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Editor’s Note: This story was originally published during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival but has been updated as of Friday, January 10.

Coralie Fargeat has always zigged where others zagged. But knowing what she did and did not want to do helped her to focus her goals. She grew up in Paris on a diet of American movies, which built her taste for genre films. As a teenager, she shot “Star Wars” remakes with her little camera in her backyard.

“The ones that were resonating with me that were going out of the real world, out of reality, were more English-speaking genre films,” she told IndieWire at the Toronto International Film Festival, where her second feature, Cannes body horror breakout “The Substance” (Mubi), starring Demi Moore as an actress fighting her age with radical chemistry, won the screenwriting prize at Cannes and the TIFF People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award.

Buckle up! Demi Moore has made her acting come back with her latest film, The Substance, in an attempt to plunge into the muddy waters of horrifying standards of beauty in Hollywood. After stunning fans with her performance in award-winning psychological movies like Passion of Mind (2000) and Moral Thoughts (1991), Moore returned just to ignite wild controversies with her 2024 new daring horror feature.

Demi Moore in The Substance | image: Mubi

Directed by Coralie Fargeat, the film is designed as a subtle psychological horror drama that takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride, highlighting the absurd lengths to which a middle-aged actress would go to reclaim her position and visibility in an industry obsessed with youth.

Spoiler Alert !!!Spoiler Alert for The Substance Demi Moore’s The Substance Unravels the Toxic Beauty Standards in the Industry

Considering how Demi Moore often returns to the silver screen with a big bang, the actress maintained...

Veteran British actor Joss Ackland, best known for his roles in the films Lethal Weapon 2 and White Mischief, has died. He was 95. Ackland passed on Sunday, November 19, with his representative, Paul Pearson, confirming the death. “Joss was a long-term client and great friend who remained lucid, erudite and mischievous to the very end. He died peacefully with his family this morning,” Pearson said in a statement. Born on February 29, 1928, in London, England, Ackland trained at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama before making his professional stage debut at 17 years old, starring in the 1945 production of The Hasty Heart. He became a regular at the Old Vic Theatre, appearing alongside the likes of Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Tom Courtenay. Ackland starred in several British television shows throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, including opposite Alec Guinness in the 1979 adaptation of Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy. He also appeared...

Joss Ackland, a longtime stage and screen actor best known for his roles in “Lethal Weapon 2” and “White Mischief,” has died at age 95.

Ackland, who amassed more than 130 credits, also enjoyed parts in films such as “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” “The Hunt for Red October” and the TV movie “Shadowlands.” His death was confirmed in a statement by his family. They said, “With his distinctive voice and commanding presence, Ackland brought a unique intensity and gravitas to his roles.”

“He will be remembered as one of Britain’s most talented and beloved actors.”

Ackland’s manager Paul Pearson told TheWrap, “It is with great sadness that I can confirm the passing of my great friend and long-term client Joss Ackland. He died of old age this morning with his family around. He was lucid, erudite, and mischievous to the end.”

“I loved him deeply and for me, he...

Fierce, committed and above all, tough — these are the words that collaborators use to describe producer Robin O’Hara, a longtime fixture of the New York independent film scene, who died suddenly last week after complications from cancer treatment.

When O’Hara’s business and life partner Scott Macaulay of Forensic Films posted the sad news on Facebook last Wednesday, hundreds of prominent filmmakers, former crewmembers, and friends from across the independent film world offered an outpouring of condolences, remembrances, and testimonies about O’Hara’s importance in nurturing their art and their careers.

As “Saving Face” director Alice Wu wrote, “She was brilliant and mercurial and hilarious and terrifying. She gave no fucks — unless she did give a fuck — and then she gave everything. Anyone who has been lucky enough to be in her orbit never lets go. She pushed us all … and we became better people.”

Echoing Wu,...

I want to see a movie about Amelia Earhart that is thrilling. That is Indiana Jones adventurous. Someday, I think, someone will make a movie like that about Earhart, about whom that kind of story is simply begging to be told. But that would be a fantasy in the opposite direction of the fantasy in which Mira Nair and screenwriters Ron Bass (Passion of Mind, Snow Falling on Cedars) and Anna Hamilton Phelan chose to take their Amelia. I wouldn’t, in fact, expect an Indiana Jones-type fantasy from Nair, whose movies are so intimate and personal that it’s as if they exist to let us see the world through the eyes of her protagonists, as they see themselves and not as how the world sees them. And so this Amelia is a quiet, reflective film, and Earhart is not an icon or a symbol: she’s a human being,...

Veteran actor Joss Ackland has blasted Passion Of Mind co-star Demi Moore as "not very bright or talented." The 73-year-old star has also lashed out at himself, admitting that most of his work was "awful." Bemoaning the parts offered to him, he says, "I'm so tired of not being able to make a movie without a car chase, or the villain dying twice. It's all exactly the same." Ackland confesses that many of the roles he has undertaken in his 50 year career were just for the money or to settle bets. The 72-year-old says, "I do an awful lot of crap, but if it's not immoral, I don't mind. I'm a workaholic. I was in Mad Dogs And Englishmen, with Liz Hurley, which was God-awful and quite rightly torn to shreds. Then there was Passion Of Mind last year with Demi Moore. Terrible script. Awful, actually, but I needed the money." Ackland also says he "regretted" appearing in Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey, starring Keanu Reeves, and his cameo in a Pet Shop Boys video.