Born in 2005, the year YouTube launched, Backrooms director Kane Parsons has “always taken that for granted,” having the platform at his disposal. “YouTube, really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do,” he explains while discussing his “weird dream […]
Polish producer Ewa Puszczyńska has long been one of the country’s most recognized film producers who has steadily built a reputation for supporting some of the most ambitious cinema to come out of Europe across the last decade. She’s worked with directors such as Paweł Pawlikowski, David Lynch, Jonathan Glazer, Jesse Eisenberg and Agnieszka Smoczyńska […]
From Hollywood’s earliest era up to today, brothers have produced an outsized impact on the movie industry: Jack Warner and his siblings, Joel and Ethan Coen, the Duffer brothers, Russo brothers, Farrelly brothers, Duplass brothers, and the Ways (Chapman and Maclain), among others. Hamza and Badie Ali are emerging as the newest brother tandem to […]
With the entertainment industry in flux and talk everywhere about new models, Level Forward has been plugging away at one as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company legally required to balance a focus on earnings with positive societal or environmental impact. It’s worked with more than 100 organizations over the years to build […]
EXCLUSIVE: When Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov, the founders of Ukrainian microdrama behemoth Holywater Tech, visited the offices of Brent Montgomery’s Wheelhouse, they were immediately struck by a poster hanging on the wall. Montgomery’s office was bedecked with Walt Disney’s famous 1957 flow chart, which set out in epic detail how the Mouse House would […]
Avedon. The syllables roll fluidly, as elegant as the man. Photographer Richard Avedon possessed movie-star good looks, but he would spend his career not posing for the camera but working behind it, capturing the beauty and often the subtle vulnerability of some of the most glamorous and celebrated people on the planet. Marilyn Monroe, Sophia […]
Pedro Almodóvar is known for mining his own personal experience, but Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) explores this on a whole new level. His viewpoint is reflected in the film in two interwoven protagonists — director Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia), and Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), the cult filmmaker at the center of Raul’s screenplay. As Raul grapples with […]
Jay Abdo has a mission. “I want to show the world who Syrians really are; why they sometimes had to leave, and why they’re coming back,” says the Syrian American actor Jay Abdo in a Zoom call from Damascus in late March. Fifteen minutes in, the screen freezes. Abdo comes back on five minutes later […]
In a special three-part series — including All the Presidents’ Men and Taxi Driver — Deadline is looking back a half-century at 1976, an incredible year for movies. Things could have gone very differently for Sylvester Stallone in the year he broke out; by 1976, he was just a jobbing actor with seven years of […]
Picture yourself in a boat on the Riviera… Most rock superstars have been seduced by the glamor of the Cannes Film Festival at some point in their career. The Rolling Stones went twice, first with Gimme Shelter in 1971 and then with Stones in Exile in 2010. The Who closed the festival in 1975 with […]
Heated Rivalry didn’t just break through — it rewrote the industry playbook. In the five months since its Season 1 finale, the once “unconventional” adaptation has emerged as a breakout success, reshaping expectations around genre, LGBTQ+ storytelling and representation. Based on Rachel Reid’s bestselling novel, the queer hockey drama follows the steamy, contentious relationship between […]
Evan and Gregg Spiridellis are no strangers to the intersection of technology and entertainment. In 1999, back in the dial-up Internet days, the brothers founded JibJab, which quickly went viral for its flash animations and political satire videos such as the John Kerry vs. George W. Bush parody This Land! The pair later expanded into the children’s […]
Although a relatively new concept for many in Hollywood, artificial intelligence has been on Natasha Lyonne’s mind for years, quite possibly since she was a kid studying the Talmud at a Jewish private school in New York City. “I feel that I understand how it formed my brain as a tween,” she says. She sees […]
Puerto Rico’s native son, René Pérez Joglar, better known as Residente to his legions of fans, has dominated the music industry for decades — and now he’s looking to disrupt Hollywood. Residente, a four-time Grammy and 29-time Latin Grammy Award winner, is gearing up to make his feature film directorial debut with Porto Rico, an epic […]
When Josh D’Amaro was chosen as Bob Iger’s successor as CEO of the Walt Disney Co., he seemed to be straight out of central casting. The 55-year-old was not merely a popular and outgoing executive, equally comfortable at the head of a conference room or mingling with theme-park visitors. But with his salt-and-pepper hair and […]
The Iranian revolution of 1979 saw the US-backed rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi collapse almost overnight, to be replaced with an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The impact of the regime change was felt immediately by the filmmaking community, with the obliteration of filmfarsi, the country’s cheap, commercial and heavily-Westernized industry. Nevertheless, Iranian […]
Barry Keoghan returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Riley Keough in Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam, a family drama set in and around an East Coast Circassian community. Balagov won Best Director in Un Certain Regard for Beanpole in 2019. His first film in English, Butterfly Jam marks the first feature involvement for Keoghan’s Wolfcub Productions and […]
Japan is out in force in Cannes this year across the Official Selection and parallel sections as well as the Marché du Film, where it is the country of honor, with its high-profile presence continuing a long and illustrious relationship with the festival. Kōzaburō Yoshimura’s The Tale of Genji, Kiyoshi Saeki’s Man in the Storm and Noboru Nakamura’s Nami marked […]
Three years on from the dual writers and actors strikes, and everything is not as film and television workers might have hoped. After years of adopting phrases like ‘survive til ’25’ to establish a light at the end of the tunnel, the Hollywood labor unions are out of pithy offerings. Both the Writers Guild of […]
When it comes to Paramount Pictures’ pending takeover of Warner Bros., the shouts from those with pitchforks — including exhibitors, filmmakers and lawmakers — are loud: The monopoly of it all, the zany promise of some 30 movies annually, the anxiety that the new merger becomes Disney-Fox, the mass elimination of jobs and so on. […]
Not many American actors make the transition from TV to movies, but even fewer cross over from Hollywood to Europe. Four years ago, while still a bankable name in commercial studio franchises, Woody Harrelson swanned effortlessly into the international arthouse, playing the Marxist captain of a doomed cruise liner in Swedish auteur Ruben Östlund’s second […]
In Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, Sebastian Stan returns to his Romanian roots with a story that forces us to examine our prejudices, our assumptions, and the treatment of immigrants. Starring opposite Renate Reinsve, Stan once again plunges into a risky, thorny role with a look that belies his MCU star status. As he prepares for both […]