The hometown crowd went wild Monday night for the world premiere of The Spiral, a campy, fun Italian horror thriller from director Paolo Strippoli (The Holy Boy, A Classic Horror Story).
Jasmine Trinca (Saint Laurent, The Caiman) stars as Anna, a controlling mother who makes a deal with the devil, in the form of a trench coat-wearing, chain-smoking Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, to save her daughter Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano) after a gruesome accident. But the agreement sets off a, you guessed it, spiral of macabre events that will end up tearing the family apart. Adriano Giannini plays Anna’s wealthy alpha-male businessman husband, Walter. Andrea Genovese plays their son Tobia.
The twisty genre film, which dips into Grand Guignol territory, with plenty of OTT performances — led by Tedeschi’s glorious turn — may be an outsider for the Golden Lion, but it definitely played for the Venice audience, which gave it a warm and enthusiastic standing ovation, with the director and cast coaxing the crowd to keep clapping past the 9-minute mark.
Whether that will be enough to convince the Venice jury, headed by The Bride! director Maggie Gyllenhaal, remains to be seen. But at a Venice where fun has been in short supply, The Sprial, came as a welcome palate cleanser.
The Spiral next heads to Toronto, where it’s screening in the popular Midnight Madness section. Le Pacte, which is handling international sales for the film, will be hopeful for its prospects. Given the film’s high-concept premise, remake rights could also be in play.
The film hits Italian theaters Oct. 8, released by 01 Distribution.
On Monday, the rapper wrote on social media, “Wanting all humans to be treated equal should never be controversial.” His post also included his speech from Saturday, the second night of back-to-back shows at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.
After stating “Free Palestine” again onstage Saturday night, Macklemore later clarified to the audience, “To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.”
“So I say Free Palestine, I say Free Lebanon, I say Free Cuba, I say Free Congo, Free Sudan, I say Free all people in America living in fear of this terrorist organization, ICE. None of us will be free until we are all free,” he added.
This came a day after Macklemore’s opening set on Friday drew criticism for the rapper’s performance of his protest song “Hind’s Hall” and telling the audience, “A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.”
The Israeli-American Council (IAC) launched a petition in response, calling for Macklemore’s removal for the remaining tour dates.
“This was an Ed Sheeran concert – not a political rally, not a protest, and not an activist event,” the petition read in part. “The issue is not whether Macklemore has the right to hold political views. The question is where the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Sheeran’s rep for comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication.
Multiple acts participating in a comedy festival in Portugal, the inaugural MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest (Lisbon International Humour Festival), have announced that they are no longer participating.
Actress Inês Aires Pereira announced on Saturday that her show Namastê was being removed from the festival‘s lineup and explained her reasoning being that “one of the names insistently defends ideas and acts that I consider indefensible.” She also added in her social media post: “We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.”
Her statement did not explicitly identify any particular act that she was referring to.
The comedy duo Cebola Mol, made up of Eduardo Madeira and Filipe Homem Fonseca, also announced on Saturday that they too would not be performing in the festival.
“We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” they wrote on social media.
Other acts to withdraw from the festival include concert “Tributo Pop” (Carolina Deslandes, Tatanka and Bárbara Tinoco), the group Conjunto Cuca Monga, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils (Alexandre Farto). Reasoning was not publicly revealed.
The first edition of the Lisbon International Humour Festival will take place from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1.
American comedian Jerry Seinfeld is headlining the festival.
The comedian has openly supported Israel amid the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict. When announcing their exit from the upcoming festival, Cebola Mol shared an illustrated photo of themselves and a watermelon, which is recognized as an unofficial symbol for Palestinian solidarity. The fruit’s colors notably match the Palestinian flag.
Seinfeld recently received backlash for his comments last year while appearing at a Duke University event, where he compared the Free Palestine movement to the Ku Klux Klan.
“Free Palestine is, to me, just — you’re free to say you don’t like Jews,” Seinfeld said, according to The Chronicle, Duke University’s student newspaper. “Just say you don’t like Jews. By saying ‘Free Palestine,’ you’re not admitting what you really think. So it’s actually — compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK that’s honest.”
TheChronicle quoted a University spokesperson who noted, “Duke does not preview the remarks of speakers who are invited to campus, and the invitation of speakers to campus does not imply any endorsement of their remarks.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to reps for Seinfeld and the Portugal festival for comment.
The entertainment industry has been increasingly vocal about the Israel-Gaza conflict, with calls to remove certain actors from projects including Kevin Zegers from Heated Rivarly, and mounting criticism directed at individuals expressing opposing views on the issue. Two actors recently withdrew from the production of Right Before I Go at the Soho Theatre over Dame Maureen Lipman‘s public comments about Israel and Palestine. A petition for Macklemore to be removed from Ed Sheeran‘s tour has also spurred after the artist yelled “Free Palestine“ while performing at the MetLife Stadium.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the music duo turned up fashionably late to the Cineworld theater in Leicester Square. Liam pumped his fist in the air with an arm wrapped around Noel, who could only smile at the fervent reaction around them.
By the time the rock legends arrived, the black carpet was empty, aside from the herd of photographers and screaming fans.
Written by Peaky Blinders mastermind Steven Knight, the two-hour movie on their globe-spanning reunion tour last year combines concert film, backstage documentary and an unusually intimate portrait of the Gallagher brothers’ famously volatile relationship.
Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace followed the duo across 12 concerts on three continents during the Live ’25 tour, capturing previously unseen rehearsals, backstage and onstage footage.
Knight, Southern, Lovelace and the producers joined the Gallaghers for a short introduction before the screening. Though they didn’t speak — bar Liam’s “story of my fucking life” over a faulty microphone — the siblings had made quite the entrance.
“I hope that people watch this and maybe think about someone they haven’t spoken to for a while,” said Knight, referring to the brothers’ notorious feud that kept them out of contact for 15 years. “It’s about the story of these two, the story of the band, but it’s much more than that. And people who watch it… You can hear people getting emotional about it. […] It’s an emotional film. It’s meant to be emotional,” he added. “Be prepared, it’s really good.”
The event was teeming with an eclectic group of stars, from Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten and soccer player Jack Grealish, to TV presenter Vernon Kay and prolific film producer Andrew Macdonald. Also in attendance were Liam and Noel’s children, including Lennon, Anais, Donovan, Sonny, Molly, and Gene, rooting for their rockstar fathers.
Disney will give Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger a limited theatrical run, with the film opening in select Imax and U.S. cinemas on Sept. 11. It will then stream later this year on Hulu in the U.S. and exclusively on Disney+ internationally.
The winning combination of whimsy, gravitas and good looks that Gael García Bernal has brought to both the big (Amores Perros, Y tu mamá tambíen) and small (Mozart in the Jungle) screens fails to translate to his second stab as director, Hombre Al Agua, an offbeat dramedy that’s too chaotic and muddled to hit its marks.
The actor, who wrote the script with Mariano Pensotti, does double duty as star and helmer in this overcooked story of a Cuban lifeguard who becomes the right-hand man to a Mexican business tycoon, only to have his life quickly unravel because, well, that’s what these quirky dramedies do. The film strains for laughs and meaning despite a good cast that’s easy on the eyes, even if they play characters who seldom feel like real people. After its premiere in the Venice Spotlight sidebar, Hombre should make headways in Latin America but will have a harder time navigating international waters.
Hombre Al Agua
The Bottom Line
An offbeat passion project without much purpose.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Venice Spotlight) Cast: Gael García Bernal, Esmeralda Pimentel, Débora Nascimento, Natalia Oreiro, Anna Díaz, Manuel García Rulfo, Jorge Salinas, Ricky Martin Director: Gael García Bernal Screenwriters: Gael García Bernal, Mariano Pensotti
1 hour 56 minutes
The title translates to “man overboard,” which applies to both the topsy-turvy tone the actor gives his third feature after his more restrained 2019 debut drama, Chicuarotes, as well as to his new movie’s inciting incident. Following a rather hilariously botched opening sex scene between Cuban émigré Camilo (Bernal) and his pro athlete wife Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), we flash back to see how Camilo went from being a lonely lifeguard on Cuba’s Varadero Beach to a successful father and businessman after saving scion Don Abel (Jorge Salinas) from drowning, marrying the man’s daughter soon after. Now he lives on his boss and father-in-law’s bodacious country estate in Yucatán, helping Juana take care of their baby daughter and managing a factory that holds a monopoly on zip ties.
The set-up is fast and the humor on the wacky side, like a Coen brothers flick minus their mastery of narrative rhythm, which here remains erratic throughout. Lots of crazy things start happening to Camilo, beginning with the breakdown of his marriage as Juana gets too close to a striking Brazilian actress, Fabiana (Débora Nascimento), whom she’s training to portray a professional pole vaulter onscreen. Meanwhile, Don Abel gets hit by a truck and confidentially asks Camilo to take care of his pregnant Argentine mistress Silvana (Natalia Oreiro), whom he tucks away on the estate for most of the film. Things are also coming apart at Camilo’s factory, where he’s forced to lay off a chunk of the staff.
The actor-director tosses all he can at his protagonist without much logic, in what feels like a rudderless midlife crisis scenario that never finds a strong throughline. It’s hard to know what the unifying principle is in Hombre Al Agua, aside from Bernal surrounding himself with three beautiful women — and one beautiful man in the form of Ricky Martin, who makes a fun cameo — in a beautiful location.
He seems to be having a good time, flexing a Cuban accent and his usual charms to play a decent man who’s desperately hanging onto a privileged life that fell into his lap. There’s some running social commentary in the film about the Mexican class divide, whether it involves Don Abel’s complete disregard for his workers or Juana prancing around like a spoiled princess in gym wear, but such observations rarely dip below the surface. A black-and-white Brazilian telenovela, starring Fabiana as the wife of a blue-collar rebel, constantly plays in the background but doesn’t leave much of a mark.
At best, Hombre Al Agua is a passion project in which the Mexican star dishes out some thoughts on fatherhood, masculinity and moral purpose. But tighter scripting and less mayhem would have helped make his message heard, instead of diluting it with too many shenanigans. “This is like a bad sitcom,” Camilo exclaims at a point when things really get silly, and you can’t help wondering if Bernal is saying aloud what we’ve all been thinking.
This year’s San Sebastian International Film Festival has unveiled a slew of top talent for its Film Talks slate.
Among the high-profile names reflecting on their creative processes and films in a sit-down discussion will be San Sebastian jury president Ira Sachs, Club Kiddirector-star Jordan Firstman and Josephine‘s Beth de Araújo.
Filmmaker and Andor actor Diego Luna will also make an appearance, alongside Argentine filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat, Naëmi Ada, Fernando Postigo, Peter Decherney, Angelica Cantisani, Vanja Kaludjercic, Andrea Queralt, Maialen Franco, Beatriz Mbula, Dagmary Olívar Graterol, Wendy Espinal, Lucía G. Romero, Daysi Cruz Cid, Eva Montoya, Xixi Sofía Yen Chen, Herminia Loh, Cecilia Barriga, Antxón Gómez, Enric Pastor, Fran Araújo, Aina Clotet, Javier Ferreiro, Tiagx Vélez, Lluís Garau, Afioco Gnecco, Gloria Saló, Fleur Dopheide and Victoria Cazalla.
“The talks will also look at issues such as inclusion and anti-racist attitudes in the audiovisual world, the new narratives and authorships, creative residencies and international creation labs, the transformative power of the cinema and design and art direction,” said the festival. “They will also analyse the new ways of narrating family relationships, the body as a narrative device and the challenge of audiences, algorithms and audiovisual distribution.”
San Sebastian’s opening film is Ghost Song from Fatih Akin. A number of buzzy projects are premiering in and out of competition, such as from Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Pablo Larraín (My Sad Dead) and Jaime Lorente (The Bad Son).
Competition highlights include Milo from director Nicole Garcia (Oran), a French drama featuring Marion Cotillard and Lurker star Théodore Pellerin; and In My Father’s Room, the directorial debut of Japanese novelist Maha Harada.
Prolific German filmmaker Werner Herzog and British star Naomi Watts are receiving the fest’s Donostia Awards this year.
Such Brave Girls star Freddie Meredith has joined the cast of Saturday Night Live UK ahead of its season two premiere.
Fresh off his Edinburgh Fringe Festival debut with comedy show Need a Light?, nominated for the best newcomer award, the Brit joins the returning SNL UK ensemble: Hammed Animashaun, Ayoade Bamgboye, Larry Dean, Celeste Dring, George Fouracres, Ania Magliano, Annabel Marlow, Al Nash, Jack Shep, Emma Sidi and Paddy Young.
Meredith, also known for his performance in Channel 4’s Big Boys, most recently featured in Kat Sadler’s twisted female-driven comedy Such Brave Girls on the BBC. He plays Josie’s embarrassingly needy and oblivious husband, Seb.
Among his comedy heroes are Jamie Demetriou, Tim Key, Tina Fey, Nathan Fielder, Kristen Wiig, Steve Coogan, Steve Carrell and Julia Davis. Meredith said about joining the show: “It will undoubtedly inform everything I do for the rest of my career, and I can’t wait for the experience.”
“I trained at drama school and began working professionally in theater,” Meredith added about his background. “Over time, I found myself increasingly drawn to comedy and started doing stand‑up alongside my acting work, and that naturally led me into making short sketches online.”
The next season of SNL UK is set to kick off on Sep. 12 with host Jeff Goldblum and musical guest CMAT. Broadcast live each week, the U.K. spinoff of NBC’s hit sketch series will once again welcome a different celebrity host and musical guest for every episode, alongside topical sketches, live music performances and a British take on the iconic Weekend Update segment.
Last season’s celebrity hosts included Tina Fey — in a premiere that accrued an audience of over 220,000 — as well as Jamie Dornan, Riz Ahmed, Jack Whitehall, Nicola Coughlan, Aimee Lou Wood, Hannah Waddingham, and Ncuti Gatwa.
SNL mastermind Lorne Michaels serves as executive producer on the show, and James Longman is lead producer.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras spoke bluntly at the Venice Film Festival Monday about the motivations behind her latest project, They’re Here, a 25-minute documentary that viscerally chronicles the Minneapolis resistance movement to ICE’s paramilitary occupation last year.
“We believed in a sense of urgency in documenting this,” Poitras said of the film origins. “What we’re seeing in the United States is a nightmare, and we feel what’s happening in the mainstream media is that this kind of violence is being normalized. We believe very strongly in the power of cinema to denormalize this violence and to show what’s happening, so that you can feel the sense of terror.”
They’re Here is Poitras’s first project since her Nan Goldin documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the festival’s Golden Lion in 2022 and later earned an Oscar nomination. Poitras previously won the best documentary Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour, her landmark account of Edward Snowden and his NSA surveillance disclosures.
Poitras co-directed They’re Here with Minneapolis-based journalist and documentarian Rachel Lauren Mueller. Told in the style of dystopian sci-fi cinema, the film starts in a picturesque wintry American Midwest landscape — but this is Trump’s America in 2025, where masked men are soon shown abducting children, as residents hide in the trunks of cars to safely get to work. Elsewhere, everyday American vacationers mill about at Minneapolis’ airport, gazing out the windows at shackled prisoners being dragged onboard planes nearby.
They’re Here draws on dashcam footage, crowdsourced data visualizations and ground-level footage to reconstruct the resistance network and the cat-and-mouse surveillance tactics used by residents and ICE’s masked agents.
“We were using the genres or language of dystopian cinema or horror to take us closer to reality, not to take us further away, and not to make fiction from reality,” Poitras explained in Venice. “This actually is the reality — the reality is a nightmare. The entire country is under attack, and immigrants are living in fear throughout the United States right now.”
“Over the two Trump terms, we’ve seen that things have gotten more extreme, but people become used to certain things,” added Mueller. “So I think the real role of this film is to shake that up a bit — to change things from a space of intellectualization about these numbers and these images that we see, and to have it become more visceral again.”
Poitras explained that the doc, like the resistance movement at its heart, emerged from a sense of solidarity with the immigrants who had made Minneapolis their home.
“It came from a real sense of, ‘These are our neighbors, and we don’t want them stolen from us. We want these people to stay safe,’” she said.
She also sees causes for both hope and despair in the Trump administration’s response to Minneapolis’ resistance, which she described as a “great success.”
“At the end of the film, we say how these tens and hundreds of thousands of residents responded, and that ICE removed 80 percent of its agents. So there was a real response to this kind of resistance, which I think we can all take hope from,” she explained. “At the same time, ICE has a budget of $70 billion, which is just an astronomical amount of money. Additionally, in the last two months, 90,000 people were abducted. So it’s this is a record high that has happened in June and July. So ICE is absolutely still active. Their tactics just look very different now.”
They’re Here is screening in Venice Open – Out of Competition, the festival’s nonfiction and special-presentation strand, and will have its world premiere in the Sala Grande on Monday afternoon. The film was produced by Mueller, Poitras and longtime Poitras collaborator Yoni Golijov, with ARTE France serving as co-producer. Submarine Entertainment Sales is handling U.S. sales.
Rob Reiner and Betty Gilpin have won the awards for best guest actor and guest actress in a comedy series at the 2026 Creative Arts Emmys.
Reiner won for his role in The Bear, which he was nominated for posthumously. The legendary actor and his wife, Michele Reiner, were found brutally murdered in their Los Angeles home last December. Their son, Nick Reiner, has been charged with and pleaded not guilty to to the murders.
“It’s appropriate to stand for this one,” presenter Wendi McLendon-Covey said to the crowd, who gave the win a standing ovation. “I know we all wish Rob could be here tonight.”
Gilpin took home the award for her role in Apple’s Widow’s Bay. Her speech was a highlight of the night as it was told in poem form. She began with a shoutout to her date, former Glow co-star Alison Brie.
Two other guest acting awards were given out earlier in the evening. The award for guest actress in a drama series went to Shailene Woodley for her work in Paradise. It marked the show’s first Emmy win. Ernest Harden Jr. took home the award for guest actor in a drama series for his role in The Pitt.
The Creative Arts Emmys take place over two days, usually a week ahead of the Primetime Emmys show. This year, the typically below-the-line-centric portion of the awards featured five categories that were previously given out during the Primetime ceremony. Among those were best supporting actor and actress in a limited or anthology series. Sunday’s awards were not televised live. Instead, Saturday and Sunday’s awards ceremony will air together on Saturday, Sept. 12. The 78th Emmy Awards, hosted by Mariska Hargitay, will air live on NBC on Sept. 14.
Franz Kafka and Don Quixote would feel right at home watching Ground Floor (Földszint), the new film from Hungarian auteur Gábor Reisz. But former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would very likely not be amused.
Back in 2023, Reisz’s Explanation for Everything, a dramatic look at the culture wars, won the best film award in Venice’s Horizons (Orizzonti) program. Now, he is back at the Venice Film Festival, this time in the Venice Spotlight section, with a sharp social and political satire. Ground Floor is a deep dive into a quixotic journey into an existential crisis that is full of absurdity, dark humor, political metaphors and mold – yes, mold!
The film, world-premiering at Venice on Thursday, Sept. 10, stars Ádám Tompa (Blue Heron) as Kristóf, a failed artist who, on a single day on which he and his wife want to go on a lake holiday, learns that he will become a father and discovers strange black mold in their apartment. To the exasperation of his wife, the usually apathetic man is spurred into rare action to solve the mold issue. He doesn’t even really know the people in the building. Can he fix the mold emergency and change things for the better?
Or, as a logline for Ground Floor puts it: “Which will break down faster – the building where Kristóf lives, or the apathy from which he awakens to find himself at the forefront of a tragicomic domestic revolution?”
Rodrigo Crespo, Bettina Józsa, Tünde Bacskó, György Gazsó, Juli Kindl, Éva Tímár and Marcello Fonte also star in Ground Floor, which Reisz co-wrote with Éva Schulze (Explanation for Everything) and Zsófi Reisz-Varga. Kristóf Becsey handled the cinematography, while Reisz and Schulze edited the film with Dávid Jancsó and Ilka Janka Nagy. Films Boutique is handling sales.
THR can exclusively premiere a clip from Ground Floor. Watch the scene that puts Kristóf on his unusual journey.
Now that you have seen a first teaser for the film, here is how Reisz describes key inspirations and themes he wanted to explore, and his take on just how Hungarian Ground Floor is.
Where did the idea to set the film in an apartment building that is threatened by mold and other issues, which is clearly a metaphor or a fable for the bigger world, come from?
Reisz Actually, the basic idea came from my producer Júlia Berkes. She could imagine a movie which was set in a building residents’ meeting. Maybe you don’t know about residents’ meetings. It’s really specific to our [country]. Every Hungarian could easily relate because in every apartment building, you need to go to this meeting twice a year. And you can’t imagine how absurd this kind of meeting is because everything is about the apartment, the staircase, the cleaning stuff, how to spend money. So, usually there are a lot of arguments.
When she told me about this idea, my answer was, “Okay, let’s go with this, and I will try to think about it.” It was 2024 when we talked about the story, and I felt that in Hungary, the [political] system and the atmosphere were in such bad shape that I could not think about anything else but how the building idea was connected to how it is living in Hungary. So, that was the starting point.
And black mold is something that always sounds terrible to people because it’s really expensive to get rid of. You talked about the metaphorical part. From the very beginning, it was so clear that if we shoot something in an apartment building, it’s, of course, somehow about Hungary in a small version, in a microcosm.
Can you tell me a bit more about the atmosphere in the country that you found so bad?
Around the middle of the scriptwriting process, we realized with my co-writer Éva Schulze that the basic problem is the apathy of society. This is the main reason that I wanted to make this film to, a little bit, generate a revolution or something like this, even if it sounds naive. But I think the mission of every form of art, also of filmmaking, is to talk a little bit about the problems and somehow generate a change in society.
It’s funny because I heard one year before Béla Tarr atar died that somebody asked him if he feels he changed anything with his amazing filmography, and he answered no, he didn’t think so – maybe just a little bit.
How would you describe the tone of Ground Floor compared with Explanation for Everything?
Our previous movie was a social drama, and maybe a few parts were a little bit funny. And with this movie, I found it was so dark that we felt we needed to get a little bit lighter. Of course, the Hungarian humor is a little dark. It’s maybe connected to English humor and Czech humor.
With the government change in Hungary, are you feeling a bit more optimistic?
I think I am a little bit optimistic. We actually changed the ending of the movie. The shooting started in March, and the election was on April 12. During the editing process, I always check with my co-writer. And we started to discuss the end because the original end was really dark. There wasn’t any sunrise. So the sunrise idea came later, from my optimistic part. It’s not too much because I’m not absolutely optimistic. I just have a tiny little hope. [The country], like the house is still in the same shape. So, you need to do a lot of work.
Are you working on a new movie?
With the political change in the election, there will be a new [film funding] system in Hungary. We haven’t had any public money for ages. If you know that you won’t have more than 200,000 euros ($233,000) for a film, then you cannot think high concept. But I hope that now we can start with a blank page and just write what we want to write.
