Chris Hansen recently gave his reaction to Robert Pattinson’s impression of him in the upcoming A24 drama-thriller “Primetime,” which chronicles Hansen’s stint as host of Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator.”
“I mean, obviously he has practiced imitating me, and while I think it’s overly dramatic, I think there is a pretty good imitation there in the trailer,” Hansen told Entertainment Tonight. “It’s not so much what I think; it’s what other people think. And you know, my wife [and] my family seem to think it’s a pretty good imitation.”
“He’s saying things I never said and doing things I never did, and that’s not who I am. I’m a nice guy, except when it comes to criminals and predators,” he added. “I think people should remember that it is a work of fiction, only based on real-life events.”
Reps for Pattinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Hansen’s comments.
Hansen recently told Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” that when he showed up at the A24 offices for a private screening of the film, he was asked to sign a legal agreement that would sign away several of his personal rights.
“The lawyers at A24 wanted me to sign away my rights to my name, image and brand, essentially, as well as any potential legal rights that would come out of the movie,” Hansen claimed. “I couldn’t sign that, so they didn’t show me the film. I went all the way over there.”
A source close to A24 said at the time that Hansen was asked to sign an NDA that every preview audience must adhere to for an unreleased project.
American author Jay Parini’s 2020 memoir “Borges and Me: An Encounter” read as a charming extension of an anecdote any writer would dine out on for the rest of their life: the tale of how Parini, as a college student in the 1970s, was somehow partnered on a winding road trip through the Scottish Highlands with the venerable Argentine literary icon José Luis Borges. Like any good anecdote, it feels healthily embellished — Borges was doubtless a character, but is fashioned on the page into a Character — in ways that director Marc Turtletaub‘s enjoyable, good-natured screen adaptation appears to build upon. As a feature film, “Borges and Me” is perhaps extended beyond its natural capacity: It feels both a tall story and a thin one. But the charm is still there.
Benefiting considerably from the tawny, textured splendor of its Scottish locations — shot with dewy autumnal crispness by DP Christopher Norr — this is mellow, quietly sentimental fare that was ideally suited to its home-turf world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It will likely please plenty more crowds on the festival circuit en route to global arthouse-crossover distribution, assisted by the mixture of British, South American and North American drawcards in a transatlantic co-production. Those include its deliberately mismatched leads: Chilean veteran Luis Gnecco (“Neruda”) as the twinkly genius, and Fionn Whitehead (“Dunkirk”), an actor eternally English in his uprightness but appealingly cast an Anglophile American, as his exasperated minder.
As played by White, the young Parini may be fairly advanced in his studies — as an English literature doctoral student at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland — but he exudes an unworldly freshman quality in his just-askew tortoiseshell glasses and oversized duffel coat. A native Pennsylvanian, and still very much a fish out of water, his shy, sweet earnestness makes him an easy target for good-humored ribbing by his breezily bohemian supervisor, the poet Alastair Reid (Alan Cumming, on pleasingly Alan Cumming form). A scholar of South American literature and a leading translator of Borges’ work, he invites the Chilean to stay with him at his ramshackle coastal cottage; joining them for a day, Parini is both bewildered and a little enraptured by the brilliant, eccentric and sightless septuagenarian visitor.
He’s not, however, prepared to be Borges’ babysitter — which is precisely what he becomes when Reid heads off on a last-minute trip to London, leaving some pointers regarding the writer’s various medications, but not much else. It also happens to be the week when Parini was planning to drive up into the Highlands to interview his Ph.D subject, the elusive and hermetic poet George Mackay Brown (Peter Mullan, in a mischievous extended cameo). Cue a cross-generational odd-couple road trip, with rather more sightseeing detours than Parini had planned for. Borges may not be able to see the scenery, but delights in every scrap of local color, to a degree that the American — tasked with describing everything to his elder, in suitably lyrical terms — finds quite wearisome.
Audiences might relate to some extent. In a sprightly performance rife with oddball mannerisms, Gnecco gives Borges equal parts impish wisdom, earthy vulgarity and childlike wonder, rarely letting a moment’s silence go unfilled with eager chatter. When the virginal Parini — who thus far has read romantic poetry without truly feeling it — hits it off with smart, kindly pub worker Ailith (a wonderful Freya Mavor) and they steal away for a time, the film positively breathes in the old man’s absence.
Borges’ presence accounts for some amusing and even poignant adventures: a bumbling boat excursion on Loch Ness, or a fanciful, hallucinatory visit to a long grassed-over battlefield. But the film’s most affecting moments are its quietest ones, largely centered on Parini and his interior anxieties, which include his less academically-inclined brother’s travails as a soldier in Vietnam. Whitehead gives “Borges and Me” the stillness it needs to avoid feeling mawkish or shticky, but screenwriter Oren Moverman (working from an earlier adaptation by Parini and Ross Clarke) pivots between moments of graceful poetry and others of simpler feelgood sentiment.
The final balance slightly favors the latter: There’s little engagement with Borges’ own writing, for example, though audiences so inclined have the upcoming five-hour-plus documentary “Life of Jorge Luis Borges” for that. (Perhaps the two films’ eventual distributors could put their heads together and work out a complementary release strategy.) Full of warm feeling and fuzzy nostalgia for the porous, knowledge-gathering naïveté of youth, “Borges and Me” treats the author as a general, buoyant, heavily imagined spirit rather than a historical subject, and likably so.
Speaking with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Conversations recently, Woodley shared her reaction to learning that her scenes with Andrew Garfield, who starred as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, had been cut from the final film. The actress said she didn’t find out until about a year after she had finished filming the scenes for the Sony Pictures movie, which was released in theaters in May 2014.
“That was a fun phone call,” she joked.
“I was cast as Mary Jane for Spider-Man, which was my dream. Oh my god, Spider-Man’s my favorite superhero; Mary Jane was my favorite character growing up. So, when I got it, I was like, ‘This is so exciting!’”
The Big Little Lies star continued, “We filmed like three scenes together, me and Andrew Garfield. And then, like a year later, they were like, ‘So, you’re not in the movie anymore.’ And I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ And they’re like, ‘We’ve introduced a lot of new characters in this last one, and we’re going to wait for whatever happens between [Emma Stone] and Andrew [Garfield].’”
Woodley said she was told the filmmakers planned to introduce Mary Jane after Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy, played by Stone, came to an end.
“They were like, ‘Let’s wait for her to die, and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane.’ Which made sense, but then they didn’t make that film. So, there was no reintroduction,” Woodley said. “That’s what I was told, but again, who knows what the truth is? I could have been terrible, and they were like, ‘We can’t do this.’”
The Hollywood Reporterreported in 2013 that Woodley’s scenes had been cut from the film. At the time, director Marc Webb said the decision was made to streamline the story and focus on Peter and Gwen’s relationship.
“Shailene is an incredibly talented actress, and while we only shot a few scenes with Mary Jane, we all love working with her,” Webb said.
Mary Jane had previously been established as Peter Parker’s main love interest in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy, with Kirsten Dunst playing the character opposite Tobey Maguire. Garfield’s iteration of the franchise instead centered on Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy, played by Stone. Bryce Dallas Howard also appeared as Gwen in 2007’s Spider-Man 3.
Sony ultimately shelved plans for a third Amazing Spider-Man movie following the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which underperformed compared with expectations. Garfield, meanwhile, eventually returned as Spider-Man alongside Maguire in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Garfield has previously described returning to the franchise as “really healing” and has teased that he would be open to reprising Spider-Man “if it was the right thing.”
The Venice Film Festival is weighing scrapping its traditional opening jury press conference on the Lido.
The festival, which kicks off Sept. 2 with the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” told Variety that the presser will “probably not” take place, citing a scheduling conflict, and said a welcome cocktail hour with the press will be organized instead. If the press conference is axed, it could raise eyebrows given the political pressure building around Venice this year.
Last year’s Venice opening jury press conference was dominated by questions about Gaza, with then-jury president Alexander Payne saying he felt “unprepared” to answer a question about the conflict and was blamed for seemingly dodging it.
The news comes just days after Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters and filmmakers including Matteo Garrone and Isabel Coixet signed an open letter urging the Venice Biennale and film festival to take “concrete action in support of Palestine.” The letter was organized by the Venice4Palestine collective, which similarly targeted the festival last year and had urged the event’s organizers to withdraw invitations to Gerard Butler and Gal Gadot over their previous support for Israel.
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera has described this year’s lineup as Venice’s “most political” in recent years, with films tackling war, Palestine, immigration, climate change and shrinking political freedoms. Earlier this week, the fest added “NAZA,” a new hot-button documentary from “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, to the Venice competition lineup.
The festival’s main competition jury is headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and includes Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, whose acclaimed “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza, premiered at Venice last year and won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize. Other jurors are Daniel Blumberg, Francesco Casetti, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat and Johnnie To.
Anne Hathaway has joined Tom Cruise for the Days of Thunder sequel, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Paramount has set a June 2, 2028, release date for the follow-up to the 1990 movie, which will also be filmed for Imax and released in theaters in Dolby Cinema, 4DX and premium large formats.
Cruise will return as NASCAR driver Cole Trickle, while Hathaway will play a team owner and engineer. Further plot details are under wraps. The Top Gun star will also produce alongside Jerry Bruckheimer and Tommy Harper.
A script will be penned by Will Staples, with Jonathan Levine set to direct, as THR exclusively reported in July. Staples has previously written video games including Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare and co-wrote the Michael B. Jordan action movie Without Remorse.
Days of Thunder was a reunion for Cruise with his Top Gun director, Tony Scott, and is considered one of the actor’s most memorable roles. The film followed Cole as he was recruited by a retired racing legend, played by Robert Duvall, to a new NASCAR team. Additional castmembers included Nicole Kidman, Cary Elwes and Randy Quaid.
Cruise’s films, including Top Gun,Top Gun: Maverick, Risky Business, Jerry Maguire, the Mission: Impossible series, have helped make him one of Hollywood’s biggest box office stars, with his films grossing more than $13 billion globally. Next up, he is set to star in Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, which will be released in theaters on Oct. 2.
Hathaway is coming off a packed release schedule, with films such as The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey and The End of Oak Street debuting this year. The Oscar winner’s next role is in Verity, based on Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, which is also set for release on Oct. 2.
Organizers of the Met Gala are reportedly considering changing the date of the 2027 event amid growing backlash over plans to honor John Galliano.
In July, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Galliano’s work would be spotlighted in the Met’s Costume Institute. This exhibition serves as the centerpiece for the annual Met Gala, an event attended by the most elite of the A-list, with one of the most coveted invites. This would make him the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition at the Met, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017.
At the time, it was announced that the exhibit would feature all the highs and lows, including his antisemitic rant. Galliano is credited with growing luxury-fashion brand Dior into a global giant. However, he was fired by the company in 2011 after video footage surfaced showing the designer, who was inebriated, making antisemitic remarks in a Paris café. Galliano retreated from public life for two years and was found guilty by a Paris court of public insults based on religion, race and ethnicity. He received a fine and was forced to pay damages and court fees. Galliano met with Jewish leaders and rabbis following the scandal and received blessings from groups like the Anti-Defamation League.
The exhibit is scheduled to kick off May 3 with the Met Gala, which is overseen by Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director who also serves as a Met trustee. However, a growing number of voices are criticizing the plan to honor Galliano. According toThe New York Times, criticism has grown stronger.
“In recent days, opposition to the museum’s plan to honor Galliano has grown among Jewish leaders in New York and beyond,” The Times reported. “Donors have contacted Met executives and threatened to rescind gifts to the museum if the exhibition moves forward as planned.”
As a result, Met trustees and board members “have been scrambling to do damage control,” The Times reported. This includes possibly moving the date of the Met Gala, which is always held the first Monday in May, to the following week. The current date of May 3 also happens to be Yom HaShoah, also known as Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, The Times noted.
Last week, New York City Council speaker Julie Menin posted a letter to Wintour, Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton and Met director Max Hollein, saying the decision to honor Galliano was “a serious mistake.” While noting that his influence in the fashion world has been “enormous” and “unquestionable,” Menin added that she had “deep concern” about the decision to honor Galliano.
“Mr. Galliano’s long public record of antisemitism, racism and anti-Asian bigotry is deeply troubling,” Menin wrote. “His conduct was repeated and significant. He was criminally convicted in France for racist and antisemitic public insults. He was also captured on video praising Adolf Hitler and telling others that their ancestors would have been ‘gassed.’ That is not behavior that should be easily overlooked or normalized. Recently, there were reports of a similar antisemitic incident that allegedly occurred in 2019.
“At a time when our city is confronting a serious rise in antisemitism, anti-Asian hate, and other forms of hatred, I find the decision to so prominently honor someone who has engaged in this behavior to be wholly inappropriate. New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world.”
Menin added that she was “deeply concerned about the process through which this decision was made. Mr. Galliano’s rhetoric and conduct, including the alleged 2019 incident, should have been more thoroughly investigated.” She urged organizers to “reconsider” their decision and suggested other ways Galliano could be honored, including a “contextual exhibit or educational program.”
“The Met is one of New York City’s most treasured and visible cultural institutions. Its choices carry enormous weight, both here and around the world,” she continued. “I believe this choice falls short of the standard New Yorkers should expect from it.”
Paramount Pictures has dated the feature film sequel for June 2, 2028, when Cruise and Hathaway will hit the road almost 40 years after the original Tony Scott film was released. The project will be shot for IMAX screens, and released exclusively in theaters for formats including Dolby Cinema and 4DX. Cruise released a promotional image on Saturday celebrating Hathaway’s casting and posing with his co-lead on a NASCAR track.
Cruise will reprise his role as the scrappy driver Cole Trickle. Plot details are scarce, but Hathaway is set to play a racecar team owner and engineer. Jonathan Levine (“Long Shot,” “Mr. Irrelevant”) is confirmed to direct. Cruise is producing alongside Jerry Bruckheimer and Tommy Harper.
In the original, Cruise’s Trickle gets recruited to a new NASCAR team by a retired racing legend (Robert Duvall). The first film also starred Nicole Kidman, Randy Quaid and John C. Reilly.
Hathaway has been on a tear in 2026, with four films in theaters including “Mother Mary,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The Odyssey” and “The End of Oak Street.” The expecting movie star will close out the year with the Coleen Hoover adaptation “Verity.” She’s just wrapped production on the Adam Driver military drama “Alone at Dawn,” and is working on a three-quel to her star-making Disney movie “The Princess Diaries.” Hathaway is represented by CAA, Entertainment 360 and Apex Public Relations.
The ”Days of Thunder” follow-up is the first significant piece of IP that Cruise will engage with after ramping down the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. He’s also on the hook for another “Top Gun” movie, and will return to the prestige drama space with this year’s Alejandro González Iñárritu film “Digger.”
Despite recent claims by Max Greenfield, who played Schmidt on the hit Fox sitcom, that he has read “amazing” scripts for a reunion, show creator Liz Meriwether insists, “There are no scripts.”
I caught up with Meriwether at the Season 1 finale screening of her latest hit series “Furious” on Thursday night at the DGA in West Hollywood.
Greenfield set off speculation about a “New Girl” reunion in late July when he said during an appearance on “Today with Jenna & Sheinelle,” “As far as I know, it’s happening. I’ve seen scripts, they’re amazing.”
Meriwether responded to Greenfield’s claim with a very tongue-in-cheek video on Instagram. “Max told everybody that there’s amazing scripts of a ‘New Girl’ reunion that I’ve written. Um — and just an update on that — the scripts were pretty good until everybody just started giving me notes on every little thing,” she cracked, before listing changes all of the stars of the show requested.
For now, Meriwether told me, “I’ve honestly been enjoying this thing, whatever this is, that’s like this back and forth between the cast and me, and I think this is the show and I feel like maybe in the world of the internet…maybe the show is just this, these little videos, maybe that’s the reunion. I don’t know.”
“New Girl” ran for seven seasons from 2011 to 2018.
The Rising Phoenix Award will recognize the series’ theme of starting over and people who make starting over possible.
As for the Spears biopic, Meriwether said she can’t say much because it’s too early in the process: “It’s really interesting because I haven’t written a movie in a long time, so that’s been part of the process is just trying to think in a two-hour story as opposed to like an eight-hour story, which is what I’ve been used to doing.”
She has yet to meet the “…Baby One More Time” hitmaker. “I would love to,” Meriwether said.
Scoot McNairy, Emmy Rossum, Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Liz Meriwether at the “Furious” Los Angeles special screening at the DGA Theater on Aug. 27 in Los Angeles.
Ray Winstone recently recalled to The Times of London that he once told off an unnamed director after he saw them “groping” his female co-star.
“I had this director once,” Winstone said. “I was in a scene where I had to pick up this girl, and the director wanted to show me what to do. But he was groping her. That was it. I said, ‘Don’t you dare do that.’ He abused his power, took advantage, and she was a good kid, you know, who seemed a little lost. Anyway, it was dealt with.”
When asked in what matter the situation was “dealt with,” Winstone added, “Well, back in the day, if there was a wrong ’un on set, 99 times out of 100 it was sorted, either by the hairy-arse riggers or sparks. I’ve done it myself too, taken someone to the side to give them a slap or to tell them, in no uncertain terms, to behave. But it’s a different world today.”
Winstone will soon star in Season 2 of “The Gentlemen,” which recently got the green light for its third season on Netflix. In the Guy Ritchie crime drama, Winstone plays kingpin Bobby Glass. Later in his sit-down with The Times, he said the role made him realize he is “getting old.”
“When you’re not the young lead but the old boy, who everyone says they’ve got to look after because he’s getting on a bit,” Winstone said. The Times then asked if he had any plans to slow down his career, and Winstone quipped, “Well, you’ve got to pay the taxman, haven’t you?”
During the Friday episode of Real Time, Bill Maher addressed Dolly Parton’s death that got some backlash on social media.
He began his monologue by discussing current events of the week, specifically the United States’ trade war with Canada. “All this is going on, and all America could really talk about this week was how sad it is we lost Dolly Parton,” Maher said.
“Everybody around the country, even around the world” was honoring the late singer, he said. “London, they’re doing things. The Santa Monica ferris wheel is lit up with hearts. The Empire State Building was put up in pink. The Sphere in Las Vegas added a nipple.”
The joke drew some criticism on social media. “Even Trump refused to be shitty about Dolly Parton in her passing it’s wild that Bill Maher would choose to be this much of a shit bag about a beloved person on both sides of politics,” wrote one person on X. Added another: “Imagine if this is the thing that finally gets him thrown off the air.” Posted another: “typically charmless and classless. Thinks he’s on some superior plane.”
Another tribute, like Maher’s, that drew negative attention was that of Ricky Schroder, who portrayed Parton’s father in two biopic movies based on her childhood. “I didn’t agree with her advocating for Transgender & Covid Vaccine support … but Loved her anyway. Thank you for choosing me Dolly to be your Movie Daddy,” he wrote online.
In a follow-up post after the backlash from his initial comments began, Schroder reportedly posted a clip on his Instagram Stories about the two-time Oscar nominee’s support of the COVID-19 vaccine, writing, “I warned Dolly to not support the Experiment. Wished she listened.”
Fox Sports South Florida co-host Josh Cohen, in response to Schroder’s post, wrote on X, “Congratulations to former child TV actor Ricky Schroder on becoming the first person to disrespect Dolly Parton in her passing. What an absolute douche.”
