Latest news with #Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Epoch Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
‘Dashing to the End: The Ray Milland Story'
Film critic and historian Eric Monder traces Ray Milland's tumultuous life in 'Dashing to the End: The Ray Milland Story.' This first-ever biography about the Welsh-born actor shows how Milland's career evolved in a series of starts and stops, rising to an Oscar-winning crescendo before dipping into a long series of mostly forgettable work. Born Alfred Reginald John Truscott-Jones in 1907, he served with distinction in the Household Cavalry of the British Army before drifting into the London-based film industry in the late 1920s. A serendipitous casting in the first British talkie, 'The Flying Scotsman,' (1929) caught the attention of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) talent scout who secured a Hollywood contract for the newly renamed Ray Milland.
Time of India
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
'Project Hail Mary' teaser out: Ryan Gosling in a gripping sci-fi adventure
Project Hail Mary is an upcoming science-fiction film adaptation of Andy Weir's bestselling novel. The film is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and stars Ryan Gosling . The movie is about an isolated astronaut who embarks on a quest to save Earth. The teaser trailer has been dropped, and here's a look into the suspenseful space journey. Come, let's find out when it's releasing. About the Movie The upcoming film Project Hail Mary is a science fiction film based on the bestseller by Andy Weir, author of The Martian. It is being directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the director duo behind hits like The LEGO Movie and 21 Jump Street. The film features Ryan Gosling playing the lead role. Trailer Release The official teaser trailer for Project Hail Mary has come out. It provides a brief glimpse of the space environment in the story and the enigmatic feel. In the trailer, we can see Ryan Gosling waking up by himself in a spaceship. The trailer builds curiosity, showing glimpses of space, emptiness, and a sense of urgency. Release Date The film is produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), now part of Amazon , it is scheduled to be released on March 20, 2026 (United Kingdom). Filming of the movie began earlier this year and is expected to wrap up in 2025. Plot of the Movie The tale is set with Ryland Grace, an ex-schoolteacher, who awakens on a spaceship known as the Hail Mary with no idea who he is or why he's there. As he gradually regains memories, he finds himself on a mission-critical rescue of Earth from a global catastrophe. But he's not alone in the universe then he eventually encounters an alien lifeform. Surprisingly, the alien is not a threat. Instead, the two beings, despite their differences, must learn to work together to survive and possibly save both their planets. The story combines science, suspense, survival, and friendship, making it unique. Just like in The Martian, the character uses science and logic to solve big problems. However, Project Hail Mary goes a step further by adding emotional depth, memory loss, and the unlikely friendship between a human and an alien. Stars Ryan Gosling Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a character who needs to solve problems with science, memory, and imagination. The role should be intense and emotive, as the character experiences isolation, discovery, and personal development. He has a reputation for delivering strong acting performances, and fans can't wait to see how he interprets this complicated character. About the Novel 'Project Hail Mary' Project Hail Mary is a critically acclaimed novel released in 2021, it became a New York Times bestseller and was praised for its mix of real science and emotional storytelling. Because of its popularity, the idea for a film adaptation began soon after the book was released, and Ryan Gosling quickly signed on to play the lead. The teaser trailer gives just a hint of the adventure to come, and fans of space stories, science fiction, or Ryan Gosling will definitely be keeping an eye on this one and it is expected to be a major cinematic event when it releases in 2026.
Business Insider
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Denis Villeneuve once said he'd 'deeply love' to make a James Bond movie. Amazon just hired him — and 007 fans seem to approve.
James Bond fans, rejoice. Amazon has picked Denis Villeneuve to direct the first 007 movie since it bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $8.5 billion in 2022. The idea of a new take on the character is a daunting prospect after Daniel Craig's 15-year tenure ended with " No Time to Die." The 2021 film ends as 007 goes out in a sacrificial blaze of glory to save his partner Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) and their daughter Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet). Now, Amazon is working on rebooting the James Bond franchise, a prospect that's worried fans since the MGM acquisition. Many joked that the streamer would Marvel-ize the property with spinoffs about characters such as Moneypenny, Q, or M. I can see it now. Q and M prequels, a Miss Moneypenny spinoff and a Blofeld series depicting him as an anti-hero — LifeMi (@LifeMi1987) February 20, 2025 However, Amazon announced on Wednesday that Villeneuve had signed on to direct the next film in the series. His wife, Tanya LaPointe, has also joined the project as an executive producer. Villeneuve said in a press release: "Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007. I grew up watching James Bond films with my father, ever since 'Dr. No' with Sean Connery. I'm a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he's sacred territory. I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honor." It's something of a dream come true for Villeneuve, who told the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast in 2021 he "would deeply love to one day make a James Bond movie," before calling it a "big challenge to reboot after what Daniel did." Villeneuve's movies including " Arrival," "Blade Runner 2049," and " Dune" have won 11 Oscars from 33 nominations, and many are taking this as a sign that Amazon is approaching "James Bond" seriously by working with an auteur. Fans on X pointed to Villeneuve's 2015 crime thriller "Sicario" as a sign that the director is the right choice for Bond. The director behind the Sicario border scene getting to make the next phase of James Bond is incredible stuff. It almost doesn't matter who they cast as Bond, they're going to be in good hands. And I'd argue the 1st films were the best for the last two runs (GoldenEye and Casino… — Scott Kacsmar (@ScottKacsmar) June 26, 2025 The person who directed this will be directing new James Bond. Denis Villeneuve — The Cinéprism (@TheCineprism) June 26, 2025 If Denis Villeneuve does anything like this with the next James Bond movie, we're in for a treat. — The Sting (@TheStingisBack) June 26, 2025 "Sicario" follows an FBI agent who joins a ruthless CIA task force whose goal is to dismantle a violent drug cartel in Mexico, and it has a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's worth noting that the new "James Bond" project does not have a screenwriter attached yet, and it isn't clear if Villeneuve already has a story in mind. The director is preparing to start shooting " Dune: Part Three" later this year, so it could be some time before the next version of Bond gets into production. Amazon's willingness to wait for Villeneuve suggests the studio is willing to wait rather than rush out a new 007.
Metro
06-06-2025
- Business
- Metro
'Loopy' action thriller lands on Amazon Prime with viewers cancelling plans
A new action thriller film has already landed on Amazon Prime Video despite its UK cinema release date only coming two months ago. The Accountant 2, starring Ben Affleck, is a sequel to the 2016 action film The Accountant, which also starred Ben in the lead role of Christian Wolff. Following the story of autistic accountant Christian, The Accountant followed Ben's character as he secretly reworked accounts for international criminal organisations. It received a mixed response from critics, and has a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has developed a cult following in the nine years since its release. And while it was made on a budget of $44million (£32.5m), the film – directed by Gavin O'Connor – made back $155m (£115m) at the global box office. Starring Anna Kendrick too, The Accountant was popular with viewers, and a sequel was greenlit by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after years of development. Directed again by Gavin O'Connor, The Accountant 2 saw Ben Affleck reprise his role and starred opposite Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, and JK Simmons once more. The sequel sees Christian drawn back into the criminal underworld after a mutual acquaintance is killed, uncovering a deadly conspiracy along the way. Critics were much kinder to it upon release earlier this year, with the film currently boasting a solid 72% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on more than 200 reviews. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Fans are super keen too, with the audience rating sat at 92%, which is a marked improvement upon the 77% audience rating from the first film. On X, user @4P1HT commented: 'The Accountant 2 is a solid action entertainer. It also gets unexpectedly quite intense in some places.' @PlanetReview concurred: 'The film is a fun buddy comedy. It's proof that a movie doesn't have to be deep to have a good time at the movies, and that's perfectly fine! 'The action is fun too. The characters are funny. However, the chemistry between leads Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal is as charming as it is electric.' Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman referred to The Accountant 2 as 'agreeably loopy' and described it as a 'hyperviolent good time'. @UcheKL said 'Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck have amazing screen chemistry,' while @HeyKayKay described 'the brother chemistry' as 'top notch'. @HayKayKay also argued: 'Wait. I thought [The Accountant 2] was even better than the first one and so heartfelt. Like, I'm over here crying.' More Trending @MarkOwenH raved: 'The Accountant 2 was not good… it was excellent. Normally the second installment is mailed into the viewer. Not in this case. Well done gentlepeople. Well done indeed.' And @RobertPalacios2 said: 'I enjoyed The Accountant 2 even more on a second viewing. Affleck and Bernthal are a great pairing.' While The Accountant 2 has gone over better with fans and critics, its box office figures didn't quite match up, with the film making back just $101m (£74.5m) against a budget of $80m (£59m). View More » The Accountant 2 is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Amazon Prime fans heartbroken by 'tear-jerking' show – with only days left to binge MORE: I binge-watch TV for a living – here are my recommendations for June MORE: Amazon Prime fans urged to binge 'excellent' sci-fi series before all episodes disappear
New European
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
No, Greta Garbo didn't want to be alone
The suave 47-year-old said nothing. He simply picked up his fountain pen and drew a large rectangle on the back of an envelope in black ink to represent a billboard. And then, inside it, he wrote just two words: 'Garbo Talks!'. In less than five seconds, he had delivered an unimprovable marketing slogan. Frank Whitbeck was a big deal at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had acted in and produced a few big films for the studio but by the late 1920s was in possession of a key to the executive washroom as chief of the gloriously titled 'Publicity/Exploitation Department.' Over the next two decades, he would feature as narrator in dozens of films and voice theatrical trailers for classics such as National Velvet and The Wizard of Oz, but it is what happened in a hitherto uninspiring meeting to discuss promotion for forthcoming major release Anna Christie that cements his place in movie history. Anna Christie featured MGM's (and, at that point, the world's) most bankable and fascinating movie star, Greta Garbo, in a film that would make or break her career. Warner Brothers had released The Jazz Singer two years earlier, 'talkies' were taking over and while MGM had begun to follow suit, they were worried that Garbo's Swedish accent would stop her making a successful transition from silent films. The actress shared their trepidation. At 2.30am on the day filming in sound began – October 14, 1929 – she called her young compatriot Wilhelm Sörenson and demanded he come round to her mansion on Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills to drink coffee with her. At 6am, on their way to the studio, he heard a voice from underneath the rug beside him in the car. '[It was] the moving plaint of a little girl,' he recalled later. 'Oh, Sören, I feel like an unborn child just now.'' Yet the concerns of both studio and actress were laughably unnecessary. About 16 minutes into Anna Christie, the queen of working a pause and holding the attention of the audience enters a down-at-heel bar stage right, shoots a stare at the barkeeper and, clearly carrying heavy baggage both literal and metaphorical, slumps into a wooden chair. Pause. All eyes (and ears) on Garbo. ANNA: 'Gimme a whiskey. Ginger ale on the side… And don't be stingy, baby.' BARMAN: 'Shall I serve it in a pail?' ANNA: 'That suits me down to the ground.' Garbo's Anna Christie is very far from being a 'little girl' or any of the other characters she had become famous for playing during the silent era. As Robert Gottlieb, one of her many biographers, put it, she had been 'the prima donna, the vamp, the spy, the flaunter of furs and jewels, the doomed driver of an Hispano-Suiza, the murderess, the mistress of Deco'. For this part, the most important of her career, she was to play a cynical, shambolic, world-weary former prostitute seeking comfort from the bottom of a glass. The performance was sophisticated and acclaimed but almost lost to the reaction of an adoring audience finally putting a voice to the beautiful face they had already fallen in love with. The Herald Tribune gushed: 'Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky, throaty contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.' American film magazine Picture Play went route one with 'The voice that shook the world!' Anna Christie helped earn Garbo her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1930. By the time Grand Hotel was released in 1932 she was the top box-office draw in the world. Less than a decade later, at the age of just 36, she would shock the world once again by announcing a complete withdrawal from Hollywood and the high-profile celebrity lifestyle associated with it – a 'temporary retirement' that would last 49 years. As exhausted ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, Garbo had delivered her most iconic line: 'I want to be alone'. It had been appropriated even before she retired as a shorthand explanation for her reluctance to give interviews and or be photographed in public, but now it survives as a de facto five-word epitaph and explanation for her incredible life and the sudden decision to turn her back on Hollywood. It lends her an enduring mystique, but is also key to a resurgence in her popularity among a new generation intrigued by the idea of one of the most glamorous and famous women in the world seemingly determined to reverse-engineer something like a normal life for herself. Add rumours about her private life (she never married but had a number of documented love affairs including one with silent-movie star John Gilbert and, it has been suggested, liaisons with several women including Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday and writer Mercedes de Acosta), her subsequent status as both an LGBTQ+ icon (her lead in Queen Christina, playing up her androgyny to the max, is now regarded as a gay cinema classic) and an exemplar of timeless style and it is not hard to detect a note of longing and loss in the title of Sky Arts' new documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go?. British film-maker Lorna Tucker had access to home movie footage from one of Garbo's Swedish friends, archive phone calls and over 200 unpublished letters belonging to Garbo's great-nephew Scott Reisfield, who has also just written Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. It joins at least another five other biographies published since 2020 but both Tucker and Reisfield present us with an unfamiliar Garbo, one that challenges the 'I want to be alone' cliche. The documentary shows her relaxing and enjoying time with friends, larking about for the camera, guard dropped, being silly and enjoying life, while Reisfield's letters reveal the domestic Garbo talking about moving back to Sweden with her family and buying a farm, the emotional Garbo who writes a note to herself on the death of longtime intimate George Schlee in 1964 and the ambitious post-retirement Garbo talking of future acting roles and directing films. 'The whole 'Garbo is a recluse' meme was a media creation,' laughs the 67-year-old from his home in Colorado. 'Sure, she was private. But not in a JD Salinger kind of way… Yes, she did sometimes hold her hand up to ruin a paparazzi shot, but that then became the shot and the story around it would be: 'This is a woman who never goes out,' but she did go out.' Tucker agrees. 'She partied like mad but just at friends' houses,' the director points out. 'She was having a wild time, but in private.' Garbo hated the constant harassment that began in earnest on a trip to New York in 1931 (a development many consider to be the birth of paparazzi-style reportage) and was aware of but powerless to resist the vicious circle that came with it. The more she kicked back against the attention, the bigger the story, the more valuable the next photo, the more photographers chasing the money, the more coverage and column inches she received, the more famous she became. 'There were plenty of people who stalked Garbo,' claims Reisfield, 'And people who came to LA to marry her but there was no infrastructure, like there is in the current celebrity culture, to insulate her from that.' Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she soon became psychologically intimidated by crowds to the extent that it became an issue she needed to work through with psychiatrists. At the same time, chased everywhere by the world's press, she had nowhere to hide but, as both documentary and book are at pains to point out, just because she wanted to be alone it did not necessarily mean she shunned personal contact. In fact, there is still a debate in certain quarters about whether her signature line in Grand Hotel was actually 'I want to be let alone' rather than 'I want to be alone'. Garbo had mischievously suggested as much in an interview shortly after the film was released. 'There is all the difference,' she went on to add. The actress had no children but was very close to Scott's mother Gray Reisfield, her brother's daughter, who inherited her entire estate in 1990. 'I think of Garbo's presence in my life as like a bonus grandparent,' says her great-nephew now. 'I didn't have the relationship with her my mom had, which was much closer, but she would come to our house or we would meet her in New York. I have a whole bunch of memories of her doing cartwheels or walking with her so she was in my life over decades and you just get a sense of a person even as a kid. 'That gave me background knowledge that other biographers do not have in order to strip out certain bogus sources that cashed in by talking to the press back in the day but who were not necessarily telling the truth. That's when you get a different picture of Garbo. The real one.' It's the same person who emerges in the documentary: A woman tired of the studio ('MGM is pretty rotten'), its lack of artistic integrity ('Many of the directors here know nothing about emotional life') and, of course, the whole Hollywood machine ('They're marrying me for the 759th time, can you think of anything lower than the people who are in charge of this so-called art I'm part of?'). But not tired of life. To answer the question posed by Tucker's film, Garbo: Where Did You Go? directly, after she quit in 1941 she went wherever she could go to avoid the stalkers, fans and photographers. She moved to Manhattan in 1951, taking quarters in the Hotel Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and then Hampshire House before moving to the seven-room apartment at 450 East Fifty-Second Street in 1953 that she would call home for the rest of her life. Hidden in plain sight, she loved to go shopping behind a large pair of sunglasses and/or a hat. She threw herself into collecting art (and at one point owned three Renoirs) and expensive pieces of furniture including a carved Louis XV chair that lived next to a dime-store blow-up snowman in her apartment. She dated, maintained relationships and was still being propositioned at the age of 80. She holidayed extensively but always to places where she knew she could be herself. 'Her year had a pattern and she did similar things at the same time every year,' says Riesfield. 'So she would always go to Europe, in the 1950s it was mostly on the French Riviera but from 1960 on, even if she went to the Riviera for a couple of weeks, she then spent most of the fall in Klosters. She would always go to California or New Mexico and often Wisconsin because there was no media covering her there, but I think she thought of herself as more European than American, and then after that, maybe a citizen of the world.' It doesn't read much like a woman who has chosen isolation because she wants 'to be alone', does it? It reads more like the life of a modern and emancipated woman years ahead of her time and living life on her own terms with the financial freedom her own remarkable talent and hard work has earned. One story has it that a fan recognised her at a road junction in Manhattan in the late 1950s and asked: 'Are you Greta Garbo?' To which she simply replied, 'I was Greta Garbo'. Then, without waiting for either the signal or a response, she crossed the street. Garbo: Where Did You Go? is on Sky Arts, Freeview and streaming service NOW Bill Borrows is a journalist, feature writer and columnist
