Category: Entertainment

Hollywood is living through “the friggin’ salad days,” as Ryan Reynolds puts it, after experiencing the biggest summer at the box office since COVID, thanks to blockbusters like “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey.” Last month, the “Deadpool” star personally congratulated the cast and crew of “The Odyssey” for surpassing “Deadpool & Wolverine” to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

“Obviously, [‘The Odyssey’] is an incredible, incredible movie. Christopher Nolan literally breathes the rarest air on Earth. He’s a singular filmmaker,” Reynolds told Variety at the “Mayday” premiere at AMC Lincoln Square in New York City on Tuesday night. “I mean, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, who’s clearly batting a thousand stars with Zendaya. I just love that people are going to the movie theaters. I don’t even care why or for what reason. Just go to the movie theaters. There’s no better shared experience.”

Apple Original Films’ “Mayday” marks Reynolds’ first major movie role since “Deadpool & Wolverine” hit theaters more than two years ago. Set at the end of the Cold War, he stars as a U.S. Navy pilot who becomes trapped behind enemy lines and forms an unlikely friendship with an eccentric ex-KGB agent (Kenneth Branagh) who idolizes ’80s American culture. Reynolds believes that the rosy-colored nostalgia surrounding the decade, popularized in modern-day projects like “Stranger Things,” tends to gloss over the more turbulent nature of the era.

“When you get far enough away from a time period that’s quite distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream,” Reynolds said. “The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that.”

Reynolds was quick to point to the fear of nuclear war that lingered over Americans as U.S.-Soviet tensions surged again in the early ’80s. The decade also saw the decline of American manufacturing devastate many working-class communities, along with the AIDS epidemic, which became the country’s most urgent health crisis.

“It was a tremendous strife,” Reynolds explained. “Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”

When the time comes to dissect the 2020’s in decades to come, Reynolds predicts that creatives will “pick on the big ticket items that didn’t really leave the footprint culturally that you would think they would.”

“So much of the aughts were like a mix of all the decade’s previous, whereas the decade’s previous were their own thing. I wonder if it’s going to be the Covid era or something. I have no idea. We are living in the friggin’ salad days right now! We just don’t know it.”

While “Mayday” isn’t getting a theatrical release, Reynolds teased at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con that he could return as Deadpool later this year in Marvel’s “Avengers: Doomsday.” Reynolds snuck into the Marvel presentation at Hall-H in a grey denim Deadpool suit and asked Paul Rudd a question from the crowd: “Mr. Paul Rudd: where is Thor, and why was he crying?” 

Branagh, who also directed the first “Thor” movie with Chris Hemsworth in 2011, says Reynolds never brought up the ongoing Thor gag while filming together on “Mayday.”

“He worries about offending me, that’s what it is,” Branagh joked. “That was my baby, you know! Way back before you came in.”

“Mayday” releases on Apple TV Sept. 4.

Could Hollywood entice younger audiences by having a little faith?

A surprising new Future of Faith study from The Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA suggests that both Gen Z and Gen Alpha crave realistic and complex depictions of religion and spirituality in their entertainment that go beyond stereotypes. The group surveyed over 2,000 people, ages 14-24, and a majority cited a sensitivity to how their beliefs were portrayed on-screen.

Among the interesting data points:

Respondents weren’t shy in suggesting they thought Hollywood could do a better job with well-rounded depictions of faith and spirituality that didn’t veer into stereotype.

“We heard from young people that they wanted to see grappling with faith,” says CSS founder and CEO Yalda T. Uhls, Ph.D., in an interview with Variety about the findings. “They’re at this age when they leave home, they no longer have the structure of adults saying, ‘You go to church, go to this.’ They’re around all these other people, and a lot of them do question their faith and they try to do it safely. But that’s one of the things they complained about: there’s a lot of performative religion and policing from their faith groups online. They want to be able to have honest discussions.”

Uhls, the senior author of the study, is a professor in UCLA’s psychology department, and previously worked for nearly two decades as a senior executive at studios like MGM and Sony. Her background makes her confident that developing spirituality-forward storylines could help the entertainment industry engage with younger audiences. Given the turnout at the Aug. 5 CSS event The Future of Faith, where the findings were presented, Hollywood is listening.

“It’s a big opportunity,” she says of spirituality-forward content. “At our event, we had execs from Netflix, Amazon, NBC, Lionsgate. We were talking about that. They’re all exploring it. Lionsgate has several movies around this. They see purely religious movies make a lot of money with that very specific audience, but I think there’s opportunity to integrate it into different divisions — not just the faith division.”

Uhls says respondents cited numerous series and films they believed were positive examples of what they were looking for, including films like “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” “Over the Moon” and “Bend It Like Beckham,” as well as series like “Mo,” “The Good Place,” “Ms. Marvel” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Yet the story also doesn’t have to depict the religious elements reverentially for it to be seen as impactful. Uhls points to the Netflix series “Unorthodox,” about a woman who leaves her Orthodox Jewish community to start life over, as a prime example.

“I remember when ‘Unorthodox’ came out, there was a big backlash from the Orthodox community,” she says. “But I bet younger people are really thinking deeply about these questions as you’re figuring out who you are.”

That sentiment was carried by the keynote speaker of the Future of Faith event, Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Milk.” He spoke about adapting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a true crime account of murder in the fundamentalist Mormon community, and how the story impacted him due to his real-life faith.

“He used to be a Mormon, and he was queer,” Uhls says. “And so he felt lost. He left the faith, but he went through a very long period questioning it. He still is very spiritual. He said he went back to the Bible and read it and felt like, ‘Wow, there’s stuff in here that I can relate to,’ but it wasn’t reflected in the religious structure of the Mormon faith. So I do think you’ll turn off some people with that, but you will find a lot of young people grateful. I think the young people today, because they have so much information, they want things to be really real. They don’t want to see these glossy lives or fake hypocritical stories that don’t reflect the messiness of real life.”

In recent years, several high-profile directors have tackled projects which lean into discussions about faith. When speaking to Variety in 2024, Lee Daniels said his exorcism-meets-family-drama feature “The Deliverance” was deeply inspired by belief.

“This dysfunctional family finds a higher power, and in this time that we’re in, I think that is what we need to find, whether it’s Buddha, whether it’s Allah, whether it’s Jesus, whether it’s yourself,” he said in the interview. “How do you love yourself more? Because tomorrow isn’t promised and we don’t know what’s happening out here, and it’s dark. I think this is trying to scare you to your Higher Power. I don’t know whether I succeeded, but that’s what I was trying to do.”

And there’s been several high-profile films in recent years which have put a spotlight on wrestling with questions of faith, from 2024’s “Conclave” and “Heretic” to last year’s “Wake Up Dead Man” and “The Testament of Ann Lee.” The trend won’t stop, as it seems that Greta Gerwig’s next film, an adaptation of “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” won’t shy away from author C.S. Lewis’ Christian themes. And these titles don’t even include wholly faith-based projects, like “The Chosen” series and films like “I Can Only Imagine 2.”

Ultimately, Uhls says she’s happy to shine a light on the desire young people have to engage with content that takes spirituality seriously.

“People are very, very interested in Hollywood listening to them,” she says. “There’s nobody, as far as I know, in any studio that is in charge of getting it right. There are people in charge of the creative teams developing the faith content, but they rely on the individual creator to do the homework, and maybe the exec. When I was an executive, nobody talked to me about any of this advocacy. So I didn’t know anything about it until a long time after I left the business.”

Long past his sexually explicit enfant terrible mumblecore origins, writer-director Joe Swanberg continues his ongoing experiments in honoring the romantic comedy’s conventional satisfactions while expanding its sexual parameters with “The Sun Never Sets.” Wendy (Dakota Fanning) has been dating sedate single dad Jack (Swanberg regular Jake Johnson) for two years. When he decides they should take a break so that Wendy can see other people and make absolutely sure she’s happy in their relationship, a love triangle is sparked. Both bizarre and boring, it’s definitely a signature Swanberg product: performance-driven, sexually (at least putatively) adventurous, full of craft beer.

In drone shots scored to generic indie-pop, Wendy (Dakota Fanning) drives into town, looking vaguely wistful under opening credits — so far, so romcom. But she’s not on the right heterosexual track to marriage and children, which particularly rankles after bestie Lindsay (Debby Ryan) announces she’s pregnant. With two kids and an ex-wife, Jack has no desire for more children or another marriage, but senses that Wendy might come to resent him for denying her both. So, he proposes she take six months off for her to see what else is out there; very reluctantly, she accepts.

Jack’s unnamed best friend (Lamorne Morris, popping in for a “New Girl” cameo reunion with his old castmate via Zoom) tells him the plan is half-baked, but Jack is unconcerned because he’s in Anchorage rather than his former base of New York City: “It’s a bunch of sweaty guys who smell like salmon. I’m not worried about it.” Mistake! Wendy immediately runs into old flame Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), who literally just got back to town the day before and, no longer a bad boy, begins by proposing marriage and seven children. The man who won’t change anything versus the man who’ll immediately change everything — descriptions that first apply to one character, then another, as Jack becomes desperate to win Wendy back while Chuck’s immature cracks emerge, leaving the lead with two theoretically equally red-flag choices at all times.

Scenery and single salmon joke aside, “Sun” doesn’t particularly show off its novel setting, unfolding in interiors proving Anchorage can be just as generic as any other American city: one of Swanberg’s beloved craft beer bars, a dive bar on trivia night, an art gallery for local painters, spacious suburban kitchens, less tony apartment complexes. Within these confines the main characters register as aliens; Wendy and Jack aren’t just flustered but people who seem to have never been inculcated with a rudimentary sense of social propriety. For example, Wendy is on a bar date she didn’t want to go on when she runs into Chuck, immediately sending the other guy packing; her decision is mirrored later when Jack also splits with his date Sara (Karley Sciortino) in a different bar after running into Wendy. Here, Sara finally raises her voice to express bafflement: “Is this a bit?”

The otherwise strangely becalmed register might make more sense if the protagonists were conceived as unflappable sociopaths, but the film’s theoretical naturalism heightens the inadvertent strangeness of watching people put other through so many stress positions while keeping their voices and mannerisms calm and level. That disjuncture could work if the film were stylized in some way to indicate that we’re operating in a realm of heightened emotional logic, rather than the familiar world of naturalism.

But despite shooting on 35mm, Swanberg continues to pursue a visually inconspicuous style that’s complementarily but counterproductively in line with the performance style. This is a film about difficult people in self-made traps — not unlike the willfully abrasive performers in the work of one of Swanberg’s admitted inspirations, Maurice Pialat, who understood the dramatic importance of externalized volatility to drive his emotionally bruising scenarios. Here, everyone both behind and in front of the camera seems a little too concerned with remaining likable and smooth on the surface. Like its protagonists, “The Sun Don’t Shine” wants to, but can’t, have it all.

Elliot Page has never felt more comfortable on screen. Finding the right role, however, has proven to be more difficult. During his appearance on the “On Film… With Kevin McCarthy” podcast, Elliott revealed he hasn’t been able to find another great role after starring in “The Odyssey,” which hit theaters in July. The actor revealed he has no role currently lined up.

The “Umbrella Academy” actor, who came out as transgender in 2020, said he hopes to continue acting. Looking back at his experience filming Christopher Nolan‘s 2010 film “Inception,” Page recalled feeling uncomfortable in his own skin. But now that he’s embraced his true identity, he feels he’s in the perfect place to accomplish his “best work.”

“I had such a great time being in [“Inception”]. I had such a great time working with [writer-director Nolan], but I was also personally really uncomfortable,” the Oscar nominee shared. “Whereas a part like ‘Juno,’ I was able to feel more comfortable and embodied.”

While working on Nolan’s film, Page developed shingles after feeling out of place while working “in a cast full of cis men.” In his memoir, “Pageboy,” the actor shared the cast and crew were “delightful to work with,” but he still struggled to feel comfortable on set.

Page reunited with Nolan for “The Odyssey,” which he told McCarthy was a “cathartic” experience compared to working on “Inception.” On his last day filming Nolan’s epic, Page said it was an emotional day because it marked a full-circle moment. 

“To come back now, as you can imagine, being more comfortable in yourself makes these sorts of projects more enjoyable,” Page said during the “X-Men: Days of Future Past” panel at New York City Comic Con in 2025 about “The Odyssey.” “To get to have a Chris Nolan experience again now meant so much to me selfishly.”

When Page’s casting as Sinon, the cousin of Odysseus (Matt Damon), was announced, the actor faced backlash online. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called the choice an “absolute puzzler,” noting that Page is “about 5’2 and 105 pounds soaking wet and has the voice of a woman. It doesn’t work.”

Whoopi Goldberg spoke out against Shapiro’s remark during an episode of “The View” in July, saying “A lot of conservatives who see this are going to feel the same way. That’s okay. But I don’t understand. Why go see the movie? If you don’t want to see it, don’t go see it. Why do you care who’s cast in it?”

Venice Film Festival kicked off on Wednesday night with the splashy premiere of “Ink,” an explosive drama about the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire.

The film, which stars Jack O’Connell as The Sun editor Larry Lamb and Guy Pearce as media mogul Rupert Murdoch, was met with a nearly four-and-a-half minute ovation after the credits rolled. Festival director Alberto Barbera tried to keep up the clapping by telling the cast to move up on the stairs. They obliged, but only for a few moments. The ovation was cut short because stars O’Connell and Claire Foy started to walk back to their seats, collect their stuff and head for the exit.

Earlier, O’Connell, Pearce and Foy walked the red carpet with director Danny Boyle. It was so hot and humid on Lido that O’Connell took off his Dunhill coat and handed it to a publicist before blotting the sweat on his face and white shirt with paper towels.

Set in 1969 London, “Ink” follows a young Murdoch, who buys The Sun and transforms the struggling paper into a high-selling tabloid. O’Connell stars as “The Sun” editor Larry Lamb, Pearce portrays Murdoch, and Foy plays a fictional journalist named Jules Davies.

Of course, Murdoch became one of the most influential — and divisive — media figures in history. The 95-year-old Australian built an empire spanning television, sports and entertainment through the conglomerate Fox Corporation, which includes Fox News and Fox Sports, as well as newspapers such as Wall Street Journal and New York Post. During Wednesday morning’s press conference for “Ink,” Boyle noted the movie doesn’t “monsterize” Murdoch, which he says, “a lot of people do now.”

“He represented, at the time, a breath of fresh air in what was a very rigid British society,” Boyle said. “He offered a kind of freedom with a different voice.”

“Ink,” which was acquired by Netflix prior to the festival, is competing for the Golden Lion. After Venice, the streamer will bring the awards hopeful to North America for stops at Telluride and Toronto International Film Festival. “Ink” will debut in theaters on Dec. 11 before landing on Netflix on Jan. 8.

Venice is opening against a politically charged backdrop, and jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal spoke to tensions surrounding the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as U.S. politics, at Wednesday morning’s press conference. She said she thinks movies are “fundamentally, unavoidably political,” adding that no subject should be off limits. “I think we can challenge ourselves to hear stories about the most corrupt, most perverse people because it opens up the opportunity to find empathy for those people.”

Gyllenhaal also spoke about lack of female directors in this year’s competition lineup. Only two films up for the Golden Lion — “Woman Unknown,” a drama by Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May El-Toukhysolely and “Naza,” a documentary co-helmed by “No Other Land” filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, were directed by women.

“There’s a systemic problem,” she said. “It’s harder for women to get films financed.”