‘Justice’ Review: Doug Liman’s Brett Kavanaugh Documentary Wants Our Outrage [Sundance]

EXCLUSIVE: Starz New England-set eight-episode drama series, The Venery of Samantha Bird, has added Mission: Impossible actor Henry Czerny and Desperate Housewives actor Doug Savant in recurring roles.

Jim Mahoney was one of Hollywood’s go-to guys. He spent 60+ years in public relations, guiding the public images of Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Christie Brinkley, Peggy Lee, and hundreds more.

With a long and varied career under his belt, Jake Gyllenhaal has earned the right to develop whatever projects he wants — and it looks like he wants to work with every A-list action director he can get his hands on. With recent collaborations with Antoine Fuqua (“The Guilty“) and Michael Bay (“Ambulance“), as well as his upcoming remake of “Road House” with director Doug Liman,” Gyllenhaal is well on his way to building an impressive mid-career action resume.

EXCLUSIVE: Brillstein Entertainment Partners is exploring a sale of its venerable management/production company. Several are circling, but sources said Casey Wasserman has emerged as a frontrunner to bring BEP into the fold alongside his formidable sports and music divisions.

The new Broadway production of Parade starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond has completed casting, with rehearsals beginning today for the February 21 preview.

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.

Bachelor Nation is a small world. Ben Higgins and ex-fiancée Lauren Bushnell‘s husband, Chris Lane, competed in the same charity golf tournament — and couldn’t avoid a close run-in.

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.

After an intense multi-studio bidding war, New Line Cinema has acquired the original screenplay “Weapons” from the filmmaking team behind the award-winning horror thriller “Barbarian,” according to an individual with knowledge of the project.The project is from writer/director Zach Cregger, who will also produce alongside his “Barbarian” producing team: Roy Lee of Vertigo and J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures.

New Line Cinema won a heated auction to win Weapons, a film it will fast track with the filmmaking team behind the horror thriller Barbarian. Zach Cregger wrote the script and will direct, and he’ll produce alongside his Barbarian producing team: Roy Lee of Vertigo and J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures. Vertigo’s Miri Yoon also produces.

The cost of living crisis has hit the U.K. hard, but you wouldn’t guess from the trio of films screening in the official selection at Sundance. Rye Lane, in Premieres, is a goofy love story set in south London; Girl, in World Dramatic, is a tender parent-child drama set in Glasgow; and Scrapper, also in World Dramatic, is a curious mixture of the two. It deals with issues such as social care, single parenting, truancy, and grief, but director Charlotte Regan handles these matters with a candy-colored levity that can quite often be charming, in a whimsical, Wes Anderson way, but sometimes just plain baffling (there’s a reason why you don’t see talking spiders in a Ken Loach movie).

Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, sparkling in her feature debut) likes to believe that she’s no ordinary British-Pakistani teenager. Her dreams, for instance, always seem outsized — she doesn’t just want to learn martial arts but rather perfect it so well that she can become a world-class professional stunt woman.

Spanning three time periods and two continents, “Past Lives,” the directorial debut of Celine Song (“Endlings”), tells the story of two childhood friends and sweethearts pulled apart by time, circumstance, and fate. They come back together and end in a way that might subvert the romantic fantasies of the audience — but this only shows the important roles people play in our lives, even if it’s not what we expected.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Disembodied voices start us off in “Past Lives,” making guesses at who Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro) are to each other as they sit at an NYC bar.

“From the YouTube sensations…” isn’t exactly the phrase you want to hear going into a film — horror or otherwise. This set-up brings a certain amount of baggage that the audience will be hard-pressed to shake, regardless of the filmmaker’s talent.

Richard Pryor used to do a bit on the differences between Black and white churches – one that was often revised and revisited by his many imitators in the decades that followed. But one thing he got particularly right, beyond the lameness of the hymns and the restrained quality of the ministers, is the eerie quiet of white churches, the way that the fires of hell and the sins of man can be described in tones barely more threatening than a hot dish recipe.

A surprise documentary unveiled at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday night revealed new sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and raised disturbing questions about whether the FBI ever actually investigated his behavior.The most heart-wrenching footage in the documentary by director Doug Liman and producer Amy Herdy involved a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale. Deborah Ramirez went on camera for the first time to detail her story of being sexually harassed by Kavanaugh in front of their friends during a drunken college party in the 1980s.

Director Doug Liman says his self-funded Brett Kavanaugh documentary Justice, which premiered at Sundance Friday night, might be far from finished as new tips started pouring within a half hour of the highly-secretive project being announced on Thursday.

The last few years have been great times for documentaries about cults. That does not mean it is a time of introspection about the questing impulses driving people into cults.  The appeal of content—generally of the limited streaming series variety—about cults has more to do with the queasy fright provided by seeing roomfuls of people prostrate themselves before a bored-looking bearded guy on a dais.

Director Doug Liman brings to mind his 1996 breakout “Swingers,” or his 2010s Tom Cruise vehicles like 2014 “The Edge Of Tomorrow.” Or maybe his upcoming “Road House” remake with Jake Gyllenhaal for Prime Video. So, consider this news from the Sundance Film Festival a serious curveball.

Following in the slipstream of Shudder’s surprise hit Skinamarink, Laura Moss’ birth/rebirth is a similarly non-conforming horror, this time one that prioritizes its intriguing but somewhat underdeveloped conceit above the traditional trappings of its genre. Very loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s 19th century novel Frankenstein, the film centers on a decidedly post-modern Prometheus: by making its central scientist female rather than male, Moss’ feature debut short-circuits the usual blunt clichés of a crazy scientist bent on defying nature and instead enters the realm of David Cronenberg’s ’80s heyday with its focus on the human anatomy as a battleground for shady ethics.