Produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Chris Miller, the magical story of Puss in Boots continues with the feline crusader, played by Antonio Banderas, trying to restore his nine lives after using up eight.
According to the DreamWorks fandom page, the original title was Puss in Boots: Nine Lives and Forty Thieves, and it’s now Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The change most likely occurred because the story focuses on Puss getting his last wish to regain the eight lives he spent swashbuckling through fairytale land.
Directed by Janus Metz with a screenplay by Olen Steinhauer, adapted from his bestselling novel of the same name, All the Old Knives starts on a bleak winter morning in Vienna. CIA Chief of Station Victor Wallinger, played by Laurence Fishburne, visits veteran case officer Henry Pelham, played by Chris Pine, and delivers volatile news.
Ilyas Shushani, played by Orli Shuka, the Chechen extremist who masterminded a deadly hijacking that killed more than 100 airline passengers and crew in Austria eight years ago, has been captured by the agency. During interrogation, Shushani revealed that a mole in the Vienna station provided vital intelligence to the hijackers, resulting in the catastrophic loss of life. With this new information, Henry is assigned to reopen the case of Flight 127 and identify the traitorous double agent.
But the mission means revisiting painful memories and laying traps for old friends. Even for a spy as adept at compartmentalizing his emotions as Henry is, that’s no easy task. His first stop is a pub in London, where he surprises his former superior, Bill Compton, played by Jonathan Pryce, who was second in command in Vienna during the hijacking. Long since retired from the agency, Bill considers the incident ancient history. Still, Henry points out several disturbing inconsistencies in Bill’s story, suggesting he knows far more than he’s letting on.
With troubling investigation details piling up, Henry travels to Northern California to question another retired Vienna station colleague, Celia Harrison, played by Thandiwe Newton. Henry and Celia were once passionate lovers, more than just ex-coworkers, but their relationship fell apart after the hijacking disaster.
When they meet for a meal together at a stylish cliffside restaurant in Carmel, romantic sparks reignite as the two seasoned spies reminisce about their bittersweet past. But as night falls and the dinner conversation gradually becomes an interrogation, their intimate rendezvous becomes a sly cat-and-mouse game played by two experts, where the stakes are life and death.
As his second feature film, Danish filmmaker Metz found the script most intriguing because of its powerful emotional depth and the complex ethical questions it raises. “I fell in love with the script from the moment I read it,” says Metz. “It was a very compelling story about two CIA agents meeting for dinner, one tasked with interrogating the other. Essentially, it’s a love story interwoven with a spy thriller. There’s a whodunit plot that drives the film, but Henry and Celia’s tragic relationship anchors everything.”
Metz believes the film is about people forced to make difficult choices to preserve what they care about, regardless of the consequences. “It’s a story about trying to do the right thing at the right moment,” he says. “But the dilemma for Henry and Celia is that they are in a situation where that becomes next to impossible.”
Written and directed by Mariama Diallo, Master follows three women who strive to find their place at a prestigious New England university whose frosty elitism may disguise something sinister.
Regina Hall plays Professor Gail Bishop, who was recently promoted to “Master” of a residence hall, being the first Black woman to attain the post in the prestigious Ancaster College.
Determined to breathe new life into a centuries-old tradition, Gail soon finds herself wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of Jasmine Moore, played by Zoe Renee, an energetic and optimistic Black freshman.
Jasmine’s time at Ancaster hits a snag early on when she’s assigned a dorm room that is rumored to be haunted. Things get worse when Jasmine clashes in the classroom with Liv Beckman, played by Amber Gray, a professor in the middle of her own racially charged tenure review.
As Gail tries to maintain order and fulfill the duties of a Master, the cracks show in Ancaster’s once-immaculate facade. After a career spent fighting to make it into Ancaster’s inner circle, Gail must confront the horrifying prospect of what lies beneath, her question ultimately becoming not whether the school is haunted but by whom.
As her feature film debut, Diallo first encountered the idea of a college “Master” when she was an undergraduate at Yale. Faculty members oversaw an undergraduate residence called Masters, shaping these communities’ cultural and intellectual life and helping students navigate academic and personal problems. A long-standing tradition at elite British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, Yale adopted it in the 1930s.
Diallo recalls some of the older students downplaying the term’s connotation of enslavement. “It was very slickly normalized,” she says. “They induct you into this crazy system where they just tell you, ‘We know it sounds weird to call somebody master, but it’s nothing to do with slavery.’ And I was able to accept that in a remarkably and disturbingly short amount of time. So for my four years, it was just completely normal to have this person in your life who you would call Master so-and-so. They’re the person who you go to talk to if you’re having trouble in a class or if you’re feeling homesick or anything like that.”
But several years after graduating, Diallo ran into the former Master of her residential college and saw the title in a different light. “I was so excited to see him that I called out hello, addressing him as Master. He looked hugely uncomfortable because we were in earshot of a ton of people. It was almost like our kink was discovered. It’s a relationship that could only exist within the university gates. Anyway, we went on to have a lovely conversation. But as soon as I walked away, I told myself I had to make a film about it because it really threw into relief how bizarre that term, that relationship is. And I knew I wanted to call it Master because of the multiple layers of meaning.”
In response to student protests, Yale eliminated the term in 2016 — several years after Diallo graduated.
From that germ of an idea, Diallo drafted a screenplay that told the connected stories of three women at fictional Ancaster College: Professor Gail Bishop, the school’s first African-American Master; Jasmine Moore, a bright, optimistic incoming freshman; and Liv Beckman, an outspoken professor seeking tenure.
