SPOILER ALERT: This story contains descriptions of key scenes and storylines in “Saltburn.” Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s new twisted thriller, “Saltburn,” includes several graphic scenes that have left moviegoers debating whether to be titillated or disturbed. “It gets under your skin,” Fennell told me Tuesday at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. “We just want to
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The odds were ever in favor of “The Hunger Games” prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” which emerged victorious in a busy box office weekend despite opening slightly behind expectations. The film, which brings audiences back to the dystopia of Panem for the first time in nearly a decade, collected $44 million from 3,776
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Robbie Ryan says “becoming a diplomat and a bit of a politician” was one of the key skills he learned while filming “Poor Things,” the surrealist Frankenstein-esque adventure by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. The film screened at the Camerimage cinematography festival in Torun, Poland, where director of photography Ryan and Dafoe
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Fast-emerging Mexican auteur, delivering knowing and cross.grained takes on life in Mixtec communities, actress-turned-director Angeles Cruz’s “Valentina or the Serenity” walked off Saturday night with the top best picture award and best actress (Myriam Bravo) in a high-caliber main competition at this year’s Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival. Best actor went to “Money Heist’s” Rodolfo de
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Cinematographer Linus Sandgren says he and director Emerald Fennell relied on their emotions and instincts to conjure the “gothic” look of “Saltburn,” the hybrid psychological horror and dark comedy just screened at the Camerimage cinematography festival in Torun, Poland. The film’s tight Academy aspect ratio, for one thing, was an idea that arose only after
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Indie and art film producer Jon Kilik, unlike many, remains hopeful for the personal, mid-budget movie for grown-ups. “Those are the films directors love to make and audiences still love,” says Kilik, being feted this week at Poland’s Camerimage cinematography festival for work of special visual sensitivity. Having flown in from a shoot in Rome,
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Recreating epic battle scenes was just part of the challenge in filming “Napoleon” with director Ridley Scott, says Polish-born cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, who screened the grand-scale biopic at the Camerimage cinematography festival in Poland on Friday. Getting the realism needed to capture the vast brutality of the Battle of Austerlitz or Waterloo, says Wolski, depends
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Cinematographer and director Warwick Thornton scored top honors Saturday at the Camerimage cinematography film festival for his magical tale of an aboriginal youth, “The New Boy,” which film jurors called a distinctive “portrait of an extinguished spirituality.” Thornton, in accepting the Golden Frog, said he had been so moved by the cinematography work onscreen at
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Bowen Yang played U.S. Representative George Santos, who found himself at the center of an investigation into his campaign donation spending, during the “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update. Santos was found by a House Ethics Committee report to have spent tens of thousands of campaign dollars on designer clothes and shoes, Botox, OnlyFans, personal trips
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Bowen Yang starred as Tian Tian, a giant panda from China who interrupted an awkward Joe Biden press conference, in the “Saturday Night Live” cold open. As Mikey Day’s Biden was getting grilled at a press conference about his recent meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping, response to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the border crisis,
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Danielle Brooks and Taraji P. Henson, standout performers from Blitz Bazawule’s daring re-imagining of Alice Walker’s beloved novel “The Color Purple,” are vying for recognition in a fiercely competitive supporting actress race. Following three consecutive days of screenings in Los Angeles, the film has garnered enthusiastic applause from voters, critics and industry professionals, sparking burning
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At the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, the Baltic Film sidebar has showcased an impressive range of work from the Baltic states – Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – including the post-Soviet documentary “The Last Relic” and the 3D fable “Twittering Soul,” the hand-painted animation “The Peasants” and the Estonian oddity of “Spit in
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SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points, including the ending for “Saltburn.” In the final moments of Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 song, “Murder on the Dancefloor” pumps out over the speakers, while Barry Keoghan’s Oliver dances stark naked through a grand estate house in the British countryside. “Everything is diabolical, but it’s exhilarating,”
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If it’s a marketing scheme, it’s an elaborate one. “The Curse” stars Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder parodied the trailer introduction to the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell rom-com “Anyone But You” in a newly released promo. In an almost exact parallel to that of Sweeney and Powell’s, the intro features Stone and Fielder standing
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“You may know me from other stuff, but I don’t use a lot of colors, except when necessary,” says renowned costume designer Trish Summerville. So, when it came to designing the main outfit worn by Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” Summerville, whose credits include “The Girl
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Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” is a nesting doll of a film—a television broadcast of a documentary about a play, assembled with the same precision and detail as Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch” among others. Thematically, the connective tissue between its layers of reality, like many of those earlier
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Geffen Records and Hybe, the K-pop entertainment company behind BTS and NewJeans, have announced the final six members of the new girl group Katseye. The Katseye finalists, who were unveiled at a live event in L.A. on Friday night, include Daniela Avanzini, Lara Rajagopalan and Megan Skiendiel from the U.S.; Yoonchae Jeong from South Korea; Sophia
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“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” has caught some fire at the domestic box office. Lionsgate’s “Hunger Games” prequel earned about $19.1 million on its opening day from 3,776 locations, a figure that includes $5.75 million in Thursday previews. The new installment in the young adult dystopian action series will still secure the top slot
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