All posts tagged: steven spielberg

Amanda Seyfried, Scoot McNairy Go Dark in Tim Blake Nelson’s New Film

Amanda Seyfried, Scoot McNairy Go Dark in Tim Blake Nelson’s New Film

Published by Daniella Wilson

After every acting job, Scoot McNairy likes to get a haircut, head to the store to buy some new t-shirts, and wash off whatever portrayal he’s just come out of as he prepares for the next. With The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, after the actor took on the most intense leading role of his career, the impulse was stronger than ever: “I do remember adamantly wanting to get a haircut after this job,” he says with a laugh in his first conversation about the film, which sources confirm to The Hollywood Reporter will premiere later this year. “It hit me for a while — and still hits me now when we talk about it.”  It tracks that Wilson Shedd is directed by a great actor in Tim Blake Nelson, who’s also helmed features like The Grey Zone and Leaves of Grass over his decades in the business. The movie is a major showcase for its stars — McNairy, known for supporting turns in films like Argo and A Complete Unknown, doing transformative work …

They Knew Too Much | Geoffrey O’Brien

They Knew Too Much | Geoffrey O’Brien

Published by Jenni Sidey

With Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steven Spielberg promised an encounter and delivered one. Disclosure Day announces a precisely scheduled disclosure but at the last moment, just as a world-changing message is about to be delivered, cuts off the mic. “Listen,” says Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, the Kansas City meteorologist who is now the spokesperson for an extraterrestrial species. She is about to translate for a global TV audience the first certified cosmic communication. Instead the screen goes dark and the credits roll. It is like one of those dreams whose internal contradictions force the dreamer to wake, with a head full of jarring signals. It is hard to imagine any other ending. To go further would be to venture (as some of the characters in Disclosure Day seem tempted) into the realm of religious revelation. Close Encounters was a different sort of dream, happily and wordlessly mysterious to the end, an orchestrated trance. It invited surrender, without worrying much about to whom or what you were surrendering. Airplanes miraculously materialized in a …

Sam Neill Inspired a Generation of Scientists

Sam Neill Inspired a Generation of Scientists

Published by skeptic

Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who died at age 78 in Sydney, Australia on Monday, had a long and varied résumé. He played everyone from an international spy (Possession) and a detective chief inspector (Peaky Blinders) to a legendary wizard (Merlin). He even played the literal spawn of the devil (Omen III: The Final Conflict). But throughout his career, Neill was also known for scientist roles in films like The Dish and Event Horizon, with none more celebrated than Dr. Alan Grant, the rugged paleontologist and undisputed hero of Jurassic Park. As fans paid tribute to Neill, remembering both his wonderful performances and the charming updates about the farm animals on his idyllic New Zealand vineyard, one clear theme emerged with respect to the iconic Dr. Grant. “How many of us were inspired to become scientists after watching Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler?” wrote Lucky Tran, the director of science communication at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, in a post on X that included an image of Neill and costar Laura Dern …

‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘The Piano’ Actor Was 78

‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘The Piano’ Actor Was 78

Published by Daniella Wilson

Sam Neill, the amiable and adventurous leading man who emerged from New Zealand to make his mark in such films as Jurassic Park, The Piano, Dead Calm, In the Mouth of Madness and so much more, has died. He was 78. The news was shared in a post on Neill’s official Instagram account. “It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia,” the post read. “Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free. They would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care. More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.” Neill revealed in March 2023 that he had been diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma a year …

Jennifer Garner on “the Most Important Scene I’ve Ever Shot” in Her 30-Year Career

Jennifer Garner on “the Most Important Scene I’ve Ever Shot” in Her 30-Year Career

Published by Sam Flores

“That’s more badass than I remembered it,” Jennifer Garner declares while watching an action sequence from her 30-year career for Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection. As it turns out, there’s a lot for Garner to rediscover from her storied career, starting with her breakout role on the hit spy show Alias and going through to her latest project, The Five-Star Weekend, Peacock’s series adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s bestseller. “Alias was so far outside of anything I had done. No one had thought of me for action. No one had thought of me for a tough role,” Garner says of her pivotal five-season turn as undercover agent Sydney Bristow from 2001 to 2006. Born from an idea that arose during the writing of J.J. Abrams’s prior show, Felicity, Alias introduced Garner to longtime friend Victor Garber, who played Sydney’s CIA-operative father, Jack. “Anything Victor Garber does is iconic,” Garner tells VF. “I kind of feel like his actual daughter and I feel like he’s a real father figure to me. He married Ben [Affleck] and me [in …

Who Might Be the Next Steven Spielberg?

Who Might Be the Next Steven Spielberg?

Published by Sam Flores

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: There’s only one Steven Spielberg. His filmmaking legacy is clear: genre-spanning work, delivered over six decades, that includes action-adventure blockbusters, gripping Oscar-winning dramas, critically acclaimed sci-fi, and so much more. He invented the summer blockbuster with Jaws, launched the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises, and made us all weep because of aliens and robots. Disclosure Day Universal Pictures/Everett Collection This week the Little Gold Men team explores Spielberg’s incredible body of work and examines his latest film, Disclosure Day. The movie (which has already earned more than $90 million worldwide) may be uneven, but it reminds us why Spielberg is one of the best: He’s an empathetic filmmaker who can ask the big questions about humanity through sci-fi epics. The Little Gold Men crew also wonders who among the next generation of filmmakers might be able to walk the same path—releasing big, bold tentpoles, but also winning over Oscar voters. Ryan Coogler, especially after the success of Sinners, feels like the most likely heir …

The theology lesson in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’

The theology lesson in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’

Published by Sam Flores

This essay contains spoilers. Keep reading at your own cinematic risk. (RNS) — I went to see “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg’s new film, expecting a science-fiction thriller. But I also came away with a theological essay. To understand “Disclosure Day,” you have to see it as the third installment of a trilogy that Spielberg never announced but has been making for almost a half-century. First, there was “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), the story of an Indiana electrician named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with visions of a particular mountain after a UFO encounter. He makes a pilgrimage to Devils Tower in Wyoming, where humans and the alien visitors meet in a spectacular exchange of light and music. The aliens are not the typical fiends of Cold War-era science fiction. They are soft, docile, childlike and androgynous. They return their human abductees unharmed. The encounter is peaceful and spiritual. I, and more than a few other rabbis, would show this movie as part of a study session on the Jewish festival of …

As UFOs go mainstream, the jury is out on what the existence of alien life might mean for religion

As UFOs go mainstream, the jury is out on what the existence of alien life might mean for religion

Published by Sam Flores

LOS ANGELES (AP) — In “Disclosure Day,” out Friday, Steven Spielberg is once again inviting audiences to ponder the existence of extraterrestrial life — and the implications it would have for religion on Earth. But Spielberg is hardly the only one making headlines of late about UFOs and the possibility of life on other planets. What was once considered fringe or conspiratorial has in recent months popped up everywhere from the White House to the Catholic Church, as public fascination with unidentified anomalous phenomena — or UAPs, as the government calls them — becomes more mainstream. The Pentagon in May made public large swaths of UFO files with very little context, leaving curious sleuths to piece together their own interpretations. The dump came just weeks after former President Barack Obama set off a media frenzy for stating unambiguously in an interview that aliens are real, though he later tempered that take. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” the former president, who made a surprise visit to …

Let’s Talk About That Wild ‘Disclosure Day’ Ending

Let’s Talk About That Wild ‘Disclosure Day’ Ending

Published by Jenni Sidey

The following article contains major spoilers for Disclosure Day, including its ending. Watching a lot of Steven Spielberg’s movies is like bathing in a gigantic bucket of sentimental, dewey-eyed optimism, and Disclosure Day is no different. And I actually mean that as a compliment. As you might’ve read, we live in increasingly depressing times, and it is entirely welcome to leave a cinema feeling less despondent about the state of the world—and, well, humankind—than when you walked in. Which is kind of an odd way to feel about a story in which the American government is colluding with a shady corporation to hide the existence of aliens from the public. Oh, and all the while, the planet is on the brink of World War III and nuclear destruction—thanks to renewed conflict between North Korea and the United States—and people are either frozen in terror or flocking to supermarkets to stock up on toilet paper in droves. And yet, somehow, Disclosure Day manages to be one of the most hopeful films in years; an anathema to …

Steven Spielberg Responds To Emily Blunt Disclosure Day AI Claim

Steven Spielberg Responds To Emily Blunt Disclosure Day AI Claim

Published by Sam Flores

Steven Spielberg has clarified his stance on AI in cinema after Emily Blunt′ recent comments about their new film, Disclosure Day. In Spielberg’s new sci-fi blockbuster, Emily plays a local weatherwoman who begins speaking in an unusual, clicking alien language mid-broadcast, for reasons that become apparent over the course of the film. During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the British star opened up about the origins of these noises, claiming that Spielberg had told her: “You know, we could do it with AI, or you could do it.” “I was like, ‘I feel confident I can make some weird noises’,” she then quipped. Meanwhile, she also revealed to Hot Ones host Sean Evans that AI was something she was “a bit terrified of” when it was apparently presented to her as an option for her Disclosure Day character’s alien language. Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day Since then, Spielberg sat down with ITV News to discuss the film, during which Emily’s comments about him supposedly offering to create these sounds with generative AI were brought …