President Donald Trump has said he was only kidding about appointing Ultimate Fighting Championship president and CEO Dana White as his next White House press secretary. Following the ousting of Katie Zacharia from the role, Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday: “I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and […]
Donald Trump and Dana White are meeting Monday, but whether or not the UFC boss will become the next White House press secretary is not seriously on the agenda. A day after the former Apprentice host offered the “Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior” the still vacant mouthpiece position via social media, Trump […]
James Earl Jones theatre, New York City A ‘mostly true’ tale of 19th-century sisters running from the law is underserved in a production stuffed with superfluous showboating The new retooled musical Wanted, from writer Angelica Chéri and composer Ross Baum, opens with a blare of excitement: a Greek chorus of sorts, clad in billowing white garments like spirits from the great beyond, lay their scene in 1890s Texas. There, we meet two Black sisters, Mary and Martha Clarke, who will become wanted criminals. The tone of Baum’s music is portentous, its volume high, suggesting that an epic journey is about to unfold. What ensues from there is, sadly, not quite as suspenseful, moving or grand as advertised. Chéri based this “mostly true” story on two of her great-great aunts, daughters of an emancipated sharecropper whose absent father was white. Mary and Martha are light-skinned and thus figure they can pass in the white world, at least long enough to earn some money that might allow their mother, Tallulah, to buy the cotton-field land she’s been working for decades. It’s a dangerous gambit, and soon devolves into a gun-wielding crime spree in which the sisters rob various deserving targets. But that potentially invigorating spree is reduced to a mere montage, a quick flurry of activity that saps these daring acts of their inherent tension, of any true sense of risk. Despite its dynamic subject matter – marginalized people violently asserting themselves in a repressive time and place – this is a dismayingly tame production, albeit a more muscular one than was staged at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2024. Continue reading...
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.
Brooks Nader turned heads at the CFDA Fashion Awards in a sheer black-and-white metallic hooded dress ahead of her upcoming "Baywatch" reboot.
Donald Trump says he has offered the job of White House press secretary to UFC President and CEO Dana White, “a violent Fighter and Warrior,” in the president’s words. It was not immediately clear whether Trump was joking, trolling, both or neither. If White accepts the gig, he would fill the vacancy left when the […]
President Donald Trump has offered UFC President and CEO Dana White the White House press secretary role after Katie Zacharia was ousted in October. “I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” Trump wrote on Truth […]
After Democrats celebrated a historic victory this week, Bill Maher is praising his favorite dinner companion for being a good sport. On Friday’s episode of Real Time, the comedian joked he “might get to go again” to dinner at the White House after he found Trump’s response to the blue wave “amazingly humble,” following his […]
While his HBO counterpart John Oliver issued an urgent warning about voting GOP during the midterms, Bill Maher spent the majority of his time in the lead-up to the critical election dining with the Trump at the White House (and then bickering with him publicly), conducting an embarrassingly softball interview with Trump’s former press secretary […]
The president announced that his longtime adviser and immigration hawk will take over for Susie Wiles as White House Chief of Staff
Stephen Miller is replacing Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, Donald Trump said on Friday, in the first major post-midterm shake up. Trump posted on Truth Social, “I am pleased to announce that Mr. Stephen Miller, the current Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trump Administration, and one of my most trusted advisors, […]
EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Kitsch (Lone Survivor), Alexandra Daddario (The White Lotus) and screen legend Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter) are set to star true crime thriller The Long Island Bank Robber. Based on a true story, Kitsch will star as Stephen Trantel, “a successful Wall Street commodities trader. After being fired from his job, Stephen’s desperate […]
The series “It Gets Worse” is a star vehicle for its 20-something writer-creator that skewers a dysfunctional friend group flailing about in a big city. Though there are important distinctions — the protagonist is a gay man, not all the main characters are white and the action unfolds in London rather than the Big Apple […]
The Romanian auteur’s new film could have been the kind of homogenous ‘Europudding’ he’s railed against for years. Instead, it’s a culture-clash skewering of conservative and liberal values worthy of its Palme d’Or ‘Pffff!” Cristian Mungiu lets out an exasperated sigh. We are sitting in the basement of a London hotel, at the end of a long morning of back-to-back interviews for the Romanian film-maker, and his press handler has just snuck into the room to remind him of his next appointment across town. But Mungiu blanks him and leans on to his table, because he wants to tell one more story. In 2013, Mungiu was part of a delegation of European auteurs who travelled to Brussels to meet the then president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. At the time, the EU and US were in talks to slash barriers to trade between the two economic blocs, and the film-makers were lobbying the Commission to spare their industry from the deal . Continue reading...
Major Hollywood studios have gone from banning generative AI outright to shunning visual effects vendors that lack an AI plan, according to Daniel Seah, CEO of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Avatar” VFX house Weta FX. Seah spoke to press in Taipei on Friday, after Weta FX signed a partnership with the Taiwan Creative […]
Also among the nominees this year are Jack White, Sia, Boy George and Vince Gill among many more.
The world of “Dune” is getting the beauty treatment. Ahead of the Dec. 18 release of “Dune: Part Three,” Glamnetic has teamed up with Warner Bros. on a limited-edition collection of press-on nails inspired by the sci-fi franchise, marking its first foray into the beauty category. Launching Nov. 5, the limited-edition Glamnetic x Dune collection […]
Wunmi Mosaku, the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning star of Ryan Coogler’s 2025 hit “Sinners,” has come aboard British documentary short “Swim Sistas” as executive producer. The film, celebrating Black women’s relationship with swimming, was directed by Catherine Joy White (“Bridgerton,” “Fifty-Four Days”), with Naomie Harris (“Moonlight”) narrating. After premiering at DOC NYC and winning several awards […]
The Songwriters Hall of Fame has announced the nominees for its 2027 class, a genre- and generation-spanning list led by stars like Lady Gaga, Jack White, Boy George, Deborah Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, Sia, Vince Gill and Grandmaster Melle Mel as well as “non-performing” songwriters like disco titan Pete Belotte, Scandinavian pop powerhouses […]
Lady Gaga, Shakira, Pink, Boy George, Jack White, Sia, Vince Gill, Ne-Yo, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein are among the impressive list of nominees for the 2027 Songwriters Hall of Fame class
In off-Broadway show Ms Blakk for President, Oscar-winning Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney explores a slice of under-appreciated queer history At the height of the Aids crisis, Chicago activist Terence Alan Smith put on his drag persona, Joan Jett Blakk, and announced she was running for president. Her slogan: “Lick Bush in ‘92!” Her platform: fire everyone in the White House and paint it pink, reroute the military budget towards education and healthcare, then give the land back to Indigenous people “and let them take it from there”. The campaign did not advance. But Blakk did make it on to the floor of the Democratic national convention by infiltrating Madison Square Garden (as Smith) and changing in the bathroom. The country saw its first Black drag queen presidential candidate. Continue reading...
The Southwark Crown Court trial, which dominated the British press for over a month, has come to a close — and condemned the former presenter, comedian and actor.
Portraying the humour, passion and grit that took the actor from bit parts to Oscar glory, this making-of tale is even more mythic than the original movie For fun, excitement and the transcendental thrill of success, there’s nothing to touch this very enjoyable drama about the making of Sylvester Stallone’s Oscar-winning 1976 boxing movie, Rocky. It’s a movie of duplicates and surfaces and heartfelt imitations. Perhaps not very profound but, as Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton says, it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. It is the story of the struggling young Italian-American unknown who’d had some minor acting jobs – including softcore pornography – but wrote a thumpingly good screenplay inspired by the underdog white boxer Chuck Wepner , who briefly knocked Ali down in 1975. With tremendous self-belief, Stallone insisted he play the lead role himself, holding out against vast cash offers to just take the writing credit and let an established star into the ring. Continue reading...
"Last night Americans treated Donald Trump like he was the East Wing of the White House," Jimmy Kimmel quipped
A Korean family is willing to sacrifice everything for their children’s education, in the third book in Lee’s Diaspora Quartet “An excellent hagwon,” according to one of the characters in Min Jin Lee’s new novel, “is everything.” Every year, Korean parents pay hefty sums to send their children to these private after-school academies designed to turbocharge academic performance, where they spend evenings and weekends being drilled in mathematics, reasoning and essay technique. In the third book in what she has called her Diaspora Quartet – a follow-up to 2017’s Pachinko , recently named one of the New York Times’s top 100 books of the 21st century – she presents the fierce competition to snag a spot at those hagwons deemed the best as symptomatic of Korea’s scarcity mindset: in a country where university places and white-collar jobs are hard to come by, everyone’s looking for an edge. But over the course of the novel’s 650 pages, they also come to stand as symbols of pretty much everything you can think of: of country and culture; of failure and success; of responsibility, or the lack of it; of what it means to achieve, and of what, in the final analysis, the purpose of our achievements might be. The action in American Hagwon unspools over nearly three decades, and crisscrosses from Seoul to Sydney to California and back to Seoul again. At its centre is the Koh family: John, Helen and their three children, Bo, DH and Mido. When the novel opens in 1992, their life in Korea appears comfortably middle-class – John is a senior manager at a multinational corporation; Helen is an upmarket saleswoman, her commissions covering the children’s hagwon fees. But they are dramatically capsized: first by a personal betrayal and then again, in a brutal one-two, by the financial crisis that clobbered Asia in the late 90s. The family move, then later move once more: sometimes together, more often following their own trajectories; but always connected, and supporting one another as op
Carrie Coon sits down with "CBS Mornings" to discuss the fourth season of "The Gilded Age," her role on "The White Lotus" and more.
Texas made history Tuesday night when James Talarico became the state’s first Democratic Senator since 1988, defeating Republican Ken Paxton. The flip may have come as a shock for many, but Red, White & Royal Blue fans saw it as a prophecy coming to life. In author Casey McQuiston’s popular 2019 novel and Prime Video’s […]
EXCLUSIVE: Nick Hall, who has exec produces series including The White Lotus and worked at companies including HBO, Amazon and A24, is getting into business with Vice Studios. Hall has struck a non-exclusive producing partnership with the company to develop and produce scripted projects through his Hallogram banner. It comes just over twelve months after […]
Italian director Tinto Brass, known for the historic erotic epics “Salon Kitty” and “Caligula,” has died. He was 93. Brass’ family announced the news of his death on Wednesday to Italian press agency Ansa. Born in Milan in 1933 to a Venetian family of artists, Brass first studied law before veering towards film during the […]
Italian film director Tinto Brass, whose filmmaking spanned many genres but came to be associated internationally with his erotic films of the 1970s, has died in Rome. He was 93 years old. His wife Caterina Varzi and children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass announced the news of Brass’ death on Wednesday to Italian press agency Ansa. […]
Judi Dench has never been one to mince words. And in her new memoir “Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It?”, out Nov. 3 from St. Martin’s Press, the Oscar-winning icon of stage and screen opens up about the highs and lows of her storied career via a wide-ranging conversation with actor […]
The Oscar-nominated 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s high school horror remains heartbreaking and horrifying in equal measure Often when a pop culture figure, whether real or fictional or somewhere in between, is described as an eternal teenager, it refers to an image of youthful vitality. Carrie White, the wallflowery, telekinetic, sort-of heroine at the center of Stephen King’s book and its multiple adaptations, is a sadder case. She’s forever a teenager because until recently, every version of the story ends with her demise – a turn that would qualify as a spoiler if not for the universal familiarity of her story, or the fact that the book heavily implies her fate within the first 30 pages or so. That fate is poised to change with Mike Flanagan’s TV series , which was recently renewed for a second season (though even then, there’s still plenty of room for poor Carrie to die young). The new show updates and expands the story of the 1974 novel, taking its inspiration from a combination of 2020s social trends and details from the original text. In other words, it’s a new adaptation, not a remake of the Brian De Palma film from 1976. As such, it’s the first truly successful version of Carrie in half a century. (Previous iterations popped up in a 1999 movie sequel, a 2002 miniseries and another film in 2013 .) It’s arguable, however, that the reason such a high-profile new version of Carrie exists in 2026 is that first film, which was released 50 years ago on 3 November. Continue reading...
Exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof pointed to Jafar Panahi’s latest prison sentence as proof that Iranian cinema remains under repression, speaking at a Tokyo International Film Festival press conference for the Kurosawa Akira Award. Rasoulof and Japanese director O Mipo are this year’s recipients. “Of course, Iranian cinema continues to face repression, and my friends […]
Epic romantic K-drama The Remarried Empress, starring Shin Mina, Ju Jihoon, Lee Jongsuk and Lee Seyoung, will launch with the first four episodes on Tuesday, November 3 on Disney+ and Hulu, one day earlier than the originally scheduled November 4 premiere date. The surprise reveal, announced during a press conference from Seoul, South Korea, is […]
EXCLUSIVE: Two-time Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner and Oscar nominee Josh Brolin are headlining the survival thriller A Speck in the Sea which Oscar winner Orlando von Einsiedel (short documentary White Helmets) is directing. 193, a Legendary company, is repping international sales on the title at AFM. Oscar nominee Jeff Pope (Philomena) penned the screenplay which […]
Johnny Depp is finally sounding off about the possibility of returning as Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean 6.” Speaking to Entertainment Tonight on his “Ebenezer” press tour, the Oscar nominee stopped short of confirming he will put the pirate costume on once more. Instead, Depp said he would never turn down a request […]
Mckenna Grace told Cosmopolitan magazine on her press tour for “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping” that she turns down acting roles that require nudity because she harbors dreams of one day playing a Disney princess on the big screen. “At this point, I definitely don’t do nudity or very hypersexual things,” Grace told […]
Bleecker Street on Monday released the first trailer from The Liberation, the dramatic thriller written and directed by Guy Nattiv and starring Carrie Coon in a role that has been garnering award-season buzz since the pic’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Coon (The Gilded Age, The White Lotus) plays Rita, a 1980s New […]
EXCLUSIVE: Hulu has cast the leads for the second installment of its true-crime anthology Good American Family. Isabela Merced (The Last of Us) will play Lorena Bobbitt, with Patrick Schwarzenegger (The White Lotus) as her one-time husband, John Bobbitt. Not yet titled, the limited series is inspired by the ripped-from-the-headlines story of the infamous Virginia […]
It’s a good time to be Spike Lee. The illustrious New York filmmaker behind cinema classics like “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X” and “25th Hour” is still basking in the glow of his beloved Knicks’ fairy-tale run to their first NBA title in 53 years — a result that he boldly predicted in a […]
The year of Sandra Hüller continues. Hüller is heading to the supporting actress race for “Fatherland,” Variety has confirmed exclusively. Mubi, which is handling the U.S. release of Paweł Pawlikowski’s black-and-white postwar drama, will campaign both Hüller and co-star Hanns Zischler in the supporting categories at the Oscars and across the awards circuit. The pair […]
Fox News viewers still like Fox, they just can’t take any more news. A decline in viewership at Fox News Channel over the third quarter and into last month has attracted the notice of the company’s most senior executive, with Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch telling investors Monday he has seen evidence of “viewer fatigue” […]
EXCLUSIVE: Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), Sabrina Impacciatore (The White Lotus), Rachael Stirling (Rivals) and Selena Tan (Crazy Rich Asians) have been unveiled in the cast of Trudie Styler’s The Reception about it a chaotic wedding party, which is currently shooting on location in Scotland. They join two-time Emmy winner and five-time Golden Globe nominee Jeff […]
The latest in our ongoing series of writers detailing their most rewatched comfort films carries special romantic meaning It is September 2009. Barack Obama is settling into the White House. The global economy is hauling itself gingerly out of the financial crisis. And Keisha has just left the Sugababes. But more importantly, I am on a first date. Continue reading...
The maximalist, heart over head adaptation of the romantic tragedy made stars of its leads and became an English teacher’s most trusted weapon for Bard-averse students Romeo + Juliet is not the most renowned or beloved of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is perhaps the most foundational. The 16th-century tragedy, a story of love-addled teenagers and white-hot resentment, is often an English student’s first introduction to the bard’s oeuvre – more accessible and relatable to teens, with its plaintive lust and histrionic mood swings, than the more austere machinations in, say, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. And if Romeo + Juliet is the young person’s entry to Elizabethan English, perhaps no version of it is more worthy of the term “gateway drug” than Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film version, which reimagined Verona’s family feud as a tropical gang war and launched an army of teenage crushes with the faces of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. The maximalist interpretation of Shakespeare’s most lovelorn work, released 30 years ago this week (!), retains Elizabethan verse but announces its divergence from rigid classicism from the jump. Our scene is set in fair Verona beach by a news anchor via TV set, relaying the woe of two star-cross’d lovers before clips of civil strife. Fresh off his breakout success in 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, the Australian director boldly mapped the medieval story on to 90s tabloid fixations – grainy footage of violence in the streets, magazine headlines of capos and criminals, helicopter views of car chases and riots that recalled the media circus around the OJ Simpson chase two years prior. It is a movie that could have only been made in the 90s; Luhrmann’s vision of two warring families as rival gangs, replete with their own economic operations and marked territory, tapped into the era’s preoccupation with gangland as a source of transportive art, from movies to hip-hop, and as a conservative fixation for ideas on intrinsic criminality. Continue reading...
Rapper Pos of the hip hop greats favours Barry White for the bedroom and sobs to Stevie Wonder, but which cheese-rock hit does he love on the sly? The first song I fell in love with My father could sing really well – he was in a choir and had this coolness. He would walk around singing Love and Happiness by Al Green and, because he looked so much like him on the cover, I actually thought he was Al Green. The first single I bought Underlove by Melba Moore from Abraham & Straus, this department store in Long Island that had a mini record store inside. I later realised it was produced by Kashif, and I would fall in love with everything he produced. Continue reading...
The president was asked whether the rapper could take on the role in his administration.
Sanjay Gupta, the Indian director best known for the crime drama films Kaante and Shootout at Lokhandwala, died Friday, October 30, after a fall at his home in Mumbai. He was 57 (though some sources put his age at 59). His death was confirmed by friend and fellow director Milap Zaveri to the Press Trust […]
Indian filmmaker Sanjay Gupta, whose credits include the crime thriller “Kaante,” the gangster saga “Shootout at Wadala” and the Hrithik Roshan-starring “Kaabil,” has died following a fall at his Mumbai residence on Oct. 30. He was 59, according to the Press Trust of India. Director Milap Zaveri, a longtime friend of Gupta who worked on […]
Bill Maher opened his new episode of “Real Time” Friday night by addressing Trump’s 1,300-word social media tirade against him following their White House dinner earlier this month, with the comic comparing the president to Taylor Swift. Following a sit-down interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who was busy hawking his new book on Supreme […]
