Life of Famous Turkish Photographer Ara Guler Set For Biopic Directed by Aren Perdeci, Ela Alyamac (EXCLUSIVE)

will not be performing her Oscar-nominated song “Hold My Hand” at the 2023 Academy Awards on Sunday because, well, she's too busy working on her next Oscar-bait project: . Gaga will star as Harley Quinn in the sequel to 2018's Joker, which was nominated for 11 Oscars.The news was announced at a March 8 press conference by the executive producer and showrunner of the Oscars, Glenn Weiss.

says the first time she was paid the same as her male costar was for her upcoming spy-thriller series opposite Richard Madden.“I might get into trouble for [saying this], depends on who’s watching,” the 40-year-old actor said during a panel at the SXSW film festival on March 10, per . “I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for now 22 years, and I have done almost 70-plus features and two TV shows, but when I did Citadel, it was the first time in my career that I had pay parity.”She continued, “I’m laughing about this, but it’s kind of nuts.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Early on in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” enterprising London-based filmmaker Zoe (Lily James) pitches a proposed documentary about Muslim arranged marriages to a pair of white male commissioners. They’re bored and disengaged until they realize how the topic can be dressed up in the tropes and lingo of Western romantic comedy to appeal to a general British audience: One suggests interview inserts in the style of “When Harry Met Sally,” the other name-drops “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” as a reference point. When Zoe suggests titling the doc “Love Contractually,” the deal is done. Sharper than anything else in Shekhar Kapur’s pleasant, easygoing comedy, the scene neatly satirizes how nuanced cross-cultural material can be blandly packaged and whitewashed for the mainstream — a point that would land harder if “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” didn’t proceed to do much the same thing. At a push, you could credit the film — a first feature screenwriting credit for producer and former journalist Jemima Khan — with some meta self-awareness as it tackles a thorny, divisive cultural institution in the sweetest, sunniest terms possible, down to its own recurring “When Harry Met Sally”-style inserts. But to what end, exactly? As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.

Stassi Schroeder is revealing the gender of her new baby.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The upcoming Apple TV+ competition series “My Kind of Country,” executive-produced by Kacey Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon, is not just going to be a genre-specific knockoff of “American Idol” or “The Voice,” it’s clear from a first trailer released Friday. (Watch the new preview, below.) Fostering inclusiveness of every sort looks to be as high on the agenda as finding unknown talent, as is made apparent not just from the YouTube teaser but the previously known trio of celebrity talent scouts — Jimmie Allen, Mickey Guyton and Orville Peck — plus a just-released rundown of the dozen competing aspirants. “The people that i love in country music, they don’t look like me,” one contestant, Camille Parker, a Black woman from North Carolina, is seen as saying. “I’m ready to show people what they’ve been missing.”

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief CJ ENM is putting an emphasis on TV content over feature film at the upcoming FilMart rights market in Hong Kong. The South Korean behemoth, which operates multiple studios and the TVing streaming platform, is touting at least six shows and formats. Sebastian Kim, the group’s director of international content sales and acquisition, will also be taking part in a Monday morning seminar “Spotlight Conversation: The Asian Wave in 2023 and Beyond” at FilMart. His lineup is headed by “The Heavenly Idol,” a fantasy, romance series which sees a priest from a different era transported to the present day as a pop idol. His training makes him a hopeless celebrity, but he has to learn to adapt. Starring Kim Min-gue and Go Bo-gyeol, the 12-part series began airing mind-February on tvN.

Easter is just a couple of weeks away, meaning you've probably started to see some common treats popping up on shop shelves like eggs and novelty chocolate. And one of the most popular snacks at this time of year is the hot cross bun - fluffy, spiced cakes packed with citrus, dried fruits and bearing the familiar cross shape on the surface.

Former Celtic star spotter Neil McGuinness is in the frame for the head of recruitment role at Southampton.

Netflix series that made him a household name promoted a “conspiracy” that he tried to kill Carole Baskin.“Well, first of all, I didn’t do ‘Tiger King,'” Exotic, 60, told TMZ by phone Friday from his Texas prison after the outlet asked if he regretted participating in the docuseries. “Did ‘Tiger King’ ruin my life? Absolutely.”He continued: “I was filming just a little tiger show in 2016 and 2017, and then Netflix and [‘Tiger King’ director] Eric Goode and all of them turned this into this conspiracy that killed [sic] Carole Baskin to make a show.”Exotic gained worldwide fame from the 2020 docuseries, which showcased his work and personal life as he looked after exotic big cats at his G.W.

a report by WalletHub.It’s apparently a boon for the local economy, too: Los Angeles reportedly sees a more than $163 million boost from the ceremony.For an A-list actress, that means they could drop about $10 million on a show-stopping look for the red carpet. Even first-time attendees have to open their wallets wide, with an outfit potentially ringing up $266,000.Cate Blanchett, who is nominated this year for Best Lead Actress for “Tár,” set the record for the most expensive look ever at the Oscars in 2014 — where her ensemble cost a whopping $18.1 million.Lady Gaga’s Tiffany pendant that she rocked at the 2019 ceremony was valued at $30 million.By the way, according to WalletHub, a win in the Best Actor or Actress category can mean a 20% boost in pay for the victor’s next film.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian actor-turned-director Andrea Di Stefano, whose gritty police drama “The Last Night of Amore” is launching from the Berlin Film Festival’s Berlinale Special Gala section, reps an Italian anomaly. “Amore,” which refers to a police lieutenant named Franco Amore, oddly marks Di Stefano debut directing an Italian-language film after helming well-received U.S. indie thrillers “Escobar: Paradise Lost,” with Benicio del Toro, and “The Informer.”  Sumptuosly shot in 35mm film and set in present-day Milan, “Last Night of Amore” harks back to Italian genre films of the 70s and 80s but has a fresh contemporary feel. The plot sees the good lieutenant, played by Italian A-lister Pierfrancesco Favino (“The Traitor,” “Nostalgia”) being called on the night before retirement to investigate a crime scene where his best friend and long-time partner Dino has been killed during a diamond heist. Complications ensue, things get very frantic, and we learn how his love for his wife Viviana, played by Linda Caridi (“The Ties”) will help Amore survive the longest and most challenging night of his existence.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian animation auteur Enzo D’Alò – whose globally known works include “The Blue Arrow,” “Lucky and Zorba,” “Momo” and “Opopomoz” – is back with Roddy Doyle adaptation “A Greyhound Of a Girl” launching from the Berlin Film Festival’s Generation Kplus section. “Greyhound of a Girl,” which is D’Alò’s first English-language film, is about four generations of Irish women who embark on a car journey. One of them is dead, one of them is dying, one is driving, and the fourth is twelve-year old Dublin school girl Mary O’Hara. Mary shares her grandmother’s rebel spirit and love of cooking and is bravely dealing with the fact that her granny’s days are drawing to a close.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The story of Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, whose recent arrest by police in Palermo after 30 years on the run made global headlines, is set to become a big-budget film. Rome-based producer Marco Belardi (“Perfect Strangers”) has acquired rights to ace anti-Mafia journalist Lirio Abbate’s book about the Cosa Nostra boss. The book is titled “U Siccu,” which is Sicilian dialect that translates as “The Skinny One.” Messina Denaro was arrested in mid-January by dozens of police officers outside an upscale medical facility in Palermo where he had been undergoing cancer treatment for a year under false identity.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Veteran auteur Mario Martone, whose Naples-set drama “Nostalgia” launched last year from Cannes, has quite a lot in common with Massimo Troisi, Italy’s beloved late comic actor-director who is best known internationally as the star of Oscar-winning film “Il Postino.” Which is why Martone was well-suited to direct the multi-layered doc about Troisi’s legacy “Somebody Down There Likes Me” that is screening in the Berlinale Special sidebar. For starters, they are both Neapolitan, and were born only a few years a part. Troisi – who in “Il Postino” played the simple postman who rides his bicycle on a sandy Italian island to deliver mail to his sole client, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda – died tragically of congenital heart failure at age 41 in June 1994, the day after “Il Postino” finished shooting at Rome’s Cinecittà studios.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Egyptian director Abu Bakr Shawky, whose first feature “Yomeddine” had the rare distinction of making the competition cut for Cannes, has completed his followup, the Saudi-set travel movie “Hajjan” which is expected to soon surface on the festival circuit.  Somewhat similarly to “Yomeddine,” which made a splash in 2018, the hotly anticipated “Hajjan” involves a journey across the desert, this time embarked upon by a boy and his camel. The big-budget film, which was shot mostly in the sprawling area situated along Saudi’s Red Sea coast in Tabuk – in the northwest of the kingdom – is about a young boy named Matar who, after the death of his brother on the camel race track, tries to avenge his death. To do so he becomes a camel jockey, only to find himself entangled in a battle for his own freedom.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Locarno Film Festival’s Locarno Pro initiative dedicated to pics in post is set to look at films from the U.K. that are in their final stage of production for its upcoming 76th edition. Locarno’s First Look focus on indie U.K. film segues from the fest having developed a close rapport with the British industry over the decades, spanning from Mike Leigh’s 1972 Golden Leopard winner “Bleak Moments” to Terence Davies’s “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” which scooped the pard in 1998, and the more recent launches last year of Andrew Legge’s “LOLA” and Charlotte Colbert’s “She Will.” Locarno’s First Look initiative, in partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI), will run August 4-6. Six selected U.K. films that are currently in post-production will be unveiled, providing their producers an opportunity to pitch them to international industry professionals attending the festival. The U.K. pics in post will be presented to sales agents, buyers, programmers and representatives from post-production funds.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s Kino Produzioni, the indie shingle that co-produced 2022 Berlin Golden Bear winner “Alcarràs,” is ramping up production with new films by emerging Italian filmmakers Carlo Sironi, Laura Luchetti and Irene Dionisio, as well as also Dutch director Michiel Van Erp and Argentine filmmakers María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat.  “We reached a turning point last year that started out well with the ‘Alcarràs’ victory,” said Kino chief Giovanni Pompili, speaking at the EFM. He noted that in 2022, the Rome-based outfit shot four films, “which for us was pretty challenging, but worked out well.” Meanwhile, the Kino team has grown. Producer Lara Costa-Calzado, who has been working for a decade between the U.S. and Europe on films such as Eliza Hittman’s Silver Bear winner “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Sally Potter’s “The Roads Not Taken” and Halina Rejin’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” has joined Kino as head of production.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent In “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,” which is premiering on Feb. 17 at the Berlin Film Festival, the folk icon with a supple soprano voice and a long history of activism, takes a disarmingly candid look on her life as she faces the end of her 60-year musical career. The immersive doc is co-directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle. They interweave Baez’s 2018 Fare Thee Well final concert tour with her early years, her rise to fame, struggles with drugs that ensued, and a darker psychological thread involving a form of child abuse on the part of Baez’s father. A surprising level of intimacy is reached thanks to a wealth of material obtained from Baez’s meticulously preserved personal archives comprising home movies, diaries, artwork, therapy tapes, and audio recordings of voice letters to her family. Some, while Baez was on tour in England in 1965 with Bob Dylan whom, she confesses in the doc, “broke my heart.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Gael García Bernal and Renate Reinsve (“The Worse Person in the World”) will soon be appearing on screen as lovers caught in an unusual bind in Italian director Piero Messina’s sci-fi film “Another End.” French sales company Newen Connect is launching sales on the pic at the European Film Market.  “Another End” is set in a near-future when a new technology exists that can put the consciousness of a dead person back into a living body, in an attempt to ease the grief of separation, providing a little extra time to say goodbye.  The English-language sci-fier by Messina — whose first feature, “The Wait,” launched with a splash in the 2015 Venice competition — sees Bernal play Sal, a man whose wife dies, and Reinsve as Zoe, the woman who then becomes his partner after renting out her body, in which the memory and consciousness of Sal’s former wife have been temporarily implanted. First look image of Reinsve as Zoe above.