#michael-arias

#michael-arias

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the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded.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.

"Whenever you manage, through cinema, to cast doubt on the assumed nature of things, you might be approaching something really interesting. And when you have done that once, there's no way back."

Cut & Paste Pictures is developing a feature-length documentary chronicling the lifelong friendship between Rise Against guitarist Zach Blair and wrestler Hassan 'MVP' Assad, who will also front an unscripted series about life after prison.

Abraham Vazquez has this lusty, powerful, aching voice. This song is about loss, and you feel it with every inch of intensity that he's performing.

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.

In the film, Bronz's character is commissioned to compose a new national anthem for post-Oct. 7 Israel, and writes a warmongering ballad about destroying Gaza and 'love sanctified in blood.'

We're making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.... As time's gone on, I realized my job is to make sure the films appeal to everybody.

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.

"[Bias] is that thing that stops you being regarded as a person and makes you something smaller. With my accent, I've had that experience where I'm suddenly no longer a person with infinite possibilities and potential - I am 'that Scottish person'. I'm reduced to a noise that comes out of my mouth."

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?

DreamQuil is filled with so many anxieties that now feel commonplace, or that growing leaders in the development of AI will call 'inevitable.' Ads present tidy solutions to Carol before she even realizes she has a problem, as if the tech around her home is listening to every conversation. Some ads even feature her likeness, reaffirming the fears that AI will replace actors like Banks in real life.

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

My father was naturally a great storyteller. He always started with what was almost the end of the story, so he threw you a hook, but then he went back to the middle. He was a great storyteller, always finding ways to get new hooks here and there, to get you to listen to a long story.

You can be alone, with a camera in your hand, and you can walk. In that moment, the medium sheds the expectations attached to narrative production. You don't need to have something specific in your mind. You don't need to have in mind that you have to do something with it at some point. This is freedom.

This turned out to be a very British night for the Baftas, a smidgen more British than usual in fact. It started out with the Hollywood A-listers in the audience being presented with hilarious British snacks, of whose existence they had no more idea than they had of life forms on the moons of Saturn. Emma Stone got some Hula Hoops, Timothee Chalamet had a bag of Scampi Fries and Leonardo DiCaprio got his laughing gear around a Hobnob flapjack.

Bernardo grew up in Monterrey, Mexico. From a young age, movement was part of his life. He rode BMX and mountain bikes daily. That routine shaped his mindset. "Being on a bike teaches you focus," he says. "You fall, you get back up, and you keep going." That early discipline stayed with him. It later showed up in his professional life, even when the work looked very different.

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.

Filmmaker Simplice Ganou, from Burkina Faso, spends his time documenting people and relationships, but when he travels to Winterthur, Switzerland, he faces a new challenge: nobody wants to talk to him.

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.

In all the dystopian visions of the future that the movies have trotted out over the last few decades, the one that sticks the most, surprisingly, is WALL-E. That's not just because of the chastening sight of an over-polluted Earth or those sedentary humans glued to their screens. It's because those quite plausible possibilities mean something different in a kids movie. It's their future, after all.

Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary's world seems enchanting and vast. Bree's work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary's world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands. O'Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life's work making magic real.