As I wrote last February, an early draft of After The Hunt “planted expectations that Julia Roberts‘ lead performance might stir convos about a Best Actressnomination and perhaps the ultimate gold trophy itself. She’s playing one of those well-sculpted, sturm und drang roles that older actresses have always pined for.”
Earlier today I read an early draft of Nora Garrett‘sAfterTheHunt screenplay, a #MeToo rape accusation drama that feels like a splicing of Todd Field‘s TAR, David Mamet‘s Oleanna and Ruben Ostlund‘sThe Square.
It’s the basis of an upcoming Luca Guadagnino film that MGM-Amazon will release on October 10th — a whipsmart, dialogue-driven, pressure-cooker thing with Julia Roberts toplining.
Strong supporting performances from Andrew Garfield, The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny will presumably round things out.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy recently reported that Hunt had test-screened in early December. He also sketched it out as one of those jarring, controversial, hot-button melodramas that stir the soup among educated audiences.
HE is guessing Hunt will debut six months hence at the Venice Film Festival.
Garrett’s page-turning screenplay (which a friend found on Reddit) vaguely summons the downswirling mood of Frank Perry‘s DiaryofaMadHousewife…if Perry’s 1970 film had been set in the realm of elite academia and concerned a middle-aged female professor (Roberts) on the brink of tenure.
Guadagnino (Queer, Challengers, CallMeByYourName) made some changes to Garrett’s Swedish-flavored scenario before filming it last summer in London and Cambridge.
That’s as far as I’ll go description-wise, but the screenplay did plant expectations of Roberts’ performance possibly stirring convos about a Best Actresstrophy. She’s playing one of those well-sculpted, sturmunddrang roles that older actresses have always pined for.
The Toronto Int’l Film Festival destroyed itself when it began to go wokey–wokey in ‘19 or thereabouts, and then it was further crippledbyCovid. I for one was happy to see TIFF gradually slide down the slope…good!
For the last four or five years TIFF has been a shadowofitsformerself, and everyone kind of despises it for having become a festivalofsecond–tier, sloppy–seconds, Venice–and–Telluride–rejected or leftoverattractions.
Initial TIFF 2025 rundown:
Nicholas Hytner’s The Choral
Agnieszka Holland’s Franz
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound
Paul Greengrass’ The Lost Bus
Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life
HIKARI’s Rental Family
Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman
Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s She Has No Name
Clement Virgo’s Steal Away
Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Galas (in alphabetical order):
The Choral | Nicholas Hytner | UK
World Premiere | Gala Presentation: Homebound | Neeraj Ghaywan | India
North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Hamlet | Chloé Zhao | UK
Canadian Premiere | Gala Presentation: A Private Life | Rebecca Zlotowski | France
North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Roofman | Derek Cianfrance | USA
World Premiere | Gala Presentation: She Has No Name | Peter Ho-Sun Chan | China
North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Special Presentations (in alphabetical order):
Franz | Agnieszka Holland | Czech Republic/Germany/Poland
World Premiere | Special Presentation: The Lost Bus | Paul Greengrass | USA
World Premiere | Special Presentation: Rental Family | HIKARI | USA/Japan
World Premiere | Special Presentation: Steal Away | Clement Virgo | Canada/Belgium
World Premiere | Special Presentation: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery | Rian Johnson | USA
World Premiere | Special Presentation: The 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, presented by Rogers, runs September 4–14, 2025.
The full Festival schedule will be released on tiff.net on Tuesday, August 12.
I’ve somehow missed a pair of three–month–oldquotes from Marty Supreme dp Darius Khondry, one in which he said that he and director Josh Safdie have “pushed the negative to increasethegrain” (i.e. an apparent assurance of an Egyptian grainstorm), and another in which he divulged that Marty Supreme contains “140differentcharacters”
14 characters means a film will be fairly verbose, but 140? A film with 25characters means it’ll be a lot like Robert Altman’s Nashville (which has 25 characters) and 50characters would be Nashville on Adderall. Double that and you’d have Nashville injected with “hoo-hoo!” Daffy Duck serum. Bump that up to 140 and you’d be going beepity-beep-beep and whoa-baby “hoodily-hoo-hoo!” and homina-homina-homina start to finish.
We all know that Josh Safdie is a humanpogostick on speed to begin with, and so what Khondji has conveyed should strike cold fear into the hearts of cineastes everywhere.
This plus a likely prospect of Timothee Chalamet and his 139 costars inhaling and re-inhaling hundreds of billions of Egyptian mosquitoes into their lungs between lines, and I’m scared…genuinelyterrified of this film. I’m certainly exhausted just thinking about it.
This poster for Anthony Mann’s BendoftheRiver (‘52) shows “Julia” Adams (better known as CreatureFromTheBlackLagoon’s Julie Adams) with a Native American arrow lodged in her upper right chest…above the breast, next to right armpit).
This amounts to a blatanttheft of a scene in Red River (‘48) in which Joanne Dru is arrow-shot in almost the exact same spot. Not cool!
If I’d been directing the arrow would’ve pierced Adams’ left collarbone area.
Every film maven knows tall, dark and reptilian Steve Cochran, who played Virginia Mayo’s extra-marital boyfriend in William Wyler‘s TheBestYearsofOurLives (‘46) as well as Mayo’s extra-marital gangster lover (“Big Ed”) in Raoul Walsh‘s WhiteHeat (‘49).
Known for playing casual attitude bad guys on-screen, Cochran’s inside-the-industry rep was that of an insatiable party hound…booze, broads, fast cars, private planes and inevitably “scoring” with his female costars. The town gradually formed an opinion that Cochran was much more into cooze and trim than than investing in the basics of a solid film career (devotion to acting, playing his political cards right, trying to be cast in prestige projects). In the late ’40s and ’50s Cochran was almost the Bob Crane of his time.
Fewer know about Cochran’s abrupt and curious death aboard his sailing yacht Rogue. It happened in mid-June of ‘65, somewhere off the coast of southern Mexico or perhaps Guatemala, when Cochran was 48. If you know the story of his sudden demise and especially the grisly aftermath, it’s hard not to imagine someone (perhaps Michel Franco?) making a dark twisted film about it. The Cochran saga could be a perfect vehicle for a feminist director making a standard-issue “all men are pigs” movie.
There’s something simultaneously chilling, existentially creepy and almost perversely “funny” about Cochran, who, in his late ’40s and ’50s heyday, surely dipped his wick as much as Errol Flynn or Charlie Chaplin or George Roundy or any other hardcore poon hound…there’s something simultaneously wicked and darkly funny (in a pathetic, lampoonish sort of way) about Cochran hiring three young Mexican girls to accompany him on a cruise to Guatemala in order to (heh-heh) research a film (Captain O’Flynn), and the ship being hit by a heavy storm and one of the masts being damaged, and the Cochran suddenly falling ill with an infected lung and wham, he’s dead two days later.
But the three girls don’t know how to sail and the Rogue is a long way from the coast, and so they’re stuck with Cochran’s stinky, decaying corpse — getting smellier and smellier as it bloats and turns black — for ten days until a fishing ship happens by.
The poor women had no choice but to tough it out. If they’d thrown Cochran’s body overboard and let the fish eat him, the authorities would’ve accused them of murder.
I’ve been sensing uh-oh vibes from Paul Thomas AndersonOneBattleAfterAnother since 3.29.25, which is when I talked to a fellow who’d recently seen a preview screening and called it “asatireofradicalleftrevolutionaries”…”it’s played for comedy but thewokeyswon’tlikeit”.
Who the hell cares enough about rural looney-tune radical lefties to see, much less enjoy, a satire of their behaviors? I hated PTA’s last Thomas Pynchon adaptation so what are the odds I’ll be receptivetothisone?
Preview guy also called it “a guy movie like UncutGems but aimed more at black women and [even] white conservative women than liberalwhitewomenonanti–depressants…I wouldn’t take my girlfriend to it…it’s nota2025movie…it would’ve gone down well during Obama’s second term, but movieslikethisarenotmadetoday.”
It is therefore not surprising to read a JordanRuimyreport that the Warner Bros. distribution team may have decided not to premiere the PTA at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (8.27 to 9.6):
I’ve been sniffing weirdo gas fumes (i.e. the eccentric “I love black women!” kind) from this pricey PTA flick all along. If the Italian Cinematore guy is correct, it would appear that WB p.r. execs are persuaded that the film will draw a “mixed” or half-negative critical reaction in Venice and have decided it’s better to cutbaitratherthanfish.
The Venice lineup will be announced on Tuesday, 7.22.
My system wasn’t just wilting from a massive injection of James Gunn geek arsenic, but from a feeling of terrible spiritual exhaustion…a feeling of defeat and hopelessness that had nowhere to go but down.
From Owen Gleiberman’s 7.13essay about the movie-critic war over the horror of Superman:
Jackie Gleason’s 39th birthday party was held on 2.26.55 at Toot’sShor’s (51 W. 51st Street). He was rolling in clover and adulation back then, and on this particular night (i.e., Saturday) he was being toasted and celebrated by every showbiz hotshot in town (including Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio).
Plus ratings for TheJackie Gleason Show had been surging since ‘53 or thereabouts, and Gleason had recently decided to gamble big on a full season (39 episodes) of TheHoneymooners, a hugely successful half-hour series which ran from 10.1.55 to 9.22.56 and is still being re-watched as we speak.
Gleason was a genius madman back then — big drinker, smoker and spender, living for the highs, burning the candle at both ends — and he enjoyed a long and successful career, of course, but I hated his constantly seething Buford T. Justice in the Smokey movies, and I never cared much for his old-school, tweedle-dee mustache.
Gleason was beautiful when youngish and livin’ large and full of beans, but the old pizazz ebbed away as he got older. His heyday had happened in the ‘50s, and everyone knew that.
When you’ve got it, flaunt it. Life is short. Go for the gusto while it’s still gusting, etc.
Gleason’s final peak momrnt — at least in my estimation — was his performance as Minnesota Fats in Robert Rossen’s TheHustler (‘61). for which he was Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category. Gleason should have damn well won the Oscar, but WestSideStory’s George Chakiris unjustly edged him out.
Poor John Milius is grappling with the big C. Here’s to a great eccentric gun owner, a great individualist, a great commentary-track raconteur, an allegedly devotional surfer and one of the most influential director-writers of the ‘60s, 70s and ‘80s. Salute!
How do you write about Lena Dunham’s semi-autobiographical TooMuch, a 10-part Netflix series that popped on 7.10, without stepping on a land mine or stepping over the woke-terror line by addressing the elephant in the room?
You start by praising Dunham’s writing, I suppose. (Right?) The dialogue is well honed and just right — wise and zeitgeisty and agreeably settled-in and never less than perceptive. I immediately felt at ease because of this talent, this signature, this attitudinal stamp.
And because of Megan Stalter’s believably dug-in and disarming lead performance.
But we can’t just sail along and pretend that TooMuch, despite its emotional precision and candor and generally elevated vibe, isn’t a chubbo sell-job.
The truth is that I briefly gasped when a shot captured a partially disrobed Stalter in profile. I didn’t gasp because I wanted to earn or ratify my ayehole credentials. I gasped because a voice deep inside went “holy shit!”
Remember when the great Shelley Winters (who once told me I reminded her of an old boyfriend) ballooned up in the mid ‘60s? In Jack Smight and Paul Newman’s Harper (‘66) she was candidly and unapologetically described with the “f” word. Imagine!
Remember James Mangold ‘s Heavy (‘96)? And Catherine Breillat’s FatGirl (‘01)? Remember that moment in Sideways when Thomas Haden Church described Missy Doty as “the grateful type”? The Stalinists would never tolerate this terminology now..
Too Much is an engaging, faintly downish but agreeably hip and certainly chuckle-worthy feminist romcom that is also (I’m repeating myself but an emphasis is warranted) an attempt to normalize.
Normalize what? Well, what has always seemed to me and tens of millions of others like anexoticconcept, which is that obese, whipsmart, Type-A women and lean, open-hearted, chubby-chasing dudes often hook up and wind up happily entwined or even married. Not to be spoil-sportish but this kind of thing is not by any stretch a common relationship occurence, not even among size-affirming Millennials and Zoomers.
We all understand the basic appeal of curvy, zaftig and even a little Rubenesque action. As far back as the ‘70s a friend used the term “tons of fun”, and I knew exactly that he was joking about, conceptually speaking.
Speaking as a trim guy from way back, how many overweight women have I “been” with? One. Okay, maybe two. (And I don’t mean obese.) Did I mostly steer clear of calorically challenged lassies because I’m a bigot? It sure didn’t seem that way back then (i.e., the 20th Century). Nobody “slept” with fatties.
Backstory–wise, TooMuch is about a moderately fetching Dunham-esque producer-writer-whatever (Stalter) who moves to London in the wake of a traumatic breakup with a longtime Brooklyn boyfriend (the trimly proportioned Michael Zegen) who’s dumped her for a model-esque hottie (Emily Ratajkowski).
The main order of business is about Stalter falling for a poor, well-sculpted musician and kindred spirit (TheWhiteLotus’s Will Sharpe) who, in a non-wokey, normal-seeming world, would almost certainly be seeing a girl more his own size and shape. Or at least a zaftig rather than a tubby tuba.
What happens between Stalter and Sharpe is the meat and essence of the show, of course. Most of it romantically resonates and touches bottom and all that good stuff. (Including, I’ve read**, one or two harsh stand-offs.) Dunham is grade-A all the way. But how do you get around those gasp moments?
I felt so drained Wednesday night and Thursday by my recentdiagnosis that I figured I couldn’t stand the combination of atherosclerosis plus watching James Gunn’s Superman.
But now that I’ve settled into (i.e., accepted) the glumness of things, I guess I can handle a Superman viewing. That’s what I’m doing now. Suffering through the godawful trailers, I mean.
