Film

Film

In the last few weeks we've had three almost completely pointless short trailers online, with another reportedly playing in cinemas ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash. First there was Captain America cradling his baby, then Thor praying to his dear old dead omnipotent dad. This week we got our first proper look at the classic X-Men lineup in the new film, and there are suggestions that an encounter between the Fantastic Four's The Thing and half of Wakanda is imminent. Something weird is clearly happening.

"When I met up with Michael B. Jordan at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank before a late-night event on the lot, he seemed exhausted and understandably so. The always-in-demand actor, one of Hollywood's hottest talents, was just back from Europe, where he spent a year directing, acting and producing a new version of the heist thriller The Thomas Crown Affair."

Where does such a charge leave Magellan, despoiler of every Eden he encounters? The film, to its credit, does not skimp on paradisiacal visions. Every shot of the tropics is a painterly study in lush foliage and golden-pink sunlight; the beauty of the natural world seems, if anything, magnified by Magellan's encroaching, annihilating threat. Such visual wonders will hardly surprise admirers of Diaz, whose work has encouraged contemplation, and at marathon lengths.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

If in our earliest issues we valorized filmmakers recklessly putting their production budgets on their credit cards, Robinson in a 2009 series on filmmakers and their second jobs preached the necessity of a good side hustle, convincing filmmakers such as Barry Jenkins, Tze Chun, Joe Swanberg and Liza Johnson to reveal the wage labor they undertook before their entertainment industry careers took off.

Wearing a bright turquoise suit, Cumming was joined by his husband Grant Shaffer, as well as other friends and family. However, some fans were surprised to see Cumming is close with activist Lewinsky, who was a key figure in the infamous Bill Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that led to Clinton's impeachment. The US host was awarded the 2,832th star, located at 6320 Hollywood Boulevard. Cumming is renowned for his performances on the stage and screen.

Adapted from Rosenkrantz' book of the same name, published in 2022, the film hinges on a single conversation in December 1974, as Hujar recounts, almost pedantically, everything he did the previous day. Drawn from a long-lost tape, the monologue turns errands, meals and irritations into a portrait of an artist's inner life. It trades plot for precision, offering instead a study of friendship, attention and the conditions of making work in 1970s New York.

Predator: Badlands is finally available to preorder in physical formats at major retailers, including Amazon and Walmart. Blu-ray preorders for most big-budget movies open alongside the theatrical premiere these days, but it took two months for physical versions of Badlands to surface. Fans of the iconic sci-fi series won't have to wait much longer to complete their collection. The new standalone Predator movie releases February 17 on 4K Blu-ray, 1080p Blu-ray, and DVD.

The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis' apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm. That's owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like It, The Crow and Nosferatu, here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very '70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels Dead Man's Wire.

One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy joined the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade floats, the latest Demon Slayer film earned $780 million at the worldwide box office in 2025, and the animated musical KPop Demon Hunters (though not technically anime) became the most-watched original Netflix movie of all time. As someone who had no one to talk to growing up during the days of Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, it's tough to even process that the genre has reached mainstream status around the globe.

Your imagination is really the limit when it comes to film. I think that's what's so cool is that it's taking your dreams and it's making them a sort of reality," said Greenberg.

Gerard Butler has made his fair share of sequels, but few have held as much potential as Greenland 2: Migration. The original Greenland wasn't even a traditional hit; it was released in theaters and on VOD at the end of 2020, when plenty of movie theaters remained closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it garnered some attention for being an unusually sober and thoughtful apocalypse movie, especially given that Butler previously starred in the likes of Geostorm.

Whether you want to catch a cool concert or the Golden Globes, or just settle down to a decadent lasagna dinner, we are here for you. So let's get to it, shall we? (As always, be sure to double check event and venue websites for any last-minute changes in health guidelines or other details.) Meanwhile, if you'd like to have this Weekender lineup delivered to your inbox every Thursday morning for free, just sign up at www.mercurynews.com/newsletters or w.eastbaytimes.com/newsletters.

The upcoming Star Wars: Starfighter has already attracted its share of big names thanks to director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Gosling. But apparently, they're only the start of the famous figures involved in the work. According to a new report, one of the biggest movie stars alive helped out with a major scene, which is both a testament to the appeal of Star Wars and a sneaky glimpse of what's to come.

My eyes zero in on a red door, its frame one of the few surviving remnants of a home. I pull it closer to me, and in moments I see a fraction of the house as it once was - now I'm in a cozy kitchen with blurred but welcoming pictures in the background and a grandfather celebrating a birthday. A voice-over tells me that it was Alexander, a grandfather, who painted the door red.

50 weekends a year, the critically-acclaimed San Francisco Neo-Futurists present The Infinite Wrench, an attempt to perform 30 bite-sized plays in a frantic race against the clock, in an order determined by you, the audience. Each week, the ensemble offers up new plays ranging from the personal, to the political, to the profoundly WTF, all truthful and inspired by the lived experiences of the performers.

Anderson's One Battle After Another continues a resurgence of VistaVision that now includes The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Bugonia. The format, which uses 8-perf 35mm traveling through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to create a larger negative, gained popularity as a non-anamorphic widescreen alternative in the mid-1950s. It was used for everything from Biblical epics ( The Ten Commandments) to musicals ( White Christmas) to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers ( Vertigo and North by Northwest).

As seen in viral Instagram videos, the interviewer asked about the Wicked sequel's ambiguous ending, and Grande was ready to make her case, warning, "Oh, I'm gonna ruin that for you." She confirmed that Glinda doesn't know Elphaba is alive, even though it seems like they reconnect through magic in the final scene of the film. "She can't. Well, they don't see each other," she said. "You see us, but we don't see each other. She's far as hell."

"I said, 'Well, there's a lot,' Then I was gonna say, because we keep reading everybody thinks that Bradley's had plastic surgery. Everybody keeps saying that. I'm like, 'What people don't know is that he hasn't.' Right?"

"You have to be smart about what you can and can't handle, and I could not handle what was out there," Garner told the magazine. "But what was out there," Garner said, "was not what was hard. The fact of it is what was hard. The actual breaking up of a family is what was hard. Losing a true partnership and friendship is what was hard."

Lucy Liu knew the instant she watched Lawrence Shou's open-call audition video that the neophyte East Bay actor would be the perfect choice to portray her troubled cinematic son in the wrenching Rosemead, inspired by a real-life Southern California tragedy. The 23-year-old Shou, a lifelong Fremont resident, won out over hundreds of others eager to play 17-year-old Joe, a troubled San Gabriel Valley area high school student with schizophrenia whose distraught mom Irene (Liu, in a transformative performance) is dying of cancer.

The result is the highest total since 2019, which saw 1.35bn in total revenue, shortly before the collapse of the physical cinema box office the following year, to 323.7m, as Covid restrictions hit hard. Cinema revenues recovered to 595.5m in 2021, and 980.7m in 2022, only returning above 1bn in 2023, with a total of 1.06bn.

One of the most beautiful women on the planet is covered with blood and dirt as she curls her hand inside the opening of a conch shell. She raises it as a makeshift set of brass knuckles and proceeds to pulverize the face of one of the buccaneers who has attacked her island home. This is Priyanka Chopra Jonas's first major fight scene in The Bluff, which tells you this is far different from the kind of pirate film moviegoers have seen before.

It would be hard to overstate the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne on traditions of realism in European cinema. The Belgian brothers, now in their seventies, have been making compassionate, uncompromising dramas about the social and economic conditions of modern life for nearly 40 years, approaching each with a direct, unvarnished style that's been imitated far and wide across the international arthouse circuit, if seldom rivaled in its emotional impact.

NEW YORK -- Warner Bros. again rejected a takeover bid from Paramount and told shareholders Wednesday to stick with a rival offer from Netflix. Warner's leadership has repeatedly rebuffed Skydance-owned Paramount's overtures - and urged shareholders just weeks ago to back its the sale of its streaming and studio business to Netflix for $72 billion. Paramount, meanwhile, has made efforts to sweeten its $77.9 billion hostile offer for the entire company.

Marty is attempting to prove himself as the world's greatest table-tennis champion, to escape his meagre mid-century New York City circumstances and achieve a dream he's locked on to, seemingly more out of desire to achieve it than a particular love for the sport. And just as he's presumably blown up some natural athleticism into a monomaniacal quest, all of Marty's misdeeds across the film escalate.

The world's largest tech showcase does not come without theatrics. Innovations and gadgets like a lollipop that sings to you as you consume it, a laundry-folding robot, and a "smart" LEGO brick have stolen the spotlight so far at CES 2026. But underscoring this year's programming is a strong focus on an industry that relies on a similar theatrical flair: entertainment.

Tom Blyth, best known for playing young Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, could soon become known for something more surprising: his dance moves. His most recent film, Plainclothes, in which he plays a closeted police officer who is hired to catch gay men cruising in public restrooms - and then falls for one of his targets - isn't exactly a laugh riot. But there's a small, tender moment where Blyth's Lucas and his mother, Marie (Maria Dizzia), dance around in the kitchen that's truly transcendent.