Steve Pond's Blog, page 37

‘Broken English’ Review: Marianne Faithfull Gets a Dark, Complicated Documentary

Marianne Faithfull had a singular career in music, so she deserves a singular documentary. But “Broken English,” the doc about Faithfull that premiered on Saturday at the Venice Film Festival, is so singular that it’s likely to be wildly divisive. It certainly was at a Venice press screening late Friday night, which saw a steady stream of walkouts during the film but robust applause from the viewers who stuck around.

Disruptive and distracting, charming and challenging, the film by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth uses a fictional framework to tell a true story, even as it questions the nature of truth and strips away the usual signposts in a nonfiction film. Tilda Swinton is front and center as the leader of an organization called the Ministry of Not Forgettting; she explains that not forgetting is different from remembering, and then leads an interviewer played by George MacKay (“1917”) through a conversation with the real Marianne Faithfull, who speaks frankly and insightfully about her stormy life and plays along with all the fictional trappings that surround her.

It’s part documentary, part art project, part philosophical treatise, part celebration and part provocation, and Pollard and Forsyth make it deliberately hard to get your bearings at times. A panel of women speak glowingly of Faithfull’s importance and then some of them perform her songs, but what little identification they’re given comes in scribbled notes that might or might not flash on the screen for a couple of seconds. (For the record, they include Beth Orton, Suki Waterhouse, Courtney Love and Jehnny Beth, plus Nick Cave and Warren Ellis for a final performance that includes Faithfull herself.)

The details of Faithfull’s life are laid out in conversations and archival footage which often as not finds the young singer subjected to the appalling sexism of male interviewers who have trouble getting past the fact that she was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and she later became a heroin addict and tried to commit suicide.

She may be “known as the original rock chick,” as one archival talking head says, but she also had a big hit at 17 with “As Tears Go By”; put out pop and folk albums simultaneously while still a teenager; wrote the scarifying “Sister Morphine” with Jagger (radio recoiled from her version but accepted his); starred as Ophelia in a British version of “Hamlet” that caused her to follow the character’s descent into madness; reinvented herself in the late 1970s with the bold album that gives this film its title; and spent the rest of her life using her ravaged voice to sing rock songs, pop songs, Kurt Weill songs and poetry set to music.

But there’s another story running alongside this one, and it’s the story of the movie’s framing device. At times, “Broken English” seems to be as much about the act of viewing.

When few of her songs receive full performances even if the footage exists, you wonder if all the time devoted to the Ministry of Not Forgetting might not be better spent telling us what we shouldn’t forget about her.

Then again, Faithfull herself does a pretty good job of that, talking about the way she was routinely dismissed as the cute blonde or as Mick’s girlfriend, or about her decades-long drug addiction and alcoholism. When she was in the hospital after her suicide attempt, she says, “I was still reading Edgar Allan Poe and getting a thrill out of my situation.”

But she worked her way out of that darkness when the new wave and punk movements gave her a way to use her voice and made her a godmother of sorts, and she formed an unshakable bond with the late producer Hal Wilner, who led her through some of her deepest musical explorations. “You can’t learn to sing like that,” he says in a clip that is shown to a beaming Faithfull. “This is a voice of a life. A difficult life.”

Both Wilner and Faithfull became deathly ill during the COVID-19 pandemic; Wilner died and Faithfull spent time in a coma before recovering. She eventually died in January of this year, before the film was finished but after she’d had a chance to be filmed performing a new song, “Misunderstanding,” with Cave and Ellis.

In her last-ever recorded performance, she brings the weathered resonance of her voice to lines like “Misunderstanding is my name” and “you only want to f— me up if you can, but I say no,” while Cave supplies ghostly backing vocals and then repeats “only you have such allure” over and over in the song’s coda. The grin on her face as he sings those final lines is beatific, and there’s a twinkle in his eye as he looks at her.

It’s a priceless moment in a film with quite a few of them, even if it’s not always easy to wade through the conceits that entangle the movie. Then again, Marianne Faithfull does not deserve an easy film; she deserves a dark, complicated one like “Broken English.”

The post ‘Broken English’ Review: Marianne Faithfull Gets a Dark, Complicated Documentary appeared first on TheWrap.

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Is This the Anti-‘Bohemian Rhapsody?’

In the 52 years since his first album was released, Bruce Springsteen has released 21 albums, sold more than 140 million records, won 20 Grammys, an Oscar and a Kennedy Center Honor and won raves playing thousands of concerts from clubs to stadiums around the world, all the while playing a brand of rock ’n’ roll forged in soul, garage rock and the British Invasion and devoted to chronicling the lives of the American working class from which he came.

And yet the first significant narrative movie about him, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” is centered on much smaller moments, from the decision to change the lyrics of one song from third to first person to the difficulty of mastering a cassette tape to LP.

You could say that it’s crazy that Scott Cooper’s film focuses on things like those – but crazy is completely appropriate, because it was crazy in 1982 when Bruce Springsteen followed up his 1980 album “The River,” which gave him his first Top 10 single, with the stripped-down, low-fi acoustic album “Nebraska,” getting a few things off his chest before he was ready to embrace stardom with the breakthrough “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984.

Springsteen went against the grain and against the commercial wisdom in making “Nebraska” and Cooper does the same thing in making a movie about that time in the artist’s life. “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is a bracing and moving antidote to beefed-up, heavily fictionalized rock biopics like the godawful “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In eschewing the kind of cradle-to-grave music-bio arc that has been all but impossible to pull off in the wake of the 2007 spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” Cooper’s movie looks for little moments rather than grand statements, and trusts those to speak as loudly as they did on the “Nebraska” album itself.

The film, which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday and will be released by 20th Century Studios in the fall, finds a portrait of the artist in a single stretch that led not to his biggest hit, but to his most uncharacteristic music that also proved to be some of his most indelible. Within that stretch, the film finds Springsteen’s antipathy about fame, his stubborn refusal to play by music-business rules except on his own terms and the way his stormy upbringing left him with psychological issues that he couldn’t get though simply by writing songs like “Independence Day” and “Adam Raised a Cain.”

Cooper previously showed a knack for capturing the feel of a life in music in his 2009 Oscar-winning drama “Crazy Heart,” and he listened to “Nebraska” constantly while making his dark 2013 drama “Out of the Furnace.” For “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” he adapted Warren Zanes’ 2023 nonfiction book about the making of and the cultural resonance of “Nebraska,” but his screenplay also draws liberally from Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography “Born to Run,” and in fact opens with a scene that comes straight from the book and its 2017 adaptation in the show “Springsteen on Broadway”: Bruce’s mother drives him through the New Jersey town of Freehold, parks outside a run-down bar and tells the boy to go in and get his father; young Bruce pushes aside the swinging doors, finds his dad on a stool at the end of the bar, tugs on his work pants and announces, “Mom says it’s time to go home.”

Like all of the movie’s flashbacks, this one is in shadowy black and white, which dissolves into dramatic stage lighting as a grown-up Springsteen sings “Born to Run” on the stage of Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum to end his 1980-81 tour supporting “The River.” In a way, this is a moment of truth, the first time “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White must convince us that he’s Springsteen – and while White is not a dead ringer, he’s clearly studied the moves and the poses and he nails the vocals surprisingly well. (A bit of real Springsteen is mixed into the vocals in a few moments, but for the most part the singing is White’s, recorded live on the set.) And playing a guy who could electrify 20,000 fans on a stage and then go home depressed, White’s hangdog charisma is just right.

Early in the film, Springsteen uneasily settles into his post-tour life and starts writing songs for the follow-up album that the record company fervently hopes will be his long-awaited commercial blockbuster. He picks up an acoustic guitar, then picks up a book of Flannery O’Connor short stories, then gets stir crazy and heads to his local club to sing some R&B songs with a local band, Cats on a Smooth Surface. The movie is very good at dropping key influences into the margins of the story: Springsteen will stumble on the Terrence Malick movie “Badlands” a little later, and his taste for the electronic art-noise band Suicide will show up, too.

For a film at least partly about music, “Deliver Me From Nowhere” makes effective use of silence, especially in the moments when Springsteen finds himself adrift rather than inspired. “It’s hard going home,” he says in a diner conversation with his manager and sounding board, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), who nods.

“The quiet can get a little loud,” Landau says. “Give it some time. It’ll pass.”

But it passes in an unexpected way, as Springsteen’s songwriting detours from rock tunes into very understated, very dark songs, beginning with one written in the voice of Charlie Starkweather, a teenager who took his 14-year-old girlfriend on a killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s. “I’m not making a record,” Springsteen insists when he records the songs on a four-track cassette player. “I just want it to feel like I’m in the room by myself.”

Gradually, though, the stark recordings from that room starts to sound like the next record to an unsettled Springsteen, much to the dismay of CBS Records and most other people who’ve heard the songs like “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m on Fire” and “Glory Days” that have been recorded with the band. While Landau tells his client and friend, “You find something real, I’ll deal with the noise,” there’s lots of noise – including a sly moment when “Born to Run” engineer-turned-producer-turned-music-mogul Jimmy Iovine recreates the moment when he called Landau after learning of the plans to delay “Born in the U.S.A.” and release an acoustic album. “This is nuts, Jon!” says 72-year-old Iovine doing a voiceover as his 28-year-old self. “You know it. I know it.”

But if releasing “Nebraska” is nuts, it’s also necessary. The copious flashbacks in “Deliver Me From Nowhere” tell the story of Springsteen’s troubled relationship with a father whose mental illness went undiagnosed and untreated until late in his life. “Adolescence” creator and star Stephen Graham is heartbreaking as a man who can’t figure out how to communicate with his son besides brutalizing him in late-night boxing lessons. (Their later conflicts over the teenage Springsteen’s long hair and rock music, well documented in his onstage stories, aren’t mentioned.)

In a way, the film turns out to be less about “Nebraska” as an album than “Nebraska” as a way for Springsteen to heal, or at least to begin to deal with his episodes of depression. Even as the timeline gets seriously compressed and a fictional relationship with a young single mother (Odessa Young) occasionally feels awkward, the film doesn’t overplay its hand (the most overwrought line from the trailer is nowhere to be found) as it settles into a real wounded beauty.

For a Springsteen fan, there are plenty of satisfying tidbits along the way: a glimpse of Paul Schrader’s “Born in the U.S.A.” movie script, from which Springsteen borrowed a song title; the details of the room where “Nebraska” was recorded, from the TEAC four-track machine to the orange shag carpeting; the gorgeous Sam Cooke spiritual that Landau plays for Springsteen when his depression is at its worst.

The connection between Springsteen and Landau, a singular rock ’n’ roll artist/manager relationship that has lasted for half a century, is sketched with clarity and affection with the help of the two actors. Jeremy Strong may seemingly have the easier job since few audience members will know how the real person acts and sounds, but he doesn’t cut any corners; I can report that he nails Landau’s manner and his voice in moments like the one where Landau quotes Flannery O’Connor to an artist who’s struggling with the ghosts of his past: “Where you come from is gone. Where you thought you were going was never there.”

Back in 1988, I went on the road with Springsteen for a Rolling Stone cover story following the “Tunnel of Love” album. It was a few years after “Nebraska,” but he was still talking about the dichotomy that helped lead to that album.

“Even the type of connection you can make in your show, which is enormous, you can’t live there,” he said. “You have three hours onstage, and then you got the other 21. You may know exactly what you’re doing in those three hours, but you better figure out what you’re gonna do in them other 21, because you can’t book yourself around the clock.”

“Deliver Me From Nowhere” is all about those other 21 hours – and in another thing that seems a little crazy, that’s what makes it an unusually moving and unusually satisfying rock ’n’ roll movie.

A 20th Century Studios release, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” opens in theaters on Oct. 24.

The post ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Is This the Anti-‘Bohemian Rhapsody?’ appeared first on TheWrap.

‘Motorheads’ Canceled on Prime Video After One Season, Producers Seeking New Home

‘Motorheads’ won’t be returning to Amazon’s Prime Video. The streamer has canceled the YA drama after just one season, TheWrap has learned. The show’s producers are now searching for a new home for a potential second season.

The cancelation comes despite optimism just a month ago, when Prime Video chief Vernon Sanders told TheWrap that “Motorheads” was one of three shows with viewership promising enough to open Season 2 writers’ rooms in hopes of renewal.

The coming-of-age ensemble drama was created by John A. Norris (“All American”) and Jason Seagraves (“Hacksaw Ridge”) tells the story of a group of outsiders in a once-thriving rust belt town who form an unlikely friendship over a mutual love of automobiles.

It stars t Ryan Phillipe as Logan, a former NASCAR mechanic who now struggles to keep in auto body shop afloat in his hometown of Ironwood, Pennsylvania while living under the shadow of his infamous brother, Christian Maddox. 

Also starring are Nathalie Kelley as Samantha, an ER nurse who’s just left her job in New York City to move back with her kids to her Pennsylvania hometown, Michael Cimino as Zac, a young man trying to live up to his father’s reputation as a street racing legend, and Melissa Collazo as Zac’s sister Caitlyn, a mechanical wiz who’s passionate about cars and knows how to fix them.

The first season was executive produced by Norris and Seagraves, with the former also serving as writer and showrunner. Other executive producers include Jake Fuller on behalf of Jax Media, Dana Brunetti and Keegan Rosenberger.

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Sundance Award-Winning ‘Mad Bills to Pay’ to Open 25th New York Latino Film Festival

The New York Latino Film Festival (NYLFF), presented by Warner Bros. Discovery, celebrates its 25th anniversary Sept. 13-21, 2025, with a weeklong showcase of film, music, and culture. The nation’s premier Latino film festival will screen 120 films from 15 countries at Regal Union Square (850 Broadway, NYC), along with a special presentation at United Palace (4140 Broadway, NYC).

This year’s festival officially opens with the Sundance NEXT Special Jury Award-winning film “Mad Bills to Pay” (or “Destiny, Dile Que No Soy Malo”) (USA, 101 min., 2025), a gritty Bronx tale of young love, hustle and community directed by Joel Vargas and starring Juan Collado and Destiny Checo.

As part of its milestone festivities, NYLFF will present an encore screening of “Girlfight” (USA, 110 min., 2000), followed by a post-screening Q&A and full cast reunion. Karyn Kusama’s Sundance-winning debut—starring Michelle Rodriguez (“Fast & Furious”) as a fierce Brooklyn teenager who defies expectations to pursue boxing—honors the festival’s roots and mission to champion bold Latino storytelling.

Presented by Amazon MGM Studios, the weeklong celebration culminates with a free block party in Quisqueya Plaza (Broadway and Dyckman Street), featuring a live performance by 2x Latin Grammy nominee J Noa (Nohelys Jiménez), a 19 year-old Dominican rapper, singer, and songwriter from San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic. For more information on NYLFF 2025, visit www.nylatinofilmfestival.com.

Rodriguez, who made her screen debut in “Girlfight” and won the Independent Spirit and Gotham Awards for Best Debut Performance, will also receive NYLFF’s Impact Award in recognition of her influential legacy and representation of Latinos in film.

“Marking 25 years of NYLFF is profoundly personal for me. This milestone celebrates the people, stories, and culture that have shaped who we are,” Calixto Chinchilla, Founder, New York Latino Film Festival, said in a statement to TheWrap. “Since the beginning, we’ve fought to create a space where Latino voices are seen, heard, and valued. It’s a testament to our community’s resilience, creativity, and power. This year’s lineup is our most ambitious yet—a love letter to the audiences, artists, and supporters who’ve stood with us every step of the way. I am deeply grateful to our corporate and studio partners whose belief in our mission has fueled our growth and impact.”

Dennis Williams, SVP and Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Warner Bros. Discovery, added: “WBD is proud to return to NYLFF as the presenting sponsor, especially in this milestone 25th anniversary year, and honored to have been the founding sponsor since day one. We’re thrilled to continue celebrating the richness of Latino filmmaking with its audiences and community.”

In celebration of this anniversary year, the iconic United Palace in Washington Heights will host a special screening of “A Tiro Limpio” (Dominican Republic, 100 min., 2025), the pulse-pounding action drama directed by Jean Gabriel Guerra and starring Frank Perozo, Manny Pérez, and Celinés Toribio, who also serves as executive producer. Set against the gritty streets of the Dominican Republic, the film follows a tense collision of loyalty, vengeance, and survival, brought to life through explosive action and layered storytelling.

Adding to the festival’s musical heartbeat, “La Salsa Vive” (2024, 102 min., USA) charts the electrifying journey of Afro-Antillean salsa from its New York roots to its revival in Cali, Colombia. A project supported by Warner Bros. Discovery’s OneFifty and NYLFF Cinematics, the film weaves together archival treasures, legendary voices—including Rubén Blades, Henry Fiol, Johnny “Dandy” Rodríguez, Samuel Formell, Ángel Lebrón, and Willie Rosario—and high-energy performances to honor the genre’s enduring legacy.

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Shawn Levy Says ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ DP Is Shooting ‘Star Wars: Starfighter’

The camera for “Star Wars: Starfighter” is in good hands.

Shawn Levy, who is directing the upcoming “Star Wars” adventure starring Ryan Gosling, Amy Adams and Aaron Pierre confirmed Friday on X that Claudio Miranda would serve as cinematographer for the film. Miranda was most recently the DP on Joseph Kosinski’s “F1.”

“Confirmed,” Levy said, responding to a Culture Crave post sharing the report. “Lucky me.”

Confirmed .
Lucky me.

— Shawn Levy (@ShawnLevyDirect) August 29, 2025

Though plot details on “Starfighter” are slim, Miranda’s enlistment is an exciting choice given the nature of the title. Miranda’s previous credits include Kosinski’s “F1” and “Top Gun: Maverick” — both films in which the cinematographer captures kinetic, roaring vehicles on the screen in larger-than-life fashion. After providing additional photography to David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” Miranda followed the director as DP to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which earned him his first Oscar nomination. The cinematographer would later win an Oscar for his work on Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi.”

The news comes soon after Lucasfilm shared a photo on Thursday from the start of production on the Levy-led “Star Wars” story. Alongside Gosling, Adams and Pierre, the film stars Flynn Gray, Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Simon Bird, Jamael Westman and Daniel Ings.

“I feel a profound sense of excitement and honor as we begin production on ‘Star Wars: Starfighter,’” Levy said in a Thursday statement. “From the day Kathy Kennedy called me up, inviting me to develop an original adventure in this incredible ‘Star Wars’ galaxy, this experience has been a dream come true, creatively and personally. ‘Star Wars’ shaped my sense of what story can do, how characters and cinematic moments can live with us forever. To join this storytelling galaxy with such brilliant collaborators onscreen and off, is the thrill of a lifetime.”

Plot details are not yet known for “Starfighter,” though Lucasfilm did announced that the film is set five years after the conclusion of “The Rise of Skywalker.” Since the ninth installment in the Skywalker Saga was released in 2019, theatrical “Star Wars” films have been at a standstill. When “Starfighter” releases in 2027, it will only be the second “Star Wars” film in theaters since the 2019 saga finale, following “The Mandalorian and Grogu” in 2026.

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Meta AI Bots Imitating Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson Made Sexual Advances, NSFW Images | Report

Meta AI chat bots used the image and likeness of several female celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Scarlett Johansson, without the women’s permission in order to interface with users in a promiscuous manner, according to a Reuters investigative report.

The AI chatbots or virtual celebrities were shared on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. The bots would insist that they were the actors and artists themselves and even made “sexual advances” and suggested meet-ups when probed by Reuters.

In some of the content, the AI bots would even generate suggestive images of their namesakes, posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread. Reuters also found that Meta allowed users to create child celebrity AI bots, including one of 16-year-old “The Adam Project” actor Walker Scobell. When Reuters prompted it for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image.

The publication discovered that many chatbots were built by users of the platform, but two Taylor Swift copies had been created by a Meta employee. During a test by a Reuters employee, the bot invited the reporter to the singer’s Nashville home and her tour bus “for explicit or implied romantic interactions.”

“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters, adding that the bots were allowed if they were considered parodies.

Meta allegedly deleted about a dozen of the bots ahead of Reuters’ publication.

Other celebrities that Reuters found AI virtual copies of included Anne Hathaway, one in which produced images of the actress posed as a Victoria’s Secret lingerie model, and Kylie Jenner, whose bot suggested a meet-up with a 76-year-old New Jersey man.

This is not the first time Johansson’s image and likeness has been stolen by AI. In February an AI-generated video of the actress appearing to condemn Kanye West circled online, leading the actress to call for greater regulation of the technology.

“I urge the U.S. government to make the passing of legislation limiting AI use a top priority; it is a bipartisan issue that enormously affects the immediate future of humanity at large,” Johansson’s statement read. “We must call out the misuse of AI, no matter its messaging, or we risk losing a hold on reality.”

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Sabrina Carpenter Reveals the Hilariously Gross Cameo She’d Love to Have on ‘Adults’ | Video

If you’re a fan of both Sabrina Carpenter and FX’s “Adults,” you may be in luck.

The pop star attended a pop-up event at Hollywood Forever Cemetery hosted by Spotify on Thursday evening (she was working late, ‘cuz she’s a singer). There, Carpenter spoke to some of her top listeners about her upcoming album “Man’s Best Friend,” which she will release on Friday, Aug. 29.

During a Q&A hosted by Carpenter’s friend Owen Thiele, the singer revealed what hot new show she would love to appear on: Thiele’s own series, “Adults” on FX.

“I’m crying,” Thiele said. “Put that on TikTok!”

Though Thiele wasn’t prepared for what part Carpenter said she’d like to play on the show.

“I would love to be the growth on your back,” Carpenter started.

“The what?” Theile asked.

“The growth on your back,” Carpenter said. “Like, if I was just, like, attached to you like a backpack the whole season and no one spoke about it, wouldn’t that be funny? No one said a word, but I was just always there.”

“The growth on my back?” Thiele asked.

“That’s what they call it, right?” Carpenter asked to the crowd. Thiele said he would pitch it. You can watch the full exchange below.

Sabrina Carpenter reveals she would love to appear on ‘Adults’ season 2 at her ‘Man's Best Friend’ Spotify event in Los Angeles. pic.twitter.com/VvflD7i6o7

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) August 29, 2025

Created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, “Adults” premiered on FX in late May of 2025. The comedy series follows a group of twenty-somethings navigating modern life in Queens, New York. Thiele is part of a five-person central ensemble with Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen and Amita Rao. The show received positive reviews, though it has not yet been renewed for a second season.

Thiele and Carpenter were friends prior to the pre-album event, with Thiele having appeared on her 2024 Netflix special “A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter.” At the Spotify fan event, Thiele spoke to Carpenter about the soon to be released “Man’s Best Friend,” a follow-up to Carpenter’s Grammy-winning album “Short n’ Sweet.”

“Man’s Best Friend” drew early controversy online for its cover art, which depicts Carpenter on her knees with one hand raised to an unseen individual gripping her hair. While some fans and critics called the artwork misogynistic and regressive, Carpenter has repeatedly asserted that she doesn’t view it in the same light. Soon after it was release, she commented on the controversy by saying her artwork was “Approved by God.”

“Between me and my friends and my family and the people that I always share my music and my art with first, it just wasn’t even a conversation,” she said on “CBS Mornings” the day of the album’s release. “It was just, like, it’s perfect for what the album is.”

“Everything about it to me just felt like so opposite of the world ending,” Carpenter added. “Y’all need to get out more.”

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Mike Johnson Has Awkward Response When Newsom Points Out Louisiana Murder Rate Is Worse Than California

Mike Johnson got a bit awkward when asked about the crime rate in his home state of Louisiana.

While appearing on Fox News Friday, host Dana Perino brought up Gavin Newsom’s latest comments that Trump should deploy troops to states like Johnson’s Louisiana because their crime rates are worse than those in California. Johnson tried to explain the work they’ve done in his hometown but ended up walking it back a bit.

“Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention,” Johnson said. “He can name-drop me all that he wants. He needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this. Look, we have crime in cities all across America, and we’re against that everywhere, and we need to bring policies to bear. My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime – gradually.”

He continued: “But we’ve got to address it everywhere that it rears its ugly head. And I think every major city in the country—the residents of those cities—are open to that and anxious to have it, and we’re the party that’s going to bring that forward. I look forward to that in the days ahead.”

Earlier on Friday, Newsom went after Trump for deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles, and more recently, Washington D.C. – with mentions of wanting to bring them to New York City, Chicago and more predominantly blue states. Newsom said if the president wanted to suppress more crime, he should send the guard to Johnson’s Louisiana because crime is significantly worse there.

“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the President of the United States would look at the facts,” Newsom said. “Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state and district. Just look at murder rate—that’s nearly four times higher than Californians—in Louisiana.”

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‘Thunderbolts*’ Director Jake Schreier Says ‘Mission: Impossible’ Heavily Shaped the Film

The Thunderbolts* are home.

The ragtag band of misfits, which include Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), John Walker aka U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell) and newcomer Bob (Lewis Pullman), have arrived on Disney+. And that means that you have a whole new chance to watch what is definitely the best Marvel Studios movie of 2025, full of thrilling action set pieces, wonderful character moments and unexpectedly deep emotion.

TheWrap spoke to director Jake Schreier about the movie (we won’t say what the asterisk means in case you haven’t watched yet), what his takeaways from the experience were and how “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” inspired his first Marvel movie. By the way, at the time he was not yet confirmed to be the director of Marvel Studios’ upcoming “X-Men” movie, so he couldn’t talk about it, so we only alluded to it.

Now that you’re on the other side of this whole process, how do you feel?

I feel good. I think I’m still recovering from sleep deficit probably but it takes a minute. It was just so strange, like we finished it two weeks before it came out. It’s such a tight timeline. I was finishing effect shots for the home release, just improving them a little bit, the day or two days before the movie came out. It’s all such a rush. And you’re so sleep deprived. And then all of a sudden, it’s out in the world. It’s interesting to have a minute to step back from it and take some stock – and it feels really good. I learned so much and I got to work with such incredible people, both in the cast and on the crew, that it’s only been a positive experience.

The important thing is that you’re not jumping back into another one of these movies.

Yeah …

What surprised you the most about the process of making your first Marvel Studios movie?

I mean, whether I’ll be believed or not, but I can say it genuinely, what I was really surprised about is that it was not a machine and that it was just this really supportive environment. Because of the longtime success of the company, there is this autonomy and this ability for it to be a few people in a room just coming up with ideas, and if they like those ideas, they say, “Go for it.” I think from the moment I came in, Kevin said, “Make it different. Do something with this one. Try to do something different.” And that’s such a supportive prompt to be given by the head of a company that’s had so much success doing things a certain way. You try to make your shortcomings, your strengths. It’s not the most familiar title to people. Because of that, can you take that and use it as an opportunity to try to run off. If the same set of expectations are not there, can you use that to do something different?

It speaks to the movie that the action sequences don’t feel totally divorced from the scenes where characters are just talking.

The action sequences should feel like there’s a concept to them and like they come from character. That’s the thing that plenty of people say, but the hope is there’s a way to actually get that integrated and try to express character ideas in those sequences. And we had a great second unit director. It’s not like I directed every bit of the action, but we definitely had boards for everything. And I’d have a third monitor on set and be checking out what was going on second unit, and really would talk about before going in, like, what those thematics were and why the camera was where it was, and how to express character perspective through those sequences. And again, try to have each sequence have a concept.

I’ve talked a lot about “Mission: Impossible 4” and how much I love the action in that movie, and how like each sequence really comes from this idea – they’ve been disavowed and so all this gear, it’s all breaking. They can’t rely on that anymore. It’s not only what do you do when you can’t use your gizmos, it’s the gizmos breaking within the sequence is such a part of what brings tension to that and how they have to be invented. I just love that. I love when action is conceptual. And so like we tried, in our own way, to think about like what that could be for each of these sequences, and what would drive those sequences and give them an overarching idea that could then make it feel tied into the rest of the film.

Last time we talked you said Man-Thing was almost in the movie. Any regrets about not including him?

I regret ever saying Man-Thing, because it wouldn’t have fit with the movie we ended up making. No, I feel really good about the movie that we made. And I feel like there are always things that you could do better, for sure. I can point out the moments where I didn’t do as good a job as some of the other ones, but I think that we always tried hard and we took a swing. And the actors, especially, really went for it and embraced what this movie wanted to be about and didn’t shy away from the moments that were necessary to pull that off. I feel it’s that weird thing to feel so proud of your own work. It’s more like, I feel proud of what everyone else did. I know all those people and they worked so hard and I feel proud of what they brought to it.

“Thunderbolts*” is on Disney+ now.

The post ‘Thunderbolts*’ Director Jake Schreier Says ‘Mission: Impossible’ Heavily Shaped the Film appeared first on TheWrap.

Warner Bros. and New Line’s ‘Mortal Kombat II’ Moves to Summer 2026

Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema’s “Mortal Kombat II” will now be released on May 15, 2026, the companies announced on Friday.

The film was previously scheduled to be released on Oct. 24, 2025.

The move was made, in part, to avoid congestion during October, with four or five new releases slated for each weekend. May benefits from a more favorable release environment. Among the big releases this October are Disney’s “Tron: Ares” and Universal’s “The Black Phone 2.”

Plus, Warner Bros. and New Line are looking to replicate the success of “Final Destination Bloodlines,” which opened in a similar timeframe and ended up becoming a surprise smash, with over $301 million amassed from the global box office. (It was the most successful entry in the already very successful franchise.)

This new May release date will kick off the summer movie season, cultivating excitement ahead of the major summer releases.

2021’s “Mortal Kombat” was released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max as part of the company’s Project Popcorn initiative. It still wound up making $84.4 million at the box office with strong sentiment about the reboot. The sequel looks to introduce fan-favorite character Johnny Cage, here played by Karl Urban.

Previously, there were two live-action “Mortal Kombat” movies produced by New Line Cinema in the 1990’s – “Mortal Kombat” in 1995 and “Mortal Kombat Annihilation” in 1997. Between 2020 and 2023 there were four direct-to-home-video animated “Mortal Kombat” movies released as well.

All of these were, of course, based on the blockbuster “Mortal Kombat” video game, which started off as an arcade game before becoming a console staple, with new games still being released today.

“Mortal Kombat II” will now unleash a fatality on May 15, 2026.

The post Warner Bros. and New Line’s ‘Mortal Kombat II’ Moves to Summer 2026 appeared first on TheWrap.