The video starts with Cher's son, Chaz Bono, who is transgender and recently got married. However, the video then changes to show a before photo of 'Jennifer Coolidge' as a man; that then morphs into a picture of Trace Lysette, who bears absolutely no resemblance to Coolidge whatsoever.
"Michael" was designed to be an international crowd-pleaser—the kind of film that executives hope will drag audiences away from their small screens and deposit them in front of big ones, where they can watch and sing along and even dance, if theatres permit it.
On May 2, 2025, arts and cultural organizations across the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded. This was part of a larger initiative by the Trump Administration to dismantle not just the NEA, but also other arts advocacy programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
The first half of the movie plays out as an intimate chamber piece between Mary and Sam, the two of them rehashing long-buried grudges and betrayals, as we get occasional flashes to Mary's extravagant concert performances.
I can't say it feels great and I can't say that it makes me happy. It just makes me feel peculiar. It's just a movie, at the end of the day. It's just supposed to be an action movie about a guy trying to get his daughter back. And, what I see every day, it weighs heavy on my heart for the world.
Filmmakers and actors whose careers were shaped by Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute he founded reflected on his legacy as the godfather of independent cinema at a star-studded gala Friday night during the first Sundance Film Festival since his death. The 2026 festival - its last in Utah, before relocating to Boulder, Colorado - is a love letter to the haven Redford established in the state decades ago for stories that didn't fit into the mainstream.
That setup makes Sirāt sound like an arty Euro version of some Liam Neeson paternal vengeance thriller, complete with one-word title. No, sirāt isn't Arabic for taken—it literally translates as 'path,' but it's also a reference to the Islamic end-times prophecy of a bridge that souls must cross to reach the afterlife, the unworthy being cast over its side into eternal damnation. And that eschatological connotation is key to director Óliver Laxe's immersive but unpleasant parable.
The project was prompted by a new practice requiring all journalists or outlets who received any non-Russian funding to self-identify as "foreign agents." At first, the reactions of TV Rain on-air host Anna Nemzer and her colleagues, forced to read an absurd disclaimer at the beginning of every story, is one of typically Russian dark humor.
For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship-a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça's work, memory functions as a tool of defiance.
My value as a person is not reliant on me being nominated for anything or being snubbed. It's such a constructed reality. It's not a real competition. We made something months ago, and now we're putting it in a pot, and somebody's going to choose one.
