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Although much of the film deals with the protagonist trying to escape her past, she finds comfort through an unlikely friendship with her car mechanic James (Henry), who also lives with a disability stemming from a traumatic event. Henry had many reasons for wanting to play James, from a desire to work with Oscar winner Lawrence, to finally finding a project where his friend and fellow Yale alum Lila Neugebauer would direct him, to telling a story about making it through to the other side of a trauma....

But “Bridgerton” isn’t your typical Regency romance tale of virgins blushing when their bonnets get knocked off in front of the vicar. The show has a decidedly modern air — there is smoking, drinking, and sex, sometimes all at the same time — and that is reflected in glorious, edgy costuming that includes a vibrant palette of colors, intricate detailing on each and every dress and eye-catching embellishments to complete the look....

Filmmakers are not the only ones who feel the pinch of Hollywood’s gears. With the Tony Awards on Sunday, it’s worth looking at how the film and TV industries can benefit from investing in playwrights, and avoid the pratfalls of absorbing their talent instead of giving it room to grow. The entertainment industry needs originality to survive, and the theater community has a talent pool that’s a de facto pipeline, so long as the industry puts resources behind it....

“This year, everyone wanted to come to Cannes and meet together again,” said Fremaux, who greeted opening night attendees at the top of the Palais tapis rouge. They were friendlier than the interlocutors at his Monday press conference, who grilled him about everything from gender parity to the festival’s glitchy ticketing system and new partner Tiktok. “They didn’t want to talk about cinema,” he told me. Accepting an invitation to address the televised opening ceremony audience was Ukraine president (and former actor) Volodymyr Zelenskyy via live video, who brought the Palais crowd to their feet....

Loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name — so loosely, in fact, that Millepied thinks of his film as less of a re-telling or adaptation than he does a version of Bizet’s tragedy from a parallel universe — this “Carmen” moves the action from the southern tip of Spain to the northern cusp of Mexico, pares the source material’s busy story down to the brink of abstraction, and transmutes its soaring arias into defiant ballets of freedom....

Meanwhile, he’s prepping a new project. Petzold has explored themes of desire in his past films, from his water nymph romance “Undine” to his Hitchcockian lost love story “Phoenix” in 2014. But the German director now says his next movie will deal with love in more explicit terms, and specifically gay love. His latest run of movies, beginning with “Undine,” is a trilogy centered on the elements, with “Undine,” the Berlinale Silver Bear winner for Best Actress for Paul Beer earlier this year, dwelling in water....

Most years, winning Best Picture includes a careful effort by its distributor to make it hit. Recent winners such as “Parasite” and “Green Book” played theaters during the campaigning period and it served as a proof of concept: Audiences responded. In earlier years, lower-grossing winners like “The Hurt Locker” (an early-year release) and “Moonlight” (strong for an independent film dealing with challenging themes) got credit for doing better than expected. This year, all Oscar contenders had some theatrical life....