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“We weren’t gonna make a biography,” Poitras told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “One thing I try to do as a filmmaker is to not hear the story that people repeat about their life over and over. We all do that. We all tell a story and we go into a kind of a mode of repeating, but how could it feel in the present in a really meaningful way.” While Poitras filmed Goldin risking her career by challenging global art institutions to cut ties with the Sackler family — major philanthropic donors who fueled the opioid epidemic through the manufacturing of OxyContin — it was readily apparent how this moment in Goldin’s life was connected to her personal experience and history....

Framing its interviews as long-overdue confessionals (sometimes through one-on-one interviews, other times through therapeutic workshops), the film strings together a timeline of the pre-9/11 era, before the world’s biggest flashpoint for Islamophobia, but the image it paints is far from rosy; racist assumptions about American Muslims didn’t suddenly spring from the ground in 2001. Dadabhoy collects a handful personal family histories, contextualizing them along a timeline of several major landmarks — the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, the Oklahoma bombing of 1995, the election of Donald Trump, and so on — as she threads the needle between global events and American policies, from immigration crackdowns to the PATRIOT Act....

The actress is best known for “Murder, She Wrote,” but started her career in 1944 and has delighted generations of fans with nearly 150 credits. That includes everything ranging from voice-over performances to musicals and dramas. Lansbury was able to be anything an audience needed, from a warmhearted mother to a vicious villain. Angela Brigid Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925 in London, England. She was born into entertainment, with her mother, Moyna Macgill, being a regular performer on the West End stage....

The “Witch” breakout star, who teamed up again with the director on “The Northman,” addressed why Eggers is known for helming tough productions while speaking to IndieWire at the NYC red carpet premiere of Mark Mylod’s “The Menu” on Monday night. “I think anybody that’s precious would have a difficult time, just in the sense it’s a difficult, physical shoot,” Taylor-Joy exclusively told IndieWire at “The Menu” New York premiere. Her “The Menu” co-star Nicholas Hoult is set to lead Eggers’ long-awaited “Nosferatu” film, which initially was set to star Harry Styles....

Why so cheerful? Top Films Are Ready to Go The Calendar Is Optimal Although the Oscar deadline to open was extended to February 28, films that open by December 31 qualify for the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics prizes that were critical for movies like “Parasite,” “Roma,” and “Moonlight.” A year-end opening also allows movies to enter their VOD windows many weeks before the Oscars. That’s a prime opportunity for post-nominations revenue....

“How can you associate me with a government whose extremist media has spared no effort to destroy, marginalize, and stigmatize me in past years?” Farhadi writes (via Vulture translation). “A government to which I have made my views clear on the suffering it has caused over the years — from the events of January 2017 and November 2019, to the bitter and unforgivable tragedy that caused the murder of the Ukrainian plane passengers, from the cruel discrimination against women and girls to the way the country has allowed coronavirus to slaughter its people....

But no one was prepared for his star power that broke out of Baz Luhrmann’s musical biopic “Elvis” (Warner Bros.). Before the movie opened last June, Luhrmann and others were nervous about the younger-audience interest in the King of Rock ‘n Roll, who died in 1977. As it turned out, young moviegoers helped boost the movie to over $286 million worldwide — thanks to Butler. The California-born actor’s “Elvis” origin myth is well-established: the obsessive prep before Butler landed the role over Harry Styles and Miles Teller, sending a video of himself crying over the loss of his mother (to cancer, in 2014) as he sang “Unchained Melody,” learning how to croon as Young Elvis, collapsing when the movie was over....