Per People magazine: “The inside of each watch was engraved with personal messages to each individual from the actor. Marinas shared a look at the watches in his Instagram Stories, calling it the ‘best wrap gift ever’ and revealing his watch read ‘The John Wick Five’ along with the message, ‘Jeremy Thank you Keanu JW4 2021.’” “John Wick 4” once again reunites Reeves with director Chad Stahelski, who happens to have served as Reeves’ stunt double during the making of the original “Matrix” trilogy....

“A festival can be quite highbrow and also entertaining at the same time,” Nazzaro told Variety in a statement. “That is why for this year’s lineup we have selected several comedies and also some genre movies, as well as straightforward auteur films.” Variety also notes of the Locarno lineup: “As for gender parity in this year’s Locarno lineup, Nazzaro noted that the Filmmakers of the Present section, which is dedicated specifically to discoveries, features nine out of fifteen entries by female directors....

The “Bones and All” director revealed that he “wasn’t interested at all in the shock value” of adapting a cannibal love story from Camille DeAngelis’ novel of the same name. Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell star as a ravenous nomadic couple who live off the land (and the people) they encounter. Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, and David Gordon Green also star in the film penned by “Suspiria” scribe David Kajganich....

Maïmouna Doucouré, the director behind controversial film “Cuties,” is confirmed to write and direct the upcoming Baker biopic, with Baker’s sons Jean-Claude Bouillon Baker and Brian Bouillon Baker supporting the Studiocanal film. “I am very excited to be involved in this wonderful project. Josephine Baker is such an inspiration for me and so many people around the world,” Doucouré said in a press statement. “It’s a huge honor and also a beautiful challenge to board this project with Studiocanal....

Mikkelsen took over the role of Gellert Grindelwald for “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” the third “Harry Potter” prequel film, after Depp lost a UK libel trial in November 2020 relating to abuse allegations from Amber Heard. (The film was released in March 2022.) “Obviously, well, now the course has changed — he won the suit, the court [case] — so let’s see if he comes back,” Mikkelsen told Deadline about Depp’s possible return....

“It’s a conversation that I’ve had with my team, just to be on the lookout for up-and-coming filmmakers that are making interesting and different stuff,” Monroe said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “We all are trying to be up on the short films that come out of film festivals and the smaller movies. I try and pay attention to that as much as possible. It’s part of my job....

After breaking out in Netflix’s viral hit series “Stranger Things” to releasing a new album and leading indie films like Gia Coppola’s “Mainstream” and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s “Do Revenge,” premiering September 16, It Girl Hawke refuses to take a break. “I mean, I’ve done a bunch of stuff on my little hiatus from ‘Stranger Things,’” Hawke joked to IndieWire during a recent interview. “I’m going to sneak in under the wire before I go back to do more ‘Stranger Things....

Five-time Emmy nominee Williams died of a drug overdose in September 2021 at age 54. The “Lovecraft Country” and “Boardwalk Empire” actor portrayed gay drug dealer Omar in “The Wire” from 2002 to 2008. “As for Omar’s homosexuality, it was groundbreaking 20 years ago, and I admit that at first I was scared to play a gay character,” Williams penned in an excerpt from his memoir “Scenes From My Life” co-authored with Jon Sternfeld, via Vulture....

She’s a studious astrophysics major whose very long-distance boyfriend (Mason Gooding) doesn’t seem to care that his perfect match is afraid of flying. He’s a floppy-haired dreamer who can’t afford the $937,000 space ticket, but feels so destined for a great adventure that he sneaks aboard a shuttle in pursuit of his crush, Ginny (Emily Rudd). At heart, it’s a story you’ve seen countless times before — often told on a much larger scale....

There were other surprises: Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon” triumphed in animation over the studio’s Oscar-frontrunner, “Encanto,” which has won a slew of guild awards, and “The Rescue” (Disney+) took feature documentary over Oscar-frontrunner “Summer of Soul” (Searchlight Pictures). Additionally, “Cliff Walkers” (Viki) earned foreign language honors, and “Infinite” (Paramount +) grabbed non-theatrical feature. In terms of the Oscar race, both “Dune” and “West Side Story” were given a boost, with the 58th annual Cinema Audio Society Awards for sound mixing coming March 19 (at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown)....

The Verge reports that users can “stream at either 0.5x or 0.75x speeds for slowed-down viewing and 1.25x or 1.5x speeds for faster watching,” but that “subscribers must opt in to use the playback speeds with every single title they want to watch; it won’t just remain active when you pick something else to watch. This prevents people from accidentally watching everything at 1.5x speed if they don’t want to....

Turns out, the iconic final girl made her final appearance in “Scream 5,” released earlier this year and marking the first “Scream” film without late Craven’s involvement. Campbell confirmed the rumors on June 6, telling press in a statement that salary negotiations led to her exit. (Deadline first reported the news.) “Sadly I won’t be making the next ‘Scream’ film,” Campbell said. “As a woman, I have had to work extremely hard in my career to establish my value, especially when it comes to ‘Scream’....

In the Best Picture category, “Nomadland” beat out “The Father,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “Mank,” “Minari,” “Promising Young Woman,” “Sound of Metal,” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” This is also the first time since the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony that Best Picture was not presented at the very end of the ceremony. At that Oscars, the show ended with a lengthy tribute to Charlie Chaplin, culminating in the silent icon winning an Honorary Award after having been exiled from the U....

Paramount — along with Disney, which saw “Cruella” open to an initial $21.3 million — gambled that theaters would be ready to approximate the business they hoped for last year. That’s happened, even with a 45-day theatrical window (for “A Quiet Place Part II”; “Cruella,” of course, is now available to Disney+ subscribers with a $29.95 surcharge). The result is a three-day estimate for “A Quiet Place Part II” of $48....

And while many bigger films pushed back to post-Oscar 2021 and the slimmer fall festivals didn’t serve as the usual awards launchpads, they did brand smaller titles, including four of the films whose directors will compete for the Best Director brass this year. Two of them came straight from Sundance 2020, which yielded two mighty Oscar contenders, Lee Isaac Chung’s jury and audience-award winning farmland family drama “Minari” (A24), starring nominees Steven Yeun and Youn Yuh-jung, and rookie writer-director Emerald Fennell’s stylized revenge fantasy “Promising Young Woman” (Focus Features), starring Best Actress frontrunner Carey Mulligan....

Literary adaptations While David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky may have been defeated by big-screen adaptations of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction novel “Dune” (Warner Bros./HBO Max), Oscar-nominated French-Canadian auteur Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”) embraced the chance to bring his trademark visual panache to the sci-fi epic, which will come in two parts. Part One was whittled down from the sprawling novel by the director, veteran Oscar-winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), and Jon Spaihts....

“The Academy’s Board of Governors is honored to recognize four individuals who have made indelible contributions to cinema and the world at large,” said Academy President David Rubin in a statement about this year’s recipients. “Michael J. Fox’s tireless advocacy of research on Parkinson’s disease alongside his boundless optimism exemplifies the impact of one person in changing the future for millions. Euzhan Palcy is a pioneering filmmaker whose groundbreaking significance in international cinema is cemented in film history....

As is so often the case, however, Yotam Ottolenghi got there first. The revered Israeli-born chef, restaurateur, and food writer has become one of the most influential cookbook authors in the world not just on the strength of his recipes, but also because he thinks of them as a link to the past — as an experiential way to reanimate faded eras through taste, smell, and any other sensations that books, films, and museums can only describe....

Just as Delilah’s personal life begins to get more complicated she finds herself in the middle of a legal firestorm, facing off against her best friend, Tamara (Jill Marie Jones), for the first time in her career. Through her work on films like “Janine” and “Stranger Inside,” as well as her contributions to series like “All Rise,” “Dear White People,” and “Queen Sugar,” Dunye consistently gives the world an in-depth look into her views on race, sexuality, and gender....

During a cover story interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Reeves revealed that Paul Dano’s turn as Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson in the 2014 biopic “Love and Mercy” helped inspire the enigmatic villain Dano takes on in “The Batman.” Dano played a younger version of Wilson, who struggled with mental illness; John Cusack starred as the older Wilson. “That character, he’s caught up in his artistry and he struggles to communicate with those around him,” Reeves said of Dano as Wilson....