In early 2022, Pablo Larraín asked esteemed cinematographer Edward Lachman whether he’d be interested in shooting a movie about Augusto Pinochet, the 20th century dictator responsible for torturing, abducting or executing thousands of Chileans during his 17-year rule. Larraín is the master of the anti-biopic, having directed unorthodox films about …

In April 2019, the Academy made a major change to the category formerly known as best foreign-language film. The following March, at the 92nd Academy Awards, Parasite made Oscar history when it became the first non-English film to take best picture — and the first movie to win the Oscar …

“Schindler’s List was never a cure for antisemitism,” emphasizes Steven Spielberg. “It was a reminder of the symptoms of it.” These days, tragically, antisemitism is all over the headlines: Neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville. The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. The Oct. 7 terrorist attack …

Back in September 2021, a friend sent me a paragraph-long notice in a magazine, reporting that Hollywood director Christopher Nolan was working on a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer. This was disturbing news to me, a co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 720-page …

Director Wes Anderson “wasn’t quite sure for some time” how to go about adapting Roald Dahl’s short story “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” he explains in a long voicemail message. But then he came upon a realization: If he wasn’t directly adhering to the original text, he didn’t really …

On Oct. 21, 2021, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, then 24, arrived at the Bonanza Creek Ranch just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, an hour or so before sunrise and reported to her job as the armorer and props assistant on the set of the low-budget indie Western Rust. She took a COVID …

On Jan. 12, Jennifer Lawrence showed up at a private screening room in Beverly Hills for Jonathan Glazer’s searing Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. When the movie ended, she sat on a makeshift stage and asked questions of Glazer, production designer Chris Oddy and sound designer Johnnie Burn during the …

From the first moments of A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature, A Thousand and One, the audience is in the company of Teyana Taylor’s vivid portrayal of Inez, a woman in 1994 Harlem. She’s just out of Rikers and on a mission to rescue her son, Terry, out of the foster care …

Writer-director Aaron Schimberg offers an endearingly twisted take on actors, playwrights, egos and the plight of the disfigured. The provocative, dark A24 comedy centers on an aspiring thespian with neurofibromatosis (played with tongue-in-cheek gravitas by Sebastian Stan) who finds a cure, only to long for the life he had when …

Since their respective premieres in 2023, two of this year’s best picture frontrunners have contended with very similar criticisms. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which details the invention of the atomic bomb by an American team of physicists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, does not depict the direct outcome of the Manhattan …

On Thursday afternoon, the history-filled Sony lot in Culver City — which was the MGM lot during Hollywood’s Golden Age, home to “more stars than there are in heaven” — welcomed film composer John Williams, after whom the studio’s musical building was being renamed. Williams, 91, who is best known for the …

It’s unusual to see an animated movie make the visual effects Academy Award shortlist — and even more rare for one to earn a nomination. But this season, Sony Pictures Animation’s bold Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse became the first animated feature to advance to the final 10 since 2020’s Soul …