EXCLUSIVE: Mia McKenna-Bruce, recipient of last year's BAFTA Rising Star laureate and star of Molly Manning Walker's breakthrough hit How to Have Sex, has joined Claire Denis' new film The Cry of the Guards. She replaces the previously announced Riley Keough. The fast-rising British actress travels…

EXCLUSIVE: Wicked production sound mixer Simon Hayes says Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba opposite Ariana Grande's Glinda in the musical extravaganza, has the prowess of an Olympian, which enabled his team to achieve vastly more than they'd expected. When Hayes and his unit were setting up…

EXCLUSIVE: Early one morning up in Haddon Hall, a grand Tudor hall in Derbyshire, England, this corpulent, menacing-looking man swathed in a richly brocaded tunic trimmed with fur shuffled over to have a chat with filmmaker Karim Aïnouz and the Oscar-winning actor Alicia Vikander. I had no idea who…

It's amazing watching Mike Leigh's film Hard Truths, starring the extraordinary Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin, in an American theater. Another layer is added as audience members, mostly women at the regular afternoon screening I attended, engaged in the story of two sisters who are the…

Monica Barbaro, who portrays Joan Baez in James Mangold's powerful awards-season contender A Complete Unknown, about how Bob Dylan — as played by Timothée Chalamet — put his colossal stamp on our rock 'n' roll culture, hails costume designer Arianne Phillips as a "detective" for her ability to track down…

EXCLUSIVE: Ariana DeBose sure had some exciting news to share last night. "Fingers crossed,” come this summer she will star in the Jamie Lloyd-directed revival of the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita at the iconic London Palladium, she told me exclusively. The Oscar-winning star…

Those actors scurrying around at the festival in Palm Springs would have been better served witnessing masterclasses in artistry from Viola Davis and Ted Danson, the recipients of Golden Globes honors on Friday night. Not only that, there was Mary Steenburgen and Meryl Streep, too.  And Carol…

EXCLUSIVE: Jon M. Chu learned to use his power in the right way — just as Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba does in Wicked. Chu says that after 15 years working with studios he knew "how the machine works" because otherwise, he says, it's very easy to get "overwhelmed by the pressures of fans, by the pressure…

EXCLUSIVE: "Unlimited", Cynthia Erivo sings, "My future is unlimited.” The lyrics from The Wizard and I, a number from the musical Wicked, tumble sweetly, melodically – effortlessly – from her mouth. Such a moment could not have happened 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, because, the star reveals: "I was not…

EXCLUSIVE: It’s quite something when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the West End’s biggest theater owner, taps you on the shoulder and says he has something to tell you. Even more so when he leads you from the London Palladium’s orchestra seats, up a couple flights of stairs where a beaming Madeleine Lloyd Webber…

EXCLUSIVE: James Mangold is sitting comfortably in a posh London hotel sipping tea. Actually, the seats are disagreeably sunken and the filmmaker jokes that we're like "six-year-olds" because we're sitting so low to the ground. "Yes, daddy, I'll have tea," he jokes. The filmmaker has been scooting…

EXCLUSIVE: Nicole Kidman says she was smitten the moment filmmaker and writer Halina Reijn revealed the name of a movie she was writing. “I love the title. So, I was like, ‘Oh! I’d like to be a Babygirl!'” The Oscar-winner says that when she read the script, she was “completely sort of hypnotized” by…