In short
Screen Talk (IndieWire) episode covers: Toy Story 5 box-office performance and themes about kids bonding with tech (Bonnie’s iPad-like lily pad; Buzz Lightyear set pieces; Jessie voiced by Joan Cusack; Andrew Stanton’s Brain Trust; Kenna Harris’s co-writer/co-director contributions). Olivia Wilde’s A24 Sundance pickup The Invite: a dinner-party comedy about a swinger couple (Ed Norton, Penélope Cruz) clashing with a married couple (Wilde, Seth Rogen), resonating with Gen X/older millennials; screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormick; adapted from Spanish film The People Upstairs. Reviews/expectations for DC’s Supergirl (Craig Gillespie; Millie Alcock; Jason Momoa; villain Matthias Schoenaerts; concerns about the orphan character Eve Ridley). AI controversy: Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial (Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman) dropped by Amazon; possible Neon/Mubi; studios avoiding big-tech-darkness; Google stake in A24 with DeepMind for production/distribution tools.
Guests
Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio (hosts; no other guests named).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOToy Story 5 Box Office Success
0:04 to 0:32
Discussion on the impressive box office performance of Toy Story 5 and its appeal.
“It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.”
Toy Story 5 Box Office Success
1:06 to 2:16
Discussion on the impressive box office performance of Toy Story 5 and its appeal.
“Having been in New York recently, I am loving.”
Analyzing Toy Story 5
2:16 to 4:04
Hosts dissect the themes, humor, and emotional aspects of Toy Story 5.
“it scored a 312 million worldwide opening, which is 160 million domestic, 152 million international.”
Cultural Impact of Technology in Toy Story 5
4:04 to 5:44
Exploration of the movie's representation of technology's role in family dynamics.
“pulling out the stops with the military themes and stuff.”
The Invite Review
5:44 to 7:30
Discussion about Olivia Wilde's film The Invite and its thematic elements.
“And as Australia and the UK try to forbid kids under 16 from using mobile devices, so far in Australia with limited success.”
Audience Reception and Themes of The Invite
7:30 to 10:34
Examination of how The Invite resonates with audiences and its thematic exploration.
“Okay, so what did you think of A24's $12 million Sundance pickup, the invite?”
The Debut Trailer Reaction
10:34 to 11:24
Hosts discuss the trailer for Jesse Eisenberg's upcoming film The Debut.
“It's a remake of a Spanish movie called The People Upstairs that I candidly have no familiarity with.”
La Bola Negra and Awards Season
11:24 to 12:39
Insights into the Cannes award-winning film La Bola Negra and its Netflix release.
“And Jesse Eisenberg is a very good writer.”
Supergirl Film Overview
12:39 to 14:00
Discussion on the upcoming Supergirl film highlighting its cast and themes.
“You'll be gasping for air on the mountain emerging from the theater.”
Supergirl's Challenges and Audience Expectations
14:00 to 17:42
Discussion about the character Supergirl, her portrayal, and audience reception.
“an australian director craig gillespie who i like he did cruella he did i tanya so he directed this with australian actress millie alcock who i really liked in house of the dragon and i like her here too.”
Show all 13 chapters
Concerns About AI in Filmmaking
17:42 to 21:37
Exploration of the film 'Artificial' and its implications on AI and big tech.
“in our world today where men are rewarded for being gross and callous and violent and and unethical, you know, the super do-gooder is not the trope that everyone's responding to at the moment.”
AI's Impact on Hollywood and Awards
21:37 to 24:15
Discussion on AI's influence in Hollywood and its implications for the Oscars.
“industry has always been tech forward you know they embrace new technology they like playing with new toys christopher nolan has approved an ai michael caine voice narrating the odyssey audio book.”
Weekend Movie Recommendations
24:15 to 27:18
Hosts recommend classic Hitchcock films and a new Spanish release.
“Like Phil Lord and Chris Miller are going to be asked ad nauseum about their response to their distributor dropping this movie and about AI.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01Anne Thompson:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.
0:32Anne Thompson:Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on the latest goings on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson in balmy Los Angeles. Actually, today is a perfect June gloom day where all the marine layer keeps things cool in the morning.
0:48Ryan Lattanzio:This is Ryan Latanzio in New York, where it's so beautiful out that I don't want to be doing this podcast or working. I want to be outside. Having lived in LA, I miss the June gloom days because they are few and far between, right? Whereas here, everyone savors the beautiful day. Whereas LA, it's beautiful 350 days out of the year.
1:05Anne Thompson:No question. No question. Having been in New York recently, I am loving. Actually, the weather was great when I was in New York. It was good. It was good.
1:13Ryan Lattanzio:Boy, they knew you were coming.
1:14Anne Thompson:So Ryan, you finally caught up with Toy Story 5.
1:18Ryan Lattanzio:Which has done really well at the box office. And elsewhere today, we're going to review Olivia Wilde's raucous comedy, The Invite Finally, which I saw at Sundance, which feels like a year ago, but it was only six months. And we're also going to look at Warner's latest DC entry, Supergirl, which Anne saw. I looked at that one and thought I can't go through this again, so I did not attend. Also coming up in the awards race is the can hit La Bola Negra, which Netflix just dated for November 6th in theater. So we're going to talk about that. There's also a trailer for the debut that's been very well received, which is Jesse Eisenberg's latest movie.
1:54Ryan Lattanzio:his third feature and second starring julianne moore also with paul giamatti we're also going to look at the latest ai brouhaha well before we get into all of those things ryan
2:11Anne Thompson:what did you think of the pixar box office blockbuster toy story 5. it scored a 312 million worldwide opening, which is 160 million domestic, 152 million international. This makes it the biggest global debut in the franchise's history. And Pixar rides again. How do you explain the franchise's extraordinary ongoing popularity?
2:38Ryan Lattanzio:Well, like you, I've also been watching the Toy Story movies for, I think, almost three decades, basically. The first one was 1999, So I was nine years old. That's the age a lot of people are at when they are first discovering Toy Story 5 or Toy Story 4 and so forth. That's often the age of the main character, in this case, a girl named Bonnie who is glued to her lily pad, which is basically an iPad. So this one is working both audiences, the Gen Z audiences that are perhaps discovering the films mid-franchise or who did. also the new the young audiences and also the millennial crowd like myself for whom the original toy story was so formative and still so embedded in our consciousness anyone who has an allergy to watching little kids soul bond with an ipad or other device is going to find either a lot to laugh at and resonate with or feel very triggered probably some of the parents out there really resonate with this and there are a lot of really witty set pieces in this movie but sometimes it did feel like sequences that were just sort of strung together rather than something that was really cohesive.
3:42Ryan Lattanzio:Like, why did we need all of those buzzes exactly? I know it's so they could fly at the end of the movie.
3:46Anne Thompson:Ryan, that was the funniest part. I was on the floor rolling in the aisle with all those Buzz Lightyear sequences. Every time the squadrons of Buzz Lightyear showed up, I would be hysterically laughing. The Randy Newman score was very clever and he's like pulling out the stops with the military themes and stuff. I thought it was hilarious.
4:11Ryan Lattanzio:The score is definitely better than the Taylor Swift song, which is one of her blander outings, though I know I risk my life by saying that anywhere in public.
4:19Anne Thompson:We know it's going to get nominated.
4:21Ryan Lattanzio:Of course it's going to get nominated. She's going to perform. The ratings will be big for that. It's all teeing up to the YouTube Oscars in a few years. Joan Cusack as Jessie in this movie. I felt like she was the best part. I really liked how that story was fleshed out. You know, I saw this movie. you probably saw it in a screening room that was very raucous and a lot of people were laughing at all media or something like that. I saw it alone in a matinee in Times Square, like here, a single man in his mid thirties alone. Yes, it was very sad sitting next to someone who was on his phone, literally the entire movie is getting worse and worse.
4:55Anne Thompson:And they do it at screen. I was at MoMA. I was seeing these great universal Westerns at the museum of modern art in New York. and there was a woman with her screen open in the middle of, I had to tap her shoulder and ask her to put it away.
5:08Ryan Lattanzio:Oh yeah, no, but you can't do that either. I've done that a few times and then I get yelled at. It's like it becomes their space and you're violating it.
5:16Anne Thompson:At least at MoMA, she knew she was in the wrong. You can't do that there.
5:19Ryan Lattanzio:I've seen people whip out their computers or take calls. It's really getting out of control, but there's nothing you can do about it. That's why generally I avoid going to first run movies in a multiplex. We are very fortunate that we can be in a screening room or go to art houses where that is not as prevalent.
5:38Anne Thompson:So I will add that this movie targets the fraught relationship between parents, kids, and tech. And as Australia and the UK try to forbid kids under 16 from using mobile devices, so far in Australia with limited success. Also social media, they've asked.
5:57Ryan Lattanzio:Wish I had it. Fantastic. Yeah.
5:59Anne Thompson:But so of course no one delivers. Yeah. They're basically forbidding them. You have to have an age.
6:10Anne Thompson:Proof of age and stuff like that to go on. You have to register for all the websites.
6:15Ryan Lattanzio:So just lie. Lie.
6:17Anne Thompson:They get their parents to sign them up. You know, those real world concerns are at the heart of many families. And the point here, though, is that no one delivers laughs and tears like Pixar. And Andrew Stanton, who was with the original Brain Trust from the start and is responsible for WALL-E and the classics, including Toy Story. He really delivers this. I would say, you know, that Toy Story 3 is the peak and no one will ever reach that peak again. But that doesn't mean they can't make more of them that are really good. And this is really good.
6:52Ryan Lattanzio:he also brought on a new filmmaker kenna harris who co-wrote and co-directed the movie uh was originally just a co-writer but then that role advanced and this is you know common in pixar they want to bring people up in the ranks but i can see where that co-writer co-director brought in certain elements like the blaze character who becomes friends with bonnie ashamed about the fact that she still plays with toys there was a youthfulness that i don't know that that came from andrew stanton of course they have like you said they have a whole brain trust of people who's contributing ideas.
7:23Anne Thompson:They have people in a room who are all brilliant, you know, going over everything and doing it over and over and over again, reiterating until it's perfect. And this was pretty close to perfect. Playing a potty training toy.
7:38Anne Thompson:A potty training toy. Okay, so what did you think of A24's $12 million Sundance pickup, the invite? They're on a roll with Backrooms and other recent hits. Is that going to continue with this one?
7:53Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I do think you talk about back rooms, but obviously I think the invite, it'll bring people in the door, but I think it'll play of all ages, but I think it'll play better for the adult audiences than the decidedly majority, very young audience that came out for back rooms. And I could just tell from experience of who I've talked to about Olivia Wilde's movie, which stars her and Seth Rogen as a kind of foundering married couple in San Francisco opposite the much more liberated swinger couple played by Ed Norton and Penelope Cruz. They become these warring dinner party couples. It's not, well, I wouldn't compare it to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is very acidic.
8:30Anne Thompson:No, I don't think, no, this is funnier.
8:32Ryan Lattanzio:It's funnier. This is more compassionate. To note, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, one of my favorite movies ever. So I'm not going to put this in that category. But anyway, I've noticed people I've talked to that this movie really resonates with Gen X and elder millennial men especially whose marriages might not be going super well uh i think what bowled a lot of people over at sundance was this kind of refresh and reintroduction of polyamory to audiences it's kind of like straight people meet the open marriage so to that end thematically i did find it a little basic just because for the gay community it's just that's another weeknight right i figured out what makes movies like the invite and the drama succeed so well at the box office is that they come with a call to action, which is how would you react in this situation and how does the film ask you to reflect on your own relationship?
9:21Anne Thompson:I agree with that. It's exactly why they're successful. They're conversation starters and people get engaged. And you're right. There are a lot of people who are not as sophisticated about this sort of thing as you might. I'm not saying that I am a swinger,
9:35Ryan Lattanzio:but I have some familiarity with the concept.
9:40Anne Thompson:But I will add that this kind of forehander, because it is literally in one apartment the whole time, four people talking. So this is really hard to pull off. The writing has to be precise. The actors need to have really deft timing. And I think Wilde did a great job with this. It's very entertaining and more like Booksmart than Don't Worry Darling. And the two couples are far from likable, even as some of us may root for them to jump into neighbor to neighbor sex player or not. I'm not sure, though. I have no confidence. I never know what's going to work and what isn't going to work.
10:17Ryan Lattanzio:But I think we've been wrong. That's for sure.
10:20Anne Thompson:Judging for how well it played at Sundance. But then again, you can't use that either as a marker.
10:25Ryan Lattanzio:No, that is a total microcosm. I do see this movie recirculating in the awards season, especially the screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormick. I agree with that. And it will be adapted. It's a remake of a Spanish movie called The People Upstairs that I candidly have no familiarity with. So to me, this was a total new experience. A24 has a number of screenplays that are probably going to be in the conversation, like Jordan Firstman's Club Kid. And then the next movie that we've seen a trailer for that you're going to tee up for us.
10:54Anne Thompson:Okay, so also for May 24 is Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut, which showcases the great Julianne Moore as a fledgling actress, and Paul Giamatti as her demanding director. Judging from the trailer, which I thought was terrific, awards prospects look good for both, I would suggest.
11:11Ryan Lattanzio:I agree. It's funny, the reactions to this trailer. It's like it's immediately propelled. Here's my Oscar predictions based on the trailer. Here's how good the movie is based on the trailer.
11:22Anne Thompson:You have to see it.
Read the full transcript
11:23Ryan Lattanzio:But it is a good trailer.
11:25Anne Thompson:Yeah, sometimes they tell you.
11:27Ryan Lattanzio:And Jesse Eisenberg is a very good writer.
11:30Anne Thompson:Oscar nominated.
11:32Ryan Lattanzio:Oscar nominated for original screenplay for A Real Pain. And he is just a pleasure of a man. I have so enjoyed talking to him.
11:40Anne Thompson:People like him. They like to have him on the Oscar circuit. So Ryan, you saw the Cannes director prize winner La Bola Negra. They've made a decision in Netflix to keep the Spanish title campaign.
11:54Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, the black ball. I'm already having visions of Netflix sending out black balls to various people in the guilds, you know, this various swag that we receive.
12:04Anne Thompson:What does it actually refer to in the movie?
12:07Ryan Lattanzio:It refers to a plot point in an aspect of the movie that chapters in the movie and one of them is an unfinished Federico Garcia Lorca story and involves a young man who's repressed and caught up in gambling schemes with his father. So there is an actual black ball that features in the film. so these gay Spanish director duo Los Javis they're definitely going to be on award season overdrive with this one as it definitely looks like it's going to be Netflix's biggest pony in the awards race though I'm hearing really good things about Li Chang Dong's possible love which that seems like a Venice movie everyone at can just totally flipped for this movie we've talked about this there was like a triple bill of gay movies that suddenly played at the end of the festival when everyone was kind of on their last flicker of energy and you really want to be knocked over uh so i i do think they i expect the reaction to be a little different here uh the movie definitely delivers the grandeur and the big sweeping emotions of the sort of movies that miramax would release in the 90s with sort of romance and tragedy against a wartime backdrop you know think something like the english patient and i imagine this would be a telluride and you're probably going to love it.
13:22Ryan Lattanzio:You'll be weeping.
13:24Anne Thompson:You'll be gasping for air on the mountain emerging
13:27Ryan Lattanzio:from the theater.
13:28Anne Thompson:I do look forward. I loved The English Patient. You know me. You know me with period movies. Yeah, no, definitely.
13:35Ryan Lattanzio:So this is going to open in theaters, meaning the Paris and the Egyptian and wherever else, whoever, I don't know who else at this point is showing Netflix movies, Zyam C, and then it'll stream in December. I do wonder if NYFF, the New York Film Festival, is going to pick it up they tend to be more capricious in their tastes but it's very well reviewed yeah so on the other end of the super girl um which you see under james gunn hired uh
14:05Anne Thompson:an australian director craig gillespie who i like he did cruella he did i tanya so he directed this with australian actress millie alcock who i really liked in house of the dragon and i like her here too. She's actually very good in this role. And they go out of their way to make her a hard drinking punk rebel at the beginning, reluctant to don the silly supergirl suit, complete with tennis skirt. When she eventually puts it on, it's like she doesn't own it at all. It is so out of date. I'm surprised that they kept that.
14:38Ryan Lattanzio:Intentionally doesn't own it?
14:40Anne Thompson:I mean that she puts it on and it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like she's happy in it, in the suit.
14:46Ryan Lattanzio:The actress.
14:48Anne Thompson:The character.
14:49Ryan Lattanzio:Okay.
14:50Anne Thompson:I don't know.
14:51Ryan Lattanzio:Probably the actress, too, on some level. I think so.
14:52Anne Thompson:Yeah, yeah. I can't tell. So Matthias Scheunerts, who we love, makes a delicious metal-studded punk villain and cigar-chomping motorcycle bounty hunter Jason Momoa is really fun to watch. on a young orphan sad sack Eve Ridley who has lost her family and it feels like Supergirl would like nothing better than to ditch this girl and I'm afraid the audience may feel the same way it's like she just pulls the movie down they spend a lot of time with her you know sounds like a drag I think they probably thought she was some kind of entryway for the younger audience. I don't know. Anyway, David Kornsweat -
15:37Ryan Lattanzio:Or the entryway into another movie, probably. They're always looking for a portal into another character. Yeah, I don't think so.
15:43Anne Thompson:So David Kornsweat provides a short supporting cameo as Superman. And we love Krypto, the dog. We love Krypto. And it seems like Supergirl is geared toward a female audience. I'm not sure how this will fare. DC's Wonder Woman was a blockbuster with$882 million worldwide. But that pulled men, too. I mean, they were into Gal Gadot, you know, but Wonder Woman 1984 did half of that. And then again, over at the MCU, Captain Marvel delivered over$1 billion worldwide at the box office. But its sequel, The Marvels, was not a hit at all. So Black Widow wasn't as big with$379 million worldwide. So I don't know.
16:23Anne Thompson:Supergirl's expected to open at about$44 million on a$175 to$200 million budget.
16:28Ryan Lattanzio:So as a comp, we're looking at something like the Marvels in the MCU. It's the soft.
16:35Anne Thompson:I don't think it will do anywhere near as well as that.
16:37Ryan Lattanzio:And that didn't even really do well at all. And that one was really excruciating. Like Owen Gleyberman in Variety, he called it, quote unquote, super horrendous. He is not the target audience.
16:49Anne Thompson:No. You know who Owen Gleyberman is.
16:55Ryan Lattanzio:Just looking at other reviews, male and female mix, is there some sexism going on here? Absolutely.
17:03Anne Thompson:This is not a movie for men. It's very, very female-centric. And I think she's a good model. She's a great character. I don't know that they delivered on this, though. We'll see. They introduced some good characters. Momoa, we will see him again.
17:22Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, again and again. Yeah, well, I'll never know because I don't know that I'm likely to see this one. So I did Superman last year and that was my fill for a while of this kind of thing.
17:32Anne Thompson:You know, Superman is a challenge. I thought they did really well with Superman, actually. I thought they cast it well. I thought that they delivered it. But there's this problem in our world today where men are rewarded for being gross and callous and violent and and unethical, you know, the super do-gooder is not the trope that everyone's responding to at the moment.
17:58Ryan Lattanzio:Right. And I guess if you're a woman in that position in a movie, you have to start as an alcoholic or something, and then you find your way to redemption. Yeah, we've seen that before. Well, obviously, we also want to talk about another bit of news that has really dominated the conversation for the past week, which is the film Artificial, which is directed by Luca Guadagnino written by Simon Rich. Amazon MGM greenlit this movie last year with a script in hand that a lot of people have said has a kind of nihilistic take on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who's played by Andrew Garfield. Now it is looking for a home because Amazon has dropped the movie.
18:35Ryan Lattanzio:Here are screenings of the movie that took place last weekend, which are handled by CAA Media Finance. Brian Lord represents Luca Guadagnino.
18:49Ryan Lattanzio:And word is indeed that the movie is a lot more negative on Altman than Amazon was expecting. And the streamer saw no upside in releasing it. OpenAI just made a$50 million investment in Amazon and Bezos and Altman are friends. Altman attended the Bezos-Sanchez wedding. And so in the screenings were other major studios, Netflix, A24, Universal's Focus Features. It's not surprising as most of these big corporations, as we know now, are in bed with tech and AI in some form or another.
19:20Anne Thompson:So that leaves Neon and Mubi. The word is Mubi is more eager than Neon, but we don't know. We don't know that. And the movie may not be commercial from what I hear. Aside from challengers, Guadagnino does not reliably churn out crowd pleasers. The question is whether this represents an all-around chill on projects relating to big tech companies. I'd argue that this one is specific and personal. It's an unflattering portrait of one powerful man, but the bigger corporate-owned entities will be careful in future about not taking unnecessary risks. We do have the social network that did very well back in the day, followed up by one coming up on October 9th, the social reckoning.
20:05Anne Thompson:There's no problem there, at least as far as we
20:08Ryan Lattanzio:Are people excited about that, though? I feel like, do people want to go to the theater and see the issues of the day reflected on the screen? And the social reckoning, I don't know how fresh it feels. We've kind of done all of that, I feel like, with the social network already, which is a bona fide generational masterpiece.
20:24Anne Thompson:Yes, I would agree with that. I'm eager to see it. Of course. It's interesting that Jesse Eisenberg couldn't go for it. He could not agree to play that part again. So I think this is a one-off. What do you think? Is it an overall chill? Or are they just going to avoid anything close to... I just feel like the Sam Altman thing is one specific story that they can't touch.
20:52Ryan Lattanzio:No, I do. And listening to... He spoke to someone who wrote the biography of Sam Altman. She looked at the script and said, It's very dark and presents a really grim worldview, not just on Sam Altman as a sociopath, allegedly in the screenplay, but also on the whole project of artificial intelligence. I do think people are afraid to take this on. And it's very concerning that now it feels like due to relationships with big tech that studios, I mean, it's censorship ultimately.
21:24Anne Thompson:It is. It is. And that is the biggest concern. concern and and you know that the corporate uh entities aren't going to go near it they just aren't and they they won't in the future but ai itself is clearly embedded in hollywood the industry has always been tech forward you know they embrace new technology they like playing with new toys christopher nolan has approved an ai michael caine voice narrating the odyssey audio book. In this case, AI took a job away from Notorious Cain imitator Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. I don't know. Anyway, actors and writers are threatened by AI, but a lot of other people and companies are really deep into it.
22:08Ryan Lattanzio:It's really interesting to learn that Artificial was actually pegged to a world premiere at South by Southwest, which tells you a number of things. Well, first of that's a very tech forward festival. They probably don't want to get involved in this either. They want to be implicated in a negative portrait of someone who -
22:26Anne Thompson:We don't know why it didn't play there.
22:28Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, well, it was supposed to play 2027 South by Southwest.
22:32Anne Thompson:Oh, okay.
22:33Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, because I knew they were going to skip the minutes.
22:35Anne Thompson:Did they accept it?
22:37Ryan Lattanzio:According to New York Times, it sounds like it was going to be accepted. Yeah, as the world premiere there, which tells you a couple things. tells you that probably Luca Guadagnino wanted to avoid the after the hunt situation where
22:55Ryan Lattanzio:also they're more after audiences than they are critics and maybe not awards even necessarily but it's a$40 million movie that's very expensive for someone, a studio to invest in a Luca Guadagnino movie is not guaranteed to make that back I believe after the hunt made something like$9 million such a bad movie
23:13Anne Thompson:yeah, really bad
23:14Ryan Lattanzio:So then also we have Google that's taking a$70 million stake in A24 as, quote unquote, part of a new artificial intelligence research partnership, which sounds very sort of nefarious. And that's per The Wall Street Journal. So the partnership is going to bring together A24 with Google's DeepMind AI, which Aronofsky is already playing with. This is to create new tools for movie production and distribution. And A24 has reiterated that there's not going to be intellectual copyright infringement that we're seeing litigating with these AI companies because they feel like their materials have been stolen to create LLMs and so forth.
23:54Ryan Lattanzio:So the creators are going to retain ownership of their work. But we don't really know what this all means.
24:00Anne Thompson:What the hell does research mean?
24:02Ryan Lattanzio:It sounds somewhat nefarious, like I said. Also, the Academy rules about AI transparency are going to be really interesting this year as they try to establish what is or isn't eligible for the Oscars. But amid everything we've said here, I do feel like we have arrived at what the nucleus of controversy and issue is going to be for this Oscar season, which is AI. We're going to hear a lot about it. Like Phil Lord and Chris Miller are going to be asked ad nauseum about their response to their distributor dropping this movie and about AI. And it's like no question that Cain Parsons of Backrooms, Olivia Wilde of The Invite, Jesse Eisenberg of The Debut, are going to be asked the same thing because of A24's Google.
24:41Anne Thompson:Yeah, that's true. Anyway, to move on to the current recommendations for this weekend, for those of you who are in L.A., I'm excited to be going to four Hitchcock movies at the Academy Museum this week. You can sort of see how I roll. When I was in New York, I went to three Universal Westerns at MoMA. And now I'm going to four Hitchcock movies with lectures by Guillermo del Toro. And this includes Notorious, which is my favorite Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, and Frenzy. I'm going to miss, I confess, because I got to go see some soccer on Friday night. Which is your favorite Hitchcock, Ryan?
25:20Ryan Lattanzio:I do think Psycho at the end of the day.
25:23Anne Thompson:Yeah, that's a good one.
25:23Ryan Lattanzio:It's always going to be psycho. And I've seen it a number of times in the theater with live orchestra. One time I saw it sitting next to Norman Lloyd. I've seen it in a lot of different contexts. And that one always continues to blow my mind. And you're better off going to these Hitchcock movies because it's not. I mean, we're going over some of these movies at the multiplex and it's a better, safer bet to see a Hitchcock movie than some of these other films.
25:49Anne Thompson:Well, the alternative would be to finally catch up with Obsession, which is continuing to chug along. It's doing really, really well. You don't want that. You want the studio cut. What's your recommendation? I'm going to recommend a movie that's just opening in New York now, but it's moving to L.A. next weekend, which is a Janice Films release called Romaria from the Spanish director Carla Simone.
26:18Ryan Lattanzio:This was at K-On! in 2025, so more than a year ago I saw it. And my review was a little bit mixed in some ways, but I remember this movie so well, and it's really grown in my estimation ever since. It is a filmmaker about an 18-year-old girl who wants to be a filmmaker. She needs permission from her paternal family to get a scholarship, so she travels to Galicia to meet them, and then is revisiting all these memories of how her parents, who were drug addicts, died in the early 90s from HIV AIDS due to needle contamination and that kind of thing. And it's shot by Helene Louvart, the cinematographer who works with Eliza Hitman.
27:02Ryan Lattanzio:It's an extremely beautiful movie showing a part of Spain that is often not seen on the upper Atlantic coast. A beautiful movie to see in theaters.
27:11Anne Thompson:Okay. Thank you, Ryan. And until next week. I will see you then.
27:17Ryan Lattanzio:Talk to you then.
From the publisher
It's been a week of much news and many releases. IndieWire editors Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio unpack the drama around Luca Guadagnino's upcoming Sam Altman biopic "Artificial." They also share their thoughts on the buzzy new trailer for Jesse Eisenberg's second directorial effort: "The Debut" starring Juliane Moore and Paul Giamatti, as well as the news of Google's partnership with A24. Finally they review a slew of new releases, from the Pixar box office smash "Toy Story 5" to the Olivia Wilde directed sex dramedy "The Invite" and the floundering "Supergirl."
Check out the trailer for "The Debut" - https://www.indiewire.com/news/trailers/the-debut-movie-trailer-julianne-moore-jesse-eisenberg-1235201503/
Read how Olivia Wilde fought for theatrical for her third feature: https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/the-invite-olivia-wilde-rejected-netflix-1235201797/
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