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“There are known unknowns,” the ever-shifty Donald Rumsfeld famously once said back in 2002 to a reporter’s question about supposed links between Saddam Hussein and known terrorist groups. “That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know,” the then Defense Secretary added.

Well, this morning a week before Christmas and Hanukkah, we know that 10 film and TV projects have been awarded $108.6 million in California tax incentives to further help jumpstart production in the heart of Hollywood. Truth be told, with names like “Untitled Disney+ Project”, and “Untitled Apple Studios Series II”, there are several projects that just got some sweet credits from the Golden State’s $330 million annual fund that we don’t know a lot about.

What we do know with this somewhat unexpected pre-holiday spree from the California Film Commission administered program, is that they are anticipated to create 3,583 cast and crew jobs.

The villain who everyone remembers from "Star Trek Into Darkness" is Khan "John Harrison" Noonien Singh (Benedict Cumberbatch). In the Kelvin timeline film, Khan's wrath is focused not on James T. Kirk, but on Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller).

Marcus, who's a warhawk and head of intelligence division Section 31, wants Starfleet to bring the Klingon Empire to heel. In the original "Star Trek" timeline, it was the Enterprise crew (in the classic episode "Space Seed") who discovered Khan and his other human "augment" followers. These superhumans had tried to conquer Earth in the 20th century, but were driven out and escaped Earth aboard the SS Botany Bay, going into cryosleep to weather the passing of time.

In the Kelvin timeline, Marcus reawakens Khan and puts him to work designing weapons, holding his other augment followers hostage. Khan escapes and wages a one-man war against Starfleet before fleeing to the Klingon homeworld Qo'noS.

Steve Carell might be best known for his pitch-perfect portrayal of the lovable yet unhinged Michael Scott but the man has many other feats under his belt. Whether it’s Crazy, Stupid, Love, or The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell has proven time and time again that he can be much more than just Michael Scott. Not that we have any complaints about his time as the World’s Best Boss.

The Big Short (2015) | Credits: Paramount Pictures

In 2015, Steve Carell starred in the thriller-comedy film, The Big Short, along with Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling. Now that’s a star cast that can make fans flock to the theatres! Steve Carell plays the role of Mark Baum, FrontPoint Partners’ leader. Here’s what he had to say about his character.

Steve Carell Talks about Mark Baum’s Ethical Dilemma Steve Carell as Mark Baum | Credits: Paramount Pictures

The Big Short...

The hosts of Deadline’s Doc Talk and ElectionLine podcasts are getting together for an unprecedented crossover episode. Think Law & Order: Svu meets Law & Order: Organized Crime; Angel meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural meets Scooby-Doo (Zoinks! — that really happened).

Doc Talk’s John Ridley and Matt Carey and the ticket of ElectionLine’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson debate the greatest political documentary of all time. The candidates may surprise you – one from Brazil, another from Québec, a classic about JFK, a groundbreaking series that ran 14 episodes, and a 7-hour and 47-minute epic ostensibly about an all-star athlete turned accused murderer.

And we plumb a mystery: why conservatives have such a hard time making a documentary that’s any good. Johnson, who is based in Washington, D.C., shares what Steve Bannon had to tell him on that subject. And Patten, Deadline’s Executive Editor, Legal, Labor & Politics,...

Conspiracy theorist and Maga devotee Laura Loomer accompanied former President Donald Trump to a 9/11 remembrance event in Manhattan on Wednesday. Loomer may be best known for chaining herself to the doors of Twitter’s headquarters after she was banned from the platform, and has pushed conspiracy theories — including about the 9/11 terror attacks.

Last year, Loomer tweeted a lengthy post featuring a video that claimed: “9/11 was an Inside Job!” The video accused former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of having a hand in orchestrating the attacks.

Loomer’s appearance at the...

Over the course of his 45-year career, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has interviewed an eclectic array of subjects ranging from physicist Stephen Hawking and execution technician Fred A. Leuchter to controversial figures like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and political strategist Steve Bannon. Yet when he sat down with novelist David Cornwell (aka John le Carré) for his latest film “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Morris realized he had finally met his match. “He was perhaps the most articulate person I have ever interviewed,” Morris told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I got the sense that he was really prepared — probably better prepared than I was.”

The director sat down to interview Cornwell, and before he knew what was happening, his interview subject was interviewing him. “He was interrogating me! The question [he asked]: ‘Who are you?’ It’s so strange and disarming. How do you answer such a question?” In trying to find out who Cornwell was,...

Update, 1:34 Pm: The domestic violence trial of Jonathan Majors has a jury.

After several hours today and yesterday whittling the initial pool of 39 down in the Manhattan criminal court room, six jurors and two alternates have just been selected. Three men and three women will assess the misdemeanor assault and harassment charges against the Creed III actor..

The alternates are one man and one woman.

The trial will not start tomorrow.

Instead Majors, the lawyers, Judge Michael Gaffey and the jurors all back at 10 am Et on December 4 for opening statements The trial is expected to last two weeks.

If found guilty, Majors could face up to a year behind bars for the March 25 incident against ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari.

While the jury and perhaps Majors will not be in court Friday, Judge Gaffey, prosecutors and the defense team will be. “So what we’ll do is we’ll come...

In 2016, John le Carré published a memoir called “The Pigeon Tunnel,” which the late spy novelist — who died in late 2020 — claims had been the working title of nearly all his books at some point. For le Carré, the term describes the passage through which naive birds of sport were forced from their nests, only to emerge as targets for marksmen waiting with rifles poised at a hotel in Monte Carlo. That’s just one of several metaphors Le Carré uses to communicate his cynical worldview in a playful portrait from Errol Morris, whose career-long interest in truth and delusion fits his subject so well, the whole film ultimately feels like a bit of a ploy.

For starters, there was no such person as John le Carré, a pseudonym adopted by David Cornwell, an Oxford-educated ex-spy who turned to literature to process the absurdity of England’s so-called “intelligence” industry, which Cornwell slyly dubbed “the Circus.

Documentary filmmaking legend Errol Morris has built his extraordinary reputation on two principle foundations: what might be called dramatizations (he rejects the terms reenactments or recreations) and interviews of incredible insight and verve. He has conversed with a fascinating array of people — Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, Steve Bannon, owners of pet cemeteries, a woman accused of kidnapping and raping a Mormon missionary, to name a few.

Now, on Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, it’s our turn to interview Morris, about his latest documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel. In the film, which is about to premiere on Apple TV+, the director trains his lens on perhaps his most elusive subject yet – the spy-turned-novelist David Cornwell, known to the world by his pen name, John le Carré.

Morris tells Doc Talk why his encounter with Cornwell made him question the very nature of documentary interviews. And he gets into whether any person...

Less a last will and testament than a mischievously mutual final troll, Errol Morris’s documentary The Pigeon Tunnel sees both its director and its subject, the late spy turned novelist John le Carré (né David Cornwell), engage in a circuitous dialogue, shot over four days near the end of 2019, that’s as charming and playful as it is oblique and ominous.

Contradictions abound, beginning with the film’s title visual, which is taken from le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name. It refers to a hotel in the Mediterranean that a young le Carré would visit with his father Ronnie, a career swindler. Pigeons were bred on the roof, and at certain points of the day the birds were forced to fly through a tunnel where they would emerge over the ocean and be shot at from below by wealthy clientele. Those that survived, rather than break for freedom,...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris unveiled his new documentary The Pigeon Tunnel – about the spy-turned-novelist David Cornwell, aka John le Carré – at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday. Audience buzz afterwards ranked it among Morris’s best work, a canon that includes the classics The Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven.

Morris said it took years for The Pigeon Tunnel to be completed. But during a Q&a, he referenced a different endeavor that apparently isn’t fated to come together – a nascent documentary project on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The controversial figure who guided American foreign policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations recently reached the century mark.

Henry Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday in Bavaria, June 20, 2023.

“Someone wanted me to interview quite recently, on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, Henry Kissinger,” Morris told the audience at the Chuck Jones Theater in Mountain Village. “And as my wife has pointed out,...

While director Adam McKay and star Steve Carell have collaborated four times, their movie projects could not be more different. McKay first directed Carell in 2004’s comedy cult classic Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Although the movie was a star vehicle for Will Ferrell, Anchorman proved a huge success for Carell as well. While Ferrell was already a comedy A-lister thanks to 2003’s Elf, Carell’s hysterical supporting character Brick Tamland made him Anchorman's breakout star. This role, alongside 2005’s The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, cemented Carell’s status as a comedy superstar. McKay and Carell wouldn’t collaborate again until 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

After that, 2015’s real-life satire The Big Short was a major tonal shift for the duo. This dark comedy took a look at 2008's housing market collapse. Carell played Mark Baum, the leader of an independent trading firm who was among the first...

Errol Morris has a thing for facing down squirmy subjects. For the 2003 Oscar-winning “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” he cold-called the former U.S. Defense Secretary for an interview. A decade later, the filmmaker trained his Interrotron on another former Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for “The Unknown Known.”

For the AppleTV+ production “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Morris again captured elusive quarry by recording four days of interviews with John le Carré (neé David Cornwell) in fall 2019; they proved to be the acclaimed author’s last. The film serves as a kind of adaptation of le Carré’s own autobiography, which he wrote after biographer Adam Sisman published “John le Carré: The Biography” in 2015.

“It’s not surprising to me that David took a competitive attitude towards it,” said Morris in a phone interview. “In the most direct way imaginable, he decided, ‘Hey, this...

There are movie stars and then there is Tom Cruise. Forty years a star, enough classics to make listing even a few here pointless, and, now, someone who can stake a legitimate claim to saving Hollywood (or at least jolting some life into that lazy, bloated monstrosity). Last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, with its millions at the box office, helped rescue the movies and movie theaters from the brink of Covid-19 and streaming. This year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh and ostensibly penultimate installment of the secret agent series,...

After an attempted extortion of Ukrainian President Zelensky, criminally obstructing the Russia probe, encouraging a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol to prevent the orderly transfer of power that resulted in several deaths, keeping sensitive national defense information for its trophy value, and assorted lesser grifts and grafts over the past six years, Donald Trump is on the cusp of an indictment in New York County for [drumroll here] falsifying business records in the first degree! “First degree” sounds impressive, but in New York, this crime is designated as a Class-e,...

In the new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, author James Kirchick exposes how fears and prejudices around homosexuality shaped presidential politics for decades, from the Cold War-era purge of gays and lesbians from every level of government to the rise of the conservative movement.

This exclusive excerpt goes behind the scenes of Ronald Reagan’s Washington to meet the powerful Dolan brothers: Terry the fiery founder of the notorious National Conservative Political Action Committee (Ncpac), which pioneered the 30-second attack ad; older brother Tony the Pulitzer...

A trio of powerhouse actors inhabit the lives of three powerhouse political women on Showtime’s “The First Lady.” Emmy winner Gillian Anderson plays Eleanor Roosevelt; Oscar, Emmy and Tony winner Viola Davis plays Michelle Obama; and Golden Globe winner Michelle Pfeiffer plays Betty Ford. Pfeiffer is the only one of the three main stars to not have an Emmy, though she did earn a nomination for 2017’s “The Wizard of Lies.” However, that could change once Emmy voters get a look at Pfeiffer giving a career-best performance.

Pfeiffer arguably has the most difficult job in the series as Ford might be considered the least well-known of the three first ladies. After all, Michelle Obama’s tenure in the White House only ended in the past decade and she continues to maintain a high public profile. Meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation’s longest serving first lady, is still revered as...

Is there a more thankless job in all of Washington, D.C. than first lady? The position is subject to an unreal amount of media scrutiny (second only to the president), requires a ridiculous number of wardrobe changes and demands the patience of a saint — all for the annual salary of… nothing.

Yet despite all outward appearances, being first lady isn’t a job. It’s a “circumstance,” says Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) in Showtime’s “The First Lady,” an anthology drama series that explores how she, Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Michelle Obama (Viola Davis) ended up in such a high-profile, influential, and often fraught circumstance.

Executive produced by Susanne Bier, who also directs all 10 episodes, “The First Lady” doesn’t move chronologically or profile each woman individually; rather, the show works to find parallels between arguably three of the most popular (and influential) first ladies ever.

The first...

As Chicago lawyer Michelle Obama becomes First Lady Michelle Obama in Showtime’s newest drama, her predecessor Laura Bush offers some words of advice and comfort. “You may think you have nothing in common with the First Ladies before you,” Laura tells her, “[but] trust me when I say we all felt that way.” Here, Laura Bush acts as both some benign voice of reason (an odd choice) and also as a mouthpiece for “The First Lady” writ large (odder), which tackles the stories of three First Ladies who share little beyond the fact of living in the White House.

There’s Michelle, played by Viola Davis with Obama’s familiar cadence (if also some very exaggerated stenciled half-moon eyebrows). In the timeline that comes closest to working is Betty Ford, embodied by an especially sharp Michelle Pfeiffer. Rounding out the cast is Gillian Anderson’s Eleanor Roosevelt, whose defining characteristic...

Showtime has released the first trailer for the upcoming anthology series, “The First Lady,” which follows presidential couples throughout American history.

The former U.S. presidents, first ladies, their families and colleagues will be played by a company of A-list stars. The Obamas, Fords and Roosevelts are among those portrayed on the series.

Viola Davis will play Michelle Obama opposite O.T. Fagbenle (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) as Barack Obama. Lexi Underwood (“Little Fires Everywhere”) and Saniyya Sidney (“King Richard”) play their daughters, Malia and Sasha Obama.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Betty Ford, and Aaron Eckhart is Gerald Ford. Younger versions of their characters will be played by Kristine Froseth (“Looking for Alaska”) and Jake Picking (“Top Gun: Maverick”). Dakota Fanning plays their daughter, Susan Ford.

Gillian Anderson portrays Eleanor Roosevelt, with Eliza Scanlen (“Little Women”) playing her in her younger years. Kiefer Sutherland will play Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Christopher Plummer...

Months before the chaotic final weeks of the withdrawal from Kabul, CNN had started work on America’s Longest War: What Went Wrong in Afghanistan, debuting at 9 Pm Et on Sunday and hosted by Jake Tapper, in which eight of the 11 commanding generals were interviewed and their remarks offer a candid assessment of the errors, false assumptions and misguided judgments over the past two decades. Perhaps the most difficult question to these architects of U.S. strategy is: Was it worth it? One of the more surprising answers comes from Karl Eikenberry, who served as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and later as U.S.ambassador, who said that it was “not worth the cost.” “That’s a shocking thing for a general to say,” said Tapper, who has been covering the war and authored the book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor. “That was a moment where I saw,...

One of the principal architects and salesmen of the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, is dead, his family reported on Twitter. The cause of death was multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.

Donald Rumsfeld enjoyed a decades-long career in Washington. He served as a Republican in Congress from Illinois in the 1960s. He was appointed as a counselor to President Richard Nixon, then White House chief of staff and later defense secretary under President Gerald Ford in the 1970s. After a corporate career, he returned to D.C. to serve as secretary...

Donald Rumsfeld, a Washington D.C. fixture who served in Congress and as Secretary of Defense for Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, has died at the age of 88.

His family confirmed the news on Wednesday with a statement that says at the time of his death, Rumsfeld was “surrounded by family in his beloved Taos, New Mexico. History may remember him for his extraordinary accomplishments over six decades of public service, but for those who knew him best and whose lives were forever changed as a result, we will remember his unwavering love for his wife Joyce, his family and friends,...

Donald Rumsfeld, who was the TV face of the George W. Bush Administration’s War in Iraq, has died just days shy of his 89th birthday, according to a statement from his family.

“It is with deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of Donald Rumsfeld, an American statesman and devoted husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather. At 88, he was surrounded by family in his beloved Taos, New Mexico,” the family said in a statement released Wednesday.

“History may remember him for his extraordinary accomplishments over six decades of public service, but for those who knew him best and whose lives were forever changed as a result, we will remember his unwavering love for his wife Joyce, his family and friends and the integrity he brought to a life dedicated to country.”

A statement from the family of Donald Rumsfeld: pic.twitter.com/AlKYxVvqgF

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice...

“Good to be back!” were the first words from Joe Biden tonight in his first address to a joint session of Congress, sort of.

This probably wasn’t the exuberant address to Congress that the creature of Congress thought he’d be giving when he first announced he was running for president for the third time in 2019. Yet, on the eve of his 100th day in office, a big government boosting Biden, to paraphrase ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, took to the moment he has been handed, not the one he might have wanted or wished to have.

“In another era when our democracy was tested, Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, in America, we do our part,” Biden proclaimed added the end of the just over one hour speech. “That’s all I’m asking. That we all do our part.”

Seeing the crises of the last few years as an opportunity...

Exclusive: Emmy nominee Regina Taylor (I’ll Fly Away) is set as a series regular portraying Michelle Obama’s mother, in Showtime’s upcoming anthology series The First Lady. Also cast in recurring roles are Saniyya Sidney (Fences) as Sasha Obama, newcomer Julian DeNiro as young Barack Obama and Evan Parke (Django Unchained) as SS Allen Taylor, Michelle Obama’s first and longtime security agent. They join previously announced stars Viola Davis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gillian Anderson.

The First Lady, created by Aaron Cooley and produced by Lionsgate TV and Showtime, is a revelatory reframing of American leadership, told through the lens of the women at the heart of the White House. Season 1 focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt (Anderson), Betty Ford (Pfeiffer) and Michelle Obama (Davis).

Taylor’s Marian Shields Robinson, Michelle Robinson Obama’s mother and Barack Obama’s mother-in-law, is a practical, forthright and honest member of the Obama family...

Exclusive: Showtime has rounded out the cast for its upcoming anthology series The First Lady. Aya Cash (The Boys), Jake Picking (Hollywood), Cayden Boyd (The Resident), Marc Hills (Snatchers), Ben Cook (Paterno), Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer (Bridge and Tunnel), Thomas E. Sullivan and Patrice Johnson Chevannes (Chambers) have been cast in the series, joining previously announced stars Viola Davis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gillian Anderson.

The First Lady, created by Aaron Cooley and produced by Lionsgate TV and Showtime, is a revelatory reframing of American leadership, told through the lens of the women at the heart of the White House. Season 1 focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt (Anderson), Betty Ford (Pfeiffer) and Michelle Obama (Davis).

Previously announced cast also includes Lexi Underwood as Malia Obama, O-t Fagbenle as Barack Obama and Derek Cecil as Donald Rumsfeld.

Cash will play Esther Liebowitz, press secretary to Betty Ford, who often butts heads with...

When Kevin Macdonald set out to make “The Mauritanian,” the director must have found himself identifying to some degree with defense attorney Nancy Hollander. The lawyer, played here by Jodie Foster, braved insult and scorn when she took up the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was arrested in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At the time (and likely to this day), many in the U.S. military believed Slahi to be involved in aiding and perhaps even recruiting the hijackers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center. He had confessed as much under torture — but then, who wouldn’t?

For Hollander, taking Slahi’s side was an extremely unpopular position, and one that Macdonald — a Scottish filmmaker who has been repeatedly drawn to hot-button political topics and controversial characters — embraces with a righteous fervor. No one can accuse Macdonald, who is not American, of being unpatriotic,...

The January 6 assault on the Capitol by insurrectionists left many Americans shocked, ashamed, and glued to their TV sets. Errol Morris was one of them. For years, the filmmaker has documented the tragic and dangerous actions of powerful men and the lies they tell the world, most prominently in his Oscar-winning portrait of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. But the violent outbreak on Wednesday echoed a more-recent subject of Morris scrutiny: Steve Bannon.

“He is one of the evil geniuses behind it all,” Morris said in a phone call from his office on January 7. He’s got the proof on film with his 2019 documentary “American Dharma,” which pitted the director against Bannon, Trump’s notorious campaign director-turned-senior advisor, the alt-right hero and former Breitbart News publisher who exploited raging and disenfranchised white conspiracy theorists and cemented the seditious rage at the core of Trump’s base.

Bannon relishes his role.

Rudy Giuliani is going to be a big winner this year. Forget about the looming 2020 US presidential election, as there’s a more fascinating contest on the horizon, at the 41st Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies, which honor the worst the film industry has to offer each year. This is not Russian disinformation and it is not “fake news.”

The former New York City mayor, once known heroically as “America’s Mayor” in the wake of 9/11, has been a consistent fixture on TV over the last few years in both his capacity as a vocal GOP surrogate and personal attorney for President Donald Trump. Earlier this year Giuliani hit peak notoriety as a central figure in the Ukraine scandal that led to the President’s impeachment by Congress.

See‘The Midnight Sky’ trailer: George Clooney poised to bring sci-fi back to Oscars in a big way [Watch]

More recently, in the...

If a movie about geopolitics centered around the true story of “Sergio” Vieira de Mello, a United Nations diplomat from Brazil, doesn’t strike you as must-viewing during a pandemic, you couldn’t be more wrong. What better time to celebrate a man who put human rights above politics as usual? Sergio, a Sundance sleeper debuting on Netflix on April 17th, is history brought to life, with a few extra bells, whistles, and caveats. Director Greg Barker, working from a frustratingly soft script by Craig Borten, takes dramatic license with...

The assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by an American drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport last week has brought the U.S. to the precipice of yet another war in the Middle East.

The Trump administration’s sudden, violent confrontation with Iran stands in contrast to the methodical march to war with Iraq under George W. Bush and his neoconservative cabinet in 2003. But the rhetoric around the two conflicts has been strikingly similar — as has the reliance on “razor thin” evidence of an imminent threat to establish a cause for war.

I am the son of a Vietnam veteran. Though I wasn’t alive in 1971 when the Pentagon Papers emerged, the very mention of them makes my blood boil. It is one thing to know that the most important man in your life, the one who helped later give it to you, volunteered to serve his country and ended up in a conflict that had — to be charitable — questionable morals and objectives with the transparency of an opaque cataract. Then later, as a student, I learned of Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release...

Errol Morris’ American Dharma Screens at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium(470 E Lockwood Ave) Sunday December 8th through Tuesday December 10th. The film begins each evening at 7:00pm. A Facebook invite for the event can be found Here

MacArthur Genius Grant winner Errol Morris has long been attracted to those on the fringes of society and/or problematic figures. He has made past documentaries about people on death row (The Thin Blue Line), those involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal (Standard Operating Procedure), a Holocaust denier (Mr. Death), Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known), and Robert McNamara. And yet American Dharma, a feature-length interview with Steve Bannon, is the Morris film that has most struck a cultural nerve. Never one to shy away from tangling with controversy, and more than capable at holding his own in an interview when need be, Morris offers American Dharma as a vital text to...

Alison Klayman’s intriguing documentary tracks the slippery strategist following his departure from the Trump White House

Audiences should be wary of documentaries featuring charmingly roguish, twinkly-eyed reactionary villains who play liberal film-makers for suckers. This is what happened during Errol Morris’s feeble film about Donald Rumsfeld. And Morris’s own study of media executive and White House strategist Steve Bannon, American Dharma, was considered a failure because slippery-yet-cordial Bannon wouldn’t take the bait.

Bannon, himself a dabbler in film-making who managed the Us video release of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, knows the score. But Alison Klayman’s film does better than most, as she follows Bannon in the luxury wilderness period that followed his sacking by Donald Trump – pursuing a grisly consciousness-raising world tour of far-right media organisations, breaking bread with blandly self-pitying lite-fascists all over Europe and travelling on a handsome private jet. Who’s paying for that,...

Exclusive: Oscar winner Chris Cooper (Adaptation) is joining Steve Carell and Rose Byrne in Jon Stewart’s sophomore feature as writer-director Irresistible, which we can confirm will be backed by Focus Features.

Set amidst a heated political campaign trail, the comedy is being produced by Vice and Moonlight producers Plan B with Focus and former The Daily Show host Stewart. Focus and Universal Pictures International will distribute the film worldwide with shoot due to get underway this spring.

Focus’s Josh McLaughlin, president of production, will oversee the film. Additional plot details are being kept under wraps for now.

Focus Features chairman Peter Kujawski said, “In the age of fake news, Jon Stewart continues to be the real deal. He’s been making us laugh at the bipartisan commitment to bending the truth for years, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with him and Plan B as...

J.C. Chandor has the same energy as the squad on screen in Triple Frontier. You can read his thoughts giddily bouncing around his head before they can spill out. It doesn’t matter if you ask him about stunt helicopter crashes or character psychology, he taps into wells of energy when talking about his cinematic work. This story by Mark Boal and executive produced by Kathryn Bigelow covers familiar territory within the masculine heist film but is visually distinct, courtesy of cinematography by Roman Vasyanov.

Although the movie is attributed to Chandor, it’s clear from our discussion that Triple Frontier belongs to the non-auteur tradition in Hollywood, but it also doesn’t come across as generated by Netflix’s algorithm. We discussed his writer, cast, and cinematographer’s contributions on the biggest project he’s helmed to date. Chandor talks about creating a nearly CGI-free, stunt helicopter crash that...

The solemn and gruff Dick Cheney is not someone you would expect to be a chipper, song and dance man, but Adam McKay’s Best Picture-nominated film “Vice” nearly featured a lavish musical number.

McKay directed a sequence in which Steve Carell’s Donald Rumsfeld is showing Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney the ropes inside a D.C. cafeteria, but it was ultimately cut from the movie. Rumsfeld starts to explain that every interaction and meeting could be a win or lose opportunity and chance for advancement, when who should stand up to burst out into song but Brittany Howard, the bluesy frontwoman for rock band Alabama Shakes.

Howard sings about the more underhanded techniques politicians use to get things done, like strategically leaking things to the press but then being publicly outraged about it as a way of preventing people from sitting into meetings.

Also Read: Before Christian Bale...

During the “Vice” press tour, the cast and crew revealed that the was a musical number that was cut from the eventual eight-time Oscar nominee. Now you can finally see it, and well, it was the right call to cut it.

Thanks to our sister site Rolling Stone, you can watch the ditty below, which will also be an extra on the DVD and Blu-Ray releases for the film, out April 2 (it’s out on digital on Tuesday). The number, which runs two minutes and 20 seconds, features vocals from Alabama Shakes‘ Brittany Howard and was from the sequence early in the film when Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) shows Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) the D.C. ropes. As Rumsfeld shares his pearls of wisdom about climbing the ladder and leaking things to the press over lunch, Howard and other D.C. staffers break out into song and dance. It was choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler of “Hamilton.

Adam McKay's unflattering Dick Cheney biopic Vice — which earned eight Oscar nominations and won an Academy Award for makeup and hairstyling — had a lot of unconventional moments, but one that was ultimately cut from the final film was an elaborate song-and-dance number set in the congressional cafeteria, during which Donald Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell, explains how Washington works to a young Cheney (Christian Bale).

While it never made the final cut, the number got a lot of attention after Oscar-nominated editor Hank Corwin admitted that he struggled with what to do with it — and now it ...

Adam McKay's unflattering Dick Cheney biopic Vice — which earned eight Oscar nominations and won an Academy Award for makeup and hairstyling — had a lot of unconventional moments, but one that was ultimately cut from the final film was an elaborate song-and-dance number set in the congressional cafeteria, during which Donald Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell, explains how Washington works to a young Cheney (Christian Bale).

While it never made the final cut, the number got a lot of attention after Oscar-nominated editor Hank Corwin admitted that he struggled with what to do with it — and now it ...

Adam McKay‘s Vice is a very off-the-wall biopic of Dick Cheney, but there was one moment apparently too wacky to include: a musical number. The number comes early in the film, where Christian Bale‘s Cheney is learning the ins and outs of politics from Steve Carell‘s Donald Rumsfeld. McKay talked about the scene previously, and verified it […]

The post You Can Now Watch the Deleted ‘Vice’ Musical Number appeared first on /Film.

When filmmaker Adam McKay shot his Dick Cheney biopic, Vice, it originally included a surprise musical number that featured Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard. In the clip, premiering at Rolling Stone, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), attempts to explain to a young Cheney (Christian Bale) how things work in Washington, D.C. “You have to look at this town like a big chessboard,” Rumsfeld says, paving the way for Howard to take the reins.

“So you want to climb that ladder, where power’s served upon a patter?” she sings. “Hear only...

Five Special Forces veterans unleash U.S. fury at the border area of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, otherwise known as the Triple Frontier, in J.C. Chandor’s entertaining if familiar morality tale. Checking off a few boxes in the Netflix algorithm and no doubt relevant to our cartel age, the story is one part getting the band back together, one part Donald Rumsfeldian get-rich-quick scheme, and one part The Treasure of Sierra Madre. If you’re looking for more nuanced artistic fare, add Happy as Lazzaro to your queue. Triple Frontier is at its best when it is simply five guys bro-ing out with machine guns. How compelling that sounds to a viewer will be a strong indicator of whether it’s worth clicking play.

The group of veterans are lured back into the game by Santiago (Oscar Isaac), the only one of the five still in the field.

The 91st Annual Academy Awards were finally held on Sunday night, February 24, after months of anticipation. Heck, we were already considering this year’s Oscars when “Black Panther” was released more than a year ago. So who won, who lost, what were the biggest surprises, and what did it all mean in the context of the entire awards season? Follow along below for our live, minute-by-minute report and analysis of all the winners as they’re announced.

SEE2019 Oscars: Full list of winners (and losers) at the 91st Academy Awards [Updating Live]

This Oscar season was nothing if not turbulent, both in terms of the top contenders and the show itself. Should there be an award for Best Popular Film? Should they move some category announcements to the commercial breaks? Should anyone host the show after the controversy surrounding Kevin Hart? Who should present what categories? And how many of the nominated songs should be performed?...

The comedy “Holmes and Watson” upset the derided biopic “Gotti” for Worst Picture at the 39th Annual Razzie Awards, which were announced right before midnight on Friday night, February 22. These prizes, rewarding the worst films and performances of the year, were revealed less than 48 hours before those other Hollywood awards will be given out. Check out the complete list of winners in all 10 categories here, and scroll down for the winners listed by film below.

“Holmes and Watson” won four awards total. It also claimed Worst Director (Etan Cohen), Worst Supporting Actor (John C. Reilly) and Worst Remake, Ripoff or Sequel. This was the first Razzie win for Reilly, who is a past Oscar nominee for “Chicago” (2002), but he’s not alone. “Holmes” was produced by Adam McKay, who previously directed Reilly and Will Ferrell in the better-received “Step Brothers” (2008) and is currently nominated for three Oscars for writing, directing...

Nasal plugs, K-y Jelly, yellowing dental veneers - the key items scattered on set of the Academy Award-nominated film Vice sound more like what you'd find in a nursing home medicine cabinet than beauty products. And yet, these are just a few of many things the movie's makeup team used to transform a star-studded cast into rising politicians.

More specifically, Christian Bale looked nearly unrecognizable as former VP Dick Cheney, as did Amy Adams as his public image-minded wife Lynne, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush, and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. "We needed to create over 75 'likeness' makeups of iconic characters across five decades within a 50-day shooting schedule - these products were indispensable," hair and makeup department lead Kate Biscoe told Popsugar.

"Throughout each decade, it was evident that Washington DC was dominated by very clean-cut men. No one stood out and you certainly didn't get ahead in...

After cutting the subversive complexities of “The Big Short” with Adam McKay, editor Hank Corwin quickly realized that it was just a warm up for “Vice,” the Shakespearean dramedy about the unprecedented rise to power of political operative-turned VP Dick Cheney (Oscar nominee Christian Bale).

“This was very provocative and really hard,” said Corwin, who earned his second Oscar nomination for this wacky, non-linear, surreal farce. “But life isn’t linear, and films shouldn’t be either. There’s so much ambiguity in power and the pursuit of power, and we looked at ‘Patton’ as a model of ambiguity.

“With ‘The Big Short,’ I tried to contextualize things with the culture. On this, we didn’t fall into it as much. Initially, when we started in Wyoming, we wanted it to feel like ‘Giant.’ We treated Dick Cheney as an Everyman in his pursuit of power, under the influence of...

Vice.

Writer, director and producer Adam McKay's film is a searing, nontraditional one that traces the life and rise of Dick Cheney — from his Wyoming days to becoming the 46th vice president of the United States — with acerbic wit, satire and unconventional breaks in structure, including a fake ending and characters speaking Shakespearean dialogue.

The $60 million Annapurna release, which earned eight Oscar noms, stars a virtually unrecognizable Christian Bale as Cheney; Amy Adams as his wife, Lynne; Steve Carell as Cheney's mentor, Donald Rumsfeld; and Sam ...

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Vice.

Writer, director and producer Adam McKay's film is a searing, nontraditional one that traces the life and rise of Dick Cheney — from his Wyoming days to becoming the 46th vice president of the United States — with acerbic wit, satire and unconventional breaks in structure, including a fake ending and characters speaking Shakespearean dialogue.

The $60 million Annapurna release, which earned eight Oscar noms, stars a virtually unrecognizable Christian Bale as Cheney; Amy Adams as his wife, Lynne; Steve Carell as Cheney's mentor, Donald Rumsfeld; and Sam ...

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