‘Cassandro’ Director Roger Ross Williams On The Importance Of Telling A Positive Queer Story – Contenders Film L.A.

Rodrigo Reyes joined the cast of Southern Charm in Season 9 and his participation gave Latinos visibility on the Bravo reality series for the first time in the show’s history.

Tracee Ellis Ross and Eddie Murphy are ready to get you into the Christmas spirit. The legendary actors and comedians have come together for Amazon Prime’s Candy Cane Lane, available to stream this Friday, December 1. Murphy plays Chris, a man determined to win his neighborhood’s annual Christmas home decoration competition.

EXCLUSIVE: Teresa Palmer (The Clearing, The Fall Guy), Miranda Richardson (Good Omens, Spider) and Danielle Macdonald (The Tourist, Patti Cake$) and a host of other names have joined Nicole Kidman‘s light-hearted Australian drama series The Last Anniversary.

Illumination’s upcoming film Migration is a comedy about a family of ducks trying to fly from New York to Jamaica. Writer-director Benjamin Renner makes his 3D animation debut, and John Powell wrote the score for his film. Renner told the audience Saturday at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles event that Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri assured him he could pick up 3D animation on the job.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details from the plot of John Wick: Chapter 4. 

“I definitely didn’t want to try and make a puff piece Barbie. I wanted us to run at the scary things as much as we celebrated the wonderful things,” executive producer and star Margot Robbie said during a panel for the movie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles panel on the film. “That’s exactly why I went after Greta [Gerwig], because I was like, ‘She would do that.'”

Air screenwriter Alex Convery and editor William Goldenberg represented the film at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles. The film tells the story of how Nike signed then-rookie Michael Jordan to the sneaker line that became Air Jordan. Even though Air Jordan is one of the most famous brands in the world, Convery said it remained suspenseful because Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) became such a strong character.

Colman Domingo plays civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, in the Netflix film Rustin. Domingo said he felt a responsibility to introduce Rustin to modern audiences.

Neon introduced the Michael Mann-directed Ferrari with a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles on Saturday that featured a discussion with Mann and stars Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley.

Maggie Betts, writer-director of The Burial, spoke about her film’s Oscar-winning stars Saturday at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles event. Jamie Foxx plays a lawyer representing a funeral home owner (Tommy Lee Jones) in a lawsuit against a big corporation. Betts learned she had to give Foxx space for his process.

Kelly Fremon Craig, the writer, director and producer of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, opened up about what inspired her to reach out to Judy Blume to adapt the beloved coming-of-age novel into a film.

By diving headlong into the title role for Flora and Son, Eve Hewson — the daughter of U2 frontman Bono — conquered her fear of singing, the actress said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles in a panel with co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the film’s composer and primary songwriter Gary Clark.

“I think I didn’t realize how lucky I got with this team,” franchise star Anna Kendrick said about DreamWorks Animation‘s Trolls Band Together.

The biggest story of the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin was Black track and field star Jesse Owens winning four gold medals and putting the lie to Adolf Hitler’s theories of race supremacy. A less-heralded U.S. gold medal triumph over host country Nazi Germany glides onto screens this Christmas with The Boys in the Boat from MGM Amazon Studios, directed by George Clooney.

Bottoms writer-director Emma Seligman and star Rachel Sennott came up with the idea for the raunchy teen comedy on a white board, putting down “everything we wanted to see in a movie on the board” from “punching” to “vagina” to “knitting,” said Sennott.

The Peasants would already be a daunting project in the best of times. Like their previous film, Loving Vincent, directors Hugh and DK Welchman oversaw a team of animators painting each frame of the film based on live-action reference material. Hugh, who came to Los Angeles from Poland just for his 12-minute Contenders panel, said The Peasants also had to work around COVID and the Ukraine War.

Writer-producer team Phil Lord and Chris Miller, alongside director Kemp Powers, joined Deadline’s Contenders Film L.A. event on Saturday to discuss world-building, groundbreaking animation and the fun risk they took in creating a character inspired by Daniel Kaluuya for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

An imagined conversation between two eminent historical figures who may or may not have ever met — nobody seems to know — forms the heart of Freud’s Last Session, an intellectual fable from Sony Pictures Classics that grew out of a play and, before that, a book and an Ivy League seminar.

Alexander Payne, director of The Holdovers, said he gets pushback for the kinds of films that he makes but he plans to persevere and hopes there will be more space for “human” stories in theaters.

As far as movies with history go, The Color Purple — about Celie, an abused teenage Black girl in the early 20th century — is as storied as they come. Based on Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer-winning 1982 book, it has been a 1985 Steven Spielberg pic, a Broadway musical in the mid-2000s and a Tony-winning revival play.