#clint bentley

[genevieveetguy]

. We here to become human again, to put on nice clothes and dance around and enjoy the things that is not in our reality.

Sing Sing, Greg Kwedar (2023)

[sagindie]

2025 Sundance Film Festival Recap

[spryfilm]

Film review: “Sing Sing” (2003)

[movieswithtrains]

Yes, Train Dreams (2025) does have a train in it

[randomrichards]

SING SING:

Prison theatre troupe

Create a stage comedy

Offers them some hope

[mrs-stans]

The Actor Roundtable: Daniel Craig, Paul Mescal and Colman Domingo on Impostor Syndrome and the Dark Roles Women Love

Adrien Brody, Sebastian Stan and Peter Sarsgaard bond over the pressures of delivering a standout performance: "I had a panic attack every night."

BY SCOTT FEINBERG

Former James Bond Daniel Craig, The Pianist Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Euphoria Emmy winner Colman Domingo, Marvel superhero turned Emmy nominee Sebastian Stan, consummate character actor Peter Sarsgaard and Oscar-nominated heartthrob Paul Mescal range in age from 28 (Mescal) to 56 (Craig); hail from around the world (America, England, Ireland and Romania); and forged very different paths to stardom. But they all share one thing in common: Each gave a standout performance in a 2024 film — or, in Stan’s case, two — that led to them congregating in mid-November at Soho House West Hollywood for THR‘s annual Actor Roundtable.

Their characters are unforgettable: a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America (Brody in The Brutalist); a gay American addict in 1950s Mexico (Craig in Queer); an incarceree who finds purpose in art (Domingo in Sing Sing); an angry young man set on destroying the city that betrayed him (Mescal in Gladiator II); a TV exec who oversees live coverage of a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics (Sarsgaard in September 5); a disfigured actor who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery (Stan in A Different Man); and a striving young Donald Trump (Stan in The Apprentice). So, too, was their conversation.

Let’s talk about how these projects came to you. Daniel, after your Bond chapter — five films over 15 years — how did you wind up hearing from Luca Guadagnino, whom you’d met before any of that?

DANIEL CRAIG I had no plan whatsoever. I was like, “Maybe I’ll never work again.” But there’s a movie I did quite a few years ago called Love Is the Devil, which Luca is a big fan of. I play the reverse role in that movie [the younger man in a gay relationship rather than the older one, as in Queer]. But everybody gets old! Luca wanted to adapt Queer for many years. The rights finally came free not that long ago, and he approached me. I’d have swept the floor for the guy because I think all his movies are exceptional and individual.

Colman, how did you wind up working on a film with a cast comprising mostly nonprofessional actors, 85 percent of whom had been incarcerated at one time at Sing Sing prison and had been through the program that you guys depict in the film?

COLMAN DOMINGO My director, Greg Kwedar, and his co-writer, Clint Bentley, have been volunteer teachers at Sing Sing for years. They kept saying, “If we can capture what we’ve learned from this Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, wouldn’t it be great to do a film about that?” Greg said he put the idea in his drawer and then pulled it out a couple of years later and wrote a quick treatment, and at the end, luckily enough, he wrote down, “Colman Domingo.”

“For years, sometimes I’d bow and get a cab across town and take my bartending shift,” says Domingo.

Paul, nearly a quarter century after Ridley Scott made Gladiator …

CRAIG You weren’t even born, were you?

PAUL MESCAL I was 4. (Laughs.)

… Ridley begins planning to move forward with a sequel and sees you in Normal People?

MESCAL My dad showed me Gladiator when I was 13 — I was obsessed with the battle sequences. But Aftersun and things like that [indie movies], that’s my bread and butter in terms of what I’m drawn to as an actor. But if I was going to make a big film? And Sir Ridley Scott comes asking? Ridley organized a Zoom, which lasted half an hour — he spoke with me for 10 minutes about the arc of the story, 10 minutes about his dog and 10 minutes about Gaelic football, and then it was offered to me. (Laughs.) I was like, “I could go and look at the first film and see what Russell did so excellently.” But that felt like a mistake because that’s not my lane. If Ridley’s entry point to me was something like Normal People and Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, I was keen to, where possible, draw a performance style from those films and try to bring it to something bigger.

Peter, you were working on the television series Presumed Innocent when you first heard about September 5. The director, Tim Fehlbaum, had made two prior, lower-profile films. What convinced you to ask for time off from Presumed Innocent to go and do this, 21 years after acting in Shattered Glass, another great film about journalism?

PETER SARSGAARD Believe it or not, it started at a concert. Sean Penn, who was in the first movie I ever did, Dead Man Walking, was there, and we hung out for most of the evening. At the end he said, “There’s something coming your way, by the way.” I went, “Oh, great.” He produced this movie. So when I met Tim, to be fair, I was already like, “Sean likes this guy.” Then Tim started talking about all this real footage, and I saw Jim McKay, this sports announcer who delivered the terrible news [on Sept. 5, 1972] without making it about himself, and I thought, “That type of person and sincerity has really been lost.” I started thinking it was a really interesting idea to go back to the first time that a live camera ever covered a crisis situation. Then Tim showed me pictures of all the real [original newsroom] equipment that he had, and a lot of the shit worked — it wasn’t greenscreen on the monitors behind us; we were watching actual images from the Olympics and cutting to the real Jim McKay. I’d say the lead is almost Jim McKay. We’re supporting him.

“That type of person and sincerity has really been lost,” Sarsgaard says of Jim McKay, the anchor who covered the events of September 5.

Adrien, your director, Brady Corbet, is 36. His two previous features are nothing on the scale of this one, even if the budget on this one was less than $10 million. What made you want to be a part of it, 22 years after playing another man traumatized by his experience during World War II in The Pianist?

ADRIEN BRODY There’s a real richness to the storytelling, and it speaks to many things historically that are quite relevant today but also very personal to me. My mother is a Hungarian-born photographer and artist, Sylvia Plachy, and has been a beacon for me in all my artistic pursuits. And her hardships and her parents’ — my grandparents’ — hardships of fleeing Budapest in 1956 during the revolution, losing their home and leaving everything behind and escaping under a bed of corn on the back of a truck and eventually immigrating to the United States? They’re obviously not related to my character and his personal struggles, but I felt very fortunate to be able to represent that immigrant experience. We’re all on a quest to find something of meaning that leaves behind something of meaning, and that’s also the quest of my character, as an architect. Brady is also very much like László. I often just look at my directors and try to channel them. That’s my trick. (Laughs.)

Brody, the youngest actor to win a best actor Oscar, says that experience is the ultimate teacher: “You do not listen until you fail or until it really hurts.”

Sebastian, Donald Trump is probably the most famous — and most imitated — person in the world, so I imagine it might have been a little intimidating to be asked to join the long line of people who have portrayed him.

SEBASTIAN STAN So much of what Adrien just said resonated for me in terms of wanting to be part of something that stands the test of time. I had a personal thing with the American dream because I came to this country from Romania when I was 12, and my father helped people escape illegally. I had heard all about the American dream and have been trying to this day to figure out what this dream is and what it gives us and what it takes away. That overrode any sort of fear about doing it because it was him. I played this little game with myself where I crossed out the names [of the characters], and there was still a Michael Corleone sort of story. And here was this filmmaker [Ali Abbasi] who was European, who’d fled Iran, who’s fearless and whose last film was all about his previous country, coming into this with a fresh perspective, not wanting to play for any team, just removing all judgment. I thought, “Can we just try to find out who the hell this person [Trump] is? What’s beneath this character?” And when you peel back the layers, you get to the core of a powerless child who has been enacting a sort of vendetta of revenge that we’ve all been subjected to, to no end. I think that we as artists, as actors, have to keep reflecting the times that we’re in as best as we can, no matter how ugly they are.

For Sebastian, there were two big-swing projects this year, the other being A Different Man.

BRODY Double feature. That’s so impressive.

STAN It’ll never happen again. It was thanks to the strike.

Stan stars in two Oscar contenders, The Apprentice and A Different Man. “It’ll never happen again,” he says. “It was thanks to the strike.”

Sebastian, your character in that film has neurofibromatosis, a form of facial disfigurement, and you were only willing to play him because your director and co-star wanted you to, right?

STAN With this one, I definitely feel like I took a little bit of what Adrien said about playing your director because [director Aaron Schimberg] also wrote it, and it’s so much about his experience of being a disfigured man. Sometimes I was like, “I’ll just copy.” But he’s been trying to figure out how he can get us to see a movie that represents this disability, and he was finding it very difficult. In his previous film, he hired Adam [Pearson, an actor who has neurofibromatosis] to be in it, and he got backlash because people were saying he was exploiting Adam, so the movie didn’t get seen. But if he was casting an able-bodied actor to play a disabled person, then he’s not really representing, and nothing happens. So he found a way with this movie of doing both.

These performances were ballsy. At what point did you feel most in danger of failing?

CRAIG Every day I was thinking, “This is all failing. Where is this going?” From the moment I got there in the morning until the moment I’d leave at the end of the day, it was like, “What the fuck?”

DOMINGO I was working with men who had the lived experience of being incarcerated, and every day I was like, “I don’t want to be a fraud.”

SARSGAARD If you play a real person — Nixon or somebody like that — it requires a different level of acting. When you play a Roone Arledge, nobody cares [because he’s not instantly recognizable]. You can just take whatever you want from the person. (To Stan) To succeed at what you did [playing Trump] is a whole other level.

STAN I was having panic attacks every night. There was not enough time to gain weight, and the prosthetics test failed badly, so I was fucked. And not only that, but the director, two weeks out, goes, “Originally, I was going to cast a woman to play Trump.”

BRODY That’s reassuring.

STAN “Why are you fucking telling me this two weeks before?! I’m going to die.”

Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice and A Different Man.

Most of you have played recognizable people at some point. What makes the difference between an impersonation and a performance?

DOMINGO You’ve got to find their soul. You’ve got to go deeper. When I played Bayard Rustin [in 2023’s Rustin], I had teeth knocked out and an accent and a wig, but I was like, “I can’t let that be the performance.” You’re required to find their soul.

MESCAL Sometimes those things help though, right?

DOMINGO Yeah. The physical helps.

BRODY You have a responsibility to represent the physicality and something that’s familiar.

STAN I always think of that Apollo 13 scene when they dump all the stuff on the table and they take a triangle and a circle and they’re like, “You’ve got to take this and make it fit into that.” With real people, you have targets — you know where you’re aiming.

SARSGAARD Well, you guys [Stan and Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn in The Apprentice] anchored each other. You fed back to the other person, “This is who we are.”

DOMINGO (To Stan) When I watched what you did, I thought, “Oh, he’s taken away any judgment [of Trump].” I thought that was exceptional because everyone has an opinion about him, but you’re like, “No, I’m going to do the soul work.”

STAN Thank you. I always think of the great [acting coach] Larry Moss. The Intent to Live was a big book for me, about “everyone has a big emotional need.” Is it to be loved? Is it to be heard? Is it for approval? I mean, everything for Trump, from my perspective, is about power. It’s, “I want to be the most powerful person in the world.”

Mescal was 4 years old when Gladiator was released: “This is a mad experience for me, just to clarify. I’m 28 years of age.”

You’ve all worked in the theater — in fact, Paul, you’re soon doing A Streetcar Named Desire off-Broadway. Is there something about being onstage that makes you a better screen actor?

MESCAL Yeah, I think so. Somebody said to me that film is a director’s medium — they have the canvas and you’re the paint — but stage is very much a writer’s and an actor’s medium. Once previews are over, that’s your stage, that’s where you go and play. More broadly, something like Streetcar obviously has a very famous performance history, as does something like Gladiator II. Once I’d been cast in Streetcar, I was like, “I can never go back and look at the film until the dust has settled on it all.” And being onstage, you’re acting in a wide shot the whole time — there’s no hiding, there’s no going again. On a Ridley set, a lot of it feels theatrical because it’s not wide shot then tight coverage then medium shot; it’s all happening in one go.

He has a zillion cameras going at once?

MESCAL It depends. In the scenes in the cell, he would get as many cameras in there as possible — maybe he’d get to five, trying to cram a sixth in the door. Whereas when you’re shooting the battle scenes, it’s 12.

SARSGAARD Twelve?! (Laughs.)

MESCAL Twelve cameras, easy. Camera operators dressed up in costume like Roman soldiers.

DOMINGO Really?! That’s fantastic. (Laughs.)

MESCAL So you save time with the amount of takes that you’re going to do because the coverage is there. But you also gain a sense of freedom because continuity goes out the window.

Daniel, you’ve often returned to the stage in New York. For some of the more theatrical characters that you’ve played onscreen, like Benoit Blanc, I imagine that’s helpful?

CRAIG The first movie job I ever did, I went on the set and the director kept saying to me [complimenting him], “God, you’re so still!” I was like [to myself], “Because I’m terrified!” On the stage, because I’d been doing that for so long, there was just the freedom to be. I didn’t go into film knowing how to do that. That I had to learn — and I’m still learning to this day how to be as free on film as I can be on the stage.

“Oh, it doesn’t go away,” says the Bond actor on imposter syndrome. “But I think as soon as you think you can do it, you can’t.”

A lot of actors are surely thinking about you all, “They are exactly where I want to be.” But that hasn’t always been the case. Colman, your story of the past 10 years is so inspiring. You were almost ready to hang it up, right?

DOMINGO Not almost. Full-out.

You acted in the musical The Scottsboro Boys on Broadway and got a Tony nomination, then you acted in it again on the West End and got an Olivier nomination, and then you came back to the U.S. and …

DOMINGO I was a journeyman actor for years. Sometimes in the same night, I’d bow and then get a cab across town and take my bartending shift — I couldn’t give it up because I was getting $400 a week. That had been going on for many years — I’ve been working for about 34 years now. I came back to New York and was really disheartened because I was still going in for under-fives [auditioning for parts of less than five minutes of screen time], and I just thought, “My talent is not being used. And I don’t want to be bitter about it.” Because you start to feel a little bitterness. After feeling disrespected in an audition, I’d take the sides and put them in the trash before I walked out. Then there was a series of auditions and no’s — like eight no’s in one week — and one just broke me. It seemed perfect for me. The casting director and everyone said it was perfect. I went and met with the director and the producers. And then there was the most insane reason why I didn’t get it. [Domingo has previously said that the audition was for Boardwalk Empire and he was told that the part required a Black actor with lighter skin than his.] I pretty much collapsed in the gym [upon being told that]. I was crying and thought, “This is going to kill me. I have to leave before it kills me.” And right when I said, “That’s enough,” a friend said, “Hey, my managers have been wanting to meet with you.” I said, “No, I’m good. I just dropped my manager, and I’m about to drop my agent and do something else.” He said, “Just meet with them.” I did. Honestly, I felt like it was the worst meeting I’d ever had because I went in there with my arms folded and said, “I know myself. I don’t fit in certain boxes. I know what you see is different, but I do all these different things. But I don’t think that there’s a place for me in this business.” They said, “Give us six months and we’ll make some changes together.” My first two auditions after that were for a Baz Luhrmann series and for Fear the Walking Dead on AMC. I thought, “Fear the Walking Dead? I don’t do things like that.” But then they sent me this monologue that felt like I was doing Richard III, and I thought, “This is beautiful.” Television was starting to change, and I felt like there was a place for me. I booked both jobs — which was odd to me because I hadn’t been booking anything, and those were off of self-tapes — and that gave me a new footing in the industry. I want to be useful in this practice of being an artist. I think what we do at our best is we’re in service. This is a service job. And I want to be in service to this work. (Chokes up with emotion.) I’m glad I stuck around.

We’re sitting here talking during the weird circus that is known as awards season. Some of you have been through this before. Adrien, 22 years ago you went through it with The Pianist, and at 29 you became — and to this day remain — the youngest person ever to win the best actor Oscar. What do you know now that you wish you knew then?

BRODY Oh, that’s a lovely question. No one’s ever asked that. I don’t “wish I knew” because you can’t. You only learn things through experience. CRAIG You wouldn’t listen. My younger self just wouldn’t listen. He’d be like, “Whatever. Blah, blah, blah.”

BRODY It’s absolutely true. You do not listen until you fail or until it really hurts. For a shift to occur, there has to be enlightenment. Enlightenment comes oftentimes through suffering or hardships. I’ve had a very blessed life and career, but it’s never been easy. The thing to know is there are many chapters. To be at this table, both physically and metaphorically, is a triumph, honestly. And there are wonderful, positive career bonuses from accolades. But I think at the end of the day, everybody at this table will tell you that it’s the work — the experience of getting it and making it and enduring it and feeling great about the accomplishment of leaving it — that is the beauty, the joy. I’d been acting professionally for 17 years before that [Oscar]. To a lot of people, I was an overnight success, but I’d been kicking around, paying dues. And it was a remarkable thing, but it was kind of jarring.

MESCAL This is a mad experience for me, just to clarify. I’m 28 years of age. CRAIG Yeah. Why are you here? (Laughs.)

MESCAL When I was in drama school, I became hyperfixated on watching actors that I really admired talk about the work that they do. So I’m sitting here and I’m like, “What the fuck is going on?” For me, anyway, there’s this latent imposter syndrome.

CRAIG Oh, it doesn’t go away. I walk on the set thinking someone’s going to go, “Bluff.” It’s always there, that self-doubt. But I think as soon as you think you can do it, you can’t.

Peter, you once said that after playing a rapist and murderer in Boys Don’t Cry, you were disturbed to find that out in the real world, you got more female attention than ever before.

SARSGAARD Why did I say that? Oh my God. Yeah, that was true.

That’s obviously an unexpected response to your work. What have you all noticed about the way people interact with you in the aftermath of seeing these performances?

MESCAL People think I’m a tough guy. We had a premiere in Dublin, and we were walking past the pub, and there were these Irish lads, and for the first time ever, they were like, “Go on, the Glad [as in Gladiator]! Just walk!”

BRODY No one has seen this movie yet. But it’s funny, people will say, “My mom really likes you.”

DOMINGO Oh my God. Isn’t that the wildest thing? “So you don’t, right?”

What would you be doing today if you had not become an actor?

SARSGAARD I really like being around young people, and I’ve had some experiences with teaching, so I can imagine that route.

STAN Yeah, maybe something with young people because that’s always going to humble you.

CRAIG Serving cocktails on the QE2. DOMINGO I wanted to be a chef. I still cook as an amateur — I love food. MESCAL Something that would enable me to play Gaelic football. BRODY I used to paint and draw before I was acting, and I loved that. I rediscovered it later when I put down acting for some time.

Which living actor with whom you’ve not worked before would you most like to work with?

SARSGAARD It’s going to sound schmaltzy, but I’ve never acted with my wife [Maggie Gyllenhaal] in a movie. We did a film together — when we first met, I got her a part in this movie that I was doing, and she did one scene where we made love. But then the whole film was actually out of focus — we shot it for nine weeks — and the whole film was gone. MESCAL No way. DOMINGO What?! BRODY Oh my God, that’s horrible. MESCAL Michelle Williams. BRODY Robert De Niro. STAN Cate Blanchett. CRAIG All you guys. DOMINGO Adrien Brody. BRODY Brother, that can happen!

[dalekofchaos]

MCU Recast

Just for fun, I will be recasting the MCU

Notice. Because of the 30 picture limit, will not be able to do them all the pics for the fancasts.

Timothy Olyphant as Iron Man/Tony Stark

Glenn Powell as Captain America

Alexander Skarsgard as Thor Odinson

Hugh Dancy as The Hulk/Bruce Banner

Olga Kurylenko as Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff

Jensen Ackles as Hawkeye/Clint Barton

Idris Elba as Nick Fury(if Ultimate)

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Nick Fury(if 616)

Morena Baccarin as Maria Hill

Ewan McGregor as Ant-Man/Hank Pym

Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Wasp/Janet Van Dyne

Hiba Abouk as Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff

Jesus Castro as Quicksilver/Pietro Maximoff

Ryan Gosling as Star Lord/Peter Quill

Sofia Boutella as Gamora

Simon Pegg as Rocket Racoon

John Rhys-Davies as Groot

Jason Momoa as Drax the Destroyer

Maggie Q as Mantis

Ana de Armas as Nebula

Christian Bale as Doctor Strange/Stephen Strange

Katee Sackhoff as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers

Joe Keery as Spider-Man/Peter Parker

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Black Panther/T'Challa

Ben Barnes as Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes

Robert Pattinson as Daredevil

Alexandra Daddario as Jessica Jones

Trevante Rhodes as Luke Cage

Lewis Tan as Iron Fist/Danny Rand

Frank Grillo as The Punisher/Frank Castle

Jamie Chung as Colleen Wing

Sonequa Martin-Green as Misty Knight

Jesse Plemons as Foggy Nelson

Amanda Seyfried as Karen Page

Yaya DaCosta as Claire Temple

Dakota Fanning as Trish Walker/Hellcat

Stephan James as Malcolm Ducasse

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Stick

Rainn Wilson as Microchip/David Liberman

Jamie Foxx as War Machine/James "Rhodey" Rhodes

Michael B. Jordan as Sam Wilson

Amy Adams as Pepper Potts

Kevin James as Harold “Happy” Hogan

Christina Ricci as Betty Ross

Léa Seydoux as Sharon Carter

Daisy Ridley as Peggy Carter

Charlie Day as Ant-Man/Scott Lang

Amandla Stenberg as Shuri

Maya Hawke as Hawkeye/Kate Bishop

Ivanna Sakhno as Black Widow/Yelena Belova

(I'm changing the direction of the MCU Spider-Man since there would be no mind wipe at the end of said trilogy, no Iron Man Jr, Peter is in college and already an established hero, there would be no pointless change to MJ's name and I would reframe from basically copying everything about Miles and give all his traits to Peter)

Brendan Fraser as Uncle Ben Parker(flashbacks)

Jamie Lee Curtis as May Parker

Stefanie Scott as Mary Jane Watson

Dylan O'Brien as Harry Osborn

Keira Knightley as Jane Foster

Stellan Skarsgård as Odin

Saara Chaudry as Kamala Khan

Madison Reyes as America Chavez

Isaac as Moon Knight/Marc Spector/Steven Grant/Jake Lockley

Andrew Lincoln as Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic

Jodie Comer as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman

Paul Mescal as Human Torch/Johnny Storm

Liev Schreiber as Thing/Ben Grimm

JK Simmons as Iron Monger/Obadiah Stane

Dolph Lundgren as Crimson Dynamo/Anton Vanko(adding Dynamo as I felt not including him was a waste)

Danila Kozlovsky as Whiplash

Bob Odenkirk as Justin Hammer

Chow Yun-Fat as The Mandarin(No Trevor, he's The Mandarin and actually uses the Ten Rings against Tony)

Michael Shannon as Abomination/Emil Blonsky

Mark Gatiss as The Leader/Samuel Sterns

Jamie Campbell Bower as Loki Laufeyson

Christoph Waltz as Red Skull/Johann Shmidt

Cillian Murphy as Baron Helmut Zemo

Javier Bardem as Thanos

Jeremy Irons as Ultron

Matt Smith as Malekith

Sean Bean as Alexander Pierce

Manu Bennett as Crossbones

Iain Glen as Ronan the Accuser

Oded Fehr as Baron Mordo

Brian Cox as Ego The Living Planet

John Malkovich as Vulture

John Goodman as Kingpin/Wilson Fisk

Boyd Holbrook as Bullseye

Tonia Sotiropoulou as Elektra Nachios

Jodie Comer as Typhoid Mary

James McAvoy as Purple Man/Zebediah Killgrave

Common as Cottonmouth/Cornell Stokes

Taraji P. Henson as Mariah Dillard

Barkhad Abdi as Bushmaster

Željko Ivanek as Agent Orange/William Rawlins

Wes Bentley as Jigsaw/Billy Russo

Dev Patel as Davos

Alexander Ludwig as Nuke/Will Simpson

Matthew Rhys as James Wesley

Kate Beckinsale as Vanessa Marianna

Marwan Kenzari as Bakuto

Brian Tee as Nobu Yoshioka

Lucille Soong as Madame Gao

Julianne Moore as Alexandra Reid

Eva Green as Hela

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Killmonger/Erik Stevens/N'Jadaka

Andrew Scott as Mysterio

(sidenote, Mysterio wouldn't die and would return to form the Sinister Six which would feature the villains from NWH, but it's the MCU variants, no Multiverse)

Bryan Cranston as Green Goblin/Norman Osborn

Mark Hamill as Doc Ock/Otto Octavius

Sam Worthington as Sandman

Sendhil Ramamurthy as The Lizard/Dr Curt Connors

Aaron Paul as Electro

Naomi Scott as Ghost

Henry Golding as Namor

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Adam Warlock

Antony Starr as US Agent/John Walker

Ted Levine as Thaddeus Ross/Red Hulk

Charlie Clapman as Doctor Doom/Victor Von Doom

[felicityjonesupdates]

NEXT PROJECTS

THE BRUTALIST 🗽

Director: Brady Corbet

Role: Erzsébeth Toth

Cast: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Alessandro Nivola, Isaac de Bankolé

Synopsis: When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee Europe to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious and wealthy client.

Release date: January 24 (UK and USA), worldwide late January/February 2025

TRAIN DREAMS 🚂

Director: Clint Bentley

Role: Gladys Grainer

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Kerry Condon, William H. Macy, Clifton Collins Jr.

Synopsis: Robert Grainer, an average man living in extraordinary times, worked as a day laborer in the American West at the beginning of the 20th century. Battered by the death of his family, he struggles to adjust to this new environment.

Status: Completed

Release date: January 26, 2025 - Sundance Film Festival. Worldwide Netflix release date TBA

OH. WHAT. FUN 🎄

Director: Michael Showalter

Role: Channing Clauster

Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloe Grace Moretz, Dominic Sessa, Havana Rose Liu, Joan Chen, Jason Schwartzman, Maude Apatow, Danielle Brooks, Denis Leary

Synopsis: Centers on Claire (Pfeiffer), who plans a special Christmas but is forgotten by her family. When they realize she's missing, their holiday is at risk until she returns to give them the celebration they deserve.

Status: Post-production

Release date: Holidays 2025

100 NIGHTS OF HERO 🌙

Director: Julia Jackson

Role: Moon | Also executive producer

Cast: Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe, Nicholas Galitzine, Charli XCX, Richard E. Grant, Amir El-Masry, Varada Sethu, Markella Kavenagh

Synopsis: When a charming house guest (Galitzine) arrives at a remote castle, the delicate dynamic between a neglectful husband, his innocent bride Cherry (Monroe), and their devoted maid Hero (Corrin), is thrown into chaos.

Status: Post-production

Release date: TBA

ONE (TV SERIES) 🏎️

Role: TBA | Also executive producer

Synopsis: A family drama series set in the high-stakes world of motor racing - the first officially sanctioned scripted series for Formula 1.

Status: In development (script)

[shefanispeculator]

Blake Shelton to host from the iconic Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville

Grand Ole Opry member and country music superstar Blake Shelton will host NBC’s Opry 100: A Live Celebration, honoring the Grand Ole Opry’s milestone 100th anniversary, on Wednesday, March 19th at 8-11 pm ET and simulcast on Peacock.

The three-hour live celebration will feature performances from some of country music’s most acclaimed artists, including Opry members Ashley McBryde, Blake Shelton, Brad Paisley, Carly Pearce, Carrie Underwood, Clint Black, Dierks Bentley, Garth Brooks, Kelsea Ballerini, Lainey Wilson, Luke Combs, Marty Stuart, Reba McEntire, Trace Adkins, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, and a special appearance from Randy Travis, as well as some of the Opry’s fan favorites, including Amy Grant, Eric Church, Jelly Roll and The War and Treaty. Many other members of the esteemed Opry cast, as well as additional guests, will be announced soon.

“Becoming a member of the Opry is a highlight of my life and career, and 15 years later I still get that same feeling of reverence and excitement every time I walk out on that stage. The Grand Ole Opry has been connecting the country music family for 100 years, and I’m so proud to be part of this historic celebration,” Shelton says

Since its debut in 1925, the Opry has captivated audiences with its dynamic lineup of country superstars, new artists, comedians and celebrity guests. “Opry 100: A Live Celebration” will showcase iconic collaborations, reflect on legendary Opry moments, and highlight exclusive digital content that honors the artists, fans and songs that define country music.

The broadcast will feature performances from the Grand Ole Opry House and Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of Country Music and the Opry’s most famous former home.

A limited number of tickets will go on sale Friday, January 31st at 10 am CT. An exclusive pre-sale will be available to Opry subscribers on Thursday, January 30th at 10 am CT.

The telecast will be executive produced by Silent House Productions’ Emmy Award winners Baz Halpin, Mark Bracco and Linda Gierahn, along with R.A. Clark and Steve Buchanan.

NBC to celebrate 100 years of the Grand Ole Opry - The Music Universe

[eludin-realm]

Character Name Ideas (Male)

So I've been browsing through BehindTheName (great resource!) recently and have compiled several name lists. Here are some names, A-Z, that I like. NOTE: If you want to use any of these please verify sources, meanings etc, I just used BehindTheName to browse and find all of these. Under the cut:

A: Austin, Aiden, Adam, Alex, Angus, Anthony, Archie, Argo, Ari, Aric, Arno, Atlas, August, Aurelius, Alexei, Archer, Angelo, Adric, Acarius, Achilou, Alphard, Amelian, Archander B: Bodhi, Bastian, Baz, Beau, Beck, Buck, Basil, Benny, Bentley, Blake, Bowie, Brad, Brady, Brody, Brennan, Brent, Brett, Brycen C: Cab, Cal, Caden, Cáel, Caelan, Caleb, Cameron, Chase, Carlos, Cooper, Carter, Cas, Cash, Cassian, Castiel, Cedric, Cenric, Chance, Chandler, Chaz, Chad, Chester, Chet, Chip, Christian, Cillian, Claude, Cicero, Clint, Cody, Cory, Coy, Cole, Colt, Colton, Colin, Colorado, Colum, Conan, Conrad, Conway, Connor, Cornelius, Creed, Cyneric, Cynric, Cyrano, Cyril, Cyrus, Crestian, Ceric D: Dallas, Damien, Daniel, Darach, Dash, Dax, Dayton, Denver, Derek, Des, Desmond, Devin, Dewey, Dexter, Dietrich, Dion, Dmitri, Dominic, Dorian, Douglas, Draco, Drake, Drew, Dudley, Dustin, Dusty, Dylan, Danièu E: Eadric, Evan, Ethan, Easton, Eddie, Eddy, Einar, Eli, Eilas, Eiljah, Elliott, Elton, Emanuel, Emile, Emmett, Enzo, Erik, Evander, Everett, Ezio F: Faolán, Faron, Ferlin, Felix, Fenrir, Fergus, Finley, Finlay, Finn, Finnian, Finnegan, Flint, Flip, Flynn, Florian, Forrest, Fritz G: Gage, Gabe, Grady, Grant, Gray, Grayson, Gunnar, Gunther, Galahad H: Hale, Harley, Harper, Harvey, Harry, Huey, Hugh, Hunter, Huxley I: Ian, Ianto, Ike, Inigo, Isaac, Isaias, Ivan, Ísak J: Jack, Jacob, Jake, Jason, Jasper, Jax, Jay, Jensen, Jed, Jeremy, Jeremiah, Jesse, Jett, Jimmie, Jonas, Jonas, Jonathan, Jordan, Josh, Julien, Jovian, Jun, Justin, Joseph, Joni, K: Kaden, Kai, Kale, Kane, Kaz, Keane, Keaton, Keith, Kenji, Kenneth, Kent, Kevin, Kieran, Kip, Knox, Kris, Kristian, Kyle, Kay, Kristján, Kristófer L: Lamont, Lance, Landon, Lane, Lars, László, Laurent, Layton, Leander, Leif, Leo, Leonidas, Leopold, Levi, Lewis, Louie, Liam, Liberty, Lincoln, Linc, Linus, Lionel, Logan, Loki, Lucas, Lucian, Lucio, Lucky, Luke, Luther, Lyall, Lycus, Lykos, Lyle, Lyndon, Llewellyn, Landri, Laurian, Lionç M: Major, Manny, Manuel, Marcus, Mason, Matt, Matthew, Matthias, Maverick, Maxim, Memphis, Midas, Mikko, Miles, Mitch, Mordecai, Mordred, Morgan, Macari, Maïus, Maxenci, Micolau, Miro N: Nate, Nathan, Nathaniel, Niall, Nico, Niels, Nik, Noah, Nolan, Niilo, Nikander, Novak, O: Oakley, Octavian, Odin, Orlando, Orrick, Ǫrvar, Othello, Otis, Otto, Ovid, Owain, Owen, Øyvind, Ozzie, Ollie, Oliver, Onni P: Paisley, Palmer, Percival, Percy, Perry, Peyton, Phelan, Phineas, Phoenix, Piers, Pierce, Porter, Presley, Preston, Pacian Q: Quinn, Quincy, Quintin R: Ragnar, Raiden, Ren, Rain, Rainier, Ramos, Ramsey, Ransom, Raul, Ray, Roy, Reagan, Redd, Reese, Rhys, Rhett, Reginald, Remiel, Remy, Ridge, Ridley, Ripley, Rigby, Riggs, Riley, River, Robert, Rocky, Rokas, Roman, Ronan, Ronin, Romeo, Rory, Ross, Ruairí, Rufus, Rusty, Ryder, Ryker, Rylan, Riku, Roni S: Sammie, Sammy, Samuel, Samson, Sanford, Sawyer, Scout, Seán, Seth, Sebastian, Seymour, Shane, Shaun, Shawn, Sheldon, Shiloh, Shun, Sid, Sidney, Silas, Skip, Skipper, Skyler, Slade, Spencer, Spike, Stan, Stanford, Sterling, Stevie, Stijn, Suni, Sylvan, Sylvester T: Tab, Tad, Tanner, Tate, Tennessee, Tero, Terrance, Tevin, Thatcher, Tierno, Tino, Titus, Tobias, Tony, Torin, Trace, Trent, Trenton, Trev, Trevor, Trey, Troy, Tripp, Tristan, Tucker, Turner, Tyler, Ty, Teemu U: Ulric V: Valerius, Valor, Van, Vernon, Vespasian, Vic, Victor, Vico, Vince, Vinny, Vincent W: Wade, Walker, Wallis, Wally, Walt, Wardell, Warwick, Watson, Waylon, Wayne, Wes, Wesley, Weston, Whitley, Wilder, Wiley, William, Wolfe, Wolfgang, Woody, Wulfric, Wyatt, Wynn X: Xander, Xavier Z: Zachary, Zach, Zane, Zeb, Zebediah, Zed, Zeke, Zeph, Zaccai

[disabilityshowdown]

and with that, folks, we have finished the preliminaries!

our aim was to get 132 characters narrowed down to 64, we narrowed them down to 67, because of an amazing three polls where the difference was made by literally a single vote, and i think as far as preliminaries go, that's not preference that's chance (one vote may make the difference when it comes to the final rounds, bc then it's exciting, but here that's a tie)

you can view the complete set here

which means more importantly, i can reveal who those 67 are up against!

so without further ado, here are the 64 characters that you guys nominated the most, in order of who got the most nominations! (read left to right, up to down, or look at the list i'm about to put under the cut)

the post containing the full bracket can be found here, and as usual, image description and list of characters under the cut!

ID: An 8x8 square containing icons of the following 64 characters, in this order:

Eda Clawthorne (The Owl House) 

Hiccup and Toothless (they’re a set do not separate) (How to Train Your Dragon)

Barbara Gordon/Oracle (DC)

Toph Beifong (Avatar: the Last Airbender)

Edward Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Ashton Greymoore (Critical Role)

Finn Mertens (Adventure Time)

Kitty Softpaws (Puss in Boots)

Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Marvel)

Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Marvel)

Nicholas Benedict (The Mysterious Benedict Society)

Donatello (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - both Rise and IDW)

Octavio Silva (Apex Legends)

Crutchie (Newsies)

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader (Star Wars)

Amaya (The Dragon Prince)

Charles Xavier/Professor X (Marvel)

Viktor (Arcane)

Taimi (Guild Wars 2)

Johnny Joestar (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)

Vash the Stampede (Trigun Stampede)

Drey Ferin (Just Roll With It)

Geordi LaForge (Star Trek)

Kaz Brekker (Six of Crows)

Melanie King (The Magnus Archives)

Snake (Zero Escape)

Future Leo (Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

Janice Palmer (Welcome to Night Vale)

Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)

Alphonse Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Marvel)

Della Duck (Ducktales)

Jayfeather (Warrior Cats)

Shouko Nishimiya (A Silent Voice)

Violet Evergarden (Violet Evergarden)

Briarlight (Warrior Cats)

Ticket Jerry (Dialtown)

Yang Xiao Long (RWBY)

Ricky Potts (Ride the Cyclone)

Jimmy Valmer (South Park)

Terezi Pyrope (Homestuck)

Bruno Madrigal (Encanto)

Gregory House (House MD)

Moon Knight (Marvel)

Shanks (One Piece)

Chai (Hi-Fi Rush)

Kazuhira Miller (Metal Gear Solid)

Izaya Orihara (Durarara)

Finnegan Wake (Monster High)

Frankie Stein (Monster High)

Sage Beldaruit (Witch Hat Atelier)

Urakawa Mamoru (Mega Man)

Teo (Avatar: the Last Airbender)

Tavros Nitram (Homestuck)

Hearthstone (Magnus Chase)

Tony Stark/Iron Man (Marvel)

Rani (Pixie Hollow)

Wilt (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends)

Izumi Curtis (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Juno Steel (Penumbra Podcast)

Imperator Furiosa (Mad Max)

Bentley (Sly Cooper)

Quasimodo (Hunchback of Notre Dame)

Nagito Komaeda (Dangan Ronpa)

[exotic-car-hire]

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[moorheadthanyoucanhandle]

BAR NONE

In theaters this weekend:

Sing Sing--A troupe of actors, all incarcerated, work to put up a show in the notorious maximum security state prison in New York. They're members of the institution's Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA). At the center of the company is John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo).

In prison for a crime he did not commit, Divine G not only throws his soul into his theatre work, playing Shakespearean leads like he should be onstage in Central Park, he also assists his fellow inmates with appeals and preparation for parole hearings.

His anger at the injustice of his circumstances is unmistakable, yet it's less scary than the intensity with which he works to control and channel it; he knows too well that giving vent to rage would be futile and harmful to his cause. Besides, he's a true believer. His positivity is an act of faith, sometimes a Herculean one.

Like its hero, the movie, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script he wrote with Clint Bentley, is taut and melodrama-free. Perhaps because so many of the actors were actually incarcerated people--many of them RTA veterans playing themselves--Sing Sing has almost a documentary feel at times. Yet it also has, with almost no violence or other prison-movie cliches, the charge of high drama. Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin and Sean San José are particularly memorable among the other company members. A word should also be said for Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the diplomatic, unflappable director and playwright. 

But the core of the film is Colman Domingo. Rarely does an actor gives us so much heart to invest in with so little hamming or telegraphing. It's a classic performance, both for its emotional impact and for its discipline.

My Penguin Friend--It's hard to go wrong with penguins. They've been amusing us for a long time, not just in zoos but in movies. like George Miller's mad animated musical epic Happy Feet and its sequel, and Surf's Up, and the crack team of penguins in the Madagascar franchise, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the 2005 French documentary March of the Penguins, back though the exploding penguin and the giant penguin in Monty Python, not to mention Chilly Willy and Bugs Bunny's friend "Playboy Penguin," who wept tiny ice cubes when he was sad.

It's also hard to go wrong with Jean Reno. Best known as menacing killers in Luc Besson films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the rugged-looking French actor projects an air of effortless authority. So My Penguin Friend, which has both Jean Reno and a jaunty, spirited penguin in starring roles, starts out with certain advantages. And it ends up needing both of them.

This family film is, to use its opening titles, "Inspired by a True Story." In 2011, a man named Joao Pereira de Souza living on Ilha Grande, off the coast of Brazil, found a weakened, oil-slicked Magellanic penguin outside his house along the beach. He cleaned the poor flightless castaway up, fed him some sardines, and soon became friends with him. Dubbed "Dindim"--a grandchild's mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for penguin--the bird disappeared back into the Atlantic some months later. But he returned for many years thereafter, to hang out for the winter with Joao along his migratory route.

This fictionalized retelling of the story, directed by David Schurmann from a script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich, starts off on the wrong foot with a tragic episode that seemed entirely gratuitous to me. And in its second half, it follows Dindim's encounters with researchers at his other home in Patagonia. These scenes feel very strained, with dialogue so stilted I began to wonder if it had been written by AI. And the movie's final stretch, which attempts to generate some danger and suspense, feels extremely half-hearted.

In between all this, however, we get to see Jean Reno, looking scruffy and soulful and beaky-faced as Joao, tenderly interacting with a penguin. That can carry a movie a long way. Reno seems to enjoying playing a childlike sweetness here, as Joao proclaims that Dindim "comes and goes as he pleases" and is "not my pet...he's my friend." The other humans in the film, including Adriana Barraza as Joao's wife, are all attractive, even when the dialogue coming out of them seems canned.

The movie is visually impressive, too. Dindim was played by several different penguins, and presumably his adventures, particularly underwater, have been at least partly enhanced by CGI, but it's pretty effective and seamless; he comes across as a character. And the scenery, both in windswept Patagonia and idyllic-looking Ilha Grande, is breathtaking.

So it will be a matter of personal calculation for you to decide if a penguin, a bona fide international movie star and gorgeous settings overcome feeble kid-movie devices enough to make My Penguin Friend worth your time. For me, it was; the penguin tipped the scale the farthest.

Alien: Romulus--A band of young scavengers bust into a huge derelict spaceship in orbit around the cheerless, sunlight-free mining planet on which they live. They're hoping to filch equipment that will allow them to escape their indenture, and they repeatedly express confidence that they'll be in and out in half an hour, and nothing can go wrong.

So in they go, get the stuff they need, and sail off to a new world where they live happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. The result, in this seventh entry in the Alien series, is of course another gory encounter with an infestation of the elegantly spindly, terrifying creatures in all of their various stages of development, from "facehugger" to "chestburster" to full-grown fang-bearer.

Though it's not close to the 1979 original, Romulus is on the more watchable end of the franchise, deliberate and creepy for the first half, and non-stop in the second. It's a little unvaried and dark, however, and until the climactic scenes it doesn't really give us much that's new. Toward the end, the shots of the ice ring around the planet that the ship is approaching have a certain magical beauty, but otherwise we're mostly stuck in the chiaroscuro space dungeon.

The star is Cailee Spaeny, who played the fresh-faced young journalist in Civil War earlier this year. She's sympathetic, but the movie is stolen by David Jonnson as her companion Andy, a sweet, dad-joke-dispensing android who gets a reboot that gives him an upsetting personality change. Andy may be the best robot with divided loyalties since Robby in Forbidden Planet.

One more note: I'm a little over the vogue for gynecological/obstetric body horror. We got a big dose of nasty surgical instruments and moaning, keening young women birthing unnatural spawn earlier this year in The Last Omen; we get more natal splatter here. The gifted director of Romulus, the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, also showed unsavory interest in coercive pregnancy in his terrific 20I6 shocker Don't Breathe. Even the title Romulus refers to one species nursed at the teat of another.

Could all this be a reaction to post-Roe reproductive chaos? I'll leave that to graduate students with stronger stomachs than mine.

[themovieblogonline]

One of the big break-out success stories of Sundance 2025, so far, is  “Train Dreams,”. The 102-minute film based on Denis Johnson’s novella. Director Clint Bentley premiered the film on January 26th at the Library Center Theatre in Park City. It has since been snapped up by Netflix for a figure said to be “in the high teen millions.” Only Dave Franco and Allison Brie's horror film “Together,” bought by WME Independent, has created more buzz around a Sundance purchase. Production and Theme Black Bear Productions, founded in 2011 by Teddy Schwarzman, is behind "Train Dreams." Schwarzman's previous work includes 2014's "The Imitation Game." Director Clint Bentley's film explores the era of logging and railroad expansion in the American West. The film's historical setting adds another layer to the narrative. The theme of railroad development in America resonated with me personally, as my Norwegian immigrant grandfather, Ole Monson, helped build the B&O Railroad (before his early death from Tuberculosis). The B&O, established in 1830, operated until 1997. (My mother, his daughter, was born in 1907). RAILROADS IN AMERICA The theme of the establishment of the railroads in the U.S. attracted me to this film since my  Norwegian immigrant grandfather (Ole Monson)  helped lay the B&O Railroad (before dying young of Tuberculosis). The B&O Railroad, the oldest of them all, began in 1830 and continued until 1997. The National Book Award-winning "Train Dreams" is described this way: "Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life." The Train Dreams CAST I was familiar with cast members Joel Edgerton, William H. Macy, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins, Jr., and narrator Will Patton. Add to that that the director co-wrote and produced “Sing Sing” for A24 and won a 2021 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Actor and this became a "must-see" Sundance film, for me. Screenwriters (Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar) have adapted the poetic language of the novella. The film opens with these words:  “There were once passageways to the old way.  Even though that has been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.” The Story of Robert Grainer "Train Dreams" tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century. He's an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal trauma and the radical changes that transformed America. My grandfather, Ole Monson, eventually quit working on the railroad to work in his brother's dry goods store in the small town of Hospers, Iowa, but I always was fascinated by the story of his assimilation into the culture of America as he left Bergen, Norway, for the dream of a life in the United States of America. He was dead before I was born, so I never got to hear, firsthand,  his adventures in coming to America and working on the railroad, but I have always been fascinated by the stories of others in the family. A Life of Labor and Loss Robert Grainier in "Train Dreams" is a logger who works for $4 a day. He travels to where the forests are and is gone from his home for extended periods, as a result.  Grainier is portrayed by Joel Edgerton (“Loving”). He is a bit of an enigma, as he lost his original family and watched Chinese families being mass deported from his original home town. Robert quit attending school in his early teens. His life really starts in a new direction when he meets Gladys at church. Within three months the couple are inseparable and build a cabin on an acre of wooded land. Soon, they have a daughter, Kate. But Robert is constantly leaving their cabin to work alongside men from Shanghai and Chattanooga in the forests. In the summer of 1917 he worked for the Spokane International Railroad and witnessed racism against Chinese laborers. They were sometimes summarily executed without any obvious legitimate cause. This is something which haunted Robert for the rest of his life. Encounters and Tragedy In the course of his work as a logger, Robert met many characters, including one played by William H. Macy who used explosives to fell trees---sometimes successfully. In another incident, a Black man crashes into camp. The man demands to know the whereabouts of a man named Sam Loving from New Mexico. When one of the loggers makes a break for it (apparently because he IS Sam Loving) he ends up dead, shot in the back. Incidents like these make up the narrative. In between his logging adventures, Robert returns to his family in the small cabin in the woods and to his beloved wife Gladys and daughter Kate. Robert says, “He began to feel a dread, like some punishment was seeking him.” The Fire and its Aftermath Ultimately, when he returns to his small cabin in the woods, there has been a terrible fire, reminiscent of the recent Los Angeles fires. His cabin and his family are gone.  For two weeks he searches for Gladys and Kate. The acting in the scenes where Edgerton is mourning his lost family and sleeping outside, exposed to  the elements, is Oscar caliber. The cinematography of the area (Adolpho Veloso) is gorgeous. Robert held out some faint hope that Gladys and Kate might still be alive and come home, so he lived on speckled trout during the summer and began rebuilding the cabin. As the novella said, “He wandered the city as though he were looking for something he had lost, out of time and space.  He kept waiting for his wife and daughter to return.” Themes of Loss and Racism Aside from the logging adventures (later, he takes a job helping move people via buckboard) the main  theme is that Robert spends what is left of his life mourning his lost family. The film also comments on racism in America, which made it a fine companion piece to the Sundance documentary “Third Act” that I watched, which referenced discrimination against Japanese Americans and the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII. CONCLUSION Near the end of his years of waiting for his family, Robert is shown attending a film in a theater. He sees his face in a mirror for the first time in a decade. Like many of us, Robert says, “He felt that he was just only beginning to have some faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.” The film was the most impressive I've seen, so far, of the feature films at Sundance. The visual effects of the fire, top-notch acting from all, coupled with great vistas, special effects, and good sound all contributed to a superior film that is also a history lesson, which I will connect to the Grandfather I never knew in life who helped launch this country's oldest railroad. Read the full article

[genreneutralfilm]

If I Picked the Winners- 2025 Academy Awards

With the Oscar's less than a month away I wanted to talk about what I would vote for if I were an Academy Voter. This awards season is definitely heating up and we're starting to get our precursors with the Critics Choice Awards this weekend.

Without further ado...the Oscar goes to:

Best Picture: 

Anora

Best Director:

Coralie Fargeat

The Substance

Actor in a Leading Role:

Colman Domingo

Sing Sing

Actor in a Supporting Role:

Kieran Culkin

A Real Pain

Actress in a Leading Role:

Mikey Madison

Anora

Actress in a Supporting Role:

Felicity Jones

The Brutalist

Adapted Screenplay:

Sing Sing

Screenplay by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar; Story by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin, John "Divine G" Whitfield

Original Screenplay:

Anora

Sean Baker

Animated Feature:

The Wild Robot

International Feature:

I’m Still Here

Score:

Daniel Blumberg

The Brutalist

Song:

Like a Bird

Sing Sing

Sound:

Dune: Part Two

Production Design:

Dune: Part Two

Cinematography:

The Brutalist

Makeup & Hairstyling:

The Substance

Costume Design:

Nosferatu

Film Editing: 

Anora

Visual Effects: 

Dune: Part Two

[onlinenews24-7]

We loved 7 movies at the 2025 Sunndens Film Festival

Source material for Train DreamsThe north-western American logging of the twentieth century by filmmaker Clint Bentley is a novel by Denis Johnson, a picture of a beloved sorrow of the country-one of his preetiers, later, off-hand works. It is made for a surprisingly beautiful film with a more spectacular performance by chameleon Australian actor Joel Adagartan. Here he is as good as I have ever…