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What a film is about is not the same thing as the story it tells. This is useful to remember when watching the new Netflix documentary Britney vs Spears, released in advance of an important legal hearing on her case in Los Angeles the following day.

In spite of the ongoing pandemic, producer Rodrigo Teixeira is having a very busy year. And the next one is promising to be the same:  he has eleven projects on his slate, including two pictures shown in this year’s Cannes - Murina and Bergman Island -  and two new projects from directors James Gray and Luca Guadagnino.

It was very clear to Gaby Chiappe that the lead character in AMC’s The Beast Must Die would have to be a woman. The screenwriter, who was about to adapt Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel into a TV thriller series, felt that the story about a parent who loses a child to a traffic accident would be easier for her to relate to if the character were a woman.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) announced that five distinguished outside journalism professionals have joined its Credentials Committee to screen and select new Association members — one of the most important steps of their comprehensive reform plan announced in May. Appointed to the nine-member Credentials Committee to help select new members to join the HFPA are: Tre'Vell Anderson, Terry Anzur, Bel Hernandez, Toni Moston, and Dr.

On its fourth weekend, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings still conquered. The first Marvel movie directed by an Asian filmmaker and headlined by a predominantly Asian cast stayed number one and became the biggest-grossing film not only of this year but also of the coronavirus pandemic era.

In 1989 Raul Julia spoke with the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association about playing Óscar Arnulfo Romero in John Duigan’s Romero. Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 for taking a stand against the death squads of the military dictatorship.

The Guilty stars Jake Gyllenhaal in a remake of the 2019 Danish Oscar entry, Den Skylidge about a 911 dispatcher in a race against time as he endeavors to save a kidnapped woman. In this rendition, a woman (Riley Keough) is held captive in a moving van on an LA highway.

Wars, upheavals, changing politics, all have shaped filmmaking in Iraq. In 1909 the country’s first film project took place, but it was not seemingly in the Iraqi’s DNA to indulge in cinema.

A stirring autobiographical examination of the long shadows of familial neglect and violence, director Gian Cassini’s Comala uses the 2010 murder of his estranged father to explore trauma left undiscussed and truths left unsaid. A world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the movie deftly sidesteps any type of pat true crime framing of its details, slowly developing into something much more delicate, ruminative, and haunting.

Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, which would go on to sell 33 million copies worldwide, arrived with a bang, stirring up no small amount of cultural commentary and controversy with its emotionally raw lyrics. So, it’s perhaps fitting that a documentary about its making, reception, and touring, which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, would end up also engendering friction.