Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 31B - November 11, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

I attended my first Toronto International Film Festival in 2006. At a midnight screening on the city’s then-Ryerson University campus, Sacha Baron Cohen showed up — on a horse — for the premiere of Borat. Twenty minutes in, the projector broke. Michael Moore climbed over seats to try to fix it. “What on earth is happening here?” I remember thinking. Cohen then got up and did 45 minutes of stand-up — in character. The projector was never fixed. No one cared. That was my introduction to awards season. The tuxedos? The champagne glasses? The stilted debate over which British actor best inhabits the royals drama and other supposed trappings of the season? Well, OK, they were a part of it, too. But nearly two decades later, this Borat moment is…

For anyone who’s seen Conclave, questions abound. Do the Cardinals really scheme like the Plastics in the cafeteria? Can a speech really vault someone to the papacy? And what would happen if the newly elected pope dropped the chromosomal surprise of a lifetime? THR is here to help. Our new series The Watchers gathers the biggest experts on a film’s world to discuss what they’ve seen. Think of The Watchers as friends you go to dinner with after the screening — only they’ve spent their lives preparing for the chat. Here’s who we’ve brought together this time. Check them out, then sit back and let them tell you what’s historical and what’s howl-worthy about Conclave. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) Before I send you off to the races, tell me: the level…

Reports that Colin Farrell is finished with The Penguin have been greatly exaggerated. The Irish actor made a comment a couple months back that sounded like he was fed up with the Batman villain role and its grueling daily ritual of three hours in the makeup chair. (“I never want to put on that fucking suit and fucking head again,” he told Total Film.) But that was before the acclaimed crime drama premiered and received an outpouring of adoration from fans, with strong ratings for HBO that have grown week after week (as well as generated plenty of awards buzz for Farrell and his castmates). “If there’s a great idea [for season two], and the writing was really muscular and as strong or stronger on the page than it was…

Boobs sprouting, spines separating, heads exploding — in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, nothing is off-limits. That’s what quickly became clear to prosthetics designer Pierre-Olivier Persin when he began working on the Mubi movie in which Demi Moore takes a fountain-of-youth drug with some jaw-dropping (literally) side effects. “They always say to you, ‘I have this script with lots of prosthetic work in it,’ but then you end up with two aging makeups, and that’s it,” the veteran Persin (Game of Thrones) tells THR, saying that this is the most prosthetics work he’s ever done on a project. “With The Substance, when I read the script, it fell out of my hands, and I went, ‘Wow, I need to meet with Coralie.’ ” The body-horror thriller, which leans mostly on practical…

Kristen Bell was hoping to depict a different type of love story in Nobody Wants This. While Netflix’s latest hit has a distinctly Romeo and Juliet quality — she’s an agnostic podcast host, he’s an unconventional rabbi — the Bell/Adam Brody show also bears the unusual quality of two people genuinely trying to understand each other. “The sweetest surprise about the response to the show is how many people have said they’re so thankful to see a healthy, communicative relationship onscreen,” Bell says. As Erin Foster’s fall show keeps producing buzz (it was just renewed for a second season), THR chatted with its star about how she’s absorbing the phenomenon, reuniting with Brody and what kind of Jewish-based research she did. What’s your reaction to the positive response the show…

The recently released Conclave takes viewers inside the room where the Catholic Church’s cardinals must select a new pope, all while conspiracy threatens the proceedings. But the film is far from the first to scrutinize the inner workings of the church. In 1964, the Golden Globe for best drama went to The Cardinal, which includes a conclave of its own. It also features everything from Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan to the ballrooms of Vienna in a history-sweeping narrative. The Columbia movie, directed by Otto Preminger, is based on the best-selling 1950 novel of the same name by Henry Morton Robinson. It follows Father Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) from his days as a newly ordained priest in Boston through a career that culminates in one of the church’s highest…