing against traditional gaming consoles but is looking to innovate and find new ways to reach its customers.

Tascan said he is encouraged by the reactions he has seen.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” he said. “But at the end, how many people are going to have the same reaction? We are a company driven by data, and our main data is, how many people are going to engage?”

Tascan said he thinks it will be a few short years before Netflix becomes the Netflix of games. He hopes the division can improve from Peters’ grade of a B- to a higher level.

“What I hope is, by the end of the year, we’ll upgrade to an A, hopefully A+,” Tascan said.

Times editorial library director Cary Schneider contributed to this report.

HE may be growing old very, very gracefully, but George Clooney is worried about ageing too fast – and forgetting his lines.

The Hollywood heartthrob, 64, was taken on a surprise walk down memory lane after shooting his latest film Jay Kelly, in which he plays a fictional famous actor.

Unknown to him, director Noah Baumbach had added snippets of George’s previous movies at the end of the Netflix release.

And watching the years roll by on screen was an eye-opener for the silver fox, not least when he was met with milestones he would rather forget.

His dodgy Eighties haircut in sitcom The Facts Of Life was one, as well as just how young he was when he starred in hospital drama ER in the Nineties.

George, whose hits include Ocean’s Eleven and Gravity, says: “It was really fascinating, because you go through all the things we all go through, which is you watch yourself age, which you have to make peace with.

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“You also look at some f***ing horrible mullets. And you have to kind of get through all that.

“And you do get this thing of, ‘God, that was just yesterday, wasn’t it?’. That I was on ER or something. It really does go by fast. And the older you get, the faster it seems to go.”

It is hard to imagine now, but there was a time when George was a struggling actor.

Having dropped out of university, where he was studying journalism, he sold insurance and shoes while also trying his luck as an extra on TV.

Sequels cancelled George recalls: “I came from Augusta, Kentucky, where I was a tobacco farmer. And you go on all these auditions and you go, ‘Well, I took a shot’. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s easy when you get older to go, ‘Yeah, I gave it a shot. It didn’t work out’, which happens.

“But you can’t do it when you’re old and you didn’t try. That’s regret.”

Back when opportunities were thin on the ground, George did take some roles he now recalls ruefully.

That includes the first movie he was cast in, called Grizzly II: Revenge, which suffered financial problems.

Backers pulled out of the 1983 low-budget horror flick, which also featured Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern, so the cast were stuck in Hungary for weeks while the funding was sorted out.

George reveals: “It was funded by these Hungarians. And then they lost the money.

“And so we got stuck there for, like, two months. And it was Laura, Charlie Sheen and me. It was all our first films.

“And we’re stuck there for two months. And we can’t get home. We don’t know what to do.

In Grizzly II, we get eaten by a bear in the first scene. It never comes out, thank Christ. Then some schmuck finds it. Now it’s ‘starring George Clooney’ and I get worst reviews of my life

George Clooney

“And literally, we get eaten by a bear in the first scene and so it never comes out. Thank Christ.”

Although the movie was not completed at the time, it was finally finished and released in 2020, with George given a top billing, even though he only appeared briefly.

He continues: “Some schmuck finds it and he gets a bunch of old footage of s**. And he puts it together.

“And now it’s like, ‘Starring George Clooney’. And it comes out. And after 40 years, I’m getting the worst reviews of my life.”

George’s screen breakthrough came in 1994 when he began playing paediatric doctor Doug Ross in ER, which was a global success.

It led to major movies including From Dusk Till Dawn two years later, and Batman & Robin in 1997.

The star is able to laugh off his much-panned version of the caped crusader, which was such a flop that the sequels were cancelled.

And he jokes that his eight-year-old twins Alexander and Ella will be left traumatised by the Batman outfit he wore.

The actor says: “We know they’re going to be in therapy no matter what, just from Batman & Robin. ‘My dad had rubber f***ing nipples’. Disaster.”

George, who was married to actress Talia Balsam, 66, for four years until 1993, dated a string of beautiful women, including Renee Zellweger and British TV presenter Lisa Snowdon, before settling down with lawyer Amal Alamuddin.

She is the mother of his children and the couple have been married for 11 years.

They have homes near Reading, Berks and in Kentucky, US.

It is clear that George is very content, unlike his latest character.

He says of the fictional Jay Kelly: “He regrets his relationship with his father. He regrets the relationship with his kids. “He regrets the relationship with the women in his life and not spending enough time with people you love. I don’t have much of that. I mean, I have kids that still like me.”

Even so, fans might have some difficulty separating fiction from reality when they see George in his latest role.

He is, after all, playing a Hollywood star who has experienced plenty of ups and downs.

When Noah Baumbach, who is married to Barbie director Greta Gerwig, wrote the script, he thought George was the natural choice for the lead role.

But the actor hopes he did not see any of Kelly’s nasty streak in him.

People will be like, ‘Oh, you’re just playing yourself in this’. And I go, ‘Well, I hope not, because the guy’s a d***’

George Clooney

He jokes: “People will be like, ‘Oh, you’re just playing yourself in this’. And I go, ‘Well, I hope not, because the guy’s a d***’.

‘I was scared’

“But, you know, maybe they’re telling me something. When he said, ‘I wrote this with you in mind,’ I was like, ‘F*** you’.”

This will only be George’s seventh movie in the past ten years. He has not received many scripts that interested him — and some of the roles he did take failed to “challenge” him.

That includes the 2024 Apple+ action comedy Wolfs that he made with Brad Pitt and the romcom Ticket To Paradise with Julia Roberts in 2022.

George says: “For the last ten years or so, for the most part, I was directing because I was more interested in telling stories and I wanted to continue to be a storyteller. But the parts I was getting offered weren’t all that interesting.

“And so I hadn’t really been in a film. I did a couple of movies. I did a movie with Julia Roberts and I did a movie with Brad, which were fun and they’re fun to work with and people that I know. But it’s not challenging yourself.

“We know what the audience wants delivered for those films.”

Neither of those movies were well received by reviewers and George hasn’t had a critically-acclaimed film since 2016’s Hail, Caesar!

Out of the nine movies he has directed, Good Night, And Good Luck was the biggest success, picking up Best Picture and Best Director Oscar nominations at the 2006 awards.

And while 2014’s The Monuments Men was a box-office hit, other offerings such as Leatherheads in 2008 lost money.

George is sanguine about any setbacks he has faced. “I was friends with Gregory Peck and I was friends with Paul Newman. Even those guys, and they were the biggest movie stars in the world, even their careers don’t just go like that,” he explains pointing upwards.

Making a rollercoaster motion, he continues: “Their careers do this, that’s how they ride. And my career has had many of those, many failures and many things that I wish I’d done better.”

I was friends with Gregory Peck and Paul Newman. Even those guys, and they were the biggest movie stars in the world, even their careers don’t just go upwards. My career has had many failures

George has taken risks by getting up on stage on Broadway, recreating Good Night, And Good Luck as a play earlier this year.

It received five Tony nominations, including best actor for the star himself.

Not bad for a man who struggled to remember the script.

He admits: “I hadn’t done a play in 40 years. And so I was nervous. And every night, you know, I was worried because as you get older, it’s hard to remember your lines.

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“And it’s hard to remember s***. And so I was scared. And it’s good to be 64 years old and not sure you can pull it off.”

• Jay Kelly is in cinemas now and will be on Netflix from December 5.

Clad in close-fitting black outfits, two performers get into stance for a fight scene. The cameras surrounding the massive stage in Playa Vista start rolling.

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One turns around slowly, pantomimes being shot, and carefully, deliberately, arches himself backward, clawing at the air before a stunt coordinator helps ease him toward a black mattress.

That movement is translated into dots and lines on a nearby computer, transmitted by the round, white sensors embedded in the suits’ colorful almond-shaped patches. Later, those will be fleshed out into characters and scenes in the new “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7” game, which debuts Friday.

It’s all part of the blockbuster production effort that goes into making one of the most popular video game franchises ever. “Call of Duty,” from Santa Monica publisher Activision, has ranked as the top-selling video game series in the U.S. for 16 straight years and has sold more than 500 million copies globally since the first installment was released in 2003.

And as one of the few franchises with an annual release schedule, hitting that deadline takes an army. About 3,000 people worked on “Black Ops 7” over the course of four years.

Activision executives declined to discuss the game’s budget but called it a “significant investment.” Top video game franchises can have production costs of $250 million or more — higher than most big-budget Hollywood films.

“It’s like, every year we have to launch a new ‘Star Wars.’ Every year we have to launch a new ‘Avatar,’ ” said Tyler Bahl, chief marketing officer at Activision. “So we have to think about, how do we do this in an unexpected way?”

“Ultimately, we want to treat our games like an absolute blockbuster,” said Matt Cox, general manager of “Call of Duty” at Activision, who has worked on the franchise for more than 10 years. “The investment is there for them.”

Activision’s Treyarch game production studio is where Call of Duty video game is produced.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The franchise has become a key driver of Activision’s success, analysts said.

The base game consistently sells more than 20 million units annually, not including the live services components that update after a game’s launch and keep players engaged, monthly battle passes that unlock rewards or even the mobile game, all of which add up to an estimated annual sales of about $3.5 billion to $4 billion, said Eric Handler, media and entertainment analyst at Roth Capital.

In fact, the huge popularity of “Call of Duty” helped spur tech giant Microsoft’s interest in acquiring Activision, a $69-billion deal that was completed in 2023.

“It revolutionized the first-person shooter and has done a great job, year in and year out, of being the best of breed, building the largest community and evolving, pivoting to where video game players are all over the world,” Handler said. “There are other [shooter] franchises that are trying to replicate its success … but nobody’s been able to match the consistency of ‘Call of Duty.’”

To maintain its annual cadence, Activision rotates game development among several of its studios, including Playa Vista-based Treyarch, which co-developed “Black Ops 6” and “Black Ops 7” in parallel — the first time that two “Call of Duty: Black Ops” games came out in subsequent years.

The previous game is set in the ‘90s, while the newest installment jumps ahead to 2035, meaning designers and animators had to envision what gear and gadgets might look like in the future (“Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” was eerily accurate in its predictions for the year 2025).

“It was a huge opportunity for us to tell two unique but also connected stories at the same time,” said Yale Miller, senior director of production at Treyarch.

Unlike the linear nature of film production, many things happen in tandem when producing a game like “Call of Duty.” The game has a campaign mode that follows a story, a multiplayer option to play with friends and the ever-popular zombies portion, meaning each designated team is thinking in parallel about things like tone, features and playable moments that they want fans to experience, Miller said.

While an actor is recording lines, another team may be building the weapon they mention and making it interactive, while another group builds the explosion that the lines and weapon will be part of.

“It’s not just, ‘Oh, we got the shot. We’re done for the day,’ ” Miller said. The acting performance is “an anchor for a lot of the things that we build, but then it’s the whole world in parallel, and that’s how we get to such big teams working on stuff, and everything has to get thought about.”

The franchise has become known for its intense, cinematic quality, a reputation enhanced by the live-action film and television backgrounds of many who work on the games, including some stunt performers and Treyarch performance capture director Mikal Vega, who worked on the 2017 NBC drama “The Brave” after a long career in the military.

“It’s theater-in-the-round,” he said during a Zoom call from the stage. “A lot more like theater-in-the-round than film in some cases, and very much like film in other phases of it.”

And there is a bit of a learning curve, particularly because of the motion-capture technology used, which can make movements awkward.

In the new game, “This Is Us” star Milo Ventimiglia plays Lt. Cmdr. David Mason, a character who first appeared in 2012’s “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” and is now on the hunt for a former arms dealer who caused the death of his father and was previously believed dead.

Acting in “Black Ops 7” was “more technical” than his previous film and TV roles since it required getting used to a boom mic or camera that jutted out in front of him, he said. In one early instance, Ventimiglia went to scratch an itch on his cheek and was told by the crew not to put anything between his face and the camera, and to pantomime scratching outside of the camera, not realizing it wasn’t acting.

Then there were four-hour sessions in the sound booth, saying lines dozens of times in dozens of ways with any number of weapons.

“It’s super, super taxing, hard work, but fun at the same time,” Ventimiglia said. “When are you going to talk about calling out grenades and flash bangs and using different weapons? Very rarely.”

Adding to the cinematic quality are the hyper-realistic portrayals of actors, gear and costumes, which are the result of scans on a light stage that can re-create items in 3-D. Principal and background characters sit on a chair inside the sphere and do poses, surrounded by 16 DSLR cameras and dozens of hexagonal lights that emit a hazy glow. In 1.3 seconds, more than 256 images will be shot. Principal characters like Ventimiglia will typically do up to 120 poses — all to make sure the nuances of someone’s face are captured.

Evan Buttons, Activision director of technical projects, is photographed inside the face scanning studio.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

In a nearby room with a 22-foot ceiling and black, soundproof walls, an even larger sphere with more than 140 cameras and several video cameras are used to capture full body scans, gear and costumes. Everything captured then goes to the character art team, which will tweak it to their specifications and put it in the game.

Even in the days leading up to the game’s release, the team was still busy. In an era when internet speeds are faster, work doesn’t end with a game’s initial release. Content will be released regularly in the months after “Black Ops 7” debuts, all to keep it fresh for players, who can put more than 1,000 hours into the game.

“The No. 1 reason why they play ‘Call of Duty’ is actually because their friends are there,” said Bahl of Activision. “Those bonds and those social connections, I think, is really what makes this game different and stronger, and it’s made it last for so long.”

Richard Linklater’s love letter to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut “Breathless,” shot by cinematographer David Chambille, pulsates with the rhythm, rebellion and romance of the French New Wave, crafting an artistic interpretation of the classic film’s production and the transformation of its director. In its closing chapter, Godard’s signature sunglasses catch a reflection of his own iconic film — an amateur is now the auteur. “There’s a similar shot at the beginning of the movie where he’s looking at ‘The 400 Blows’ at Cannes and Godard is nothing at that moment. Then at the end, you see him in sunglasses looking at what he has achieved,” says Chambille, who shot “Nouvelle Vague” in black and white as an homage to the original. The visually magnetic image — created in-camera without visual effects — was one of the first ideas Linklater had in creating his Godard character, played by Guillaume Marbeck. The sunglasses are not only an accessory, but a barrier to keep the world, and perhaps himself, at a distance. “Richard wanted to say something deeper. That he’s living movies, he’s living cinema and he has moving images instead of eyes,” says the cinematographer. “We often say that we can read the sound of somebody through their eyes. And in this case, you can see the sound of Godard through movies.”

I can’t name a single song by the Jonas Brothers, but I can tell you their names — Joe, Kevin and Nick — and that they made a sitcom, “Jonas” (second season titled “Jonas L.A.”), back in 2009 that I liked a lot. The memory of that show was enough to get me kind of excited for “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie,” premiering Friday on Disney+ — which, as it happens, I also like. The humor is self-deprecating, the setting international, the weather wintry, the company good.

The plot, which is basically “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” minus Steve Martin, John Candy and Thanksgiving, plus the Jonas Brothers, Christmas and magic, finds the boys — are they boys or are they men, it’s a point of discussion — in London, a few days before Christmas on the last night of a six-month tour. While they are good at being the capital-B Jonas Brothers onstage facing screaming thousands, they are less adept at being the small-b brothers after the curtain comes down. Their relationship seems pretty normal to me, but to each his own necessity.

Here they delineate their characters.

Joe (to Nick): You’re the uptight responsible one.

Kevin (to Joe): You’re the relatable tramp. I’m the relatable —

Nick: — human cardboard.

Joe: — forgettable Curly.

Nick: — the world’s most unlikely rock star.

Joe: Not Nick or Joe.

Kevin: I was going to say “handsome, relatable everyman,” but fine.

Anyway! The tour is over and the relatable tramp wants to go out and party, suggesting it could be epic. “We are three extremely exhausted dads in our 30s,” replies the uptight one, “how epic could it be?” And so, while his siblings FaceTime with their IRL families, Joe finds himself on a British barstool — a pubstool — beside a bearded stranger in a red leather jacket. You will recognize the actor as Jesse Tyler Ferguson and the character as St. Nick, barely disguised. Touched by Joe’s story of sibling alienation — “Our Christmas plans are to get the hell away from each other” — Santa works his wonders to keep them together until they get their brotherly magic back. For a start, he sends lightning to blow up the plane they’re scheduled to fly home on. (No one was aboard, we assume.)

“We should be able to function in the real world,” says Nick to Joe, who is about to phone their manager (Randall Park) to fix things.

“That would be ideal,” replies Joe, “but we’ve been famous since we were little kids, so it is what it is.”

Further supernatural complications ensue, allowing Joe to have a “Before Sunrise” episode with childhood friend Lucy (Chloe Bennet), cute-met on a train that should be going to Paris but is headed to Amsterdam, and Nick to hate-duet with frenemy Ethan (Andrew Barth Feldman), whose father he played in a fictional version of “Home Alone: The Musical” (“Being home alone / It’s like being with no / With no people”). Other talents swelling the ranks: Laverne Cox as their agent; Billie Lourd as travel agent Cassidy; Will Ferrell as Will Ferrell, No.1 Jonas fan; and Andrea Martin as a rideshare driver.

The songs feel mechanical — easy on the auto-tune, fellas, I’ve seen your Tiny Desk concert and you don’t need it — though the accompanying production numbers are fun. (You knew there would be production numbers.) But like the Beatles and Monkees before them, the brothers are natural, genuine actors; it’s my own Christmas wish that they find more to do in this line. A little breeze would blow the plot away, but keep the windows shut and you’ll be fine.

Stories will long be told about what Gazans have endured these last couple of years, and movies will be part of that unburdening. This spring, Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi believed she would be unveiling a uniquely dignified portrait of one Palestinian woman’s experience when the Cannes Film Festival accepted her documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” which comprised her year of spirited video chats with positive-minded 25-year-old photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona. The day after the Cannes news, Hassona and her family were killed by an Israeli missile.

It’s not unheard of for a completed movie to become something entirely different overnight. But what’s quietly miraculous about “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” considering its added tragic weight, is what the force of Hassona’s personality and Farsi’s filmmaking choices still manage to do: speak to what’s ineffably beautiful about our human capacity for hope and connection.

In her opening narration, Farsi explains how she’d been looking for a way into Gaza to understand it beyond the media reports. Physically, that proved impossible, but through a refugee friend, she was connected to Hassona in April 2024. In their first video call, which Farsi, then in Cairo, recorded with a separate smartphone, Hassona’s beaming face immediately dispels any notion that all Palestinians must exist in a defeated state amid relentless bombing. Asked how she feels, Hassona — who had just witnessed a huge explosion the day prior — says, “I feel proud.” With unforced lightness, she assures Farsi that they will continue to live their lives and laugh, that they are “special people.” She knows every day is about actively not letting themselves get used to it. The documentary’s title is Hassona’s description of what she does when she leaves her house.

You believe her. That high-wattage smile registers as whatever the opposite of a bomb is. But it’s also easy to notice Farsi’s ingrained cynicism about the state of things, having once been imprisoned as a teenage dissident during the years following her country’s Islamic Revolution, now in exile. In her voice-over, Farsi describes meeting Hassona as if encountering a mirror, realizing “how much both our lives are conditioned by walls and wars.”

Farsi threads in many of Hassona’s photographs. The images of daily life amid destruction and rubble — children, bicyclists, workers, laundry drying from high floors in a half-destroyed building — hint at an inextinguishable flame carrying on through a campaign of death.

Though Farsi knows how to ask for details about her life in Gaza, the vibe isn’t one of interviews conducted to make a film, but a genuine curiosity and warmth, the ebb and flow of real interaction captured whenever possible. Meanwhile, war, politics and failed leadership can be glimpsed in brief interludes of news reports on Farsi’s television. But they’re always cut short, as if to say: I’d rather hear from my friend who’s living it.

Hassona’s face becomes so familiar to us, we can tell when her cheery disposition is hard to maintain. But her energy and hope never feel like depletable resources. “I want to be in a normal place!” she blurts out in one of their last conversations, almost as if she were a musical protagonist about to break into song. But Hassona never got more than a first act.

Farsi doesn’t draw the ending out: just sparsely worded text after witnessing their final chat, followed by a video Hassona had taken rolling through her devastated city, somehow grounded in a palpable, undying everydayness. You’ll feel loss, but the afterimage of this singular woman’s belief in finding light is what will burn.

Escape to the Dolomite mountains in northern Italy this winter for stunning scenery and rooms with a view at this striking treehouse spa hotel

There’s certainly something magical about being in the mountains at this time of year, and if you’re looking for an upmarket alpine escape, Brixen in Italy’s Dolomites region ticks all the boxes.

South Tyrol’s oldest town, Brixen – also known as Bressanone – is a popular destination for domestic and international holidaymakers alike, who come for skiing in the winter and walking in the summer. With German as the locals’ first language, the region feels much more Austrian than Italian. It was, in fact, part of Austria-Hungary until the end of the First World War.

If you’re lucky enough to have snow when you visit, Brixen will look like a scene from a snowglobe, with medieval churches, traditional Christmas markets and a festive light and music show held throughout the small town.

Brixen is easily accessible from Bolzano, Innsbruck, Venice and Verona airports, but if the flights work for you, do try to fly via SkyAlps, South Tyrol’s very own airline, direct from London to Bolzano. The journey is a delight, and you’ll feel like you’ve gone back to a golden age of aviation as you board the little propeller plane, which carries no more than 76 passengers. Drinks and snacks (many of which are local to the region) are complimentary, and you get to enjoy stunning views of the mountains as you fly over them.

My Arbor hotel

The My Arbor hotel, a few kilometres uphill from Brixen, has the wow factor as soon as you pull up to it. Perched on the side of a mountain, half of the hotel is raised up on what look like impossibly spindly stilts, as if the architect sketched a design for a treehouse after watching War Of The Worlds . The result is modern yet also completely in tune with the surrounding nature.

The ‘tree hotel’ theme continues as you step through the front door, with huge trunks hanging from the ceiling of the spacious lobby, leading onto a terrace that opens out onto views of the valley below.

The bedrooms are wood-panelled too, in a contemporary chalet-style design. The highlight is the huge daybed in the windows of the rooms, putting you right among the treetops as you lounge with your morning coffee, watching the clouds clear off the mountains in the distance. For total luxury, you can stay in one of three Treetop Suites, which have private terraces and their own whirlpool hot tubs.

The spa at My Arbor

The Spa Arboris is the star of the show at My Arbor, with two entire floors dedicated to wellness, and it’s clearly popular with guests. The first floor allows clothing and has a large indoor/outdoor pool, sauna and plenty of beds. But if you want to embrace German spa culture and leave your swimsuit and your inhibitions behind, then head down to the ‘textile-free’ floor (no one is looking, trust us), where you’ll find lots more saunas, steam rooms and an outdoor hydropool. It’s down here where ‘sauna infusions’ take place four times a day too, involving intense heat, powerful music and essential oils.

Outside, cosy heated ‘cuddle nests’ can also be booked for two-hour periods, filled with snuggly blankets and uninterrupted views.

My Arbor

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From about £225 per person, per night

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A striking treehouse-style hotel in Italy’s beautiful South Tyrol, with stunning views, seven-course dinners and a world class spa.

The food at My Arbor

Most guests at My Arbor stay half-board, and you certainly won’t go hungry here. Dinner consists of a seven-course menu with a changing theme every night, alongside buffet salads, cheese boards and desserts. To accompany it is a huge wine list that the helpful staff are only too happy to advise on. Impressively, our waiter expertly talked us through the 600-bottle offering in English, his third language.

At breakfast you’ll find a selection of all the usual continental favourites – breads, meats, cheeses and pastries – as well as healthier options such as kefir water, freshly squeezed blueberry juice and different flavours of porridge every day.

What to do around My Arbor

The Plose ski resort and cable car is nearby, but locals tell us it’s not one of the Dolomites’ major ski destinations. Instead, most visitors come for the walking, with dozens of picturesque, well-signposted trails around the area. We visited earlier in the year, so our hiking routes felt like scenes straight out of The Sound Of Music , taking us past wildflower meadows, bleating baby goats, ancient churches and trickling streams. We don’t think it gets any more idyllic than that.

How much does it cost to stay at My Arbor?

Rooms at My Arbor start from about £225 per person, per night. SkyAlps operates flights from London Gatwick to Bolzano three times a week, from around £140 each way. Children under two travel free of charge.

Ruby Rose has entered the ring to take a swing at Sydney Sweeney — blaming the actor, now known for her choice in jeans, for “Christy’s” disastrous debut.

“The original Christy Martin script was incredible. Life changing,” the former “Batwoman” star wrote in a Monday post on Threads. “I was attached to play Cherry. Everyone had experience with the core material. Most of us were actually gay. It’s part of why I stayed in acting.”

“Christy” stars Sweeney as Christy Martin, the groundbreaking boxer who raised the profile of her sport during her Hall of Fame career. The movie follows Martin as a closeted lesbian boxer trying to navigate her professional ascent, an abusive marriage to her toxic coach and her identity. It made just $1.3 million at the domestic box office during its opening weekend.

In her Threads post, Rose mentions “losing roles happens all the time” in Hollywood, but doesn’t hold back from expressing her disapproval that Sweeney is the one portraying Martin.

“Christy deserved better,” Rose said. “None of ‘the people’ want to see someone who hates them, parading around pretending to be us. You’re a cretin and you ruined the film. Period.”

Her comments appear to be in response to Sweeney’s Monday Instagram post in which she shared how “deeply proud” she was of “Christy” despite it flopping at the box office.

“[W]e don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact,” Sweeney wrote in the caption accompanying a gallery led by an image of her bloodied but smiling. “[A]nd christy has been the most impactful project of my life. thank you christy. i love you.”

Attitudes regarding the “Euphoria” actor have been increasingly divided since her part in a controversial American Eagle ad campaign around her “good jeans.” Since then, it has been reported that Sweeney registered to vote as a Republican in Florida shortly before the 2024 presidential election and prominent right-wing figures including President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have voiced their support for the actor.

Sweeney, for her part, has avoided discussing her political beliefs. In the lead-up to “Christy’s” release, she told LGBTQ+ news site PinkNews that she was “excited” for the queer community to see the movie because “she is an unbelievable advocate for the community and I believe this is a beautiful story to tell.”

The prey may change — the planets, too, their digital backdrops swirling like screensavers — but take comfort in knowing that when it comes to a “Predator” movie, we’re still talking about a dude in a suit. This time, that dude is New Zealand’s Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, a game 7-foot-3 actor whose eyes bulge behind those motorized mandibles and sometimes shine with feeling.

Despite his size, his Dek in “Predator: Badlands” is what you might call a baby: an untested youth who endures a sibling’s beatdown in the film’s opening moments. Their warlord father is displeased with both of them. After some extreme parenting that would be frowned upon in most societies, alien or otherwise, neon-green blood flows and Dek is hurtling toward another world, vengeance burning in his heart.

“Bring it home — for Kwei,” he mutters in an elaborate creature language invented expressly for the film. (The dialogue itself gets less attention.) Dek will seek the “unkillable Kalisk,” prove his worth in the hunt and, presumably, have some terse words with Dad upon his return.

Not to kill a Kalisk or anything but these Yautja (to use their species name) were never meant to carry a movie. Put one in a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the original 1987 summer action hit and suddenly the Terminator seems chatty. Pit them against the immortally gross creatures of “Alien vs. Predator” and the Yautja are nearly huggable.

But main characters they are not. “Predator: Badlands” has a misshapen gait to it, like a comedy skit drawn out to feature length. Fortunately, almost as soon as Dek lands on Genna, a planet of murderous flora, to bag his Kalisk, he runs into a babbling half-robot missing her legs who makes the movie much more compelling. You can either wonder how Elle Fanning, the tremulous heart of “A Complete Unknown” and this season’s “Sentimental Value” found herself in it, or smile at the good fortune of her being a stealth nerd who apparently loves a challenge.

Strapped to Dek’s back C-3PO-style, the disembodied Thia (Fanning) fills the movie with a semi-stoned running commentary: “And what does the chewing — your outside fangs or your inside teeth?” she asks him. When a second Fanning shows up as Thia’s vicious sister Tessa, another “synthetic” built for dangerous off-world work, the film finds its groove as a new chapter in the continuing saga of our friends at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a fictional enterprise with such spectacularly bad luck at acquiring bioweapons, they should have faced a hostile takeover by now.

And, like virtually all of Hollywood’s anti-corporate sci-fi adventures, “Predator: Badlands” is, at heart, a pro-business statement, bowing especially deeply to James Cameron’s designs for 1986’s “Aliens,” including its squat vehicles, soulless directives (“The Company is not pleased,” says a computer who isn’t the screenwriter) and the colossal power loader that lets someone human-sized do battle with a beast.

There isn’t much of an original signature here. Returning director Dan Trachtenberg hits the beats competently but not too stridently, like a good superfan should. If you’re expecting Dek’s sensitivity to become an asset, give yourself a trophy. Yet if a machine — or a studio — can produce a robot as fun as Thia, there’s hope for this franchise yet.

GIG GOERS at Butlins were left stunned when a Hollywood movie star came out onstage to DJ.

Playing some trance music at Fatboy Slim’s All Back to Minehead weekender this month, this movie star went viral on social media when fans realised who he was.

Tom Cruise’s movie co-star, Simon Pegg, was spotted DJing at holiday resort Butlins this month for the Fatboy Slim event.

Several holiday makers took to TikTok to share videos of the Mission Impossible star as he got his groove on behind the decks.

Simon could be seen DJing like a pro as he played some trance music to the crowd in front of him.

“Simon Pegg at f***ing Butlins,” one user penned over the video.

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In the caption, the TikToker added: “One of the best nights of my life, I’m a Butlins convert.”

Fans of Simon then went wild in the comments section when they realised he was DJ’ing at the holiday resort.

One person penned: “This is iconic.”

Another said: “It’s so random but loving it !!”

“Was a good gig! Just got back,” added a third.

“Everyone’s a DJ these days,” penned a fourth.

“So basically everyone’s a DJ,” wrote a fifth.

“His set is great, seen him at festivals,” said a seventh.

In May of this year, Simon opened up about his passion for DJing.

The actor has a music room at the end of the garden kitted out with CDJ-3000s and shelves of vinyl.

He regularly DJs at parties and festivals having self-taught himself three years ago.

Speaking to Hollywood Authentic, he said: “DJing reminds me of doing stand-up comedy, in that you have an audience, and they react immediately to what you’re doing.

“Stand-up is like, they either laugh or you die.

“With DJing, they either dance or you die!”

As well as his DJing stint at Butlins for the Fatboy Slim All Back to Minehead weekender, he played tunes at the Big Feastival in August 2025.

He also DJ’d in Kefalonia, Greece, at the Captain’s Bar in Skala in July 2025. 

Away from the decks, Simon is good pals with his Mission Impossible co-star Tom Cruise.

Speaking to the previously mentioned publication, Simon opened up about what he learned from Tom over the years.

He said: “I get asked about him all the time because he very rarely speaks about himself in public. You know, even in private, he’ll always switch the conversation back to you.

“But everyone’s so desperate for some kind of concrete information about him because he’s such an enigma.

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“But I think that’s part of his success, that he’s maintained that. He’s maintained the interest in himself simply by just taking a step back, because he can.

“His journey is extremely simple when you look at it. He’s just always given 100% to everything that he does. Everything,” he added.

“It’s f— World War III out there,” says Gilberto Martinez Jr. as he skateboards while holding on to a car partway through Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed crime drama “One Battle After Another,” about a group of revolutionaries being hunted by the U.S. government.

Driving the vehicle is Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who enlists the help of Mexican American “vato skateboarders,” the neighborhood watch, to guide his friend Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he tries to escape the authorities during a chaotic protest when a sanctuary city comes under attack.

Gliding through tight indoor spaces and nimbly jumping across rooftops under the night’s sky, the courageous skating quartet is composed of El Paso natives cast locally: Martinez (34), Luis Trejo (30), Elijah Joseph Sambrano (27) and Julian Corral (29). That Anderson included them in this searingly political narrative as a heroic force felt validating.

“As skateboarders we’ve kind of always been the underdogs, seen as the outcast or the rebels,” says Martinez during a recent video interview with the whole squad gathered. “But in a way we’re showing freedom, we’re not trying to be put in a box, we express ourselves through this skateboard. We’re trying to give hope to other kids like us.”

Their skill set on the board landed them the part, but their presence influenced the production beyond their screen time.

“We all speak Spanish, and we were helping them on set to translate a lot of the things that they needed,” Martinez said.

Martinez and Trejo, who’ve been “homies” for a decade, learned about the opportunity from a mutual friend, Mark Martinez, involved in the El Paso film industry. Sambrano found out from a bartender pal, while Corral got word from the owner of the tattoo shop where he works. The four of them knew each other from hanging around the border town.

The group first met with casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, who read them their lines and asked them to recite them back to test their memorization skills.

“She pulled out her iPhone and we just started skating around her and giving her the lines,” Martinez recalls. “That’s pretty much what she showed Paul. And that’s when he was like, ‘These are our guys.’” [Laughs].

Though they had heard rumors that DiCaprio and Del Toro were in town, they couldn’t know for certain. “I was like, ‘It’s not true,’ just so I would not be so nervous about it,” Martinez said. It was only after signing nondisclosure agreements that they were made fully aware of the artists involved.

“They took us up to Sensei’s apartment to get an idea of the perimeter and what everything looks like,” says Martinez. “That’s when we first saw P.T.A. with his Adidas shoes and we were like, ‘Whoa.’”

Shot over the course of 11 days, their scenes took place in downtown El Paso, just a few minutes from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on the other side of the border. “Every single day was just magic,” says Trejo, who is also a musician. “This movie made us feel like we’re part of something on a big scale. It blew our minds that each of us had his own purpose in it.”

The “vato skateboarders,” as the production referred to them, recall speaking with stunt coordinator Brian Machleit ahead of their scenes. “He was very honest with us and said we needed to take this seriously,” Martinez says. “We really focused, and we weren’t playing around.” They practiced their stunts during the daytime, so that they could be prepared for shooting at night.

Anderson, they say, asks for multiple takes — often around 10 — changing his direction to have plenty of options to choose from when editing.

“Paul is always experimenting,” Trejo said. “He’s like a scientist, and he’s doing his poetry.”

Martinez revealed that his big moment, when he skates holding onto Sensei’s vehicle, transformed as they filmed it.

“My direction at first was to do it scared towards Sensei, like asustado,” he said. “After watching the dailies, Anderson came in with new notes.

“Paul’s like, ‘Hey Gil, this sounds like a zombie apocalypse. It’s not a zombie apocalypse, it’s a riot. Pretend like you’re going to go grab a beer and drink it on a rooftop, and then just say some s— like, ‘It’s f— World War III out here.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I like that. That sounds more me.’”

To personalize his close-up, Martinez had a suggestion of his own. “I was like, ‘Can I add some Spanish?’”

“Paul really let us use our lingo,” Martinez adds. “Leo was like, ‘Hey, how do I say ‘brothers’?’ And we told him, ‘Carnalitos,’”

In the film, DiCaprio’s Bob refers to the skaters as such.

Throughout the conversation, the group often refers to DiCaprio and Del Toro by their characters’ names: Bob and Sensei. Sharing the screen with A-listers they’ve grown up watching on screen was shocking at first, but then grew to feel a genuine closeness.

“I’d freak out when I got home,” Martinez said. “But on set, the first couple days you had to show them that you were like a brother to them. You can’t be like, ‘Hey man, we got to take a picture.’ It was more like, ‘We’re here to do our job.’ I never called him Leo. I always called him Bob. We just stayed in character. And then he’d be like, ‘What’s up bros?’”

Corral recalls a day when his foot hurt, and the production sent him to rest for a bit on his own. “Next thing you know, they put the other vatos in there and then they put Leonardo in there and we are just like, ‘How should we break the ice?’” Corral says. “And he did. He is like, ‘So what’s good around here to eat?’”

A musician like Trejo, and once involved with El Paso Kids-N-Co, a nonprofit community theater, Sambrano recalled sharing a moment with Del Toro.

“Benicio was like, ‘You play music? What kind of music is it? And I was like, ‘Alternative.’ And he said, ‘Oh, like the Mars Volta.’ And I thought, ‘Oh he knows of the culture, the Mars Volta is from El Paso.’”

Sambrano explains they were allowed to wear their own clothes on set. Early on, he happened to be wearing a T-shirt he got from Goodwill emblazoned with the image of the late wrestler Eddie Guerrero, also an El Paso native, and his nickname, “Latino Heat.”

“They were bouncing off each other, improvising,” Sambrano says. “And that’s when Benicio was like, ‘What if I just say Latino Heat?’ And then they were like, ‘OK, that’s the shirt he’s going to wear.’”

For the “vato skateboarders,” seeing their hometown depicted at the forefront of the resistance in such a high-profile film has strengthened their pride. “We’re from a frontera, a border city, and I’ve lived here my whole life. The community is amazing, people are friendly,” Sambrano said. “And seeing them highlight that is pretty awesome.”

And it’s not lost on them that immigration, and the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, especially in a place like El Paso, are key subjects in Anderson’s film.

“Paul did do justice to how real life is in a comedic way so that maybe it reaches a different type of audience that is not tapped into these situations,” Trejo said. “The movie touches on things that a lot of people are afraid to talk about. They are afraid to get too political.”

The four skaters watched “One Battle After Another” for the first time at a cast and crew screening in El Paso at the Plaza Theater. “It was really special to watch it in a historic building in El Paso,” Martinez Jr. says. “And having our friends and family there to watch it a week before the movie came out was a beautiful moment for all of us.”

The friends wish to continue acting, and they already have other projects lined up, thanks in part to Jacob Cena, a location assistant on “One Battle After Another,” who is pushing them to seize this breakthrough.

For now, however, they’ve been diligently studying Anderson’s work. “We got pretty obsessed; these are all his movies,” says Martinez Jr. with a smile holding up a stack of the director’s movies on physical media.

Tech scion David Ellison marked his 96th day running Paramount by disclosing an upbeat financial outlook for next year and a plan to reduce an additional 1,600 workers.

Monday’s conference call with analysts was the first time Ellison, Paramount’s chairman and chief executive, directly addressed Wall Street after merging his production company, Skydance Media, with Paramount in August — an $8-billion deal that ushered the Redstone family from the entertainment stage.

One of Ellison’s top priorities will be to reverse decades of under-investment in programming. Paramount plans to increase content spending by $1.5 billion next year, including nearly doubling the number of movies that it releases. The Melrose Avenue studio intends to boost output from eight releases to 15 that are planned for next year.

Investing in technology is another priority, which Ellison referred to as one of its “north stars.” Executives want to build streaming service Paramount+ as the economics crumble for Paramount’s once profitable cable television division, which includes Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central. Paramount also owns CBS stations and the CBS broadcast network.

Paramount announced it will be hiking streaming subscription fees — Paramount+ plans now are offered at $7.99 a month and $12.99 a month — although executives declined to say how much. The goal is to turn its streaming operations profitable this year.

Paramount said the workforce reduction of 1,600 people stemmed from the company’s divestiture late last month of television stations in Chile and Argentina. This comes on top of 1,000 job cuts last month, primarily in the U.S. The company said one of its goals was to operate more efficiently.

More than 800 people — or about 3.5% of the company’s workforce — were laid off in June, prior to the Ellison family takeover.

Ellison and his team have been looking to reduce the company’s workforce by 15%.

On Monday, Paramount executives said they should be able to realize about $3 billion in cost cuts — $1 billion more than initially advertised. The company’s goal is to complete its cost reductions within two years.

The earnings report comes as Paramount has been pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery, a proposed merger that would unite two of Hollywood’s original film studios and bulk up Paramount by adding the HBO Max streaming service, a larger portfolio of cable channels, pioneering cable news service CNN and the historic Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank.

Paramount executives declined to discuss its dealings for Warner Bros. Discovery, which has rejected three offers, including a $58-billion bid for the entire company. Ellison’s father, billionaire Larry Ellison, has agreed to back Paramount’s bid.

However, his son spoke broadly about its motivations for any acquisition during the conference call.

“First and foremost, we’re focused on what we’re building at Paramount and transforming the company,” David Ellison said. “There’s no must-haves for us. …. It’s always going to be, how do we accelerate and improve our north-star principles?”

Total revenue for Paramount’s third quarter was $6.7 billion, flat compared with the year-earlier period. Paramount reported a net loss of $257 million for the quarter.

Paramount+ and other streaming services grew by 1.4 million subscribers to 79 million, although 1.2 million of those consumers benefit from free trials. Quarterly Revenue for the streaming operations, including Pluto TV, was up 17%.

The cost-cutting comes as Ellison, 42, has accelerated spending in other areas, including agreeing to pay $7.7 billion for the rights to UFC fights and $1.25 billion over five years to Matt Stone and Trey Parker to continue creating their “South Park” cartoon.

His team, including former Netflix programming chief Cindy Holland, also lured Matt and Ross Duffer, the duo behind “Stranger Things,” away from Netflix. Paramount also paid $150 million to buy the Free Press and bring its co-founder, Bari Weiss, to the company as CBS News editor in chief.

The company also signed a 10-year lease on a film and television production facility under construction in New Jersey, a move that will give the entertainment company access to that state’s tax incentive program.

In a blow, however, Taylor Sheridan, the prolific creator behind the “Yellowstone” franchise, will be packing his bags. Sheridan, who is under contract with Paramount through 2028, made a deal to develop movies and future shows for NBCUniversal after executives he worked with at Paramount departed the company when Ellison took over.

For 2026, the company expects to generate total revenue of $30 billion and adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization of $3.5 billion.

Shares closed at $15.25, up 1%, before the earnings were announced.

When asked how much of the alien language used by the franchise’s central hunter species he is able to speak, “Predator: Badlands” director Dan Trachtenberg quickly answers, “Zero.”

“My mouth will not even permit me to utter [even] a phonic from it,” Trachtenberg says of the language created for his film, praising his actors for learning it. Linguist Britton Watkins “really developed the language as if it had evolved from the mouth shape and the throat sounds that we have heard before from the ‘Predator’ [movies], but it really fits the ecology of the Yautja species. And my throat won’t allow me to do it.”

“Predator: Badlands,” which opened to a franchise record $40 million at the domestic box office, is the first “Predator” installment where one of the alien hunters is the hero. The movie follows Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja outcast on a quest to prove his worth to his clan by hunting a massive, nearly unkillable beast on a deadly planet.

Thia (Elle Fanning) and Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) meet on a deadly planet in “Predator: Badlands.”

(20th Century Studios)

During his hunt, Dek encounters Thia (Elle Fanning), an android that has been separated from the rest of her research party — as well as the lower half of her body — and is happy to provide helpful intel on the planet’s lethal flora and fauna.

For Trachtenberg, who rejuvenated the long-running sci-fi franchise with the 2022 prequel “Prey,” it was important that the Yautja and their culture feel “as authentic and archaeological” as the human ones he has featured in his “Predator” films, which also include this summer’s animated anthology “Predator: Killer of Killers.”

“I wanted to make sure that the Yautja species was treated seriously and with dignity,” the filmmaker says. “We’re asking people to empathize with a monster, with something that was the slasher in a slasher movie to some degree, decades ago.”

That meant consulting an expert to fully construct a language for the Yautja. Watkins was recommended to the “Predator: Badlands” team by Paul Frommer, the linguist who created the Na’vi language for the “Avatar” films. He was tasked with developing both the spoken and written Yautja language, first introduced in “Killer of Killers.”

Watkins understood that “Badlands” would involve both the type of action that audiences expect from a “Predator” film as well as more quiet moments where characters are just talking to each other. This meant creating a language that was as faithful as it could be to the trills and roars of previous “Predator” movies while also being “a tonal match and a kind of atmospheric match” to English for scenes when both languages are used in conversation.

“I started, rather than with a complete language and vocabulary and everything, a framework that I could build out as things changed with the production,” Watkins says, explaining that this involved creating both phonological and grammatical rules. “I built the framework for a language that was never going to have sounds that didn’t belong in it, but could expand in terms of vocabulary and grammar to suit whatever we needed over the long course of filming.”

He also knew that once Yautja was introduced, there would be fans eager to dissect and learn it just like there have been for other constructed languages created for sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV shows.

“I knew that … people would want to pause [the movie] and they’d want to rewind and they’d want to figure it out,” Watkins says. “So I wanted to keep it simple, but it’s not dumbed down. It’s culturally appropriate but it’s approachable as a language [for] people [that] want to learn it.”

Here are a few tips from Watkins for those interested in learning Yautja.

The alphabet includes complex consonant clusters

The Yautja alphabet can be seen in the writing on some of the objects in “Predator: Badlands.”

(20th Century Studios)

When designing the phonology of the Yautja language, Watkins took into account the aliens’ physiology.

“They don’t have lips, so they can’t make ma or ba or fa [sounds] because they don’t have the lips to do that,” Watkins explains. “To supplement not having F and V and Th and M, we have consonant clusters like jl and cht … that we don’t have in English, but they can be made lower in the throat.”

These consonant clusters comprise multiple letters when written out in the Roman alphabet, but are one letter in the Yautja alphabet. The Yautja word for prey, for example, starts with the letter hrr.

Their alphabet “is optimized for visual efficiency for their sound system,” Watkins says. Yautja writing can be seen on weapons and other objects in “Badlands.”

Basic sentence structure is the reverse of English

In Yautja, the structure of a declarative sentence — one that makes a statement, provides a fact or offers an explanation — is the reverse of those in English.

“The object or the predicate comes first, the verb is in the middle and then the subject comes at the end,” says Watkins. “Once you establish a rule like that, you have to keep it unless you have a legitimate reason to break it, like we do in English.”

Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) in “Predator: Badlands.”

(20th Century Studios)

Listen for recurring words

Yautja words are largely analytical, meaning “there aren’t 14 versions of a single noun,” Watkins explains. This includes the first-person pronoun ‘I,’ which in Yautja is chish.

“When it’s ‘me’ earlier in the sentence, it’s chish [and] when it’s ‘I’ as a subject at the end of the sentence it’s still chish,” Watkins says. “It doesn’t change.”

Another sound to try to catch is nga. Ngai is the Yautja word for ‘no,’ so nga occurs in any word that has a negative element in it, like “nobody.”

You can tell how Yautja feel about you by what they call you

Unlike chish, the Yautja use different words when addressing or referring to others based on respect and affection.

“The words for ‘you’ and the words for ‘he’ or ‘she’ change depending on who’s speaking about whom,” Watkins explains. “It’s culturally appropriate for Yautja, in the Yautja culture, [to] talk about other people pejoratively.”

Think of it a bit like the difference between using tú or usted in Spanish. When addressing someone they look down on or are disrespecting, the Yautja use wul, while someone they respect would be addressed as dau. Kai is the word used when addressing a close friend.

Yautja isn’t a gendered language (for the most part)

Unlike languages such as French and Spanish, Yautja has no grammatical gender, so nouns aren’t assigned gender categories.

There is, however, a pronoun gender distinction for he and she, much like in English. Similarly, all Yautja use chish for “I” and “me” regardless of gender.

One of the reasons Yautja has no grammatical gender is because that was most practical.

“There was not a lot of time [to create Yautja], and adding gender like that is going to add complexity to the language,” Watkins says, explaining that this complexity would have made it more difficult to quickly turn around any adjustments to the script that needed to be made over the course of filming.

That it also helps keeps the language accessible for Yautja learners is a bonus.

EVER wanted to step into your TV screen when watching a Christmas movie? Well, one village in the UK feels just like doing that.

Located in the Lake District National Park, the quaint and charming village of Hawkshead is full of old cottages and has a charming community feel.

Jerry Rebbeck, a local expert at Wheelwrights Holiday Cottages, said: “It’s like something out of a Hallmark Christmas movie.”

This small village becomes the ultimate festive spot thanks to its Christmas fair, which takes place between December 6 and 7.

Jerry said: “The fair takes place across one weekend every year, taking over the centre of the village with stalls, full of local produce, food and drink.

“This tiny village of around 500 people comes alive, with street performers, carol singing and even a lantern parade.

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“It’s a fabulous thing to visit and be a part of.”

But it isn’t just the Christmas fair that is worth heading to in the village.

Hawkshead is also home to a number of businesses with vintage shop fronts, which then in the lead up to Christmas create festive window displays.

Jerry shared: “Add that to the cobbled streets, and the village that look like they’re straight out of a Christmas fairytale.”

For those with a sweet tooth, head to the Chocolate Factory Hawkshead – which is a shop and cafe that hosts Christmas chocolate making workshops.

“It’s a great place to source stocking fillers, and makes for a great rainy day festive activity for families,” said Jerry.

The village also features a pretty church called St. Michael’s and All Angels.

It was built in around 1300 on the site of a Norse Chapel and what visitors see today mostly dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries.

Jerry said: “The view of the village from the 12th century churchyard is beautiful, with an easy walk back down to get a hot chocolate from quaint cafes such as The Minstrels Gallery Tea Room, or a glass of mulled wine in pubs such as The Red Lion Inn.”

Just a seven minute drive away or a 55 minute walk, visitors can also explore Hill Top Beatrix Potter House, which is a National Trust property.

The house is believed to be the place that inspired a lot of Beatrix Potter’s stories, and it has a cottage-garden, small cafe and shop and a second hand book-nook.

It costs £18.70 per person to visit, but will be closed from November 17 for the winter season.

Visitors can choose to stay in Hawkshead or in the surrounding areas.

Jerry shared: “In the surrounding area, only a mile away you can find holiday cottages in Outgate, as well as Ambleside, around five miles away.”

The small village also just 22 minutes from Lake Windermere, which is where the closest train station can be found and it is just a 30 minute drive from Grasmere.

If you also want to tie in a nearby city, then Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds are all between one hour and 55 minutes and two hours and 22 minutes away.

For a slightly smaller city, head to Lancaster, which is just an hour away.

There are a number of quaint villages that are pretty to visit around the festive period.

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For example, you could also head to another village that was made famous by three Hollywood movies is perfect for feeling Christmassy.

Plus, the UK’s ‘most beautiful town’ set to star in huge new Christmas movie with Hollywood stars.

A MOVIE star from a hit 80s box office smash looks so different from his hunky role.

At 79 years of age, the actor headed out on a walk in Los Angeles last week while looking unrecognizable from his heyday when he wore his hair in brown curls.

Sporting a full head of white hair – which is a far cry from his curls when he took on his starring role – the acting sensation looked casual as he walked his dog in some laidback attire.

The actor, who starred in Flashdance back in the 1980s, rocked a navy blue fleece with some denim shorts, blue socks and a pair of loafers.

Concealing his identity with a pair of sunglasses, the movie star smiled as he walked his dog around LA.

He starred opposite Jennifer Beals in 1983 before taking on roles in The O.C., Yellowstone, and many more. 

Read More on Unrecognizables

BIG BREAK

TV star unrecognizable 12 years after hit show’s shock ending… can you guess who?

Have you guessed who he is?

It’s Michael Nouri who played the iconic role of hunky Nick Hurley in Flashdance.

But despite his huge role in the box office smash hit, Michael has revealed his career stalled after his next movie Sea Trial was shelved indefinitely.

Speaking out on the Still Here podcast last year, Michael said: “After Flashdance, that was the time to strike while the iron was hot.”

He went on: “Billy Friedkin got in touch with me and told me he wanted me to be in his new movie with Barbara Hershey.

“It was called Sea Trial, and it was going to be done at 20th Century Fox, and Fox wanted to turn around and that movie was shelved, so the momentum from Flashdance was dissipated.”

After his career stalled, he landed a role in Bay City Blues alongside Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone. 

“But while I was in Tokyo promoting Flashdance I got a call from my agent who said that Steven Bochco was interested in having me be in a series of his called Bay City Blues, and Bay City Blues lasted for 13 episodes,” he explained. 

Michael went on: “It had an unknown, wonderful actors, including an unknown actor named Sharon Stone.

“So my point is that the momentum, the huge momentum, that Flashdance created, just you want to keep the momentum going.

“Hopefully, when you have one big hit, you want to follow it up with something else, something equally good or better, just to keep you out there.

“And that did not happen.

“So I went from Bay City Blues to a succession of TV shows, independent movies, and so on, but nothing of the magnitude of Flashdance.”

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Though he has had little success with finding another huge role like in Flashdance, he has still been successful.

He has starred in The Proposal, The Watcher and NCIS, as well as Kim Kardashian’s recent Hulu hit All’s Fair.

If you see “Christy,” you’ll remember Christy the person, not “Christy” the movie. This biopic of West Virginia’s other famous coal miner’s daughter Christy Martin, the first female boxer to make the cover of Sports Illustrated, is an efficiently inspiring and harrowing one when the physically transformed, emotionally present Sydney Sweeney is holding the screen as Martin. But otherwise, under David Michôd’s direction, it’s one more machine-pressed product that may as well have been chatbot-prompted into existence.

That’s a shame because early on, when butch, athletic, semi-openly gay Christy is just a picked-on high schooler punching her way into feeling good about herself, you can detect a keen level of attention, especially in the script by Mirrah Foulkes and Michôd, to what’s unspoken in these types of tales: the violence and verve that can mark a boxing talent and the pressure to conform in a male-dominated sport. In this case, it leads Christy to deny a part of her identity.

It’s a very specific tension that has made movies about female boxers in the 21st century — from “Girlfight” and “Million Dollar Baby” through last year’s “The Fire Inside” — so much more interesting as empowerment case studies than the male-centered ones, which still seem rooted in conventional mythmaking. (We’re still living in the Rocky Balboa Universe.)

As memorably conveyed with twang, sweat and tenacity by Sweeney, the young Christy is a natural competitor whose fists give her an out from the judgmental eyes of small-town life, most notably those of her mom (an effectively chilly Merritt Wever). She fights as if she’s been attacked, but can make winning in the ring look both spirited and a foregone conclusion.

That energy and commitment to turn boxing into a career gets an opportunistic fine-tuning — a feminizing pink kit — when she’s hooked up with trainer Jim Martin, played by an eerily dead-eyed Ben Foster as the ghoul-in-waiting he turned out to be. Foster’s Jim, believably disturbed and shady but a bit on the nose, isn’t the movie’s first problem. That would be Michôd’s addiction to montage-ifying every significant dramatic turning point, slathering on the music to keep the timeline moving.

But the famously chameleonic Foster’s portrayal is the film’s most curious dilemma, because it doesn’t allow us to see why Christy would trust her future to his judgment, much less marry him. It’s as if “Christy,” looking backward through a bloody yet unbowed lens, is afraid of presenting Jim Martin as anything but a shifty sleazebag, when what that does is undercut Sweeney’s more delicate job of convincing us why she’d stay with him for decades.

Sweeney manages it anyway, because, despite what you may have assumed, she’s a sturdy in-the-moment actor, especially with her eyes. Still, the movie’s lack of nuance about how toxic relationships develop makes this central twosome a head-scratchingly imbalanced one. Everyone invariably falls into two camps: unfailingly supportive (a sensitive dad played by Ethan Embry; Katy O’Brian as a former rival) or, whenever Wever reappears, jaw-dropping callousness. Much more galvanizing as a combo platter of high-wattage persuasion and dominance is Chad L. Coleman in his handful of scenes as Don King.

The central problem with “Christy” — which needs to be both uplifting about its star subject’s achievement and complex about her journey of sexuality and trauma — is that it screams for a treatment grittier than the slick melodrama we’ve been given. It’s all highlights and lowlights, rarely interested in the in-between stuff that makes watching all the rounds of a bout so necessary to appreciating what it means to survive on the canvas.

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.

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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.”