‘Soul’ Duo Says Pixar Movie Is “Investigation Into What’s Really Going On In Life” – Contenders Film

Allie X is offering fans a special Valentine’s Day treat.

Andra Day is being honored at this year's Palm Springs International Film Awards. The singer and actress will be the recipient of the Breakthrough Performance Award for, the festival announced on Friday.«Few jazz vocalists are more beloved than Billie Holiday, and Andra Day brings Holiday and her iconic voice back to life through a sympathetic and nuanced portrayal that sheds new light on the U.S.

The Walking Dead star Andrew Lincoln has confirmed when the first Rick Grimes spin-off movie is expected to start filming. Andrew departed from the series more than two years ago now, but there have been few updates since then related to the anticipated movie trilogy.

To follow up his 2017 breakout indie hit God’s Own Country, Francis Lee found inspiration in the story of a little-known British fossil collector named Mary Anning. For Ammonite, he embellished what little is known about Anning, fashioning a romantic story for her, and cast Kate Winslet as the enigmatic heroine and Saoirse Ronan as the young woman who cracks her shell.

Andra Day is opening up about how she prepared to play Billie Holiday in Hulu’s upcoming movie, The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Oscar winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley says he had a simple reason for wanting to turn his play, Outside Mullingar, into a movie: location, location, location.

Poland has generated some fresh class distinctions since communist days, a development examined with a shrewd and merciless eye in the country’s Oscar-submitted feature Never Gonna Snow Again. The central figure is a mysterious private masseur, played by the UK-based actor Alec Utgoff, who goes door-to-door carrying with him a folding massage table through a wealthy gated community to offer is services to the numerous and invariably dissatisfied people living in the virtually identical houses.

“A lot of Pixar films are based on personal experiences,” says Onward director Dan Scanlon at Deadline’s Contenders Film awards-season event. “This might be more blatantly autobiographical in some ways.”

Sundance winner The Forty-Year-Old Version is a familiar story to anyone who hits the age of 40, as it makes one re-evaluate life and decide the next steps in one’s career and beyond. For the film’s writer, director and star Radha Blank, it was a personal story — and driven by adversity.

One of the most intensely personal entries in this year’s festival season saw Romanian director Kornél Mundruczó and his writer partner Kata Wéber draw on their own private life for Pieces of a Woman, in which Vanessa Kirby plays Martha, a first-time mother whose daughter dies in childbirth. Ellen Burstyn co-stars as Elizabeth, Martha’s mother, who leads the charge to prosecute the midwife present at the birth.

During Deadline’s Contenders Film panel for Warner Bros’ The Way Back, Ben Affleck addressed just how close to his own life the role of alcoholic basketball coach Jack Cunningham actually comes.

True stories provide fertile breeding ground for awards-season contenders, but few biographies are as rich and strange as that of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay on flimsy terrorism charges as the U.S. fought an often-directionless war on terror.

Irish actress Clare Dunne stars in Herself, a harrowing drama about a single mother who, after escaping an abusive partner, aims to rebuild her life in a unique manner. After months of struggling with the welfare and housing systems, she comes upon the idea of self-building an affordable home and, with the help of friends and neighbors, rebuilds her life and theirs from the ground up.

It took seven years for a sequel to come to fruition from DreamWorks Animation for its 2013 hit The Croods, but as it turns out the timing was just right. The coronavirus pandemic not only impacted the production process for the follow-up The Croods: A New Age, it also actually wound up giving it more gravitas and relevance.

“It’s rare that you find a female character who is so challenging,” Elisabeth Moss says of her role as writer Shirley Jackson in the deeply fictional Shirley. “Challenging as to me as an actor and challenging to the other characters in the film and has so much vulnerability and so many soft spots, but is also so strong, so vocal and sometimes not very nice.

For an independently made film, Amazon’s Sound of Metal has some remarkably complex and sophisticated technical challenges, including its intricate sound design. “We went for it, “ writer-director Darius Marder says of the unique sound work the film called for. “My brother said he wished we had a documentary crew covering because it was such a crazy process. We really pushed the boundaries. It is hard to understand what it really took to get it to work.”

Palm Springs, the comedy written by Andy Siara, directed by AFI grad Max Barbakow in his feature debut and starring a cast including Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, made history a year ago when it broke all sales records at the Sundance Film Festival. It was picked up instantly in a bidding war won by Neon and Hulu jointly and has won critical raves ever since.

One of award season’s more gently romantic offerings is Harry Macqueen’s film Supernova, in which a middle-aged gay couple, Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), take a road trip through England’s Lake District as they visit friends and come to terms with Tusker’s diagnosis with young-onset dementia.