Entertainment

Original title: David Keighley, Pioneer of Large-Format Cinema at Imax, Dies at 77 David Keighley, the first chief quality officer for Imax and a veteran of the large-format cinema platform for more than 50 years, has died. He was 77. Keighley died Thursday at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York after a battle with neuroendocrine prostate cancer, his son Geoff Keighley told The Hollywood Reporter. During his career, Keighley helped Imax migrate from showing mainly institutional movies to digitally reformatting Hollywood titles for the local multiplex and fanboy audiences. “David was as close to the human embodiment of Imax as there has ever been, relentless in his drive to deliver awe-inspiring images to audiences around the globe,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond said in a statement. “He was incredibly energized and proud of his work on the upcoming [Christopher Nolan adaptation of] The Odyssey, completing his review of the dailies just days before his death in a bittersweet but fitting capstone to a remarkable career.” The Toronto native oversaw postproduct ...

Original title: ‘A House of Dynamite’ Review: Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson in Kathryn Bigelow’s Precision-Tooled, Viscerally Unsettling Nail-Biter Eight years since her last feature, Kathryn Bigelow returns with an unrelenting chokehold thriller so controlled, kinetic and unsettlingly immersive that you stagger out at the end of it wondering if the world will still be intact. Though it’s less a war film than a drama about the aggressive threat of war, A House of Dynamite is very much of a piece with the director’s later-career gut punches, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a testament to the justifiably high regard in which Bigelow is held that she has drawn such a deep bench of first-rate actors, several of them onscreen for just a brief scene or two yet all making vivid impressions. The large ensemble cast has no weak link. A House of Dynamite The Bottom Line Leaves you breathless. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) Release date: Friday, Oct. 24 Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke Director: Kathryn Bi ...

Original title: Spin Magazine Sale Collapses After Buyer Doesn’t Wire the Money It was supposed to be a new chapter for Spin magazine — and it sounded, at least in terms of the diminished expectations of the current media landscape, like a theoretically decent one, too. Next Management Partners, the Santa Monica-based venture capital firm that owns the Bob Guccione Jr.-edited magazine brand, had a deal in place to sell the publisher to the Dennis Cunningham-run Airtab, a Florida-based events platform that connects bookers with local artists. Talks had been ongoing for the past eight months, both sides had incurred about six-figures on legal bills hammering out the details, a major concert had been planned and a 1,200-word embargoed deal announcement was ready to go. In the lead up, the would-be new owner, Airtab’s Cunningham, told The Hollywood Reporter that he would take the quarterly magazine to a monthly cadence, bump up its circulation to 150,000-200,000 copies, increase the full-time, mostly remote staff of 8 employees by 25 percent over the next year, bolste ...

Original title: Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall Among Five ‘SNL’ Cast Additions A few days after four people departed the Saturday Night Live cast, the NBC sketch series is bringing several new members into its ensemble — including one already familiar to viewers of recent seasons. Ben Marshall, an SNL writer since 2021 and a member of Please Don’t Destroy (along with John Higgins and Martin Herlihy), will join the cast as a featured player for the 2025-26 season. Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Kam Patterson and Veronika Slowikowska have also been named featured players. The announcement of the new featured players comes after a week that saw castmembers Heidi Gardner, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim and Devon Walker leave the show in the largest cast turnover since 2022. Please Don’t Destroy’s filmed segments have been a regular part of SNL for the past four seasons, usually featuring Marshall, Higgins and Herlihy in their office and interacting with that week’s host or other castmembers. Brennan is a stand-up comic who was named a Just for Laughs New Face of Come ...

Original title: Judy Reyes Boards ‘Scrubs’ Revival at ABC Another member of the Sacred Heart Hospital staff will be on call for ABC’s Scrubs revival. Judy Reyes has signed on to the show to reprise her role as Carla Espinosa, Sacred Heart’s head nurse and Dr. Chris Turk’s (Donald Faison) wife. She’ll recur on Scrubs and be billed as a special guest star while continuing her series regular role on another ABC series, High Potential. Reyes joins Zach Braff, Sarah Chalke and and Faison in the revival, which ABC formally picked up in July after several months of development. It’s set for a midseason premiere in 2025-26. Reyes was a regular on eight of Scrubs’ nine seasons on NBC and ABC; she didn’t appear in the final, medical school-set ABC season. The show explained her absence at the time by saying she left her hospital post after giving birth to her and Turk’s second child. After several years of the Scrubs cast and creator Bill Lawrence discussing a revival, the show went into development in late 2024. Braff signed on to reprise his role of ...

Original title: Nicola Coughlan and Lydia West Kick Off Filming on Season 2 of Channel 4’s ‘Big Mood’ (Exclusive) Filming is underway on the second season of Channel 4‘s hit comedy Big Mood, The Hollywood Reporter can reveal, with stars Nicola Coughlan and Lydia West snapped in an exclusive behind-the-scenes look. Written and created by Camilla Whitehill, season one of Big Mood became Channel 4 streaming’s biggest new comedy launch since Derry Girls. The upcoming six-episode season two will air on Channel 4 in the U.K. and on Tubi in the U.S. and Canada next year. Bridgerton and Derry Girls superstar Coughlan returns in Big Mood alongside West, best known for her role in It’s A Sin. They are joined in the second instalment by Hannah Onslow (This City is Ours), Robert Lindsay (My Family), Marina Bye (We Were the Lucky Ones), Marcus Collins (Mrs. Doubtfire on the West End), Munroe Bergdorf (Love and Rage: Munroe Bergdorf), Kyran Thrax (RuPaul’s Drag Race U.K.), Kelly Campbell (Bad Sisters), Leo Wan (Bridgerton), Zachary Hart (Slow Horses) and John Locke (Vindication Swim). Returning cast members inc ...

Original title: ‘The Stranger’ Review: François Ozon’s Bold and Beautiful Adaptation of the Classic Novel by Albert Camus Before Dean Moriarty in On the Road and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, there was Meursault, the nihilistic antihero of Albert Camus’ first novel, The Stranger (L’étranger), and one of modern culture’s original bad boys. Both a murderer and an ungrateful son (he’s sentenced to death for the former, but only because the court believes he’s the latter), Meursault narrates the short and shattering book in a stark language of indifference, filling it with piercing observations on life in French Algeria during the late 1930s. Semi-autobiographical in one sense and despondently poetic in the other, The Stranger launched Camus’ career as a major 20th century author. Years later, it became a standard of many a school curriculum both in France and abroad. The Stranger The Bottom Line Lives up to a classic. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant, Swann Arlaud, Hajar Bouzaouit, Abderrahmane Dehkani Director, screenwriter: ...

Original title: Paolo Sorrentino’s Buzzy Drama ‘La Grazia’ Gets U.S. Release Date Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, widely hailed as a return to form for the 2013 Oscar winner, has locked down its theatrical release date in North American cinemas. Mubi will open La Grazia in theaters on Dec. 5, teeing up a potential Oscars campaign for its inimitable Italian star, Toni Servillo. La Grazia opened the 82nd Venice Film Festival last week and was greeted with mostly rave reviews, including from The Hollywood Reporter. “By the director’s standards, this is a sober and distinctly mature film, centered by the unwavering composure of Servillo’s [character] De Santis,” wrote THR’s chief critic, David Rooney. “But it’s not without the customary creative arias, the witty humor and visual delights that have distinguished Sorrentino’s best work.” Heaping praise on Servillo’s performance, Rooney summed up his take, writing: “The alchemical ideal in actor-director collaborations.” A political drama of the most introspective kind, La Grazia (which means “Grace” in Ital ...

Original title: Jane Krakowski to Star in ‘Oh, Mary!’ on Broadway Jane Krakowski will take over the lead role in Oh, Mary! this winter. The 30 Rock star will play Mary Todd Lincoln for an eight-week run starting Oct. 14. Jinkx Monsoon, who is currently starring in the show, will finish her run Sept. 28. Hannah Solow, an understudy who has been with the production since its Off-Broadway run, will play the title role from Sept. 30 through Oct. 12. The role of Mary Todd Lincoln was originated by Cole Escola, who won a Tony Award for their portrayal, and also wrote the play. However, several actors have stepped into the role throughout the play’s run, including Tituss Burgess and Betty Gilpin. Krakowski returns to the Broadway stage following her Tony-nominated performance in the 2016 revival of She Loves Me. She won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Carla in the Broadway revival of Nine, and a Tony nomination for Grand Hotel. Other Broadway credits include Company, Once Upon a Mattress, Tartuffe and Starlight Express. She won an Olivier Award for Guys a ...

Original title: ‘Call of Duty’ Coming to Theaters as Paramount, Activision Strike Major Film Deal In a move that Paramount CEO David Ellison calls a “dream come true,” the Call of Duty video game franchise will become a big screen movie franchise, thanks to a major deal between the entertainment studio and Activision. Activision and Paramount have inked a deal that will see the studio develop, produce and distribute a live-action film based on the game franchise, “designed to thrill its massive global fan base by delivering on the hallmarks of what fans love about the iconic series, while boldly expanding the franchise to entirely new audiences,” the companies said Tuesday morning. The deal is a big one, with Call of Duty among the most popular video game franchises in the world. 500 million copies of its various games have been sold over the years, with the series being the top-selling game franchise in the U.S. for the past 16 years. The series is a first-person shooter, spanning various eras from World War II and Vietnam to the current day and decades in the future. Video game I ...