Unity, the industry powerhouse platform for creating and operating interactive, real-time 3D (RT3D) content, acquired Weta’s tools, pipeline, technology, and 275 engineers. This encompasses the dozens of proprietary hardware and software that brought “The Lord of the Rings,” “Avatar,” “The Planet of the Apes” trilogy, and numerous Marvel movies (including “Eternals”) to life. So that means the secret sauce behind the facial capture of Caesar will now become more widely available, along with the rendering capabilities of Manuka and Gazebo, the physics-based simulation Loki tool for water and smoke, the Barbershop hair and fur system, the CityBuilder world-building tool, and a Weta VFX asset library in the thousands....

For years, the popular assumption has been that Lynch’s 1984 version got “Dune” wrong, while the hype surrounding Denis Villeneuve’s own adaptation is that he got it right. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Villeneuve said that he approached the seemingly cursed endeavor of bringing Frank Herbert’s 1965 space epic to the big screen, it was “about the book, the book, the book.” (Emphasis his, apparently.) He added that Lynch’s attempt, much like Alejandro Jodoworsky’s unrealized production years earlier, suffered from a fatal flaw....

The Gala is a major stop on the annual awards circuit for Oscar contenders, from Breakthrough Performance Award winners (Carey Mulligan, Jennifer Hudson, Freida Pinto, Jeremy Renner) to a raft of eventual Oscar winners who accept other Palm Springs prizes, including this year’s Renée Zellweger, Joaquin Phoenix, and Laura Dern. As virtual festivals go, that contingency plan doesn’t make sense for Palm Springs. From assembling in theaters to managing the technology to navigate an online showcase, its elderly local audience wasn’t going to show up....

The secret is out: in Ti West’s bloody, boisterous “X,” a ’70s-set slasher about an ill-fated group of filmmakers who set out to film porn in the world’s worst location (an isolated farmhouse owned by a pair of pissed-off, puritanical elders), star Mia Goth is saddled with two terrifying roles. In the film, Goth plays both starry-eyed stripper Maxine (who is hoping that the porn will rocket her to fame) and the rage-filled Pearl, one half of the older couple who owns the property the film is being shot on (and who steadily reveals not only her murderous intentions, but the reason as to why she so hates the young and sexy)....

On the TV side, “Succession” (HBO), “Mare of Easttown” (HBO), “The Beatles: Get Back” (Disney+), “Kevin Can F**k Himself” (AMC), “Hacks” (HBO Max), and “Bob’s Burgers” (FOX) were the big winners for drama, limited series, documentary non-theatrical, multi-camera and single-camera comedy series, and non-theatrical animation, respectively. Editors Lillian E. Benson (“Eyes on the Prize”), the first woman of color to join the American Cinema Editors Society, and Richard Chew (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Star Wars”) were honored with Career Achievement Awards, and the Sundance Institute earned the ACE Golden Eddie Award (accepted by Michelle Statter)....

As a homegrown persona who tells his own tale, Hernandez defies any attempt to understand his essence beyond the boundaries of his act. That makes “’69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez,” director Vikram Gandhi’s unnerving deep-dive into his subject’s rise, something of a lost cause from the outset. Yet even as his subject remains elusive, Gandhi manages to deliver a thoughtful primer on the Tekashi story as it currently stands, and gives this serial troublemaker the tragic documentary he deserves....

“We made this movie during COVID, and so in Zooming with Nicole and Javier and everyone else, I’d make it very clear to them that I am not looking for a physical or vocal impersonation of these people,” Sorkin said. “Leading up to the first rehearsal, I’d write to them every day, ‘Just play the characters who are in the script.’ I know that Nicole was working on Lucy’s voice for a while, and I wanted to relieve her of that....