EXCLUSIVE: Sundance prize-winning filmmaker Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays, Animals, Good Luck to You Leo Grand) says casting "a version of yourself" is not an easy task. "It's very tricky to do," says Hyde, director of Jimpa, which is premiering today at Park City's Eccles. It's a film that sublimely…

UPDATE: Just heard that Ariana Grande has stayed in London to record this week's Graham Norton TV show Thursday evening. Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande will be in the skies, defying gravity, when Oscar nominations are announced Thursday morning. Both depart from London in the…

EXCLUSIVE: Colman Domingo is joining the cast of Gus Van Sant's hostage thriller Dead Man's Wire after completing his scenes for Edgar Wright's The Running Man. The title of Wright’s film is an apt for an actor who is doing the reverse of Phillip C. McGraw's dictum that ‘it's a marathon, not a…

David Lynch, whose death was announced Thursday, was my motion picture lodestar. When his 1977 movie Eraserhead played at an obscure film festival, now long gone, in Woolwich, London, it was like nirvana for a kid raised on The Sound of Music, Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday and Tommy Steele in H…

EXCLUSIVE: Mia McKenna-Bruce, recipient of last year's BAFTA Rising Star laureate and star of Molly Manning Walker's breakthrough hit How to Have Sex, has joined Claire Denis' new film The Cry of the Guards. She replaces the previously announced Riley Keough. The fast-rising British actress…

EXCLUSIVE: Wicked production sound mixer Simon Hayes says Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba opposite Ariana Grande's Glinda in the musical extravaganza, has the prowess of an Olympian, which enabled his team to achieve vastly more than they'd expected. When Hayes and his unit were setting up…

EXCLUSIVE: Early one morning up in Haddon Hall, a grand Tudor hall in Derbyshire, England, this corpulent, menacing-looking man swathed in a richly brocaded tunic trimmed with fur shuffled over to have a chat with filmmaker Karim Aïnouz and the Oscar-winning actor Alicia Vikander. I had no idea…

It's amazing watching Mike Leigh's film Hard Truths, starring the extraordinary Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin, in an American theater. Another layer is added as audience members, mostly women at the regular afternoon screening I attended, engaged in the story of two sisters who are…

Monica Barbaro, who portrays Joan Baez in James Mangold's powerful awards-season contender A Complete Unknown, about how Bob Dylan — as played by Timothée Chalamet — put his colossal stamp on our rock 'n' roll culture, hails costume designer Arianne Phillips as a "detective" for her ability to track…

EXCLUSIVE: Ariana DeBose sure had some exciting news to share last night. "Fingers crossed,” come this summer she will star in the Jamie Lloyd-directed revival of the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita at the iconic London Palladium, she told me exclusively. The Oscar-winning star…

Those actors scurrying around at the festival in Palm Springs would have been better served witnessing masterclasses in artistry from Viola Davis and Ted Danson, the recipients of Golden Globes honors on Friday night. Not only that, there was Mary Steenburgen and Meryl Streep, too.  And…

EXCLUSIVE: Jon M. Chu learned to use his power in the right way — just as Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba does in Wicked. Chu says that after 15 years working with studios he knew "how the machine works" because otherwise, he says, it's very easy to get "overwhelmed by the pressures of fans, by the…