Category: 5. Entertainment

Rapper Tay-K, born Taymor Travon McIntyre, is now listed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) with a projected release date of August 8, 2099. If accurate, the date means the 24-year-old artist will remain incarcerated for another 74 years, effectively ruling out his release within his lifetime.

Tay-K rose to fame in 2017 with “The Race,” a track that went viral while he was a fugitive, blending an infectious hook with the notoriety of his situation. However, before his breakout success, his legal troubles had already begun. In 2016, he was involved in a home invasion in Mansfield, Texas, that resulted in the death of 21-year-old Ethan Walker.

In 2019, Tay-K was convicted of murder in that case and sentenced to 55 years in prison. His legal record grew in April 2025, when he was found guilty of killing 23-year-old Mark Saldivar during a botched carjacking while on the run. That conviction carried an additional 80-year sentence, to be served concurrently with the first. The combined sentences leave little possibility for parole.

The newly posted 2099 date has sparked widespread reaction on social media, with fans expressing disbelief, frustration, and sadness, while others speculate it may be an administrative error. Memes and commentary have mixed with more reflective posts lamenting what many see as a lost talent.

Tay-K’s trajectory—from teenage rap sensation to inmate facing a near-century of confinement—has become one of hip-hop’s most prominent cautionary tales. While “The Race” continues to resonate with fans who remember its chart success, his career now exists in suspension. The 2099 release date stands as a stark reminder of the violent events that derailed his rise and permanently altered his legacy.

A series of million-euro robberies of luxury handbags from boutiques and brand headquarters in Paris has shown that high-value leather goods are now a bigger target for organised criminals than jewels or cash, as French police pursue sophisticated gangs targeting designer bags.

Paris has been the scene of several high-profile robberies of handbags over the past year, fuelled by the growing global demand for designer leather goods, which are increasingly being displayed by influencers on social media. As designer handbags sell for record prices at auction – with the late singer Jane Birkin’s Hermès bag fetching €8.6m (£7.4m) this summer – prices are rising in boutiques and secondhand bags are gaining value as collectors’ items.

Jérôme Lalande, an expert on leather goods at the Paris appeals court, said demand for designer handbags was so high that the secondhand market was flourishing, making bags very easy to sell on. “There’s a lot of money to be made,” he said. “Handbags have come to represent social status.”

Last month, the Paris showroom of Houlux, a broker of secondhand designer bags that sells by appointment only, was robbed in a dawn raid. Burglars climbed up to a fourth-floor balcony and in less than 20 minutes took more than 100 luxury bags by brands including Hermès, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chanel, estimated to be worth a total of €1m.

A few days later, the offices of the luxury brand Louis Vuitton in central Paris were broken into shortly after midnight by two masked men who broke down an inside door and took a large number of bags, reported to have been worth more than €1m.

In May, a large number of handbags were stolen from a Louis Vuitton boutique on Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain after a car was ram-raided into the shopfront in the early hours of the morning, allowing the robbers to enter the store and clear the shelves. It was the third such ram-raid on the boutique in only nine months. In November, neighbours had filmed a car drive into the same shop in the early hours of the morning as robbers dressed in black calmly loaded up scores of luxury bags before speeding off.

Pascal Carreau, the head of the organised crime unit of Paris’s judicial police, said handbags were one of the last remaining high-value objects that gangs can target in Paris. “Historically, before the explosion of drugs, French criminals, and particularly Parisian criminals, carried out armed robberies of banks, which in the 1970s had almost no protection at all.”

But now, with banks well-secured and less cash in circulation, patterns have changed. He said: “The teams of criminals who have not moved on to cybercrime are looking to target physical objects of value on the market. And all that is left are jewels or luxury leather goods.”

In January, an employee carrying out a stock inventory in central Paris for LVMH, the conglomerate that owns Louis Vuitton and many other luxury brands, discovered 50 handbags by the label Loewe, worth about €100,000, were missing. Examination of CCTV footage showed two suspects had entered the building one night before Christmas and exited carrying six large sacks believed to contain the bags.

Last year, a Chanel shop on Avenue Montaigne in central Paris was ram-raided by a car and robbers escaped with bags worth between €500,000 and €1m. In 2024, the home of an influencer who specialised in luxury handbags and posted photographs of herself posing with her bags in Paris locations, was targeted by thieves who stole items including bags worth between €20,000 and €30,000.

Earlier this year, Paris criminality returned to global headlines when a group of men who in 2016 robbed the US reality TV star Kim Kardashian of her jewellery, including a £3m 18.88-carat diamond engagement ring from her then husband Kanye West, were found guilty after a high-profile trial.

But Carreau said jewellery heists in Paris had dropped significantly to one or two each year because high-value jewellery pieces, which were often unique “works of art”, were hard to resell on the black market. He said luxury bags, on the other hand, were easier to sell on. “The resale is happening on secondhand sales sites. Some of the bags are transported abroad and sold the same way across Europe,” he said.

This was fuelled by the growing trend for acquiring luxury bags spreading across different levels of society and becoming much more commonplace, Carreau said. “Forty years ago these bags were marginal, now the fashion for luxury is much more widespread.”

The first six months of 2025 showed a marked drop in crime in general in Paris compared with the previous year: armed robberies were down by more than 9%, burglaries by 15% and theft of cars and motorbikes by 14%.

Carreau said raids on expensive handbag boutiques were not a daily occurrence in Paris but they had a spectacular impact because sometimes videos by onlookers who witnessed events had circulated on social media.

Lalande, the appeals court expert, said: “A classic Chanel bag that was €5,000 in a boutique five years ago can now cost €10,000 in a boutique. So alongside those shop prices, the secondhand prices have also risen … There is a global demand – from Beijing to Dubai, New York to Paris and London.”

Lalande said bags were relatively easy to re-sell because they couldn’t be traced as easily as watches or jewels.

He had seen a shift in criminals’ focus on bags over the past 25 years. “Twenty years ago, I was contacted because a [Hermès] crocodile Kelly bag was stolen from a woman in Paris. The bag was later found in a bin with her wallet that had been emptied. Years ago, a bag would be stolen for its contents. Today the target is the bag itself.”

Kate Middleton has suffered a major loss months after she revealed she is in remission post completion of her cancer treatment.

The Princess of Wales has come across an unexpected setback after she lost a major spot to her husband, Prince William, as per The Express.

According to new YouGov polling, Kate has lost her spot of being the most popular British royal to the Prince of Wales.

The poll showed that 74% of Britons have a positive opinion of William while Kate is on second spot with 71% positive reviews.

Princess Anne comes third with 70%, and King Charles ranks fourth with 59% with Prince Andrew taking the third last spot.

As per the poll, the “disgraced” Duke of York is the most unpopular royal with 87% holding a negative view of him.

It further revealed that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle also continue to face low approval ratings, with just 28% and 20% of Britons viewing them positively.

Earlier this year, Kate, the Princess of Wales, revealed she is in remission from cancer after she visited the same hospital where she received treatment.

“As anyone who has experienced a cancer diagnosis will know, it takes time to adjust to a new normal,” Kate shared in a social media statement.

“I am however looking forward to a fulfilling year ahead,” she added.

Emma Thompson might have been making headlines this week due to her surprise revelation about Donald Trump “stalking” her and trying to ask her out on a date when she was making “Primary Colors”, but she also stunned Locarno with her acceptance speech – delivered entirely in Italian. 

“I’ve written something for you,” she said, before switching to English for the last time. “I’m a little bit overwhelmed. You understand.”

Thompson received the Leopard Club Award for her decades-spanning career. 

“I’m so happy to be here, in this exquisite nest of pure creativity. And I’m deeply excited to meet the young filmmakers who are present here,” she said, also giving a shoutout to her daughter Gaia Wise. They came to Switzerland to present Brian Kirk’s “Dead of Winter,” where Wise plays a younger version of Thompson’s character: a grieving widow who finds herself in the middle of a harsh Minnesota winter – and a bloody kidnapping plot. 

“We made this film together and it’s a wonderful moment for us. She’s miraculous. I adore you, darling,” she addressed her beaming daughter, present at the famous Piazza Grande. 

Visibly moved Thompson continued: “I know the world is a bit dark right now. And for this reason, the light brought by stories and by the imaginary is more important than ever. This festival is 78 years old, and I’ve been around for practically the same time. I know how good it feels.”

Despite acclaimed roles and multiple accolades – she won two Academy Awards: for her script of “Sense and Sensibility” and lead role in “Howards End” – she’s not retiring any time soon.  

“Your gift represents a sign of faith in me, and I will do my best to continue to create in a way that you, and I, will enjoy. To tell you the truth, we, who work in the cinema, are so lucky. We are able to create stories we believe in. And we believe in our story tonight,” she added about “Dead of Winter”.

“I can’t believe we are here, outside, under the stars of our ancestors, our guides. Thank you with all my heart.”

You can watch the whole speech here:

In the past, Thompson has been open about her love for Italy, she was also granted honorary citizenship of Venice, which she described as a “dream come true,” calling Venice “the most beautiful city in the world.”

“It was extremely generous from Emma’s side to speak to the audience of the Piazza Grande in Italian, and she was also deeply humbled and funny in playing with the nuances of the Italian language. Our audience welcomed Emma’s linguistic proficiency with enthusiasm and warmth,” Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro told Variety after the event.

“It was an incredibly funny and moving evening that celebrated one of the very great artists of our time.”

The popular event was attended by 7.258 people, with around 750 forced to watch the ceremony at another cinema due to Piazza Grande reaching its total capacity – a rare occurrence and a fitting tribute to the beloved star.

Patrick Kielty’s family are still seething with Cat Deeley over her failure to attend his beloved mother’s funeral – and say they knew at that moment their marriage was over for good.

The comic, 54 is lying low in his stylish country home in the village of Dundrum, County Down where family and friends have been rallying around him following the announcement that he and Cat, 48, have split after 12 years of marriage.

But Cat’s ‘no show’ at Patrick’s mother Mary’s last rites back in March has left deep emotional scars within the Kielty family who say it confirmed for them that there was little chance of a reconciliation between the two.

Clearly still upset at the anger and embarrassment it caused the family, one relative told the Daily Mail this week: ‘Whatever rockiness was going on in the marriage, something as a momentous as his mother’s funeral, you would make up even temporarily and just put your ‘best face’ on as we say in Northern Ireland.

‘Cat obviously knew how close Patrick was to Mary and she should have come to be by his side, a hand on his shoulder as he buried his mother. The fact that she stayed in London and presented This Morning on the day, it’s not been forgotten.’

The source added: ‘In a very tight knit community in Northern Ireland, people always turn out. It’s the done thing. His family remain very upset by this. They still can’t believe it. It was the point when we all realised that that marriage had ended.’

Patrick looked bereft as he carried Mary’s coffin through his home village, where he was joined by close family and friends at the Church of the Sacred Heart.

A spokesperson for Cat told the Daily Mail at the time: ‘Cat remained at home to be there for her two young children before and after school on this very sad day.’

Patrick and his family are well known and hugely respected within the Dundrum community and virtually the whole village of 1500 people turned up to pay their respects at Mary’s funeral.

It was followed by a wake with the whole ceremony surrounding her death at the age of 88 holding huge significance in Irish Catholic traditions.

One source said: ‘The wake and all these other things are of huge importance. The house was full non-stop but her not being there was obviously a topic of conversation and caused a huge amount of embarrassment.

‘The family and their friends felt let down. We felt that Cat could have just turned up to hold his hand or put an arm around his shoulder at the graveside, regardless of the problems they might have been having. For something like this, you would put on a show of unity, it’s not too much to ask.’

A close friend of Patrick’s who grew up with him in Dundrum said: ‘It’s not just the family, it’s the whole community who haven’t forgotten. We were all there but not his wife.

‘Whatever is going on in your marriage, at the very least you need to do the right thing and show up to stand beside your husband in his hour of need.

‘The fact that she (Cat) didn’t made it obvious that the marriage was over. You can’t get back together after something like that.’

Patrick’s father Jack was shot dead by protestant paramilitaries in 1988 who mistakenly claimed that he was an IRA chief.

Mary was aged 46 at the time while Patrick was only 16 and his mother was forced to raise him and his two brothers single-handedly as she battled to keep the family together. She took a job in a local school, where she worked for most of her life, to help provide for them.

Miriam, who lives close to where Mary raised Patrick and his two brothers in the family home on the main road in Dundrum, said: ‘She was an incredibly strong and loving woman, and I don’t understand why anybody who knew this wouldn’t show up to honour her.

‘Cat’s reason for not coming because she needed to be with her two boys didn’t wash with me. If she didn’t want them to attend, they’ve got plenty of family in Dundrum who could have taken care of them while she went to the funeral.’

She added: ‘Patrick is loved by us all and I’m devastated that he’s going through what must be a difficult time.’

It is hard to find anyone in Dundrum who has a bad word to say about the Kielty family or Patrick, who locals affectionately refer to as ‘Paddy.’

Such is the regard that they are held in that the local Gaelic football club, where Patrick once played has named its pitch after his father Jack, who was also its former president.

Patrick remains an integral part of the community despite his fame and spending most of his time in London, where he lived with Cat and their two sons Milo, seven and James, five.

Patrick and Cat who wed in romantic ceremony in Rome in 2012, lived in LA for 13 years until 2020 when they moved to London after he was caught up in a terrifying gun drama with his son.

Back in the UK the showbiz golden couple bought their ‘forever home’ a derelict 1950s property in Hampstead, north London for £5million that required major renovation work.

The move coincided with Cat landed one of the biggest jobs in TV as host of ITV’s flagship daytime programme This Morning while Patrick got the job as presenter of The Late Late Show in Dublin.

But their busy schedules meant they have virtually been living separate lives. Cat once revealed on This Morning that they were like ‘ships in the night’ and slept in separate beds.

For the past year Patrick has been living largely at his secluded home back in Dundrum as he comes to terms with the end of his marriage.

Located along a winding country lane and overlooks the picturesque Dundrum Bay and the Mourne Mountains, his family say he feels peaceful there back close to his roots.

The lavish, retro-style detached house was extensively renovated by Patrick and boasts a stylish interior with a games room, cinema room, home gym, spa area, state of the art kitchen and large windows that offer stunning views of the surrounding countryside.

The home was used by the star, Cat and their children during their visits to Dundrum but at one point they considered selling it and put it on the market in 2014 for £400,000 while they were living in the U.S.

But a friend told the Daily Mail: ‘He changed his mind probably because he’s so connected to Dundrum and always wanted to keep a place here.

‘He’s been lying low in the house for the past few weeks because he’s obviously got a lot to think about. He’s not been coming out as much as he usually does when he’s here and it’s been very hard for him but the whole family and his friends have been supporting him.’

Patrick was spotted two weeks ago with his two sons in the Maghera Inn, a traditional pub located just a short distance from his home.

One regular said: ‘He was in here with the two boys and to be honest, seemed a lot quieter than he usually is. Normally, he’s not at the house very much because he spends most of his time away for work, but we all know that he’s been back in Dundrum for quite a while now.

‘If you need time and space to think then Dundrum is probably the best place because it’s so peaceful and beautiful here and this is where he probably he feels most at home.’ 

Patrick has often spoken about his love for Dundrum and once said in a media interview: ‘Growing up as a kid in Dundrum I thought it was the greatest place in the world.’

The idyllic, picture postcard village, located around an hour from Belfast, was recently crowned the best place to live in Northern Ireland by The Sunday Times.

It has featured on The Late Late Show with Patrick returning to the Dundrum Inn to have a celebratory drink just hours after making his debut as its presenter in September 2023.

Tom Doak, 63 manager of the Dundrum Inn said: ‘Paddy is very connected to the village and our community. But he’s just one of the regulars, nobody makes a big fuss when he comes in here. Whatever’s going on for him and I have no opinion on that, we’ll always be rooting for him.’

“If coming out of the closet was really as much fun as it is for the sexually adventurous youths in Better Than Chocolate, then everybody would be doing it, even straight people.”

So wrote film critic Bruce Kirkland in his 1999 review of the lesbian romantic comedy by Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler.

Kirkland pointed out that real life for queer and trans community members was “tougher, harsher and nastier” than portrayed in the 90-minute romp, but also wrote: “To hell with reality, at least for an hour-and-a-half. This movie is a little treasure and offers a lot of pleasure.”

The endearing rom-com won audience choice awards at a number of gay and lesbian film festivals, including in its hometown of Vancouver.

Today, more than a quarter century later, with hate crimes against queer and trans people on the rise and legal protections, especially in the United States, being threatened or ripped away, the film’s lens on romance — and the joy, safety and complications of being in community — may resonate with contemporary viewers and offer a brief reprieve from the heaviness of the political fight.

Like many Canadian lesbian-driven films from the 1990s, it also serves as an example of filmmakers working in queer communities to highlight once-censored voices, and reflects the sheer ingenuity and creative force of community collaboration in this moment — something that has been underrepresented in broader histories of queer and Canadian national cinema.

Whirlwind romance

In Better Than Chocolate, bookstore employee Maggie (Karyn Dwyer) and nomadic artist Kim (Christina Cox) start a whirlwind romance, moving in together within a matter of hours (echoing the classic U-Haul lesbian stereotype).

Their love story is complicated by the arrival of Maggie’s mother Lila (Wendy Crewson), a judgmental woman fresh off a divorce who doesn’t know her daughter is a lesbian. Comedic chaos ensues as the two young lovebirds navigate romantic, familial and community conflicts, all of which are neatly wrapped up by the end.

Though Better Than Chocolate may ultimately be a feel-good comedy, the film captures a community under attack from outside and within.

Skinheads harass Maggie and Kim, culminating in violence. Judy (Peter Outerbridge) is accosted for being transgender and is consistently misgendered by other lesbians.

The Canadian Border Services Agency purposefully targets neurotic bookstore owner, Frances (played by actor, author, playwright and Canadian lesbian icon Ann-Marie Macdonald), for selling queer literature.

Lesbian-centred 90s film

Better Than Chocolate is only one in a wave of lesbian-centred 90s films made in Canada. In this decade, creatives produced at least 12 narrative feature-length lesbian-centred films, several documentaries and over 400 short films.

Some echo Better Than Chocolate’s romantic tone, but the wave includes a diversity of genres – including erotic thrillers, family dramas and experimental dreamscapes.

Some of these films are well-recognized in the Canadian film canon, including Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) and Patricia Rozema’s When Night is Falling (1995), while others have been largely forgotten and prove hard to access today, like Patricia Rivera Spencer’s Dreamers of the Day (1990) and Jeanne Crépeau’s Revoir Julie (1998).

Ecosystem behind lesbian Canadian film

Canadian economic, social and artistic contexts offered a vital creative ecosystem that facilitated such a vibrant era of lesbian-driven cinema.

Feminist filmmaking collectives in the 1970s — like Women in Focus (Vancouver), intervisions/ARC (Toronto) and Reel Life (Halifax) — alongside the launch of Studio D at the National Film Board of Canada in 1974 — provided dedicated space for training talent and for producing films about women’s issues.

Wheeler came up through Studio D, co-directing the studio’s first film in 1975.

Canadian artists also had access to several funding sources, including federal, provincial and local arts councils. Beginning in the late 80s, such funding sources were soliciting more diverse content, a result of community activism driven by marginalized artists.

Importantly, a growing network of queer film festivals aided the development of an invested audience willing to pay to watch queer stories.

From 1985 to 2000, at least 11 annual queer festivals were founded in Canada, including Reel Pride (Winnipeg, 1985); Out on Screen (Vancouver, 1988); image+nation (Montréal, 1989); London Lesbian Film Festival (London, 1991); and Inside Out (Toronto, 1991).

With increasing venues to screen queer work and growing audiences came the demand for more films.

A Vancouver lesbian story

Alongside the broader Canadian context, local contexts also encouraged more filmmakers to tell lesbian stories.

Wheeler had long been committed to making films about lesser-represented Western Canada. While most of her films were set in Alberta, Better Than Chocolate moved her focus to Vancouver and its local queer politics.

The dramatic subplot between bookstore owner Frances and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is a clear reference to the then-ongoing Supreme Court of Canada case involving Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium in Vancouver.

Little Sister’s, a queer bookstore, had been targeted for years by the CBSA, which would delay shipments while confiscating and sometimes damaging materials that it considered obscene.

The film publicized the homophobia of the CBSA, with Frances comedically demanding to know why books such as Little Red Riding Hood had been confiscated.

As we discovered in our archival research, Janine Fuller, the manager of Little Sister’s, provided feedback on an early draft of the screenplay. A flyer from the film’s production company was also used to raise the visibility of the court case.

Local community ties

The film’s community ties extended further. As noted in archival documents and the film’s press package, Canadian trans activist and performance artist Star Maris inspired the filmmakers when crafting the character of Judy. Her song, “I’m Not a Fucking Drag Queen,” was solicited for use within the film.

Vancouver’s lesbian community was invited to participate as extras in a bar scene, with an advertisement stating, “This is an excellent opportunity to meet new friends, party with old ones, have much fun being in a movie.”

Finally, as Anne Wheeler told Eye Weekly in 1999: “Right from the development phase on, we had a group of 12 young lesbian women whom we consulted with and they told us very specifically what they did and didn’t want to see. … So we set out very intentionally to break the mould and dispose of the old perceptions about gay women.”

In returning to Better Than Chocolate and other films, queer audiences may find entertaining gems, but may also be reminded of the power of survival of queer communities.

Better Than Chocolate is now available on CTV. Don’t stop there! In addition to films named above, check out these other Canadian lesbian-centred 90s feature films.

Tokyo Cowboy (1994)

Skin Deep (1994)

Devotion (1995)

Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks (1996)

High Art (1998)

2 Seconds (1998)

Emporte-Moi (1999)

Zach Cregger has a look of horror on his face. He has said something he should not have said.

When the writer-director first penned what would become Barbarian, his 2022 Airbnb-set horror movie that turned into a word-of-mouth phenomenon, he was coming off years of work as an actor for hire and a stay in “director jail,” after making what he termed “a complete and unmitigated failure.” (That would be the 2009 road-movie comedy Miss March.) “I had nothing to lose, really,” Cregger says, over Zoom from an apartment in Prague. “It was: ‘I’m just gonna have fun.’ That’s it. Writing Barbarian, to me, it was [like] a kid coloring with crayons. And then Weapons… ”

He pauses. “Weapons was like me vomiting.” Another pause. It’s clear Cregger feels like he’s just confessed to a venal sin. Dear god, why did he just tell a journalist this? Then the filmmaker behind one of the most anticipated releases of the summer smiles, and his eyes light up. “And who doesn’t want to get a babysitter and go to the movie theater and spend 120 bucks to watch someone vomit?”

Cregger is joking, at least about moviegoers rushing multiplexes to see someone metaphorically puke their guts out onscreen. But given the excitement the follow-up script to his sleeper hit generated when it was being shopped around, and the increasingly breathless anticipation around the movie’s release on Aug. 8, the sketch-comedian turned filmmaker understands the stakes are higher now.

A multi-narrative story starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, and Euphoria‘s Austin Abrams, Weapons begins with 17 children who wake in the middle of the night, run out of their houses, and mysteriously disappear without a trace. The story becomes increasingly unhinged as the locals try to figure out what happened. It’s the sort of ambitious, go-for-broke genre film that suggests Cregger has officially earned the honor of being the Next Big Thing in horror.

The hype-generating new film came out of a serious low point in Cregger’s life. “I was working on postproduction on Barbarian when my best friend died very suddenly in a really awful accident,” he says. Cregger is referring to Trevor Moore. The two met at the School of Visual Arts in New York after Cregger had transferred there from Temple University, where he’d been studying film. A mutual friend introduced them, and Cregger and Moore would become co-founders of the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’Know. The troupe’s TV show ran for five seasons on Fuse and IFC; Moore, a co-director on Miss March, “was the engine of the show, and the group.”

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In an effort to deal with his grief, Cregger begin “a blitz of writing, over about two weeks or so… I just started, sentence one: ‘This is a true story. Half of my hometown, all of these kids bailed.’ You know, I’m writing this cold open, and I don’t know where the kids went. I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s go. Let’s see if I can solve this. What happened? Who were they? What was left behind? What does it feel like?’”

What it felt like, he eventually realized, was channeling a palpable sense of loss that allowed him to process what he was going through in the most outrageous ways possible. But the moment Cregger says this, he once again stops himself. “Look, like the rest of the world, I don’t want to watch another horror movie about grief. That whole horror-as-a-metaphor-for-grief is so fucking played out. I shouldn’t even be talking about this, but I can’t help myself. I don’t care if anybody gets any of that when they watch it. I want them to have fun. If the story rips, none of that matters.

“But I wanted to do something honest,” he continues, “and I found that as I kept writing, and the more I identified with all of the people I was writing about, the more this became something like an honest diary of my inner shit. It’s funny, I was talking to Ari Aster about this, and was like, ‘I don’t know about the personal stuff.’ And he was like, ‘The personal stuff is what makes this work. Don’t be ashamed of it!’ Hearing him say that… it’s part of the DNA of Weapons. The town is dealing with a loss. And so was I. It was the biggest direct hit I’d ever taken.”

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After Cregger had about 70 pages and had sketched out Weapons’ main characters — the teacher who had all 17 of the missing kids in her class; her one student who didn’t run away; a father searching for his M.I.A. son; a drug-addicted drifter who finds himself in the wrong place and the wrong time — he decamped to his manager’s house, located deep in the woods on the East Coast. Cregger knew the ending, and he had diagrammed out various plot points in charts. Then, he said, it was time to figure how to tell the story he wanted to tell.

“There was still this urgency to it,” Cregger says, admitting that the need for an emotional purge took some of the pressure off of following up a hit. “The only silver lining of this whole terrible year was that I was, once again, writing from a pure place. I was like, ‘Right, so the best version of this movie is if I can do it in these chapters where I stay loyal to the forced perspective,’ you know — to stay hyper-subjective.”

To do that, Cregger began to separate the narrative into chapters that filled in the blanks slowly, one character’s P.O.V. at a time. (He credits Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 movie Magnolia as the role model for how he wanted Weapons to play.) And he began to shake the fear of making it personal. He mentions that he strongly identifies with Garner’s character, the teacher whose classroom is the only connection among all of the missing kids, and is an alcoholic; Cregger himself has dealt with the disease and has 10 years of sobriety under his belt. He understands the anguish felt by Brolin’s character, a father who’s attempting to wrap his head around his child being there one moment and inexplicably gone the next.

And in writing the section told from the perspective of Alex, the one third-grader who doesn’t go missing, Cregger says he tapped directly into his own past. “That is straight-up, like — I lived that chapter as a kid,” he admits. “Again, I don’t know if people need to know this going in, but… it’s very much what it’s like to have a parent who’s an addict, and the child has to become the caretaker as this sort of foreign thing comes in, and…” The look of horror is back. “I’ll leave it at that.”

“He and I talked about that, yeah,” Brolin says, speaking a few weeks later in a separate interview. “We’re both sober, he talked about his alcoholic dad, I talked about my alcoholic mom. He found those spots in me that inspired me to want to tell the story even more. That was one of the things that struck me about Zach: He was really open about everything right away. From the very first meeting we had, he was willing to really talk about a lot of stuff that’s deep in the film.

“What got me before that, though, was just the script,” Brolin adds. “Look, I didn’t know who Zach was, or anything about the bidding war” — more on that in a second — “or that he’d made this other movie that people loved. I hadn’t seen Barbarian at that point. I didn’t even know this guy existed. And then to get this script that was so well-designed, so intricately crafted, so beautifully and smartly put together, then have this super-emotional meeting with the guy who was going to make this… I remember seeing The Matrix the week it came out, walking out of the theater, shaking my head like, ‘What the fuck?’ — and then turning around a buying a ticket and going to see it again immediately. Those kinds of movies don’t come around a lot. And I remember meeting him and thinking, ‘If this works, this could be one of those movies.’”

Much like Cregger did with the script for Barbarian, he started assembling each section in a way that played fast and loose with chronology. Without giving anything away plot-wise, let’s just say that what starts out as an elliptical mystery gets extremely crazy by the end. Once Cregger finished his final draft, he was ready to shop the script — and that’s when the real craziness began.

Word had begun to spread that the guy who’d made Barbarian had a new screenplay that was equally wild, and twice as ambitious. The buzz around it was becoming more and more intense. Several people made extravagant offers, sight unseen. Once potential buyers were finally able to read what Cregger had come up with, an old-fashioned Hollywood bidding war erupted. When he’d been shopping Barbarian, Cregger recalls, the film was roundly rejected by every studio he pitched. This time, he had producers fighting over the chance to be in the Zach Cregger business, to the tune of a $38 million price tag.

“After the dust settled… it was an incredibly difficult, stressful day, for a lot of reasons I don’t want to talk about,” he says, referring to the 24-hour period between the Weapons script going out and a deal being struck. “But it ultimately was a wonderful thing, and it took me a couple of days to kind of even realize that it was real. It was wonderful and overwhelming.” Asked about the rumors that Jordan Peele ended up firing his management when Universal failed to procure the script on behalf of his production company Monkeypaw, Cregger declines to comment: “Yeah, it’s not my story to tell.” (Peele’s reps also declined to comment.)

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And though Weapons’ production wasn’t without a few hiccups — he lost most of his original cast when the 2023 strike happened; he had to recast the young actor he’d hired to play the remaining student after the original kid experienced a huge growth spurt — Cregger feels like he’s ended up with exactly the movie he wanted to make. Early screenings were so positive that Warner Bros. moved the film’s release up by six months. The reason Cregger was Zooming from Prague is that he’s busy prepping the next Resident Evil film there, with the idea of bringing the franchise back to its video-game roots. (“If I fired up my PS5 right now and showed you the hour count that I put on Resident Evil 4, it would be embarrassing,” he says.) And he’s already got another script in the works, “a big, crazy thing I’m going to do after this that’s, I think, the most complex script I’ve ever written.”

“David Bowie has this quote — I’m going to butcher it,” Cregger says. “But it’s basically the idea that creatively, you should always be wading out into deeper and deeper and deeper waters, and you should never really know if you’re going to be able to swim or not. I definitely did that on Weapons. I may be doing that with the new one. But my job is to be honest. And to just to keep swimming.” Cregger exhales, then grins. There’s nothing but happiness in his expression now.

China’s latest blockbuster movie depicting one of Japan’s worst war crimes, the 1937 Nanking massacre, has been described by the director as part of an “invisible battle” to bring greater international recognition to the country’s suffering in World War II.

Dead to Rights is based on the true story of how a young apprentice in a photo studio found and developed evidence of the atrocities in secret, which was later used in a war-crimes tribunal.

The mass murder of civilians in the city, now known as Nanjing, which was the capital of China at the time, is widely recognised as one of the worst crimes committed by the Japanese during the occupation of China, which began in 1931.

While the death toll has not been conclusively established, China’s official estimate places the number of the dead at more than 300,000.

Dead to Rights has been well received domestically and hailed as a powerful tribute to national suffering and resilience during the war. Released on July 25, the film has become a major box office hit, grossing nearly 2.2 billion yuan (US$305 million) by Sunday, according to Maoyan, a Chinese ticketing and data platform.

In a widely circulated video, the film’s director Shen Ao described the production as part of an “invisible” battle – “a war of public opinion, propaganda, and culture”.

A royal expert and former aide of late Queen Elizabeth has reflected on the unfamiliar side of Prince Harry’s life.

Speaking in the new documentary titled Prince Harry: My Terrible Year, Ailsa Anderson, who served as press secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, reflected on her experiences with Harry.

Ailsa Anderson talked about Prince Harry’s BBC interview where he made peace offer to the royal family saying “This side of Prince Harry is unfamiliar to those who have worked closely with him.”

The royal expert said, “My engagement and my experience with Prince Harry has only been positive. He is very warm and very engaging and kind, so only fond memories of him, truly. I think potentially it is almost a crossroads for him now, what does he do next?”

According to the Radar Online, she also did not shy away from criticizing Prince Harry’s recent media choices.

The expert described the tell-all interview as “too impulsive”, attributing the misstep to poor advice from his current team.

Moreover, the former royal aide also expressed concern about Harry’s openness regarding King Charles health and family disputes.

She warned that such outspokenness could undermine trust within the royal circle.

Linda Hamilton recently got candid and revealed how she feels about constant praise.

Catching up with PEOPLE magazine after the release of her new sci-fi action movie, Osiris, the 68-year-old American actress reflected on playing many iconic and remarkable characters in her decades-long career in the entertainment world.

Hamilton also told the outlet that continuous praise makes her “uncomfortable” rather than boosting her confidence.

The Tarminator actress shared that when she first made it to the set of Osiris to play Anya, she received a special response from the crew members, as many among them had grown up watching her craft.

She recalled, “[I’m] standing at craft services and somebody goes, ‘Oh my God, you’re Linda Hamilton. I didn’t know you were on this movie. You’re a legend. You’re an icon.’ These words come out and I’m like, ‘No, no, no. I’m just playing one.’”

Despite treasuring kindness, the Resident Alien star confessed the admiration makes her feel “really uncomfortable” since she avoids feeling “different” and is “definitely an introvert.”

“I think I have a theory that we all want to stand out or we want to disappear, and I’m more of the ‘I want to disappear,’” Hamilton noted.

For the unversed, Osiris, a science fiction action film written and directed by William Kaufman, is about a group of commandos whom an alien race kidnaps while fighting for survival.

It is pertinent to mention the Osiris, which also stars Brianna Hildebrand, LaMonica Garrett, Max Martini, Linds Edwards, and others, was released on Friday, July 25, 2025.