During “American Idol” finalist Jamal Roberts' hometown visit on May 14, 2025, the top 3 singer was excited to see family, friends, and his students at Crestwood Elementary, where he works as a physical education teacher. But likely the most special moment for Roberts, 27, during his whirlwind trip to Meridian, Mississippi, was the chance to finally meet his newborn daughter, born in early May while he was competing on the show in Los Angeles. Although producers briefly shared a pic of baby Gianna at the hospital during the May 5 live episode as Roberts announced her birth, he has now shared his first personal photos and video of the infant on social media. On May 16, Roberts — now a dad of three daughters — added several photos of the infant, including one of her in a ladybug outfit, and captioned the post, “Hey world, meet my little ladybug 😩, Gianna Grace Roberts. I'm so proud to be her father 😭 #girldadforlife #idol” The second photo that Roberts shared of baby Gianna showed her in a tiny t-shirt featuring images of him performing on the show. But I have a healthy, beautiful, baby girl born today.” They also accompanied him during the parade and concert held in Meridian to celebrate his top 3 status. Footage from the hometown visit will be shown on the finale, when he goes up against fellow top 3 finalists Breanna Nix and John Foster. “I love my daughters,” Roberts told Parade in early May. They're the reason I'm here and working so hard to keep smiles on those little faces.” Fans were thrilled to see Roberts' photos of Gianna, writing notes of congratulations, including someone who wrote on his latest post, “She's just as beautiful and adorable as her big sisters! Roberts, Foster and Nix will compete to win season 23 of “American Idol” during the three-hour season finale airing live coast-to-coast on May 18 at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

With their futures on the line, the top 3 of “American Idol” season 23 — John Foster, Breanna Nix, and Jamal Roberts — are dealing with major pressure and a wild schedule before ABC's season finale, airing live on May 19, 2025. First-time judge and former winner Carrie Underwood knows exactly what they're going through. She said in multiple interviews that the finalists have been thrown all kinds of curveballs ahead of the grand finale, making it even more stressful than when she was in their shoes. After advancing to the top 3 of season 23 on May 12, producers whisked Foster, Nix, and Roberts off to their hometowns for parades, mini concerts, and family reunions — a wild experience Underwood also had when she was a finalist in 2005. She told TV Insider ahead of the top 3's May 14 hometown visits that they'd be reunited “with every person in the world that they've ever met. They're going to be there with a lot of people that they don't know, too, all the while thinking about what they're going to perform for the finale.” Footage of their hometown visits will air during the finale. After their whirlwind trips home, the contestants have been cramming to learn songs and prepare for the three-hour finale, as well as recording their first singles — to be released by the show's record label partner, 19 Entertainment. “There are group numbers and (celebrities) showing up,” Underwood said. “We call it ‘Star Boot Camp' because you learn a lot really fast. But Underwood told People that the pressure and stress is probably even tougher for Foster, Nix, and Roberts than it was when she was a finalist. “We've had a condensed season,” the country superstar said. So they're running to catch up the whole time.

We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. From Jean Seberg's sideswept pixie cut to Jean-Paul Belmondo's aviators, Jean-Luc Godard's “Breathless” has become more fashionable in today's cultural imagination for its iconic looks and images than for how the jump-cut-pioneering renegade feature collapsed cinematic hierarchies as we knew them in 1960. His black-and-white “Nouvelle Vague,” itself a meticulous recreation of a movie made in 1959 with all the celluloid, Academy-ratio crackle and pop, is more New Wave hangout movie than cinema history, with the parade of faces and names inspiring knowing chuckles in the cinephile audience. Related Stories ‘Desert of Namibia' Writer-Director Yôko Yamanaka Calls the Film a Litmus Test for Your Compassion ‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: Frigid Yet Potent Ishiguro Adaptation Invites International Audiences In Beyond Godard, appearances from Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda, and more figureheads — all played by lesser-known actors with varying likeness to their real-life counterparts — make for a veritable who's-who soufflé more akin to Woody Allen's “Midnight in Paris” fin-de-siècle cosplay, where run-and-gun appearances by literary and artistic idols like Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Djuna Barnes provided little more than window-dressing to a Belle Époque time travel exercise. “Nouvelle Vague” is deeper than that, though a lot of these namedrops exist without context beyond “look, here they are.” It's greatly amusing to play a kind of “I Spy” game in “Nouvelle Vague” as to who's who in the ensemble — though the filmmakers take the guessing out with name cards that introduce each character as if in a Wes Anderson or, perhaps, a Godard movie that inspired someone like Anderson. But “Nouvelle Vague,” perhaps by design, fails to make the case that “Breathless” was a groundbreaking endeavor at all. That's perhaps because the on-the-ground, glue-and-paper-clips late-1950s crew at the time (besides maybe except Godard himself) didn't know what they had their hands on or what shape it would take. Perpetually in dark sunglasses, newcomer Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as little more than a caricature of the man who lagged behind his Cahiers du Cinéma peers (Rivette and Éric Rohmer among them) in terms of taking his cinephilia beyond the storied magazine and in front of a movie camera. Well-cast is Zoey Deutch as “Breathless” breakout Jean Seberg in her nascent prime, who made the film two decades before she succumbed to mental illness and likely killed herself after becoming an FBI target for her political views (though her death remains the subject of mystery and speculation, in places like the podcast “You Must Remember This,” which offers an addictive season paralleling the careers of Seberg and Jane Fonda as Hollywood political outcasts). Those experiences must have made dealing with someone like Godard, who wrote that day's script pages for “Breathless” over breakfast across the two-week shoot, and regularly threw out said pages or balked at his collaborators who accused him of shirking eyeline and continuity conventions. One of this film's big laughs comes from Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) bloodied and running through the street for the “Breathless” finale, reassuring Parisian passers-by that it's only a movie. to its inclusion in an early scene between Godard and his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). There's a buddy comedy element to Godard's at times tempestuous relationship with his producer that makes for some of this film's most trenchant inquiries into the filmmaking mindset. “Paying audiences enjoy a formal narrative,” he cautions Godard as disasters on “Breathless” pile up — a wink to how resistant audiences were toward experimentation in favor of easier, blandly reassuring stories that tell you how to feel, and when, and why. Linklater has long been an independent filmmaker who's only courted the studio system (his recent Netflix premiere “Hit Man” is easily his most commercial film to date, though there have been others) without ever being asked to conform (“Waking Life” or “A Scanner Darkly,” anyone?). That said, “Nouvelle Vague” isn't trying to be a movie that matches Godard's style or temperament, but is closer to the more conventionally shaped narratives driven by some of Godard's less canonical peers and many imitators. Godard gets sage advice from Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) in the run-up to making “Breathless”; I can't corroborate whether this encounter ever happened, but Linklater drops in similar run-ins (like with Bresson shooting “Pickpocket” in a Paris subway tunnel) that serve more to tell the story of the French New Wave, to capture its zeitgeist and energy, than a coherent by-the-books retelling. These French New Wave filmmakers, after all, were just running around Paris with cameras. David Chambille's celluloid cinematography and a period jazz soundtrack immerse us in this world more than the features of “Midnight in Paris” managed to, while Catherine Schwartz's editing moves us through the “Breathless” production at a quick clip. But these elements may not, for a naive audience, successfully make the case for the brilliance of “Breathless” and how its pulp and punch inform pretty much everything such a younger audience watches these days. Hopefully, “Nouvelle Vague” encourages you to look back and watch “Breathless” again — or for the first time — but Linklater's movie may inadvertently suggest, “You could just watch this one instead.” Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services.

We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. It begins as many great films do: with a character peering through a window, their gaze landing on someone and fixing itself there — eyes widening in curiosity, interest, perhaps recognition. The characters in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels have a tendency to unspool when faced with their Rube Goldberg prompt to do so, the three-act nature of their memories ripe for successful cinema adaptation. Ishiguro's England-set “The Remains of the Day” was mounted by Merchant-Ivory in 1993 to much acclaim, and his boarding school existentialist sci-fi “Never Let Me Go” was emotively adapted to screen by Alex Garland and Mark Romanek in 2010. A Japanese-born British writer, Ishiguro used his lesser-celebrated early novels to examine his international heritage and identity, and it's the first of these, “A Pale View of Hills,” that now sees a lavish Un Certain Regard-premiering adaptation. Related Stories Alexander Payne's Next Film ‘Somewhere Out There' Starring Renate Reinsve Acquired by Searchlight Pictures Ari Aster's ‘Eddington' Sharply Divides Cannes: Star Pedro Pascal Defends a Western About ‘Our Worst Fears' Amid Lockdown She's careful to talk around the topic with her mother, Etsuko (Yō Yoshida), but there's another history that she's here to explore. Etsuko recalls Sachiko, a friend she had when living in post-war Nagasaki, a woman whose appearance was at once striking and elusive. The performances here are strong — Aiko especially brings a grounded believability to her role as a sharp but adrift university dropout getting to grips with her heritage. This is a Japanese co-production that understands what it is to exist in a British household space — tea and biscuits, cobwebs and all. “A Pale View of Hills” is co-produced by the UK's Number 9 films, who also had a hand in “Living,” Ishiguro's London reimagining of Kurosawa's “Ikiru.” The issue is much the same as “Living” — emotionally charged, switched-on performances can only do so much with stilted direction and an overly expository script. In the recalled past, we're introduced to the younger Etsuko (Suzu Hirose, a remarkable facial match for Yoshida) as she goes about her days in Nagasaki. What we're given of her life outside of her interactions with a few core characters is intentionally thin, but the slightness leaves Ishikawa's Nagasaki feeling less specific and more an identifiably “Japanese” set where the characters meet and talk. When Ishiguro's text engages the atomic history of Nagasaki and its effects, it's troubling for these elements to be so brushed over and minimal in Ishikawa's adaptation. The festival circuit has served up a string of glossy period pieces from the major Japanese studios this year, and Ishikawa's arrives just after Negishi Kichitaro's “Yasuko: Songs of Days Past” at International Film Festival Rotterdam — which likewise features co-lead Suzu Hirose at its centre. Starring opposite Hirose, as the mysterious Sachiko, is Fumi Nikaido — clad in striking purples and pinks against muted surroundings. Experienced in portraying ice queens with a dangerous streak (“Why Don't You Play in Hell?”, “Tezuka's Barbara”), Nikaido's sharp gaze contrasts exquisitely with Hirose's soft, open expressions. The chemistry between the two is compelling, but dense dialogue is foregrounded over much in the way of visual flair or dynamic blocking, every conversation following a straightforward shot-reverse-shot setup in a room, park, or street. You're never sold on the idea that these characters live and breathe like their present day counterparts — they are archetypal period drama figures moving like meeples from plot beat to plot beat. The film's saving grace is the climactic montage that ushers in its pivotal twist — which evokes the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi in its vivid palette and Shinji Somai's seminal “Moving” in its catharsis — evidencing Ishikawa as a sharply affective image-maker. It's easy to see why the director was drawn to this story, continuing threads of identity and memory that he keenly explored in “A Man” and “Traces of Sin”, but he's ill-suited to a film so repetitive and literary in its domestic duologues. “A Pale View of Hills” doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but it's worth that first curious glance. Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services.

On the same day Donald Trump unleashed a social media tirade aimed at Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam showed solidarity with the E Street rocker with a cover of “My City of Ruins” during the band's concert Friday in Pittsburgh. The encore portion of Pearl Jam's Dark Matter Tour shows typically opens with Eddie Vedder performing solo and acoustic, and hours after Trump lashed out at Springsteen following that singer's politically charged comments at a Manchester, England concert, Vedder whipped out his rendition of The Rising track for only the second time ever: “My City of Ruins” has been a staple at Springsteen's current run of concerts, with the singer using his introduction to the track to deliver his biting remarks on the state of America: “There's some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there,” he told the Manchester crowd. ‘It's Like a War Zone': What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl Grok Pivots From ‘White Genocide' to Being ‘Skeptical' About the Holocaust Musicians Union Slams Trump's Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen Tantrum Trump, informed of Springsteen's comments, turned to Truth Social to call the rocker “Highly Overrated” and “not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK,” as well as seemingly threaten Springsteen's ability to reenter America upon the European tour's conclusion. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) later issued a statement defending Springsteen (and Taylor Swift), with Pearl Jam providing additional support via the Pittsburgh stage. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation.

Two of Ang Lee's most disruptive films celebrate anniversaries this year; they may be five years apart, but the connective tissue between them is undeniable. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was such an intense high-wire act, the grueling shoot in China left Lee barely able to stand and fully intending to give it all up. It was Lee's father who made his son promise to try one more time, because retirement, he thought, would set a bad example for the filmmaker's son. Lee's father died in 2004, weeks after making his son promise to give it one more go, and Lee kept that promise with 2005's Brokeback Mountain, an experience that made the filmmaker fall back in love with storytelling, fueling everything he has done since including Life of Pi, which brought him his second Oscar for directing. When I meet Lee in his Manhattan offices, he is struggling to hit a budget number and a green light from Sony Pictures on a Bruce Lee movie that will star the director's son, Mason. He hopes to revolutionize fight choreography one more time. He certainly accomplished that with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film had non-martial artist actors Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang soaring in Cirque du Soleil-style aerial battles woven into a 19th century China-based drama about duty, honor, vengeance, repressed desires and lost love, mixed seamlessly into the ass-kicking wuxia genre. It was a marked contrast to Brokeback Mountain, another forbidden love story powered by the performances of Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway. RELATED: ‘Eddington' Cannes Film Festival Premiere Photos: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler & More DEADLINE: The aerial combat and wire fighting in Crouching Tiger fit loosely into the wuxia genre of martial arts films but turned out like nothing seen before in Hollywood. What ground are you hoping to break 25 years later? Crouching Tiger was my first taste of martial arts filming, and I learned the hard way that it's not about martial arts, it's about choreography. It's a two-person dance, in the form of fighting. [The Bruce Lee project] is different. It's not about choreography, although he did that extremely well. It's very different from Crouching Tiger, more like Sense and Sensibility in an ass-kicking form. Bruce Lee was the first and probably only person, even now, that put expression and thought into his fighting instead of just dazzling you. DEADLINE: You shot Crouching Tiger in China when that country was just opening itself up to outsiders. Why was it such a hard film to make? LEE: I didn't know how to do it. I believe I'm a pretty quick learner in any kind of filmmaking, like the previous movie, Ride with the Devil. Also, it was the first time I'd tried using an anamorphic lens, which is very different than your normal lens, and I picked it up in two weeks. On the other hand, it took me two and a half months on Crouching Tiger to even know what I should be looking at for action in a martial arts film, even though the choreography team were among the most brilliant filmmakers I know. Chow Yun-fat was known for John Woo's films and their stylized two-handed gunplay. Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang trained as dancers. She may not act the way I like, because she picked it up from Hong Kong action crews. Nobody talks about acting in action movies, because you have to count the beats, otherwise you get hit. That's all you think about if you don't want to get hit or poked in the eye. RELATED: Ooh-La-La Land: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*And The Cannes Film Festival) [Wuxia] is a great form of art if you know how to use it. I would sacrifice a little bit on swiftness of movement to go for the acting. It was a great challenge for the greatest choreographer, Mr. Yuen Woo-ping, I'm glad he has such a heart for drama, for art, that he was willing to compromise the visual effect — of which he's a master — for the dramatic effect. The formal martial art [film] is full of regulations. They're supposed to do this or that, it's preachy and pulpy. I wanted to make great cinema out of that. That was my yearning, to grab the Chinese tradition. But I was brought up by that culture. With that movie, I'm tracing my cultural roots. You certainly don't see that in martial art movies. By nature, I'm like Michelle's character. As a child, I was very obedient, extremely docile and shy. I behaved well, but my mind was drifting. But filmmakers didn't get respect from my father's generation. It's just that his son having a filmmaker's life was hard for him. At first, he thought, “OK, if you have to make a movie, go make a movie. But once you get that out of your system, you can do something more serious.” I remember he said that to me after Sense and Sensibility. It was being treated like a national treasure, winning awards — though not me, because nobody knew who I was yet — and he said, “I think, at this rate, you might get an Oscar when you're 50. Then you can think about something serious.” But I'm pretty sure he was proud of me even then. RELATED: As Tom Cruise Brings ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' To Cannes, All Five Franchise Directors Look Back At The Wild Ride DEADLINE: Why did Crouching Tiger take such a toll on you? LEE: It took a little bit over five months to shoot, and they were long days because we traveled to many places and those martial arts scenes take a long time. Each fight scene would take at least two weeks, from 16 to 20 hours a day. For the first two months I shot over 12 hours a day. If a non-martial arts director did that, they'd leave the martial arts team to do their thing. So, I'd be shooting drama, then move and set up the wire work, which took hours. I'd go to the other set, which was an hour away, and at night I'd do night-fighting until five o'clock in the morning. Traveling back, I'd doze off in the car, take a shower, sleep maybe an hour and go to the next 12 hours. I'd shoot six days a week, and my Sunday involved doing only 12 hours of shooting and watching dailies. Plus, there was another nearly five months in prep. There were, like, eight months where I didn't have more than three hours of rest. It's the hardest movie I ever made. I cannot do that anymore. We were very inventive [with the wire work]. It doesn't risk somebody's life, let alone the lives of the biggest stars in Asia. DEADLINE: You followed Crouching Tiger with Hulk, another big movie… I was lying down on the couch. My dad was right.” And then three months later, what am I doing? That was another exhausting five-month shoot, but I found a new playground. For the first time in my career, I learned about visual effects. RELATED: Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews LEE: My father, for the first time in his life said, “Go ahead and make another movie. It's a bad example for your boy.” And then two weeks later, he passed away. I'd taken Hulk over Brokeback Mountain. So, I asked [producer] James Schamus, “Remember Brokeback Mountain? DEADLINE: When the father who resisted your film path becomes the reason you didn't give up, that sounds like divine intervention. I think Brokeback Mountain brought me back, nursing me back to love life, to love filmmaking. That was the one movie where I felt, “There's a movie god who loves me. He wants me to keep going.” And the movie was so perfect. What have I done to deserve that movie? I was so emotionally drained, because my father had passed away, and I was exhausted after the other two movies. RELATED: ‘Simply Black' Filmmaker Jean-Pascal Zadi Aims To Break Down More Barriers: “Being Black And Living In France Has Marked Me Deeply” I don't know what it is about that movie. Every actor turned out to be great. I didn't have a cinematic ambition. People are so affected by it. You can never plan how people feel about the movie. I thought it was a small arthouse movie. I thought no American company would want it. And coming from Hulk, there was practically no budget. So, I learned that the effectiveness of a movie is literally something you cannot predict. And Brokeback Mountain was a great success that just seemed to happen on its own. DEADLINE: The movie premiered in Venice and soon became an Oscar frontrunner. How surprised were you by the warm embrace? LEE: I knew it was a good movie because, from the first cut, which I showed to friends and family, I could see that it had an effect on people. I did not expect to win there, so I flew to Toronto for the festival. I thought, “There's no way we're going to win.” When I landed in Toronto, my publicist was at the airport. I walked off the plane, and he said, “Turn around, they want you to go back.” I'd won the Golden Lion. And then Toronto, of course, complained because I wasn't on the red carpet. I still didn't imagine it would go to the shopping malls. When a film takes off, you see it go up in the box office, and suddenly everybody is going to see it. I got nervous when they started describing me as a hero. And then it stopped, at $80 million. You'd think it would keep going, but everything just stopped. I guess there was only so much tolerance in America at the time. DEADLINE: After winning most major awards, Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash at the Oscars in a big upset. LEE: When I got my award [for Best Director] right before [the Best Picture announcement], the stage manager said, “Just stay here.” We were by the curtain. Oh my god…” So, everybody expected us to win. DEADLINE: You must have wondered why. Was it the limits of tolerance, aversion to a gay love affair in the Oscar voting body? There are times when I feel like there's an unlimited willingness to watch the movie. There's so much love for it. And you cannot even define it as gay cinema. DEADLINE: I guess they weren't ready to give it the Best Picture at that time… Maybe just for one second, when Jack Nicholson opened the envelope, and then it disappeared. Honest to God, I never held any grudge because Crouching Tiger didn't get me the director award. I was winning straight up, until the Oscars. But it didn't really bother me. Even that little grudge I had was because I was the leader of the pack. So, it takes a few seconds for that to pass. How many people get to experience that? After the movie was done, we still had four months of post-production. Most of the time it was doing looping, recording Michelle and Chow Yun-fat's Mandarin dialogue. And then we had the visual effects. None of us had visual effects experience. It was all over the place. Back then, there were no preview screenings, just friends and family, and we couldn't even show it with subtitles. So, no, I didn't know [we had something] until we went to Cannes, where people cheered. DEADLINE: These are two risky movies, and we haven't focused on the others, like Life of Pi, which brought your second Best Director Oscar, or Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which didn't catch on with audiences but broke ground with high-resolution formats. How much harder would it be for you to make either movie now? I think the world was more open-minded then. The whole world has turned so hostile. I miss the good old days. Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy. Signup for Breaking News Alerts & Newsletters By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Get our latest storiesin the feed of your favorite networks We want to hear from you! Send us a tip using our annonymous form. Sign up for our breaking news alerts By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The Ari Aster film stars Pascal as a progressive New Mexico mayor battling Joaquin Phoenix's small-town sheriff amid the Covid pandemic in May 2020. The same day Trump seemingly threatened Bruce Springsteen's re-entry back into America after that singer's politically charged comments during a European tour stop, Pascal — the son of Chilean refugees — was also asked if he was worried about reentering the U.S. following Eddington's premiere. “Fear is the way that they win,” Pascal said. This is the perfect way to do so in telling stories. Pedro Pascal at #Cannes when asked about America's political chaos: "Fear is the way that they win, so keep telling the stories and expressing yourself and fighting. F*ck the people that try to make you scared and fight back. “Obviously, it's very scary for an actor participating in a movie to sort of speak to issues like this. It's far too intimidating the question for me to really address, I'm not informed enough,” Pascal said. ‘It's Like a War Zone': What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl Foo Fighters Part With Drummer Josh Freese Musicians Union Slams Trump's Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen Tantrum Grok Pivots From ‘White Genocide' to Being ‘Skeptical' About the Holocaust Pedro Pascal at #Cannes: "I want people to be safe and protected. I want to live on the right side of history. We fled a dictatorship and I was privileged enough to grow up in the United States after asylum in Denmark. We fled a dictatorship, and I was privileged enough to grow up in the U.S. after asylum in Denmark. Pascal added of Eddington, “It felt like the first time that we had a mole, like a whistleblower almost, someone from the inside being like, ‘This is what's happening. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation.

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter He talked to THR about the film and that potential U2 series. Did this process allow you to connect with your songs in a new way? Can Cannes Help California Get Its Groove Back? So “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is involved, not just because it's a song that U2 fans like, but because it illustrates and hopefully illuminates a period in time when a song about nonviolence mattered in Ireland. It was even ridiculed at the time in Ireland. I used to introduce it as, “This is not a rebel song,” because it was an anthem to nonviolence. We're currently in a moment where our world leaders can make it feel that wanting to change our world or express empathy are worthy of ridicule. Can popular artists still be a voice for change? The world has forgotten what “freedom” and “democracy” mean. These are words we never thought we'd ever question, but they are being questioned right in front of our very eyes. In my whole lifetime, the world has never been closer to all-out war. It's a high school drama, really, slash Stranger Things. [Stories of Surrender] is the end of a four-year process of addressing the past, lifting stones, discovering a few creepy-crawlies underneath them, dealing with them, and now we move on [with new music]. Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter Send us a tip using our anonymous form.

The pic follows crusty Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who decides to take on the town's mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). I want very much to be on the right side of history.” RELATED: ‘Eddington' Cannes Premiere Gets Nearly Seven-Minute Ovation That Moves Joaquin Phoenix To Tears He added: “I felt like [Aster] wrote something that was all our worst fears as that lockdown experience was already a fracturing society. Said Aster about his Cannes Film Festival debut, “I wrote this movie in a state of fear and anxiety. I wanted to try and pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.” He added: “I feel like for the last 20 years we've fallen into this age of hyper-individualism and that social force that used to be central in liberal mass democracies, which is an agreed-upon thing in the world, that is gone now. Covid felt like the moment where that link was finely cut for good.” Asked whether there would be a second civil war in America, Aster quipped, “I don't speak English!” RELATED: Everything We Know About Ari Aster's ‘Eddington' So Far “I feel like we're on a dangerous road and we're living in an experiment that hasn't gone well,” the Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid filmmaker said. “I feel there is no way out of it. RELATED: Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews For Aster, Eddington is about what happens when isolated people come up against an another. “I think fear is the way that they win, so we should keep telling stories,” said Pascal in response to a question by Chaz Ebert about U.S. toughening border patrol with Canada, “Don't let them win.” Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Get our latest storiesin the feed of your favorite networks We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services.

If you have heard his music, it is likely that you have internalized his singular voice and unique melodic sensibility, folded them into some innermost corner of your being. Yet this pair of decades-old live recordings reveals Charles Arthur Russell, Jr., gone now 33 years, as you have rarely, if ever, heard him before: just cello, the electrical heat of the microphone, the buzz and sway of a few pedals, a cocoon of empty space around him—and that voice, unmistakable, ethereal yet embodied, both distant and impossibly close, as familiar as the voice in your head. These reissues come from two tapes recorded at Phill Niblock's Experimental Intermedia Foundation, a homey loft space in lower Manhattan where Russell frequently performed. He recorded the first on June 25, 1984, at a performance billed as Sketches for World of Echo (admission: $2.50), and the second 18 months later, on December 20, 1985. Steve Knutson's Audika label—which in collaboration with Russell's partner, Tom Lee, has given the world far more posthumous work from the artist than he ever released in his lifetime—first put out Sketches for World of Echo digitally and on cassette in 2020; the second live set, now titled Open Vocal Phrases Where Songs Come In and Out, remained unheard until now. These are not unplugged sessions, exactly; Russell was an inveterate tinkerer, and in both sets he fleshes out his cello and voice with a modest battery of effects pedals—stereo delay, reverb, distortion—and a rudimentary tone generator. Yet rather than obscure his playing and singing, those add-ons only seem to heighten the sensation that we are sitting alone in the room with him. There is an uncommon purity to these recordings that suits the guilelessness of his music; it is rare to feel like you have been granted such a direct line to an artist's mind at the moment of creation. He would later stitch segments from both nights into the 1986 album World of Echo, combining them with material recorded at Battery Sound studios, and some elements are echoed elsewhere in his catalog in radically different forms—the avant-disco masterpiece “Let's Go Swimming,” famously mixed by Walter Gibbons; the Nicky Siano-produced disco anthem “Tiger Stripes,” which Russell recorded under his Killer Whale alias—but by and large, these recordings are less collections of discrete songs than extended fantasias, improvisational meditations in which lyrical hints and brief melodic figures dissolve in the ceaseless onward flow. Sketches for World of Echo begins with a feint: two and a half minutes of dissonant and seemingly formless cello burnished with bracing feedback. Russell sounds like he's looking for something, stumbling in the dark. But then a squelchy, laser-zapping synth drone fires up, and the mood turns beatific as he launches into an extended instrumental raga. For more than 10 minutes, he traces graceful curlicues against the pedal tone—tender, whimsical, hypnotic. The album concludes with an equally liquid improvisation, “Sunlit Water,” which shimmers and swirls, blissfully directionless, for more than 10 idyllic minutes. In between those dreamlike bookends, Sketches often feels like a treasure hunt. And here's “Keeping Up,” a bittersweet highlight of 1994's posthumous Another Thought. Where that recording struts gaily, propelled by programmed drums and proudly decked out in Jennifer Warnes' gorgeous close-harmonized vocals, this one feels more relaxed, more innocent. Elsewhere, the traces are foggier—bits of World of Echo's “I Take This Time” and Another Thought's “Losing My Taste for the Nightlife” turn up, fleetingly, but folded into a five-song sequence in which Russell mostly seems to be channeling extemporaneous thoughts over shape-shifting melodies. It's curious: If “Let's Go Swimming” and “Keeping Up” invite us to think of the ways in which songs are like people, growing and changing over time, at other points it's almost as if Russell wants to show us that songs don't exist as standalone entities—they're all just part of a single stream of sound. That feels especially true of Open Vocal Phrases Where Songs Come In and Out. (Curiously, it shares seemingly nothing with “Very Reason,” a song from his archives that was included on the posthumous Picture of Bunny Rabbit, though you may grasp a fuzzy resemblance between the two if you squint.) But little else from this performance feels quite as clear cut. (“There's a zillion edits throughout,” Knutson has said of that album, “because he's just taking these little pieces—a minute here, 10 seconds there—to weave all these ideas together in a way that was only in his head, that only he could hear.”) “Happy Ending,” “All-Boy All-Girl,” “Tiger Stripes,” and “You Can't Hold Me Down” all blur together in an extended passage of skeletal bowing and circuitous vocal melodies—the songs elusive, but the flow transfixing. Open Vocal Phrases' most audacious playing comes toward the end, with the 11-minute “Hiding Your Present From You/School Bell.” Russell kicks it off with an uncharacteristic blast of harmonica, then lays into abrasive, fuzzed-out cello that sounds like his version of heavy metal. Plucking and bowing tangle up in delay; disconnected lyrics float over the top. Halfway through, a chugging electronic rhythm sets in, an unstable succession of siren bursts and white-noise clicks. It is reasonable to wonder how much is left to learn about Russell and his music, after two biographies, a documentary film, and a copious run of posthumous releases. They can be abrasive, prickly, hard to follow; they toss up obstacles, outrun your attention, lag behind when you want to move forward. The usual modes of pleasure do not always pertain—until his voice hits a certain pitch, and his cello harmonizes just so, and the effect is like sunlight emerging from behind a cloud. What might be most striking about these performances is that despite the obviously broad appeal that his music has had for so many, it is an intensely private affair. You wonder if the sound felt equally far away to him. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

Sean "Diddy" Combs' ex Cassie Ventura confronted questions about financial incentives on the final day of her cross-examination, while Richard testified to witnessing Combs' abuse. Sean “Diddy” Combs' ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, faced probing questions about her financial motivations on her last day of testimony in the rapper's sex-trafficking trial on Friday (May 16), while Danity Kane alum Dawn Richard also took the stand and said she witnessed Combs abusing Ventura. Richard's testimony closed out the first week of Combs' much-awaited criminal trial, in which the music mogul is accused of coercing Ventura and other women into participating in drug-fueled sex shows known as “freak-offs.” R&B singer Ventura, the prosecution's star witness, spent four days on the stand detailing how Combs allegedly controlled and physically abused her during their 11-year relationship. Ventura faced her second and final day of cross-examination on Friday from Combs' attorney Anna Estevao, according to the Associated Press and the New York Times. Defense lawyers had previously suggested they may want to keep questioning Ventura next week, but backed off the request after prosecutors flagged concerns that the very pregnant Ventura might go into labor over the weekend. Continuing a strategy from the first day of cross-examination, Estevao confronted Ventura with more seemingly loving text messages between her and Combs. Estevao also tried to imply that Ventura is motivated by money to lie about her experience with Combs, getting the witness to reveal for the first time that she's getting a $10 million settlement from the Intercontinental Hotel in Los Angeles, where Combs was seen beating Ventura in infamous video footage from 2016. The newly-revealed $10 million settlement is on top of a $20 million civil payout Ventura got from Combs himself after she sued the rapper in 2023. “That wasn't the reason why,” Ventura replied. After Ventura completed her testimony, her attorney, Douglas Wigdor, shared a statement from the singer: “This week has been extremely challenging, but also remarkably empowering and healing for me,” Ventura wrote. Richard has a pending civil lawsuit against Combs, in which she alleges he harassed and assaulted her during “years of inhumane working conditions.” But those claims aren't part of the criminal trial; instead, Richard served as a corroborating witness for Ventura. During her brief testimony, Richard told the jury she witnessed Combs physically assault Ventura on multiple occasions. In one 2009 encounter, Richard said she saw Combs punch, kick, drag and even try to hit Ventura on the head with a cooking skillet. The trial is expected to pick up Monday (May 19) with testimony from Ventura's longtime friend Kerry Morgan, followed by other alleged victims of Combs' freak-offs. The jury could hear evidence for up to two months total. A daily briefing on what matters in the music industry Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation.

President Donald Trump thinks Bruce Springsteen is “highly overrated … not a talented guy – just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.” Trump shared his always unfiltered comments on his Truth social media platform on Friday, following Springsteen's admonishment of his administration at the opening of the E Street Band's European “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour Wednesday night (May 14) in Manchester, England. “Sleepy Joe didn't have a clue as to what he was doing, but Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,' and couldn't see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse! “This dried out ‘prune' of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that's just ‘standard fare'. Jewish Rapper and Comedian Kosha Dillz Says His Film's Canceled Screening Has Been Reinstated Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!” The setlist included 29 songs, many of which touched on themes related to American identity, justice, and civic life. That was followed by “Death to My Hometown,” “Lonesome Day,” “My Love Will Not Let You Down” and “Rainmaker,” which was performed live for the first time and introduced as being “dedicated to our dear leader.” Springsteen also played “House of a Thousand Guitars,” followed by “My City of Ruins,” “Letter to You,” “Because the Night,” “Human Touch,” “Wrecking Ball,” “The Rising,” “Badlands,” and “Thunder Road.” Springsteen, along with Patti Scialfa and Steve Van Zandt, joined honorees in renditions of classic songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Fortunate Son” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Springsteen is set to perform again in Manchester on May 17 and 20. Musicians have the right to freedom of expression, and we stand in solidarity with all our members.” Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day