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Bel Powley To Play Matthew McConaughey’s Drug-Addicted Daughter in White Boy Rick

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2016 Toronto International Film Festival - "Carrie Pilby" Premiere

Bel Powley broke out two years ago in the coming of age comedy The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and she’s been spotted in a handful of smaller films since then, but her highest profile roles are still on the horizon (see: Kirsten Dunst’s directorial debut, The Bell Jar, slated for 2018). Today, though, The Hollywood Reporter announced that the actress has signed on to a new movie with Matthew McConaughey’s weight behind it. White Boy Rick stars McConaughey, and it focuses on a Detroit drug dealer capitalizing on the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The movie is based on the true story of a man named Richard Wershe Jr., who went from being an undercover informant for police at 14 to a drug dealer in his own right until his arrest at age 17. Powley will play the drug-addicted daughter of McConaughey’s character, and the supporting cast includes Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Rory Cochrane. The title role has not yet been cast.

People of Color Directed Fewer Than 10 Percent of the Last Decade’s Top-Grossing Films, Report Shows

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2015 National Board Of Review Gala

Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative have assembled a study called Inclusion in the Director’s Chair? that examines race, gender, and age diversity of directors across 1,000 surveyed films released in the past ten years. Based on data drawn from looking at the top 100 grossing films each year from 2007 to 2016, only 5.6 percent of those movies were led by a black director. Of the major studios, Lionsgate fared the best, with black directors helming 16 of its 86 qualifying movies (18 percent). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Disney fared the worst. With 101 films in the sample size, none were directed by a black person, making it the only big studio to put up a disappointing donut, though they did have one of the higher numbers when it came to hiring Asian directors with a staggering four (it should also be noted that the studio does have two upcoming projects from black directors in the works: Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther). In total, Asian directors accounted for just 3.3 percent of the top 1,000 films, and similarly dismal numbers were reported earlier today regarding female film direction. Of the 1,114 people who directed the top-grossing fictional films over the past decade, 4.4 percent were women. Data was not available to track the number of Latino directors or those of Middle Eastern descent, but the reasonable deduction lands on underrepresentation.

Why the Grand Romantic Gesture Will Never Die

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It all began in 1989’s Say Anything, when Lloyd Dobler demonstrated the depth of his feelings by lifting a boom box toward the sky.

That bold move was hardly the first over-the-top demonstration of love in a rom-com, but it was a defining one for the genre in the contemporary era. When Lloyd blasted a Peter Gabriel song in the direction of Diane Court’s window, giving Generation X its version of a Romeo just beyond Juliet’s balcony, Say Anything permanently established the power of the grand romantic gesture in the modern rom-com.

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It Makes Sense for Ben Affleck Not to Direct The Batman

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Ben Affleck is good at many things. He’s had success as a writer, director, actor, and producer, often donning more than one of those hats at the same time. But with the news that Affleck is stepping down from his role of directing the stand-alone superhero movie The Batman, in which he will reprise his role as the Caped Crusader from Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, we might be seeing Affleck come to a realization: He can do all of those things at once, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he should. 

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The Plot of Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn’s Police Brutality Movie Sounds Questionable

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Hollywood Film Awards - Green Room

One-upping the buddy-cop genre, there's a new movie coming about two officers who are suspended for police brutality who then "descend into the criminal underworld to gain their just due," according to a press release. Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn — who last worked together on Hacksaw Ridge — will play the cops. Here's the official synopsis for Dragged Across Concrete:

A stolid, old guard policeman, Ridgeman (Gibson) and his volatile younger partner, Anthony (Vaughn), find themselves suspended when a video of their strong-arming tactics become the media's special du jour.  Low on cash and with no other options, these two embittered soldiers descend into the criminal underworld to gain their just due, but instead find far more than they wanted awaiting them in the shadows.

Just to be clear: "Embittered soldiers" in that description refers to the police officers suspended for their conduct. Writer-director S. Craig Zahler (of the acclaimed indie Bone Tomahawk) promises the movie will be something unexpected. "Dragged Across Concrete is best suited to my goal of making a heartfelt, surprising, sad, funny, shocking, and memorable world with multiple viewpoints," he said the release. Vulture has reached out for further clarification on the plot, and we'll update this post if we hear back.

How Moonlight’s Composer Chopped and Screwed Classical Music

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This awards season, Vulture is partnering with the podcast Song Exploder for a series of episodes on the most interesting film scores of the year. Here, host Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Oscar-nominated Moonlight composer Nicholas Britell about the process of creating the themes for the movie's protagonist, who's called "Little" when he's a kid, "Chiron" as a teen, and "Black" when he's fully grown. As Britell explains, he and director Barry Jenkins borrowed techniques from hip-hop to create three different themes from the same piece of music.

Edited excerpts from the conversation follow; listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Song Exploder on iTunes.

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We Finally Have More Details About Paul Thomas Anderson’s Next Film With Daniel Day-Lewis

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Vizio Di Forma - Inherent Vice Press Conference

Ten years ago, director Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis spun gold together with There Will Be Blood. Now, they’ve started shooting Anderson’s next feature, an untitled period drama set in 1950s London that focuses on a highly sought-after dressmaker who designed for the royals and British society (Vulture's guess is that it's about real-life capricious fashion designer Charles James). The movie, which has a title card reading Phantom Threads floating around online in some set photos, also brings Anderson back together with other longtime collaborators, including Oscar-winning costume designer Mark Bridges, who has worked on eight straight projects with the director, as well as composer Jonny Greenwood, who previously composed scores for There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Inherent Vice. We would now like to preemptively congratulate Daniel Day-Lewis on his future Academy Award nomination for whatever year this movie comes out.

  • Posted 2/1/17 at 4:15 PM

The Godfather’s Behind-the-Scenes Drama Might Be Getting Its Very Own Movie

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Movie "The Godfather"

This time, it's personal. Francis Ford Coppola was a young director when he was hired to direct The Godfather, and the studio gave him a hard time on nearly every decision during production. In a 1994 interview, Coppola described the experience as "nightmarish." Now, HBO Films is producing a script dramatizing the havoc behind the scenes. Titled Francis and the Godfather, the script was written by Andrew Farotte and made the 2015 Black List of best unproduced scripts. One of the original Paramount executives that worked closely with Coppola will also consult on the project, according to Variety. Here's the rest of Coppola's comments about stress from the studio behind the scenes from that old interview:

The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn't like the cast. They didn't like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn't like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn't at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I'd ever get another job.

Coppola himself revisited the first Godfather movie's production last year, releasing a book of his massive production notebook. 

Leonardo DiCaprio Will Fight Gangsters Yet Again in New Movie

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National Geographic Channel "Before the Flood" Screening

Leonardo DiCaprio is going back to fighting gangsters for his new project, according to Deadline. The Black Hand, based on the book of the same name by Stephan Talty, tells the story of an NYPD officer who fervently pursued a crime organization known as the Black Hand. It’s set in the early 1900s (so a few decades after Bill the Butcher would have been ruling over the Five Points à la Gangs of New York) when the group of vicious criminals who had migrated to the United States from Italy was terrorizing the local community with kidnappings and extortion. DiCaprio, who will produce, stars as Joe Petrosino, a fellow Italian whose connections to the community and fluency with the language helped him to arrest or deport dozens of Hand members before he was murdered by them in 1909.

  • Posted 2/1/17 at 2:47 PM
  • Horror

What J-Horror Loses When It Crosses the Pacific

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In the scary-movie business, the most reliable formula for success is someone else’s formula for success. Every time a resourceful, original horror picture spins a massive payday from a shoestring budget, legions of imitators will swarm in to get a piece of the pie. Micro-trends flare up and die down more quickly in the horror genre than any other: Scream begat a generation of self-reflexive smart alecks, The Blair Witch Project ignited a found-footage craze, and Saw cleared the way for the genre now fondly known as torture porn. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it also sounds pretty safe in a pitch meeting.

The most curious of these developments in recent memory was the brief J-horror wave of the mid-2000s, during which a handful of Japan's most popular and fearsome releases were imported to our fair shores for Americanized remakes. Everyone sat up and took notice when Gore Verbinski raked in nearly $250 million with The Ring, his take on Hideo Nakata's Ringu, and studio eyes quickly turned to Japan in search of the next big thing. The mini-trend sputtered out near the tail end of the decade, but still hasn’t been extinguished completely — this month sees Rings arrive 12 years after its predecessor, the 2005 sequel The Ring Two.

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  • Posted 2/1/17 at 11:44 AM on The Cut

10 Recent Films About Complicated Women Over 40

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A series investigating the effects of gravity on the female form.

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I Am Not Your Negro’s Raoul Peck on Optimism Versus Pessimism, the Class Struggle, and Why James Baldwin Still Resonates Today

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This winter has brought a selection of great films that powerfully and painfully reflect the black experience in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, a tender and aching coming-of-age story that portrays blackness, queerness, and masculinity in a way rarely seen on the screen, and Ava DuVernay’s 13th, a heartbreaking documentary that sheds light on mass incarceration as a form of modern-day slavery. February 3 sees the release of another crucial film, Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro. The documentary, ten years in the making, creates visual poetry out of James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House, a text that rings eerily true almost 40 years later.

The Haitian-born Peck eschews documentary conventions: There are no talking heads, only Baldwin, in archival footage and excerpts from the manuscript voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. The actor carries the heavy weight of Baldwin’s words — sometimes fiery, often weary — as he examines the civil-rights movement, the intersection of race and class, and the lives and deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. In our current political climate, it's a film that demands to be seen. Just a month before the Oscars and a week before the inauguration, I sat down with Raoul Peck to discuss what Baldwin means to him, the importance of the class struggle in the fight for racial justice, and why he put Kendrick Lamar over the end credits.

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Most Top-Grossing Women Directors Made Only One Movie in the Last Decade, Research Finds

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You don’t need science to glean the obvious truth about equity in directing: White men make more movies than anyone else. But when USC crunched the numbers, female directors working in Hollywood are even more rare than you might think. Not only do women in the industry make fewer top-grossing movies, but many only helmed one big feature in the last decade. According to an analysis of race, gender, age, and equity across 1,000 films released between 2007 and 2016, the majority of women spearheading these productions are from a narrow pipeline, and they rarely released more than one film in the nine years analyzed. Even though many of the names are recognizable — Angelina Jolie, Nora Ephron, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Ava DuVernay — the study’s data showed that there were only 35 unique female feature-film directors who made a movie that made a lot of money. This isn’t a talent problem, but a pipeline problem: White men of all ages release big features, while the study found women directors were all in a narrower age range, between their 30s and 60s. For women of color, the breakdown of opportunity is even more stark: “Across the 10‐year sample, it is important to note that only three of the female directors were black (i.e., Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince‐Bythewood, Sanaa Hamri), and two were Asian (i.e., Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Loveleen Tandan). Though ethnicity was not evaluated in this report, there was only one Latina (i.e., Patricia Riggen).” Just in case you’re not a big studio executive in charge of hiring directors, paying to see shorts, indies, and big feature films directed by women is a good place to start tackling this disparity.

Turn Anne Hathaway Into a Monster With This Colossal Slider

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"Day 26"

In the new movie Colossal (out April 7, and just announced as part of the lineup for South by Southwest), Anne Hathaway already has enough on her plate to deal with — including a breakup and a humbling return to her hometown — before she discovers one last, fairly significant thing: She's also a monster. Or, to be more specific, Hathaway can inadvertently manifest a monster simply by stumbling across a children's sandbox near her home, at which point this gigantic Groot-beast will appear in South Korea, mimicking her every moment. But how do you prove a power this far-fetched to a group of skeptical friends, including Jason Sudeikis and Tim Blake Nelson? Simple: You dance. Below, use a special slider to switch between Hathaway's I'll-prove-it-to-you boogie and the Hatha-monster's replicated dance moves a continent away, and marvel that a movie could contain something this delightfully odd, as well as much, much more.

Liam Neeson’s Next Movie Sounds Like the Ideal Culmination of His Very Particular Set of Skills

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"The Shallows" World Premiere Arrivals

It’s been nearly two full years since we had a Liam Neeson-gets-revenge action-thriller, and Neeson must be getting restless, because Variety is reporting that he just signed on for maybe the most Neeson-y movie of them all. Hard Powder mixes together Taken, Run All Night, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and The Grey to tell the story of an upright snowplow driver who’s such a decent guy that he’s even been awarded a Citizen of the Year award in his posh Colorado town. Everything falls apart, though, when his son is murdered, leading him on a roaring revenge rampage to avenge his boy and take down a drug cartel while “armed with heavy machinery.” In the process, a war kicks up between a Native American mafia boss and a “fastidious gangster” who happens to be a vegan. Basically, Hard Powder sounds like it was dreamed up by the Key & Peele valets while they were fantasizing about their ideal Liam Neeson movie. We're not mad about it! 

The 34 Best Romantic Comedies of the Past Decade, and Where to Stream Them

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Despite reports to the contrary, the romantic comedy is not dead. On television and in film, creators have been granted the freedom to upend traditional expectations for the genre. Glossy candlelit love scenes are out, replaced by rawer and more naturalistic depictions of sex. Happy endings, too, have given way to bittersweet conclusions and melancholy. And while there are still plenty of projects about good-looking white people falling in love in New York, the explosion of creative outlets available has also led to new voices and new kinds of romances. Most of all, though, the romantic comedy in 2017 is not just one thing: Projects like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Lobster delight in twisting rom-com tropes, while movies like The Proposal and Silver Linings Playbook prove there's more than one way to play them straight. There's room for all of them on our list of the best romantic comedies of the past ten years.

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Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman Is a Gripping Portrait of Life Under a Repressive Regime

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Salesman

Great news! Because of the imperial president’s ban on citizens of certain countries entering the United States, audiences are paying a lot more attention — and showing up in droves — to this year’s Academy Award–nominated Iranian film The Salesman. It’s unclear if the writer-director, Asghar Farhadi, would be able to attend the ceremony at the end of February and he has said he won’t even try — and why should he? His absence speaks louder than anything he could actually say.

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Watch James Baldwin Discuss His Relationship With America in a New Clip From I Am Not Your Negro

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View the video

James Baldwin spent the last years of his life working on Remember This House, a book about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin died before finishing the project, but his words have found a new home in Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which mixes text from Baldwin's manuscript (narrated by Samuel L. Jackson) with archival footage of the late author to present a portrait of blackness in America. In this exclusive clip from the film, Baldwin explores his own relationship with American history. "One of the most terrible things, is that, whether I like it or not, I am an American," he explains. "My school really was the streets of New York City; my frame of reference was George Washington and John Wayne." But as Jackson's voice notes, "The truth is, this country does not know what to do with its black population." After a brief Oscar-qualifying run last year, I Am Not Your Negro hits theaters February 3.

  • Posted 1/31/17 at 9:45 AM

Tye Sheridan’s Decision to Star in Ready Player One Was About As Complex As You Might Think

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View the video

Tye Sheridan stars in Alexandre Moors's The Yellow Birds. We caught up with him at Sundance to discuss the film. Of course, we couldn't resist also picking his brain about the long-awaited Steven Spielberg project Ready Player One. He told us why his role in the highly anticipated adaptation was such an easy choice to make.

James Baldwin’s Words Are Freshly Resonant in the Timeless I Am Not Your Negro

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Raoul Peck’s driving, free-form documentary I Am Not Your Negro is not a direct response to Donald Trump’s delighted recognition of the lone nonwhite face he saw at one of his rallies: “Look at my African-American over here!” But the movie feels, if anything, even timelier, which is to say, timeless. It’s a translation of James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Remember This House, with the text read by Samuel L. Jackson and footage of Baldwin giving talks and as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show.

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