EXCLUSIVE: Saturday Night Live alums Anna Drezen, Paul Briganti and Beck Bennett are developing a half-hour comedy series at FX, sources told Deadline. Bennett will star in the project as a disgraced Olympic skier who is forced to save his family’s failing Aspen resort – which will be an uphill battle because his only skill is sliding […]
Over a decade, co-directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes documented a young Syrian girl named Israa and her family's changing dynamics as refugees in Germany.
NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer speaks to Irish writer Louise Kennedy, whose new novel, Stations , captures the full-bodied tension of young love.
Randall England, who played the memorable General Hospital villain Jack Slater during the mid-1980s, died September 25 of esophageal cancer in Los Angeles. He was 75. His death was announced by his family. An Oklahoma native, England began modeling in the early 1970s, working in New York, London, Zurich, Milan, and Los Angeles. He studied […]
Irma P. Hall, who portrayed “Big Mama Jo” in the 1997 film Soul Food and, that same year, the memorable character of “root doctor” Minerva in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, died Tuesday, November 10, in Dallas. She was 91. Her death was announced by family. Although a cause was not specified, […]
Incompetent direction almost kills the Christmas spirit but American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino Taylor brings down the house Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which means Christmas creep is in full effect and the floodgates holding back the seasonal tide of holiday movies have opened to fully drown yuletide junkies in cheer. Among the first out of the gates is Netflix’s The Gospel of Christmas, brought to you by the maker of A Madea Christmas. Instead of Tyler Perry in drag, reluctantly upholding the role of family linchpin, this time it’s Durrell Babbs – AKA the R&B stalwart Tank – playing Isaac, a secular musician who is forced into ministry when his pastor father charges him with resurrecting a sister congregation that’s become a blight in a New York neighborhood defined by immorality and anomie. ( East New York, maybe.) The 103-minute feature is both a ploy to horn in on Hallmark’s well-established territory and a proper return to Perry’s roots in gospel musical theater – but with considerably more money behind it and greater latitude to bend the usual chestnuts on faith and family toward his Old Testament-facing sermons. Continue reading...
Irma P. Hall, who played Josephine “Big Mama” Joseph in the 1997 dramedy “Soul Food,” died on Tuesday, her family confirmed. She was 91. “Irma P. Hall was a beloved actress, author, poet, educator and public speaker whose contributions touched countless lives throughout her remarkable career,” her family wrote in a statement. “Her legacy of […]
A Dallas schoolteacher for nearly three decades, she also appeared in ‘A Family Thing,’ ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ and ‘Hap and Leonard.’
Spanish studio Filmax has boarded “A Family,” the debut as a director of Ricardo Gómez who attained a huge fanbase in Spain playing Carlitos Alcántara, the young son in family drama “Remember When,” the longest running TV series in Spanish history. A world premiere at Valladolid Film Festival last month, “A Family” marked out Gómez […]
EXCLUSIVE: Justin Long (Dodgeball) and Katy Mixon Greer (American Housewife) will star with Banks Pierce (The Pitt) in family film Slater’s Gold. Also starring are Kate Wilson, Henry Heffernan, Keith Rushing, Brooke Lyons, Harrison C. Thomas, Todd Terry and Glenn Morshower. The film from writer, director and lead producer Micah Lyons (Bad Men Must Bleed) […]
Stacy Keach, who starred on TV’s Mike Hammer and Titus and recurred on Blue Bloods after establishing himself as a stage and film actor, died Monday. He was 85. His wife, Małgosia Tomassi, said he died “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure” at the family home in […]
Hilary Duff opens up to Billboard’s Lyndsey Havens about returning to the stage after nearly 20 years, the overwhelming fan response to her Lucky Me Tour, and the moment her son told her, “I’m proud of you, Mom.” She also reflects on touring with her family, overcoming pre-show nerves, and why she’s ready to bring […]
David Walliams is to be cut from new movie Fing! and its stateside marketing materials following sexual misconduct allegations against the actor. Walliams had a cameo in the Sundance family movie, which is being released in the U.S. by Angel in early January. Taika Waititi, Mia Wasikowska, Matt Lucas and Iona Bell also star in […]
An animated film takes time to make. An animated film based on a funny-but-deeply-moving graphic memoir about a family’s experience with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease can take a bit longer. Lauren Miller Rogen, wife of Seth Rogen and one of the producers of the film Tangles, told the crowd at Monday night’s special screening of the […]
Cheers to another year of being the best gift giver in the family — we won't take credit.
Matthews was behind the Welsh rock band Catatonia who shot to fame during the "Cool Cymru" movement of the 1990s.
Family friendly franchise “Air Bud” returns to theaters in January with “Air Bud Returns,” while the team behind the hit canine adventures is bringing international sales and licensing back in-house after 15 years of major studio partnerships across more than 22 films and four series with Disney and Netflix. The team will be at AFM […]
The family treasure was sumptuous enough to host a pope in the 17th century, but for guests today, air-conditioning would enhance the appeal.
Speaking to THR at TorunCamerimage, the DP discusses crafting the visual language of Bassam Tariq’s genre-bending thriller, starring Mahershala Ali as a devoted hitman balancing family life with vengeance.
Perhaps most notable for the movie is the recruitment of Rob Minkoff, the veteran family filmmaker (he also directed the first two Stuart Little films).
Retailer-exclusive beauty bundles, seasonal scents from Diptyque, Uggs for the whole family and more of this year's top trending presents that won't break the bank.
Donnie Dunagan, who voiced the young Bambi in Disney’s 1942 animated classic during a brief Hollywood career as a child actor, has died. He was 92. Movie historian Tom Weaver said Dunagan died November 4 but did not provide details. Born on August 16, 1934, in Texas, Dunagan moved with his family to Memphis, where […]
For brothers Kanish and Rish Arhant-Sudhir, family fun means collaborating to write and direct a film based on their culture, creating characters based on their own grandmother and casting their great aunt to play her. The duo’s first feature film “Namaslay” does all of this as a horror satire that ignites conversation about the appropriation […]
Visar Morina’s Sundance award winner stars Astrit Kabashi and Flonja Kodheli as a Kosovar couple whose family struggles to find their place in "a hyper-capitalist society."
United Talent Agency has signed filmmaker Alyce Tzue for representation in all areas, Variety can report exclusively. Tzue will soon make her feature directorial debut with Netflix’s animated family comedy “Steps,” a retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale from the perspective of the evil stepsisters. Cast members for the film, which hits Netflix Nov. 20, […]
The BBC has greenlit a ten-part drama titled The Other Elliot Sister. The series from Bad Wolf comes after the ratings success of The Other Bennet Sister. The show will follow the eldest sister in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, similar to how The Other Bennet Sister followed Mary Bennet, the overlooked sister from the Bennet family. […]
From a Mexican folk singer who found an audience on TikTok to Brazilian songwriters carrying family legacies in entirely their own directions, here are this year’s 11 nominees.
Most of the artists on this list weren’t teen idols, as such. They simply knew what they wanted to do from an early age and got off to a fast start.
The musical, rooted in the writer Angelica Chéri’s family lore, follows Black twin sisters who pass for white and become vigilantes in 1890s Texas.
The new musical Wanted has had a long road to the Broadway stage, stretching over a 12-year stop-and-start development process or, if you want to get picky, more than 100 years of real-life (more or less) family lore. The end result is spirited but uneven, a show wherein some very big singing nearly succeeds in […]
Anime series “Spy x Family” will return for a fourth season in 2027. Japanese studio and exhibitor Toho Co., Ltd. is also lining up a new feature film to open in Japan the same year. To mark the news, Toho released a teaser visual for Season 4, the first image from the new season to […]
Saturday Night Live paid tribute to a longtime member of the show’s family last night on air. This weekend’s episode of the NBC sketch comedy show featured a title card before the goodnights, in memory of to two-time SNL host Susan Saint James, who remained close to the show over the years. While guest-hosting for […]
Small town Nephi, Utah, was where the musical sensibilities of Brandon Flowers, frontman of The Killers, started to take form, before being seduced by the bright lights of Las Vegas. Now he's released his third solo album, "Thrasher," filled with country-western songs like those beloved by his dad. Flowers talks with correspondent Luke Burbank about storytelling, family, and what true success feels like.
Taiwanese literary IP developer and production company Mirror Fiction announced the winners of its fifth Mirror Fiction Award and unveiled five projects for its 2027 slate at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF). The NT$1 million ($32,000) Grand Prize went to Iris Kong for “The Stand-In Family” (provisional title), a suspense novel about four strangers […]
Richard Lloyd, whose intricate guitar work for the pioneering punk band Television was a fiery counterpart to the sinewy stylings of the band’s co-guitarist and singer Tom Verlaine, died today of the bile duct cancer called cholangiocarcinoma at his home in Chattanooga, Tenn. He was 75. His death was reported by his family to The […]
Guitarist, who was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in March 2026, died Saturday from Cholangiocarcinoma, his family announced
A disturbing new docuseries delves deep into a world where men are pushing their bodies to the extreme – and some of them are dying for it If you’ve heard the term looksmaxxing – the manospheric pursuit of male aesthetic beauty via steroids, peptides , cosmetic surgery and total commitment – you probably know the name Clavicular . With more than 2 million followers and a cluster of mainstream media profiles , the 20-year-old streamer born Braden Peters has become the chiseled face of a once fringe movement to achieve algorithmically defined good looks by any means necessary, from daily methamphetamines to breaking your jaw with a hammer. Clavicular has courted attention for a nihilistic worldview expressed in blunt, idiosyncratic argot: “hardmaxxing”, “bone smashing”, anything to increase your “SMV” (sexual market value). Baffling, horrifying or grimly compelling, depending on your view, Clavicular would be a fascinating documentary subject. Indeed, news of a possible Clavicular documentary has percolated all year, after the influencer filed a cease and desist letter against Disney/Hulu for allegedly filming him backstage at a New York fashion show in February. (It’s far from his most serious legal matter this year – last month, he pleaded not guilty to charges that he raped a 17-year-old girl at his family’s Massachusetts home in May 2025.) But the docuseries in question, Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death, was never actually about Clavicular, who appears only in publicly available snippets. It instead trains its focus upstream of the bone-smashing, on the infamous influencer’s influences: the so-called “biohacking” scene that inspired the youths’ fixation on extreme body modification. And in particular, supplement guru Dr Tony Huge and his acolytes, in the aftermath of the suspicious death of his close associate, the “penis enlargement” expert known as “Leo Longevity”. Continue reading...
A cause of death has been determined for Matthew Wright after he died at age 52 last Friday. The Ellen DeGeneres Show executive producer’s death certificate lists cardiopulmonary arrest as the cause, with hypertension as the underlying cause and contributing conditions including obstructive sleep apnea and class II obesity, according to People. Wright’s family announced […]
Paul Howard, son of The Three Stooges’ Moe Howard, died earlier this week in Manhattan. He was 91. Paul Howard remained a guardian of his father’s legacy throughout his life, meeting generations of Stooges fans at conventions and events where he shared personal stories, family memories and insights into the life of Moe Howard. In […]
Sebastián Lelio, the Oscar-winning Chilean filmmaker behind such pics as A Fantastic Woman, The Wonder, and The Wave, died Friday in Santiago. He was 52. His family confirmed the news in a social media post from Lelio’s partner Amalia Kassai, and local media in Chile reported that he was found dead at his home. Kassai’s […]
The Mexican singer spoke with Billboard Español about his new album and how he has overcome the difficult moments he has experienced in the last years.
Arriving a bit late to ride the fizzled momentum of the nation’s semiquincentennial, and a bit early for Christmas, patriotic musical “Drummer Boy” nonetheless should strike a chord with Christian audiences. It’s the first feature for several collaborators since 2024’s “Unsung Hero,” one of the bigger “faith-based entertainment” hits in recent years, though this tale […]
Julian Brodsky, a cable TV pioneer who was a co-founding partner of Comcast more than 60 years ago, has died. He was 93. Comcast announced his death Friday. According to the cable and media company, Brodsky died peacefully surrounded by his family while in hospice care on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. Brodsky teamed with Comcast […]
Amazon Prime Video will release its two-part Melania Trump docuseries on Nov. 20. The previously announced series, which will include “content never before shared with the public,” is split between two episodes: “Family & Trust,” which follows Trump as she prepares to become the First Lady, and “Pride & Honor,” which takes place moments after […]
The country star has abandoned Nashville slickness for a set of raw, pared-back songs that reckon with the death of her mother and decades of personal struggles. ‘This is a labour of love,’ she says When Wynonna Judd appears on my laptop screen – hair a deep shade of crimson, makeup perfect and sporting a huge black baseball cap with Kentucky Queen spelt out across its brim – she looks both fabulous and confident. Which is a good thing, as the Nashville star has been off the radar for a decade. On the occasions her name has made the news, it’s more often been linked to family tragedy than music. “I’m in a good place,” says the woman Rolling Stone described as “the greatest female country singer since Patsy Cline”. “My life has been chaotic. I’ve had a lot of success and a lot of failure, and it’s music that keeps me going. Always.” Continue reading...
Todrick Hall’s off-Broadway show is about a doomed interracial love affair during US slavery in the 1860s During the intermission of Midnight, an off-Broadway musical about a doomed interracial love affair during US slavery in the 1860s, a woman sitting behind me lauded the show and compared it to Hamilton. On the surface, she was correct. Midnight also has a diverse cast with stunning vocals and a story that reimagines a time within American history. The difference, however, is that Hamilton’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, used source material – a 2004 biography on Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow – to develop his original work, something the Midnight creator and star, Todrick Hall, eschewed entirely. Therein lies the issue. Midnight aims to focus on the intimate lives of enslaved people and deviates so far from the mark that it seemed the bull’s eye was somewhere outside the theatre. Midnight’s premise is that an enslaved man named Rail, played by Hall, who wrote and directed the musical, falls in love with Richard, a member of the wealthy planter class. They grow close after Richard “rents” Rail from Rail’s owner, Charlotte. Rail is in a relationship with Lily Rose, an enslaved woman, and Richard is engaged to Scarlet, a southern belle who needs to secure her family’s financial future through marriage. It’s a formulaic and recognizable story about star-crossed lovers – updated to explore a queer relationship during the time of enslavement. For years, Hall, a singer, choreographer and theatre actor, has repurposed classics like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast through a queer lens. He deftly remixes the originals with modern cultural references, such as Beyoncé’s music or the tensions within current-day gay communities. But in Midnight, Hall reworks the past and creates his own fantasy that neglects the social realities of its characters. Continue reading...
She started acting at six and by 16 was starring in Even Stevens with Shia LaBeouf. Then her career fell apart. Here, she explains how she survived growing up in the spotlight In a class at college, Christy Carlson Romano was encouraged to think about her “community”. Who were their people, the tutor asked the class, and where did they belong? The answer that popped into Carlson Romano’s head was child actors, but not the ones that went on to have successful grown-up careers. “The ones who were once the shining stars,” she writes in her memoir, “and who are now just trying to find out their places in the world.” Carlson Romano had returned to college after initially dropping out. She had survived sexual assault and toxic relationships, was broke and drinking too much. But before all that, she had been a teenage Disney star. She had made it. The title of her memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck, gives you a flavour of where Carlson Romano, 42, is coming from, but what’s most striking isn’t that she goes off the rails (she doesn’t, hugely, compared to other former child stars), but how sensible and mature she is as a child. It’s alarming. When fans recognise her now – she was in the popular Disney series Even Stevens which started in 2000 – they tell her she was a huge part of their childhoods. She had been acting the part of a normal suburban girl, the perfectionist Ren Stevens, while having no idea what that was like. She was already a mini adult. Continue reading...
The veteran travel writer turns his eye for detail on his northern neighbour and its people Paul Theroux’s arrival in Canada doesn’t go well. An immigration officer called Sweeney finds a small pocketknife in his car and fines him $500 for failing to declare a weapon. “I’m going to make you famous,” he angrily tells her, stumping up. Maybe he will, with this book. Canadians are reputed to be polite and easygoing, “slaves to their courtesy”, but the country has changed enormously in recent years. Will Theroux find it stuffed with Sweeney-ites? Luckily the answer is no. He issues a warning that, after 11 previous travel books, this may be his last; global overtourism appals him and so does much travel writing. But he shares Jack Kerouac’s delight in being on the road, and from his home in Massachusetts it’s just a four-hour drive to the border. His purpose is less to check out “the strangers next door” than to visit the village of Yamaska, in Quebec. It was there that a Frenchman called Antoine Theroux settled in the 17th century; a dozen or more Theroux families still live there; one local street is called Rue Theroux. The author isn’t only made welcome but presented with a certificate of honour by the local mayor. He repays the honour with a long chapter of family history. Continue reading...
She is completely baffled in the kitchen, but the star valiantly resurrects her family’s famous restaurant. Her journey is chaotic, hilarious – and deeply moving It starts both very well and very badly does Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook. On the one hand, our host’s absolute ignorance of how food works – or pans, or knives, or plates – has a refreshing authenticity about it. Too often in these shows, in which a celebrity goes on A Journey to acquire basic knowledge in what is generally considered to be a normal field of human endeavour, their lack of exposure to it or inability therein is pretended or hammed up. But actor, rapper and comedian Awkwafina – real name Nora Lum, which is what she uses for this series beyond the title, for reasons that will become clear – is the real, wholly baffled deal. Non-game recognises non-game, and as a kitchenphobe myself, I see the truth in her crouched stance by the oven or hob, fearful yet hostile to anything they may ask of her. We see her pour milk over a couple of eggs she has just lobbed doubtfully into a pan, the tentativeness with which she approaches spatulas and ladles, the hatred in her eyes when presented with raw ingredients – it all speaks to someone who has remained truly untouched by the culinary arts and was, at least until a commissioning editor approached with an idea, happy to remain so. Continue reading...
The Lakers have long been a family-run team. Jerry Buss and his kids shepherded the club through 47 years and 11 NBA Championships. Now that the Lakers are being sold to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger, it seems at least part of that tradition will continue. ESPN NBA reporter Dave McMenamin broke the news that […]
