#jesse-welles

#jesse-welles

On May 2, 2025, arts and cultural organizations across the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded. This was part of a larger initiative by the Trump Administration to dismantle not just the NEA, but also other arts advocacy programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Glander and producer Payson made Boys Go to Jupiter with a tiny team and a $30,000 budget, showcasing the potential of indie filmmaking in animation.

In a bustling Boston café, Charlie is instantly smitten with Emma, who is quietly reading a novel. He approaches her, gushing about the book, only to realize she hasn't heard him.

Soderbergh has become such a prolific, tirelessly resourceful, and altogether uncategorizable filmmaker that you have to wonder why the mechanics of the break-in still inspire him.

Emma drops an absolute bombshell in the midst of a game where they're asked to reveal the worst thing they've ever done. Soon everyone around her starts to question how well they really know her.

The Drama is a more localized version of the same thing: If you do something bad (or almost do something bad, or do something bad out of your own control), how mad should people be at you - really?

Worthington describes his career as bizarre, stating, 'I've never had a plan in that regard. I think people have looked at my career and gone, 'What the f*** is he doing?''

Los Angeles is home to more than a dozen one-of-a-kind cinemas that operate on their own terms. Some of these theaters have been around for 100 years, and in classic LA fashion some of them are owned by living LA legends-think Quentin Tarantino and Kyle Ng. Kristen Stewart recently announced she's also jumping into the mix with her purchase of Los Angeles's Highland Theatre.

Jordan Lage is an award-winning actor, writer, director and founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company, which celebrates its 41st anniversary this year. He studied acting at New York University under the tutelage of playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy and then taught acting and playwriting at the Atlantic Theater Acting School for nearly 30 years. Best known for his work performing the plays of David Mamet's, he

I want to make tiny little movies that then don't seem tiny.

On February 8, 1977, Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritzis (Bill Skarsgard) kidnapped Richard Hall, a mortgage company president (Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery), claiming that Hall's company had sabotaged his real estate investment. Kiritzis rigged a 12-gauge shotgun with a hair-trigger "dead man's wire" around Hall's neck, ensuring that Hall would die if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. He held Hall for three days as police, family members, a charismatic local radio DJ (Colman Domingo) and TV reporters were drawn into the standoff.

George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."

In a big studio-backed awards season, it's rare to see much overlap between the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars. A west coast cousin of sorts to the Gotham Awards, the Indie Spirits often celebrate the movies that the Academy skipped over with its nominations. The ceremony itself is also more fun (there's some day-drinking involved) than the more staid guild awards that dot the homestretch ahead of the similarly serious Academy Awards.

In fact, I've made a conscious habit of seeking out successful individuals so I can learn from their experiences. But the man often nicknamed the "King of the Hollywood Blockbuster" continues to elude me. And yet, despite never meeting face to face, Spielberg taught me one of the most important lessons of my entire career. It's a lesson I've learned through engaging with his work.

When a movie ends, Jim Jarmusch almost always gets sick. Which illness varies it could be a cold, the flu, or worse. The phenomenon has taken place for years. In his filmography, the director tends to post more questions than answers. In contrast, when it comes to his health, he has arrived at a clear conclusion: It's fucking hard to make a movie. And that's equally true if it's good or bad. It requires a lot of resistance and concentration.

A false music cue or an overworked script can turn the most powerful story banal. You don't find those slip-ups in Sundance as often as they occur in other places-all five of the current nominees for Best Documentary at the Oscars premiered at Sundance-but the festival also isn't immune to those missteps either. In this dispatch are three works from the US Documentary competition

I was so disgusted. Like, no, you can't have a murder in this sea of people already dying - that's not right, not fair. We can't let this go.

I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn't happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn't feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.

It's not because "Melania" is an exquisitely made, informative documentary. It's not even a documentary. Instead, it falls in the category of glossy advertisement or unconvincing propaganda film with a multimillion-dollar music licensing budget. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to film. That offer came with a jaw-dropping $35 million marketing budget, which Amazon spent while also cutting 16,000 corporate jobs.

After spending the last Knives Out entry on a billionaire's private Greek island, master sleuth Benoit Blanc's latest mystery Wake Up Dead Man takes him to a remote parish in upstate New York to solve the murder of a priest (Josh Brolin). It's a classic locked door mystery, with Brolin's monsignor stabbed mid-mass in a closet a few feet from his pulpit.

Anderson's One Battle After Another continues a resurgence of VistaVision that now includes The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Bugonia. The format, which uses 8-perf 35mm traveling through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to create a larger negative, gained popularity as a non-anamorphic widescreen alternative in the mid-1950s. It was used for everything from Biblical epics ( The Ten Commandments) to musicals ( White Christmas) to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers ( Vertigo and North by Northwest).