Category: 5. Entertainment

Cinesky Pictures is highlighting its 2026 film slate at APEX Global EXPO. Consisting of over 20 titles in total, the company is keen to promote four standout movies fresh from their premieres at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival (TIFF).

The first is Couture, a drama follows the lives of three women during Parisian Fashion Week, one of whom is played by Angelina Jolie. The second is thriller Dead Man’s Wire from acclaimed director Gus Van Sant, which recounts a true hostage drama from 1977 and features an all-star cast lead by Bill Skarsgard, Al Pacino, Coleman Domingo and Cary Elwes.

The third, Charlie Harper, is a charming romantic drama starring Nick Robinson and Amelia Jones on their journey to find love in the big city; and finally, there is the epic sci-fi fantasy film Eternal Return starring Kit Harington, which is about a love that transcends time and space.

“These titles are on Deadline Hollywood’s ‘Toronto hot list,’ so we’re incredibly proud to bring these exceptional films to the in-flight entertainment market,” said Cinesky Pictures Head of Worldwide Sales Mark Horton. “These are the kind of unique, high-calibre stories that resonate with audiences, and we’re confident they’ll be a hit with airline passengers.”

Furthermore, Cinesky Pictures is offering Tinsel Town, a new romantic comedy starring Kiefer Sutherland and Rebel Wilson, to airlines from December 1 simultaneously with its theatrical release. 

The film tells the story of Jack Sterling (Sutherland), a washed-up Hollywood action star who unwittingly signs up for a stage production in England and finds he is starring in a small-town British pantomime. He clashes with the show’s fiery choreographer, Rosie Jones (Wilson), but finds unexpected charm in the quirky town and its residents. 

Tinsel Town is PG-rated and features a stellar supporting cast of British actors, including Sir Derek Jacobi, Alice Eve, Meera Syal, Lucien Laviscount, and Asim Chaudhry. 

Horton continued, “We’re really excited to be offering Tinsel Town to airlines ‘day and date’ as it releases in the cinemas. It’s a seasonal movie that will be perfect for December and its PG rating make it perfect for passengers of all ages.” 

Airline buyers are invited to watch the screener for Tinsel Town and to find out more about Cinesky Pictures’ 2026 titles at booth 1353 during APEX Global EXPO.

KARACHI: Wild animals don’t normally hurt human beings intentionally, says wildlife expert Vaqar Zakaria.

Yet, one swipe of the arm from a brown bear can inflict serious damage, even if their intent is not to harm.

Following a brown bear atta­­ck on singer Quratulain Baloch (QB) while she was filming in Deosai, Mr Zakaria told Dawn that although the local brown bear isn’t as big as its Alaskan cousin, its claws — typically around two inches long — are razor-sharp and capable of tearing flesh with ease.

“Maybe the bear thought there was food nearby, and the singer’s first reaction — screams for help — triggered the aggression,” he speculated, calling it a “rare and isolated incident”.

Dr Shafqat Hussain, Profes­sor of Anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connec­ti­cut, was not too surprised by the bear attack. “Though unfo­rtunate, it was bound to happen sooner or later,” he said.

In wake of singer QB’s close call with a brown bear in Deosai, experts stress that people should never feed wild animals; blame human intervention for wildlife losing its ‘natural shyness’

Known for his work on snow leopard conservation in Gilgit-Baltistan, he warned that since bears are attracted to food which is available in human camps “more is to come if we continue glamping at Deosai”.

When QB was approached for comment, she requested “pri­­vacy for the healing process”.

“To ask a traumatised person to stay still, upon seeing a grizzly visitor inside the tent, is not very realistic — but that’s the best thing to do,” Zakaria noted.

According to him, TikTok videos, selfies, and a taste for human food are some of the reasons why wild animals lose their natural shyness and start venturing closer to human settlements.

Above all, he blames the people for encroaching into territories that have historically been the habitat of wild animals.

There are fundamental differences between humans and wildlife, he says. “Animals attack or kill for a reason; humans often do so for none. Bears, almost never.”

Yet one key similarity rem­ains — unpredictability.

“You never really know what might happen, or what could trigger ‘wild’ behaviour. We simply don’t know them well enough to anticipate it,” he said.

Human encroachment

The Deosai Plains, spanning about 3,600 sq km between Skardu and Astore in the Karakoram range, were declared a national park by the government in 1993. It is home to brown bears, marmots (squirrels), foxes, wolves, over two dozen species of birds and a vibrant variety of alpine flowers.

“If you cast a line in the streams, you will catch a fish within five minutes, and the water is clean enough for drinking,” Zakaria says.

To manage this unique ecosystem, the Islamabad-based Hi­­malayan Wildlife Founda­ti­­on (IWF) was asked to develop a management plan by the Gil­git-Baltistan Wildlife Depart­ment, marking core zones, grazing areas, camping sites and more.

As its co-founder, Zakaria has spent over three decades studying brown bears, tracking their movements, population, diet and behaviour — not just in Deosai but around the world — and continues to collaborate with international bear experts.

“In 1993, around 20 jeeps would visit the park every day in summers,” he recalled. By the year 2000, traffic had picked up. Today, up to 500 vehicles enter the park daily during peak season, he added.

“We need to accept that humans are occupying their territory, not the other way around,” he said.

He also blames people, tourists and locals alike, for altering and even degrading habitats — cutting forests, increasing livestock and then leaving them unattended in open grazing areas, providing easy prey for hungry wild predators.

Emphasising the dangers of habituation, Zakaria said Deosai marmots were routinely being fed by visitors. “You never, never, feed wild animals; that’s the cardinal rule!”

The HWF had originally advised that no permanent roads or permanent structures be built inside the park, to avoid the kind of irreversible environmental damage seen in Naran, Kaghan and more recently in Nathia Gali.

“But now with traffic hundred times higher, we may need hard top roads to reduce dust, noise and vehicles getting stuck in snow and for them not to go astray and remain in the designated area.

He also stressed the need for better campsite management, garbage disposal and upgraded restaurants, adding that education will have a key role to play in any betterment.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2025

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Damon Dash, the hip-hop mogul and record executive who co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records with Jay-Z and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, detailed dire financial straits as he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last week.

The 54-year-old New York native claimed in his voluntary petition, reviewed by The Times, that he is in debt to the tune of $25.3 million. The petition, filed Thursday in Florida, says Dash makes no monthly income and has $4,350 to his name — including $100 in cash, a $500 cellphone and two guns worth $750.

A legal representative for Dash did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment on Monday.

Dash’s petition says he owes a total of $25,303,049.47 to as many as 49 creditors, with a majority of that (about $19.1 million) owed to the government in the form of taxes and other debts. He also owes nearly $648,000 in domestic support obligations to ex-wife Rachel Roy and ex-girlfriend Cindy Morales, the petition said. Dash and Roy were married from 2005 to 2009 and share two daughters. Dash shares a son with Morales, and has additional children from other relationships.

The petition confirms reports that Dash’s one-third share of Roc-A-Fella Records was auctioned to the New York Department of Taxation and Finance in August 2024 to help pay off his tax debt. Dash claims he is also owed a “possible” but unspecified amount of money from Burke, and also “unknown” amounts of money from his “possible” claims against actor Claudia Jordan, filmmaker Josh Webber and others he has battled in court.

“Dear Frank” filmmaker Webber and production company Muddy Water Pictures — also mentioned in Dash’s petition — sued the music entrepreneur for copyright infringement and defamation in 2019. A jury sided with the filmmakers in the spring of 2022 and ordered Dash to pay more than $800,000 in damages, but tensions from that decision have dragged into 2025. Webber last month accused Dash and the businessman’s girlfriend of hiding assets that would help pay off the hefty judgment, Complex reported.

Webber also sued Dash for libel and slander in April 2024. Dash was ordered earlier this year to pay the filmmaker $4 million.

As reports of his decision to file for bankruptcy spread, Dash seemingly took ownership of the financial revelations. On Instagram, he reshared a post from hip-hop-centric website WorldStar about his legal woes to his own page.

“Now let’s get to work #staytuned,” Dash captioned his post.

Nora Jeker

Silver anniversary

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“It’s easier to get away with killing a woman. Sadly, society doesn’t care as much when a woman dies.”

That’s the reality of life in Saudi Arabia, said writer-director Haifaa Al-Mansour at the post-screening Q&A of her new film “Unidentified.” The film, which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, opens with a truck speeding off after having deposited the body of a teenage girl dressed in a school uniform on an isolated desert peak.

More from IndieWire

The peach-tinted coloring of the sand fills the frame with quiet solemnity. Visually, Al-Mansour’s approach is middle-of-the-road: it gets the job done without flair. The pacing feels right from the beginning: as the story unravels, the plot points neither dawdle nor lurch too quickly forward.

Al-Mansour — probably the most well-known and one of the first women filmmakers in Saudi Arabia —returns with the final film in her trilogy featuring protagonists all with the surname Al Safan, each possessing an unshakeable will to assert her rights as a woman in a society where doing so is often dangerous.

In the first feature of the trio, “Wadjda” (2013), a girl fights for the right to ride a bicycle, released five years before women gained the right to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. In “The Perfect Candidate” (2019), a young woman (Mila Al-Zahrani) runs for municipal office, something women in Saudi Arabia first gained the right to do, along with voting, just four years prior to its release. And in “Unidentified,” a recently divorced young woman (again Mila Al-Zahrani) moves to the city to live alone and work as a file clerk at a police station when the murder of a teenage Jane Doe compels her to solve the case. (The Saudi Personal Status Law was enacted in 2022, expanding legal pathways for women to initiate divorce.)

In each of these films, the subtext is always to showcase the humanity and courage of women in Saudi Arabia, to put a face on the real-life reforms and make them seem less like the exception and more like the rule. And Al-Mansour, with an original script co-written with her husband Brad Niemann, well knows that creating complicated characters forced to navigate tricky situations is more compelling than a heavy-handed sermon to a largely Western audience whose understanding of the Saudi cultural context rarely extends beyond honor killings and the merits of the hijab. That is to say, what Westerners know about Saudi is often skewed or incomplete. As the last film in Al-Mansour’s trilogy, “Unidentified” turns up the heat, making a decided turn into genre filmmaking — the murder mystery — where there’s room (finally) for Saudi women to be villainous.

Mila Al-Zahrani, as the lead character Noelle, ably delivers a deeply grounded performance, embodying her steely will and relentless pursuit of the girl’s killer, paired with her ever-present stylish black leather bag. Spurred on by her obsession with the videos of an influencer who combines makeup tutorials with true crime distillations, she uses gender roles to her advantage, getting closer to the women in the victim’s orbit than any policeman could in this observant Muslim country.

Still, the stakes could’ve been amplified: every time Noelle disobeys the orders of her father-like police sergeant, Majid (Shafi Al-Harthi, who also appeared in “Wadjda”), she receives little blowback. As she gets very close to solving the case, beyond the subtle eerie noise in Noelle’s apartment on the top floor of her building, intimidation by the killer surfaces too late in the story, muting the viewer’s sense of her being in danger. There is a big twist at the end, that one doesn’t see coming, which impresses. The surprise is clever, but undercuts its emotional impact by arriving without sufficient setup.

If the only way this film distinguishes itself is in its ability to humanize and complicate flat depictions and erasure of Saudi women, that is no small feat. Many different types of women surround Noelle as she attempts to identify the Jane Doe: rebellious teenagers, school principals, widows who value tradition, entrepreneurs, a police officer at her station, even the medical coroner who lets her inspect the body for clues. That kind of intentionality around the ability of fictional narratives to change concrete realities — the ability to visually imagine change — creates a living, breathing empathy “machine,” to borrow Roger Ebert’s phrase. Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.

“As women from the Middle East, we are often portrayed as victims with no agency. That’s not the full picture. Arab women have sass, hustle, and complexity,” continued Al-Mansour at the post-screening Q&A. “Life in the Middle East can be harsh and demoralizing, and women are a part of that reality too. But we’re not always innocent angels. We don’t always need to be the moral backbone of a society; we can be flawed, conflicted, and problematic.”

In “Unidentified,” women are good, women are bad, and women are everything in between. In a society where a woman’s death can easily go unnoticed, this film makes sure the audience pays attention.

Grade: B+

“Unidentified” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release it at a later date.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? 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. 

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“It’s easier to get away with killing a woman. Sadly, society doesn’t care as much when a woman dies.”

That’s the reality of life in Saudi Arabia, said writer-director Haifaa Al-Mansour at the post-screening Q&A of her new film “Unidentified.” The film, which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, opens with a truck speeding off after having deposited the body of a teenage girl dressed in a school uniform on an isolated desert peak.

The peach-tinted coloring of the sand fills the frame with quiet solemnity. Visually, Al-Mansour’s approach is middle-of-the-road: it gets the job done without flair. The pacing feels right from the beginning: as the story unravels, the plot points neither dawdle nor lurch too quickly forward.

Al-Mansour — probably the most well-known and one of the first women filmmakers in Saudi Arabia —returns with the final film in her trilogy featuring protagonists all with the surname Al Safan, each possessing an unshakeable will to assert her rights as a woman in a society where doing so is often dangerous.

In the first feature of the trio, “Wadjda” (2013), a girl fights for the right to ride a bicycle, released five years before women gained the right to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. In “The Perfect Candidate” (2019), a young woman (Mila Al-Zahrani) runs for municipal office, something women in Saudi Arabia first gained the right to do, along with voting, just four years prior to its release. And in “Unidentified,” a recently divorced young woman (again Mila Al-Zahrani) moves to the city to live alone and work as a file clerk at a police station when the murder of a teenage Jane Doe compels her to solve the case. (The Saudi Personal Status Law was enacted in 2022, expanding legal pathways for women to initiate divorce.)

In each of these films, the subtext is always to showcase the humanity and courage of women in Saudi Arabia, to put a face on the real-life reforms and make them seem less like the exception and more like the rule. And Al-Mansour, with an original script co-written with her husband Brad Niemann, well knows that creating complicated characters forced to navigate tricky situations is more compelling than a heavy-handed sermon to a largely Western audience whose understanding of the Saudi cultural context rarely extends beyond honor killings and the merits of the hijab. That is to say, what Westerners know about Saudi is often skewed or incomplete. As the last film in Al-Mansour’s trilogy, “Unidentified” turns up the heat, making a decided turn into genre filmmaking — the murder mystery — where there’s room (finally) for Saudi women to be villainous.

Mila Al-Zahrani, as the lead character Noelle, ably delivers a deeply grounded performance, embodying her steely will and relentless pursuit of the girl’s killer, paired with her ever-present stylish black leather bag. Spurred on by her obsession with the videos of an influencer who combines makeup tutorials with true crime distillations, she uses gender roles to her advantage, getting closer to the women in the victim’s orbit than any policeman could in this observant Muslim country.

Still, the stakes could’ve been amplified: every time Noelle disobeys the orders of her father-like police sergeant, Majid (Shafi Al-Harthi, who also appeared in “Wadjda”), she receives little blowback. As she gets very close to solving the case, beyond the subtle eerie noise in Noelle’s apartment on the top floor of her building, intimidation by the killer surfaces too late in the story, muting the viewer’s sense of her being in danger. There is a big twist at the end, that one doesn’t see coming, which impresses. The surprise is clever, but undercuts its emotional impact by arriving without sufficient setup.

If the only way this film distinguishes itself is in its ability to humanize and complicate flat depictions and erasure of Saudi women, that is no small feat. Many different types of women surround Noelle as she attempts to identify the Jane Doe: rebellious teenagers, school principals, widows who value tradition, entrepreneurs, a police officer at her station, even the medical coroner who lets her inspect the body for clues. That kind of intentionality around the ability of fictional narratives to change concrete realities — the ability to visually imagine change — creates a living, breathing empathy “machine,” to borrow Roger Ebert’s phrase. Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.

“As women from the Middle East, we are often portrayed as victims with no agency. That’s not the full picture. Arab women have sass, hustle, and complexity,” continued Al-Mansour at the post-screening Q&A. “Life in the Middle East can be harsh and demoralizing, and women are a part of that reality too. But we’re not always innocent angels. We don’t always need to be the moral backbone of a society; we can be flawed, conflicted, and problematic.”

In “Unidentified,” women are good, women are bad, and women are everything in between. In a society where a woman’s death can easily go unnoticed, this film makes sure the audience pays attention.

Grade: B+

“Unidentified” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release it at a later date.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? 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. 

Two years after Stranger Things transformed the Australian actor Dacre Montgomery into an overnight heart-throb at 22, he retreated home to Perth. From there he said no to every role that came his way for four years, bar a season-four cameo and a small part in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.

“I lost my anonymity overnight and it scared the shit out of me,” Montgomery, now 30, says. He speaks fast and taps the table in time with those last words, a brimmed cap sitting low over his face. “That was a big driving force for stepping back.”

We’re in a Sydney bar on a quiet Wednesday in the lead-up to the release of Went Up the Hill – an icy possession drama set in New Zealand’s Southern Alps by the Australian writer-director Samuel van Grinsven. It stars Montgomery alongside Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps as a pair of strangers whose relationship grows increasingly antic as they mourn a mutual relative.

It’s the first of a series of anticipated films starring Montgomery, including a remake of the 70s mondo horror Faces of Death, alongside Barbie Ferreira and Charli xcx, as well as Gus van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, a true-crime thriller about the 1977 kidnapping of a mortgage broker that premiered at Venice to glowing reviews. It’s a sharp reversal from a few years ago, when his frustrated Hollywood agent dropped him.

“I needed to stop and recalibrate,” he says. “I also [knew] that I wanted more and I had more to give.”

Montgomery’s ascent didn’t allow for contemplation. He landed his first major role – leading 2017’s unsuccessful Power Rangers film reboot – before he finished his acting degree at the prestigious Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts.

Though a four-film deal disappeared after Power Rangers’ meagre box office take, it didn’t matter. Months later hundreds of millions of Netflix subscribers tuned into Stranger Things’ second season starring Montgomery as Billy Hargrove, Hawkins’ mulleted bad boy lifeguard and eventual literal demon.

Brooding, handsome and evil, Montgomery’s live-wire performance captured a passionate fanbase – the type that meant he could get a quarter of a million likes on a low-res Instagram post of a blue-black gradient shared to more than 7 million followers. The attention was overwhelming but Montgomery also questioned where his career was heading.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love commercial films,” he says. “But I grew up watching auteur films. I wanted characters that challenged me to the greatest extent.”

In the wake of Stranger Things, those characters didn’t come. “So I waited. And waited. And waited.”

With commercial and endorsement work steady, Montgomery experimented. He released a beat-inspired poetry podcast and book, both titled DKMH (after his full name, Dacre Kaye Montgomery-Harvey), and directed a handful of high-concept short films, ranging from sci-fi to viscerally violent works about motherhood.

But he credits his return to Went Up the Hill, in which he plays Jack, a young queer man who arrives in New Zealand to attend the funeral of his estranged abusive mother, Elizabeth, and meets her wife, Jill (Krieps), for the first time. They cloister themselves in Elizabeth’s house as her spirit possesses each of their bodies. The presence is welcome but menacing, as Jack and Jill try to understand her abuse without falling victim to it again.

Montgomery was instantly drawn to the acting challenge of a “three-hander told by two people”, as well as the script’s exploration of inherited trauma.

“My mum had really bad postnatal depression when I was born,” he says. “I think a lot of my anxieties come from that. So it feels a part of me, in a weird way.

“And then, in some ways, my anxiety is the fire that fuels my ambition or my work ethic. It’s part of me, her trauma.”

Van Grinsven says Montgomery was cast because of his “dangerous” onscreen presence. It’s the same intensity he exudes his viral Stranger Things audition, in which he dances shirtless to Come on Eileen between scenes, though comments focus more on his intense stare – also the subject of many TikTok videos.

“He feels like he could explode at any moment,” Van Grinsven says. “And coupled with how beautifully raw and sensitive he is as a real person, that together felt really interesting to me in a film [about] the abused welcoming an abuser into their body.”

Shot on location at Flock Hill Lodge, a five-star resort overlooking Lake Pearson that hadn’t yet opened, the cast and crew were incredibly isolated – and cold. Pulling from New Zealand’s rich cinema of unease, the mountainous landscape is as haunted as the lodge, a gorgeous outpost of concrete, glass and wood creaking in the wind.

“I liken it to The Shining, right?” Montgomery says. “I would have nightmares all night, so I didn’t sleep the whole production … We were all going crazy.”

Montgomery struggled to shake the film until its premiere last September at Toronto international film festival. “I just bawled my eyes out the whole film, because there’s so much of me and Vicky in there. I felt like I shed it that night. I was like, ‘I’m done. I never have to watch the film again.’”

From there, the floodgates opened. In addition to his upcoming acting credits, Montgomery is also aiming to shoot his directorial feature debut The Engagement Party this year in Western Australia.

Penned by Went Up the Hill’s co-writer Jory Anast, it’s a relationship drama about two couples on a remote holiday who are forced to examine a murky shared memory. “I’m brimming with ideas, and a lot of the heads of department we have on board are like, ‘Woah, you’re intense. You’re a lot,” he says, laughing. “I’m like, ‘What are you gonna do?’”