Jonathan Majors In ‘Magazine Dreams’ Pumps It Up At Sundance Premiere

Is 2023 the year Jonathan Majors becomes a household name? With “Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania” and “Creed III” in theaters soon and “Magazine Dreams” doing well with critics at Sundance last month, it sure looks that way. And for Majors, it’s the fruition of a dream whose inspiration comes from a seminal moment as a high-school senior, when he watched Heath Ledger‘s legendary performance as The Joker in Christopher Nolan‘s “The Dark Knight.” READ MORE: ‘Magazine Dreams’ Review: Jonathan Majors Shoulders The Weight Of This Incel, Bodybuilder Drama [Sundance] IndieWire (via EW) reports that Majors’ first viewing of Ledger in Nolan’s 2008 film fueled his ambition to become an actor.

It’s crazy to think that boyish-looking Jonathan Tucker, known for roles in “The Virgin Suicides” (1999), “Hostage” (2005), “In the Valley of Elah” (2007), and “The Ruins” (2008), is now 40 years old. And beyond roles like “Charlie’s Angels” (2019), the perennially youthful-looking actor generally plays nice guys, introverts, and the like.

After making history in 2022 with “CODA,” its first world premiere to win Best Picture, the Sundance Film Festival had a slightly disappointing Oscar tally for 2023. The festival didn’t make the Best Picture cut, but “Living” landed an Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor (Bill Nighy) nomination.

The avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik gets his own adulatory portrait in Amanda Kim’s documentary “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV.” An act of biographical recovery that also, somehow, flattens a controversial artist, Kim’s film provides just enough contextual information to maintain interest, even if it’s never as radical as its titular subject.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Moving succinctly from birth to death, Kim provides a broad overview of Paik’s history and aesthetic interests.

Caught somewhere between a movie and a series, “Willie Nelson & Family” doubles down on the history and mythology of its namesake to stretch the latter into what would have been better served as the former.  Honest, introspective, yet rarely revelatory, the anthology often mistakes the comprehensive for the essential, and while it succeeds in explaining Willie Nelson to its audience, that’s about all it does.

In writer/director A.V. Rockwell’s feature directorial debut, “A Thousand and One,” Inez (a deeply felt Teyana Talyor) has returned to Harlem after spending a year in Rikers Prison.

This is “a place of mountains and myths,” we’re told as a montage of Central Appalachian imagery fills the frame. The mists, buffalo, ferns, and flowing waters intercut with the coal-filled mountains and mining towns that grew up around them.

Mubi has taken the U.S., UK, Ireland and Latin America on the Ira Sachs directed title Passages which made its world premiere in the premiere section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Jonathan Majors pushed his body to its full capacity while preparing for the role of dedicated bodybuilder Killian Maddox in the upcoming movie Magazine Dreams.

In Greek mythology, it holds that for a time, gods and mortals mingled freely, creating demigods whose sole aim was to prove their worth so they might join their celestial kin. For the Greeks, the gods who ruled on mount Olympus formed the idealized version of humans—often possessing super strength to match their perfect physiques.

Sundance U.S. dramatic competition jury members — including Marlee Matlin– chose to leave after the festival fell short of providing proper captioning for deaf and hearing impaired audience members during the Eccles Theatre premiere of Magazine Dreams last night.

“Inspirations for Kang — Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar. Start there,” Jonathan Majors told us at Deadline’s Sundance studio recently about his influences for playing Marvel’s next giant villain, Kang the Conqueror.

a comprehensive examination of every factor, internal and external, that afflicts Killian, as well as their possible solutions, “Magazine Dreams” begins to feel convoluted with too many threads to rein in, all of them with relevant themes.Many of these subplots revolve around Killian expressing frustration and anger against a world that renders him invisible via self-destructive acts, which in turn confront him with police brutality and bigotry. But he also searches for affection in the arms of a sex worker (Taylour Paige) and even engages in a homosexual encounter to try to heal his intimate wounds.

EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed emerging filmmaker D. Smith, whose documentary Kokomo City will world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival later today.

In Greek mythology, it holds that for a time, gods and mortals mingled freely, creating demigods whose sole aim was to prove their worth so they might join their celestial kin. For the Greeks, the gods who ruled on mount Olympus formed the idealized version of humans—often possessing super strength to match their perfect physiques.

Magazine Dreams is a drama and second feature directed by Elijah Bynum, which stars Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett, Taylor Paige, and Harrison Page

EXCLUSIVE: For his first interview on the edgy drama Magazine Dreams that makes its Sundance Premiere tonight, Jonathan Majors was pulling into Park City, after driving for days cross country from New York. While Majors is one of Hollywood’s fastest rising stars after turns in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Lovecraft Country, The Harder They Fall and Da 5 Bloods, he was not going to drive up a small film’s limited budget with pricey airfare. Magazine Dreams is written and directed by Elijah Bynum, and produced by Jennifer Fox and Dan Gilroy, the latter of whom made Nightcrawler. Just like the unhinged photog played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Majors has gone all in physically and emotionally to transform himself into the equally extreme Killian Maddox. An aspiring amateur bodybuilder, Maddox is socially awkward and slavishly devoted to the solitary pursuit of body culture, and the drama traces how his obsession plunges him down the proverbial rabbit hole in an effort to be noticed for his physique. It is a tour de force performance that will conjure memories of De Niro’s Travis Bickle, and the work Majors put in physically is impossible to not notice. Here, Majors talks about the truths about the invisibility and stereotyping of many people, and the darkness that creates combustible conditions that often end in tragedy.