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Luke Combs and Lainey Wilson will be the big winners at the 59th Academy of Country Music Awards. That’s according to the combined predictions of Gold Derby users who placed their bets here in our predictions center. Scroll down to see our complete racetrack odds with projected winners highlighted in gold. And tune in tonight at 8:00pm Eastern/5:00pm Pacific on Amazon Prime Video to find out who takes home the coveted trophies.

Wilson just won the Country Music Association Award for Entertainer of the Year last fall in a major upset. Then earlier this year she claimed the Grammy for Best Country Album for “Bell Bottom Country.” Things have been going her way long enough now that she’s the odds-on favorite to claim the ACMs’ top prize too, even though Entertainer of the Year seldom goes to women; Carrie Underwood (2020) and Miranda Lambert (2022) are the...

Welcome to our weekly rundown of the best new music — featuring big singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week, André 3000 picks up his flute for a strange yet pleasant pivot; Drake gives Taylor Swift a shoutout; and Tate McRae gets spiteful with her exes. Plus, new music from Madi Diaz, Kacey Musgraves, Boygenius, and Dolly Parton.

André 3000, “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time” (YouTube)

Drake, “Red Button” (YouTube)

Tate McRae,...

Media giant Mediaset has acquired Italian distribution rights to Spanish writer-director Benito Zambrano’s drama “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake,” produced and sold by Barcelona-based studio Filmax.

News of the deal comes just before Filmax screens “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake” to buyers at this year’s online European Film Market.

Described as high-quality cinema for adults and predominantly female audiences, “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake” adapts the novel of the same title by screenwriter and casting specialist Cristina Campos. It has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide.

A member of Spain’s generation of directors that broke out in the 1990s, helping Spanish movies find far larger favor with audiences at home, Zambrano’s breakout debut, 1999’s “Alone,” won the Panorama Audience Award at Berlin.

He has gone on to make three more features – 2005’s “Havana Blues,” 2011’s “The Sleeping Voice” and 2019’s “Out in the Open” – earning two screenplay Goyas,...

South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass might not seem like the obvious choice to direct a horror movie. For most of her life, the 35-year-old helmer has steered clear of scares. “I was really sensitive as a kid,” she tells Variety. Even the sight of a character getting shot was too grisly for her to bear. “Horror was out of the question.”

Bass was in her twenties when she began dipping into the genre. She found herself fascinated by the form — what people found scary, and why — even while she puzzled over why most horror movies were about supernatural menaces, ancient curses or mysterious creatures from the deep: nothing that was “real or rooted in our world.”

That question would eventually lead to “Mlungu Wam” (“Good Madam”), a psychological thriller that world premieres at the Toronto Film Festival. Set in the suburbs of Cape Town, it follows a series of...

Goteborg Film Festival, the biggest showcase of local and international movies in the Nordics, will kick off its 43rd edition with Maria Bäck’s “”Psychosis,” and will close with actor-turned-director Mårten Klingberg’s “My Father Mary Anne.”

Both timely Swedish dramas dealing with trauma post-sexual abuse, and the experience of a transgender priest, respectively, “Psychosis” and “My Father Mary Anne” will have their world premiere at Goteborg.

Stellan Skarsgård, who just won a Golden Globe for his performance in the hit HBO series “Tchernobyl,” will receive the prestigious Nordic Honorary Dragon Award and will be honored with a retrospective of some of the greatest films of his career. As part of the tribute, the estival will also host the Nordic premiere of “The Painted Bird” which was recently shortlisted for the international feature film category at the Oscars. During the festival, Skarsgård will also having a masterclass.

In addition to opening the festival,...

Sorry We Missed You, The Traitor, A Hidden Life among Masters selection.

Toronto International Film Festival top brass announced on Tuesday (13) The Aeronauts and Wasp Network among a cluster of additions to Galas and Special Presentations, and also unveiled Contemporary World Cinema, which Our Lady Of The Nile will open, as well as Masters, and Wavelengths.

Tom Harper’s ballooning adventure The Aeronauts starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones will receive its Canadian premiere in Galas, suggesting a Telluride world premiere slot, while Olivier Assayas’ spy saga Wasp Network with Penélope Cruz and Edgar Ramírez gets a North American premiere...

It’s the premise of a classic short novel by a Shakespearian scholar and at least a half dozen EC Comics. What happens when beings based in a differing number of dimensions interact? Usually it’s the higher dimensions assaulting us, but if the invasion comes from the ground up, one would hope your defensive wall could be a…

Flatline

By Jamie Mathieson

Directed by Douglas Mackinnon

A mysterious force is causing the dimensions in a council estate near Bristol to collapse, resulting in people vanishing, with only distended and partial projections left behind. The Tardis is affected by the distortion, and when it lands, the connection between the interior and exterior of the ship is…oddly affected. Reduced to half-size, and then smaller, The Doctor is trapped within the ship, leaving Clara as the one with boots on the ground to discover the source of the attack, save everyone,...

Dennis Hopper’s long film career began with the 1955 teen angst classic Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, and he helped usher in Hollywood’s New Wave as director and star of the counterculture anthem Easy Rider in 1969. He later became a respected character actor, specializing in such off-beat villains as the drug-addicted, obscenity-spouting Frank Black in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), crazed bomber Howard Payne in the 1994 action-thriller Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and Deacon in Kevin Costner’s soggy post-apocalyptic saga Waterworld (1995).

Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas on May 17, 1936. He moved to San Diego, California with his family in the late 1940s, and began studying at the local Old Globe Theater while attending high school. He soon signed with Warner Brothers and was featured in a small role in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause. He was later featured as Jordan Benedict III, the...