The Academy music branch also tends to fall for global pop stars who might turn up to perform at the Oscar kudocast. Inevitably, music stars scored nominations. Vying for his first is Northern Ireland’s Van Morrison, who supplied an entire soundtrack of hits for Kenneth Branagh’s ’60s film memoir “Belfast” (Focus Features), but wrote the original “Down to Joy” to open the movie. Also looking for her first nod, amazingly, is Academy member Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, who delivered “Be Alive” with DIXSON for “King Richard” (Warner Bros....

Though not much ties the nominees together thematically, each film sheds light on some specific window of human suffering, from personal grief to long-endured discrimination. As with most compelling stories, the search for connection, belonging, and coping with the world’s cruelty pulls focus. Ranging in tone from futuristic satire to gritty rural drama, the films in this section offer as broad a range of filmmaking styles as they do perspectives. In “Please Hold,” a man tries to navigate an entirely automated prison system after he is wrongfully arrested....

To get a sense of Chapman’s artistic ethos: In an interview with The Guardian from 2005, Chapman touted his company, Chapman Entertainment, as an “attractive partner for people wanting to develop their intellectual properties.” Summing up his artistic philosophy, he added: “the closer involvement of creative talent can get more out of a property over the longer term.” Chapman my have ceded creative control of “PAW Patrol: The Movie,” but his pawprints are all over Adventure City, the candy-colored metropolis in need of the PAW Patrol’s heroics....

Starting November 2, Peacock will host a dedicated hub for Hallmark Media movies and TV shows. The hub will give subscribers the ability to watch live simulcasts of Hallmark Media’s three major channels: Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries and Hallmark Drama. New premiere shows and movies — including the long-running “When Calls the Heart” and 2023 primetime premieres “Ride” and “The Way Home” — will be available to stream on demand the day after their linear premiere....

For the majority of the 20th century, Brook was consistently viewed as one of the most important directors working in the theater world. Born in London in 1925, he began directing Shakespeare productions at Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1940s. He quickly became known for his willingness to infuse classic texts, including operas and Christopher Marlowe plays, with experimental aesthetic choices. After several of his productions transferred to Broadway in the 1960s, Brook moved to Paris in the early 1970s....

The wall of ice between Kratos (Christopher Judge) and Atreus (“Mid90s” breakout Sunny Suljic) has only gotten more frigid now that the boy is a bonafide teenager, and with Fimbulwinter blanketing Midgard under mile-deep sheets of white snow — the cold snap heralding the deadliest battle the world has ever known — it seems unlikely that things between father and son will begin to thaw anytime soon. That’s when they hear someone knocking outside the hidden safe house where our heroes are trying to hole up until Ragnarök blows over....

“There was a four-hour cut that I actually loved,” Deakins said. “I read somewhere that it was shown at the Venice Film Festival in its four-hour version, but it doesn’t exist now, and that’s a shame. The studio’s problem was they thought there’d be more train robberies, and Brad Pitt would be more of a traditional Western outlaw. And when Brad was killed and the film progressed in this way that followed Robert Ford…and the way he wasn’t celebrated like he expected to be later in life… of course nobody wanted that....