Category: Entertainment

Shannon Elizabeth is taking back control of her story.

The actress, who became a prominent sex symbol of the 1990s and 2000s with her roles in American Pie and Scary Movie, among others, recently told People that she’s launching an OnlyFans account to reclaim control of her narrative after working in Hollywood.

“I’ve spent my entire career working in Hollywood, where other people controlled the narrative and the outcome of my career. This new chapter is about changing that, showing off a more sexy side no one has seen, and being closer to my fans,” Elizabeth said of her reasoning for joining the platform primarily known for adult content.

She added, “I’m choosing OnlyFans because it allows me to connect directly with my audience, create on my own terms, and just be free. I really do think this is the future.”

Though Elizabeth didn’t feel in control of her career when she was younger, she previously told Entertainment Tonight that she’s still grateful for all the doors that American Pie opened for her.

However, starring in a raunchy franchise like that also came with misconceptions about who she was in real life. Elizabeth played Nadia, an attractive Eastern European exchange student whom Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) has a crush on, in the 1999 film.

“For me, it was a role, it was playing a character,” she explained to ET. “But even in my real life, I’m just not the girl who likes to be naked, ever. … That was never me, but because that was kind of my coming out, everyone assumed I was that girl.”

Elizabeth also reprised her role in 2001’s American Pie 2 and 2012’s American Reunion.

It’s complicated! The world’s largest solar power plant is being built in Morocco, with the aim of turning arid land into a “green energy source.” So far, so good, you say? But wait, there’s a catch! After all, barriers go up, and access to water becomes difficult. And members of the local Berber tribe, the indigenous Nomad population, are given no choice but to work for the power plant.

In The Price of the Sun (Du soleil et du plomb), Belgian director Jérôme le Maire (Burning Out, Tea or Electricity) zooms in on the ambiguities and hidden costs of progress and “the resilience and adaptability of a community forced to reinvent itself in the shadow of the renewable energy revolution.” The film world premieres on Saturday, April 18 in the international feature film competition program of the 57th edition of the Visions du Réel documentary festival in Nyon, Switzerland.

With cinematography from Olivier Boonjing and le Maire and editing by Matyas Veress, The Price of the Sun shows us how the nomads’ traditions exist in quiet conflict with the drive to supply renewable solar and wind energy to the world. “Ironically, the fight for resource control to connect the world may ultimately destroy a society that, by definition, shares resources and is obliged to be connected,” highlight the press notes for the doc. “Can there be enough sun and wind for everyone, or is the price too high?”

Or as le Maire mentions in a director’s statement: “I strove to achieve precise and intimate observation of these nomads and the values they cultivate, up until the moment they are confronted with the arrival of an unavoidable event that will lead them toward an unexpected future.”

Ahead of the world premiere of the film, le Maire shared with THR how The Price of the Sun came about, his focus on the potential cultural ambiguities of renewable energy, and what’s next for him.

How long did you work on this film, and how did you get access to the Berber tribe and the power plant workers? There must have been so much trust!

In short : The shoot consisted of 12 two-week stays spread across six years (January 2019 to September 2025), totaling approximately 168 shooting days. But location research began in 2017 with a year-long investigation around the Noor Ouarzazate power plant, followed by four two-week stays in 2018 – getting to know the Ait Merghrad community and exploring the region around the future Midelt plant site.  So the film was in production for approximately eight years, from initial scouting in 2017 through the final shoot in September 2025. 

The secret to making this kind of film is to take your time. To take the time to introduce yourself. Who am I, and what am I doing in this region? What can I do for you? Before I say what I want to film, I listen to what these people have to say, where their words come from. And in doing so, I discover myself, too, gradually.

The first time I went to this desert to scout locations, I was with my wife. She just adores these regions of southern Morocco. Another time, I was with my daughter. To gain someone’s trust, you have to offer an exchange. I’ll show you who I am, and you show me who you are.
 
And then we talked about the power station. The tribe had its opinion. I had mine. We discussed at length what was unfolding before us. We were trying to make sense of it all. We were trying to understand one another. On one side, you have those who need energy, and on the other, those who will produce it, or enable its production.

The nomads quickly realized that what interested me was less the power station itself than the ecosystem in which it was to be built. As a result, they became part of the story. It is rare for them that an “outsider,” someone who is not one of them, takes an interest in their lives. They were touched by my proposal to make a film about them, amidst the turmoil that was looming.

I also built a relationship of trust with the plant’s management. Here, it is first and foremost an institution. I know how this sort of organization operates, and in such cases, you must first prove your credentials. You have to show who you know, what your credentials are. So, I show the films I’ve made and the success they’ve had. Then, I use the connections I have in high places. But in the end, it’s always the same: you find yourself face to face with a human being, and at that point, you have to be yourself and clearly show who you are. Face to face, I don’t put on an act. I connect with the person and speak to them very sincerely. In high society, people aren’t really used to that sort of frankness, so it works very well.

For this film, I had the opportunity to meet Morocco’s Minister for Energy Transition, and we hit it off immediately. I introduced myself very simply, being completely myself. I didn’t really follow protocol; I focused on frankness and spontaneity. During the meeting, she and I came up with a plan where she would come to the site to meet the nomads I’d been telling her about in person. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. It’s a shame, as they were looking forward to welcoming her. But the most important thing for me was to speak directly to the minister about these ordinary people. She knows they exist and that she’s welcome in their homes!

How would you describe your approach to doc-making in general? Do you always look for an observational/vérité approach and why?

All my films are made in the cinéma vérité style, which we also call “direct cinema” here. Personally, I really enjoy immersing myself in worlds that are very different from those I know. I act as if I were a resident of a remote mountain village, as in Tea or Electricity, or as a member of an operating theater team, as in Burning Out. I become part of the community, whether or not I appear as a character in the film. I chart the path myself, and I invite the audience to follow it. And I film in such a way that it creates this impression. The impression of being there yourself in the desert with the nomads.

The audience loves this kind of documentary because a story is told to them and, just like in fiction films, they are allowed to navigate the narrative. They are free to form a bond with a particular character and to think whatever they like about what is happening. There is no voice-over to explain, inform or dictate a particular way of thinking. In cinéma vérité/cinéma du réel, viewers are fully immersed in a world; they experience emotions, and they interact internally with the characters and with what happens to them.

This kind of cinematic experience can leave a deep impression on us. What matters to me, as a director, is to connect the audience intimately with people who are experiencing very different things thousands of miles away. To ensure that those who watch my film can, for a moment, put themselves in the other person’s shoes – and thus, perhaps, shift their perspective away from the dominant narrative.

You show us all sorts of ambiguities, such as the benefits of building renewable energy plants, but also the downside of cultural imposition on a native tribe. How did you approach how to balance the good and the bad, and how did you think about taking sides or not?

This has been a long journey for me, documenting how these energy projects have displaced nomadic people from their traditional lands, disrupted their way of life, and highlighted the broader implications of modern renewable energy development. The nomadic way of life emphasizes the importance of simplicity and respect for the environment. I want this film to question the philosophical dimension of this new “green energy,” described as “clean” and undeniably “sustainable.”

I want to shine a spotlight on the vision and question the transaction [involved in it]. I hope audiences become more aware of the invisible people and businesses affected by their energy consumption, and that will urge them to reconsider their reliance on both electricity and technology.

But what this film, in essence, shows is that clean energy does not exist. It is sold to us as such so that we consume ever more, without a twinge of conscience. Yet today, it has become absolutely vital to take energy-saving measures – both at an individual level and at a public level. We absolutely must consume less. It is the only lever that guarantees 100 percent positive effects for the planet and the common good.

When you use artificial intelligence, when you charge your electric car or when you flick the light switch in your living room, there is someone at the other end of the power cable who will be affected by that consumption. It is not about guilt, but about awareness and responsibility!

What was the hardest part of making this doc?

Filming in the lead mines was difficult! These places are extremely dangerous, so filming there is a very delicate matter. We had to ensure there were no accidents. Yet accidents are common in these mines because the work is unsupervised. It involves just a few dozen poor people who have taken it upon themselves to work as miners. They have no equipment whatsoever. And whilst they know the place well, they have only a very limited understanding of the work involved. In fact, they can rely only on their courage and the solidarity between them. So that’s where I started.

It’s this “set-up” that I had to fit into. The sound engineer didn’t feel comfortable going down with me. My daughter, who was the assistant director, didn’t want to go down either. So I went down alone, with the lads. These were intense moments because at that point, I was completely united with them. We helped each other; we each had a goal, but the path we were taking was the same.

I’m very pleased with these scenes. You really feel that descent into the bowels of the earth. The imagery is flawless; the camera work was superb. What’s more, the story this part tells is truly incredible. As I filmed Aziz hammering away like a madman to extract lead from the rock, I thought of him – just a few months earlier, he was still a shepherd. I was really moved. I sincerely hope this film can help improve his situation!

What are you working on next?

I’m currently working on a very different project: I’d like to cross the High Atlas mountains in Morocco all alone, on foot, with a mule! So I’m preparing for this expedition, which is likely to take me several months. I need to recharge my batteries. To reflect on the meaning of life. To disconnect from this fast-paced, talkative world… and from this culture of overconsumption!

I’m going to walk a thousand kilometers along this magnificent mountain range, dotted with little villages that seem to exist in another world, in another time. Perhaps I’ll take a camera with me and end up making a film…

The philosopher Biggie Smalls once pondered the nature of dangerously escalating rivalries.

In a song of the same name, Biggie asked, “What’s beef?”

His answers included the straightforward “Beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep,” and the playful “Beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in I-C-U.”

Christopher Wallace passed away, likely a victim of a beef, long before the rise of the limited series, so Lee Sung Jin had the exploratory lane all to himself when he released the eight-episode bleak comedy Beef back in 2023. The series, about the unforeseen consequences erupting from a relatively minor instance of road rage, dominated the Emmys and eventually was picked up for a second season, transitioning from limited series to anthology and reframing Biggie’s question as: “What’s Beef?” Or, put a different way, what is the Beef brand? And could a second season, sans the extraordinary talents of Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, deliver a story and themes in keeping with that brand, without sullying what was so deviously tricky about the original series and its tone?

The answer, for the most part, is “Yes.” The second season of Beef can’t reproduce the sneak-up-on-you brilliance of the first, but without many direct connections this eight-episode story feels very much of a piece.

Once again, Jin has big ideas to play with and trenchant aspects of contemporary American culture to pick apart and, once again, he has assembled an exceptional cast in service of a story that begins tightly contained and spins wildly and intentionally out of control.

It’s possible that Jin actually has too much on his mind this time around, layering the central conflict with generational, economic and cultural divides, alternatingly poking fun and staring in jaw-agape horror at the modern condition in ways that don’t always come together. But if the thing that keeps season two of Beef from equalling its predecessor is an excess of ambition, I have no beef with that.

This time around, our featured characters — Beef doesn’t have traditional antagonists and protagonists, since its core concern is that niceties like situational ethics and morality are a fungible construct — are a pair of couples, separated in age by little over a decade but in status by a seemingly greater distance.

Josh (Oscar Isaac) is the general manager at the Monte Vista Point Country Club near tony Montecito, north of Los Angeles. His job is to be accommodating to the club’s wealthy clientele, embodied by William Fichtner’s Troy, a wildly rich music industry mogul (or something to that effect). Josh is married to Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), an upper-crust Brit who has all the external status markers that Josh lacks, but perhaps not his obsequious gifts or ambition. They’ve been talking for years about starting an upscale bed-and-breakfast, without evident progress, one of several factors adding volatility to their marriage.

At the other end of the volatility spectrum are newly engaged 20-somethings Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), two of Josh’s underlings at the club. Ashley is a beverage cart girl on the club’s golf course, while Austin works part-time as a trainer. Austin and Ashley don’t have much money, but they’re so deeply in love that they never fight.

On the night of a fundraiser at the club, Josh forgets his wallet and Austin and Ashley are tasked with returning it, walking in at the end of a heated argument between Josh and Lindsay — a fight that reaches a violent climax that Ashley films on her phone. Ashley and Austin experience this blow-up out of context, and the video captures it with even less context. But the younger couple sees an opportunity for professional advancement, to score a win in a game they’re convinced is rigged against them.

But in this clash of haves and have-nots, are Josh and Lindsay really among the privileged? Their position is made precarious by the arrival of Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), Korean billionaire and the club’s new owner. Park puts new pressure on Josh in part because of the pressure she herself is feeling back in Seoul under circumstances related to her plastic surgeon husband (Song Kang-ho, wonderful if very underused).

Soon, a cycle of blackmail, extortion and fraud ensues, borne of desperate grasping for power and a potentially fatal lack of empathy on all fronts. Meanwhile, the lines between exploiter and exploited, powerful and powerless, hero and villain blur in ways that are sometimes satirical, sometimes sad and occasionally thrilling.

There’s a lot happening in the second season of Beef. Although the episode count has gone from 10 to eight, the length of episodes have expanded from under 40 minutes to as many as 54 minutes for the season two finale, which has a relatively epic scale but gets bogged down in at least three different monologues from characters telling viewers what the season was about.

Though Beef isn’t exclusively a dark comedy, its comic beats thrive with a tighter pace and stricter focus. This best two episodes (directed by Jin and Kitao Sakurai) come midseason — a hilarious nightmare in a hospital emergency room and a differently hilarious nightmare of a search for a missing dachshund named Burberry — and they’re the two shortest episodes of the season, dedicated primarily to tracking just one of the couples on a single misadventure. One takes a scathing look at the absurdities of the American healthcare industry, while the other reinforces the season’s nature-out-of-balance themes. They’re both fast-moving and dazzlingly absurd.

Those two standout episodes are also largely separated from the country club settling, which too often opens the door for slightly superficial jabs at the club’s vapid members. They’re a perfectly worthy target, but one that invites inevitable comparisons to The White Lotus (and allows for some very odd and very unexpected celebrity cameos that I won’t spoil here).

It’s possible that Beef is actually parodying The White Lotus at times, especially with the younger couple, a high-school dropout and a former Arizona State football star — Gen Z strivers who know the buzzwords of capitalist critique (“It’s unfair. Globally. There’s gotta be a redistribution of the wealth,” Austin declares, apropos of nothing) without any substance to back it up. They simply see an opportunity to grab for the brass ring, ready to do whatever it takes to get what they believe they deserve, until they discover what “whatever it takes” means. Or maybe until they discover what Reddit tells them it means, because Beef is particularly harsh toward the online proxies for nourishing social relationships — uncaring cam girls, hollow DM flirtations and help forums that only make things worse.

As was the case in the first season, Beef is a machine driven by unintended consequences, some violent, some scatological and all designed to crush the souls of characters who might not have souls to begin with.

Even more than the first season, this round of Beef makes it difficult to root for anybody. I felt a real pendulum the first time around between Danny (Yeun) and Amy (Wong), each doing the wrong things for ostensibly justifiable reasons. Here, it’s a struggle between two flawed couples, easier to pity, if only because they don’t realize that there’s nothing the aristocracy wants more than for them to fight to the death rather than pay attention to who actually has the power.

Performance-wise, I sided with the younger couple. I thought Riverdale veteran Melton’s May December performance was more tantalizing promise than talent confirmed, but there’s evidence of comic genius in how soulfully silly he makes Austin. Spaeny’s Ashley is half Lady Macbeth, half innocent child, fully oblivious to how her ambitions are changing her and changing a relationship that seems nourishing as long as it’s based on a shared appreciation of Hot Pockets. Going back to Priscilla, I admire how Spaeny uses the height disparity with her leading men as a source of both humor and sweetness.

The show perhaps has sympathy for Ashley and Austin because they don’t know any better. Lindsay and Josh have been together long enough to realize their shared toxicity, but they’re giddy when their new rivals given them fresh targets for their simmering resentments. Mulligan delivers lacerating fragility, while Isaac turns Josh’s accommodating nature into a pathology, but both characters are littered with backstory details that Beef leaves hanging. It’s a plot point that these are both mixed-race couples that are rarely forced to confront their differences, but the show does better with Austin’s confrontation of his Korean roots than with Josh’s Cuban background.

Youn, whose presence reminds me that I’m still mad about Apple’s treatment of Pachinko, projects kindness with a glint of scheming malevolence, and I really wish the series had given us more of Youn and Song together. Several other characters on the Korean side of the story, which grows in importance as the finale approaches, could have used a little more depth — including Seoyeon Jang’s overqualified translator Eunice and rapper BM’s Woosh, a tennis instructor with aspirations of his own.

As was the case in the first season as well, the finale escalates to a place of thrilling zaniness, with a little less ultimate emotional gravitas this time around. The concluding punch isn’t as potent, but the show left me with so much to think about and so many details to be amused by that I hope Lee Sung Jin has the opportunity to show us what else Beef can be.

Horror king Robert Eggers is back with another creature feature, which got a special sneak peek at CinemaCon on Wednesday.

Following the success of vampire flick Nosferatu, Eggers has moved onto werewolves with Werwulf, which he co-wrote and directed. During Universal’s presentation to theater owners and distributors in Las Vegas, the first footage was shown with the declaration that it would be “his most terrifying motion picture yet.”

The film is largely black and white, with hints of color; the clips showed Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily Rose Depp as a villager couple, trudging along in dirty clothes and dragging a few kids behind. “Do not dread the darkness,” says a husky voiceover, with a supercut of violent images and horses running the forest. The footage ended on a close-up of Taylor-Johnson’s face screaming in horror — and no reveal of the titular monster, much like how Nosferatu‘s monster was hidden in promotional materials.

Taylor-Johnson, Depp and Willem Dafoe star in the movie, which like Nosferatu is set for a Christmas Day (2026) release in an act of counter-programming. It’s set in 13th-century England, where a mysterious creature stalks the foggy countryside, transforming local folklore into terrifying reality for its villagers.

Eggers has a particularly affinity for medieval projects, having said around the release of Nosferatu that “the idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill. And the idea of photographing a cellphone is just death. And to make a contemporary story you have to photograph a cellphone — it’s just how life is” so he did not plan to make any modern-set movies.

Both Eggers and co-writer Sjón are producing alongside Focus Features. Chris and Eleanor Columbus, who worked with Eggers on Nosferatu, serve as executive produce. Nosferatu brought in more than $180 million worldwide, becoming Eggers’ highest-grossing movie to date, and was nominated in four craft categories at the Oscars.

Steven Spielberg took the stage at CinemaCon for the first time in his career to promote his upcoming Universal release, Disclosure Day.

After an introduction from star Colman Domingo, the filmmaker received rapturous applause from the annual convention of movie theater owners in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Spielberg accepted the Motion Picture Association’s America250 Award from the group’s chair, Charles Rivkin, in celebration of the director’s work that embraces the nation’s wonders.

“I haven’t done a Western yet — that’s next,” the 79-year-old director said. He noted that his first CinemaCon stage appearance had been great: “This will not be my last, I promise.”

He recalled his transformative first visit to the cinema: “Nothing could compete with sitting in the first three rows of a movie palace, watching a Cecil B. DeMille epic with color by Technicolor. Nothing would ever be the same.”

Spielberg admitted, “Sometimes, it feels to me like a cage fight between the small screen and the big screen.” He noted that the theatergoing experience was “clobbered” by COVID but added, “There was reason for hope.” He went on to praise projects like Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which counted Spielberg as a producer.

Then, the filmmaker sat down on stage with Domingo to discuss the exhibition business, with Spielberg recalling inviting his boyhood friends over to his parents’ home to screen popular titles. “I made money by charging 12 cents on popcorn,” he quipped.

Turning to Disclosure Day, the director explained that he has long been fascinated by the potential for extraterrestrial life. “I’ve been curious ever since I was a little kid about what’s happening in the night sky, what’s happening in the sky during the daytime,” Spielberg said. He remembered his dad telling him about “advanced civilizations” that didn’t exist on Earth.

Spielberg recalled a 2017 New York Times story about a Navy pilot spotting something via camera that could not be explained. “In 2017, I got very curious again,” he said, pointing out that his alien feature Close Encounters of the Third Kind was made 50 years ago. “Half a century later, I made Disclosure Day with certainty that there is a lot more truth than fiction to what you’re going to see on June 12.”

He said of Disclosure Day, “I truly believe that this movie is going to answer questions and cause you to ask a lot of questions.” He also teased, “This movie is an experience, and all you need to get from the beginning to the end is a seatbelt.”

Spielberg introduced new footage from the film, which stars Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, chronicling what might happen if humanity were to receive proof of non-human intelligent life. Disclosure Day marks Spielberg’s first new movie since 2022’s The Fabelmans and also stars Domingo, Colin Firth, Wyatt Russell and Eve Hewson.

The footage shows Blunt as a meteorologist who finds herself unable to speak during a live segment. In describing the viral footage of Blunt’s weather broadcast, O’Connor notes that he can understand the gibberish that she is saying: “It’s math.”

Viewers see an emotional meeting between O’Connor and Blunt. “I know you,” he says, to which she replies, “I know you, too.” There was also plenty of action in store, as Blunt tries to jump from a car onto a moving train. The footage ends with the movie’s first glimpse at its alien life form.

Disclosure Day represents Spielberg’s return to the UFO genre, and fans have speculated that it could be a closet sequel to 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Blunt recently told Empire magazine, “There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day.”

When appearing at the South by Southwest Film & TV festival last month, Spielberg said, “I don’t know any more than any of you do, but I have a very strong suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now — and I made a movie about that.”

The footage comes one day after Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna’s deadline came and went for the Pentagon to declassify and release several specific video files that she’s requested which purportedly show previously unseen instances of UAP/UFOs activity.

On Tuesday, Luna posted the following update on X: “No one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out, and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities. How convenient. Nonetheless, we will be getting the requested list. We are not waiting for a briefing at some unspecified future date. The Secretary of War is someone I consider a friend and someone who backs the President. The President has authorized the release, so whoever is trying to be cute at the Pentagon can take a hike.”

Universal can only hope any such videos — which would doubtless help generate buzz for the film — will be released in time for the opening weekend of Disclosure Day, which comes out June 12.