Dropping in tandem with her first studio album in a decade, this genre-bending Amazon original showcases Jennifer Lopez’s journey to love through her eyes. This panorama is an introspective retrospective of Jennifer’s resilient heart with fantastical costumes, breathtaking choreography, and star-studded cameos.
When Love Becomes the Mirror
This Is Me…Now: A Love Storyapproaches creative storytelling from her perspective. Alongside director Dave Meyers, Lopez created a narrative-driven cinematic odyssey steeped in mythological storytelling and personal healing.
Real Love. Real Growth. Real Me.
“What came first, very plainly, was that Ben and I got back together. We were so happy and in love and couldn’t believe that we were getting this second chance that neither one of us thought we would ever get. And as an artist, it inspired me to go in and make music again in a way I hadn’t done since This Is Me…Then 20 years ago.”
I had to look back at how I got from This Is Me…Then to This Is Me…Now. What happened during all that time? What were the ups and downs? So, we created this love story that was equal parts funny, unexpected, romantic, surreal, and visually kind of explosive.”
It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing ten years earlier.
Chemistry, Conflict, and Character Depth
Cruz and Driver play the husband and wife drama brilliantly. Showing how volatile their marriage suffered because of the loss of their son, Dino, a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son, Piero, with Lina Lardi.
Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile Mille Miglia race across Italy.
Discovering what the director of the movie helps understand the carmaker’s life, “… Enzo Ferrari, one of the most famous yet inscrutable and complex men of the 20th century. For Mann, that was a perfect hook. “There is no equilibrium in his life, and that’s the whole point of Enzo Ferrari,” says Mann. “That fascinated me because that’s more like the way life actually is,” Mann continues. “Life is asymmetrical. Life is messy. Life is filled with chaos. Ferrari was precise and logical, rational in everything to do with his factory and race team. In the rest of his life, he was impulsive, defensive, libidinous and chaotic. This asymmetry and wonderful contradiction are what made him and the other characters in this unique story so human to me.”
Ridley Scott directs Napoleon with Jacquin Phoenix in the starring role and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine.
It’s a spectacle-filled action film detailing the checkered rise and fall of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
Along with a stunning backdrop orchestrated by Scott, the story captures Napoleon’s relentless journey to power through the kaleidoscope of his addictive, volatile relationship with his one true love, Josephine.
Christopher Nolan continues to bring poignant moments in history to the big screen. Oppenheimer follows the journey of developing the most powerful yet dangerous element that potentially can wipe out Earth and the human race — the fission of the atom.
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer works with a group of scientists during the infamous Manhattan Project, which leads to the development of the atomic bomb.
Learn how Nolan and Goransson create a mesmerizing film score.
The cast includes Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as Katherine Oppenheimer, Robert Downy, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.
Stephen Williams directs the true story Chevalier based on the life of the composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, played by Kevin Harrison Jr.
Stefani Robinson wrote the screenplay that follows the life of an illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and an African slave mother, played by Ronke Adekoluejo. As a prodigy, he rises to fame and befriends Marie Antoinette.
Steven Spielberg directed this coming-of-age drama from a screenplay he co-wrote with Tony Kushner. The semi-autobiographical story follows Sammy Fabelmen, played by Gabriel LaBelle. Sammy is a yearning filmmaker based on Spielberg himself.
Michelle Williams plays the mother, and Paul Dano plays the father.
Directed by Baz Luhrmann, Elvis follows Colon Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks. At the beginning of the trailer, Parker says, “There are some who make me out to be a villain.”
With the story by Luhrmman and Jeremy Doner, the screenplay is co-written by Luhrmann, Soner, Craig Pearce and Sam Bromell.
The story follows the life and career of the rock-n-roll legend Elvis Presley, played by Austin Butler. Australian, Olivia DeJonge plays Priscilla Presley.
Directed by Amy Poehler, Lucy and Desi explores the unlikely partnership and enduring legacy of one of the most prolific power couples in entertainment history.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz risked everything to be together. Their love for each other led to the most influential show in the history of television, I Love Lucy.
After his family lost everything during the Cuban revolution of 1933, Desi was a refugee from Cuba and became a bandleader, an actor, and a brilliant producer and technology pioneer. Lucille came from nothing and, with an unrivaled work ethic, built a career as a model, chorus girl and eventually as an actor in the studio system. She found her calling in comedy, first in radio.
When Lucille was finally granted the opportunity to have her own television show, she insisted that her real-life spouse, Desi, be cast as her husband. Defying the odds, they re-invented the medium on the screen and behind the cameras.
The foundation of I Love Lucy was the constant rupture and repair of unconditional love. Lucy and Desi couldn’t make it work with each other; they gave to the rest of the world.
Lucy and Desi documentaryoffers an insightful and intimate peek behind the curtain of these two remarkable trailblazers — featuring interviews with Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, Norman Lear, Desi Arnaz Jr, Carol Burnett and Bette Midler.
Poehler’s earliest memories, as a child, of I Love Lucy are of countless chuckles coming from her family’s living room, hearing her parents’ laughter as they watched the show.
“I Love Lucy and television were almost fused,” she states. “It was as if that show came with every television.”
But it was not until she was deep in her own career that she truly connected with it — and with its stars.
“It wasn’t until I got older, and doing comedy myself, that I really understood what they were doing and was able to see the many layers to their genius. I’m inspired by the big swings that the two of them took. They came to their success with a lot of confidence.
And, because of that, they said ‘No’ to a lot of things. They took giant leaps. They left their homes and worked really hard and just kept gambling. And they didn’t play small. They were very, very brave.”
“The way into a lot of stories,” Poehler explains, “for most people, is a love story. It’s really universal. I knew I wanted to touch on important themes — the different ways they approached work, what kind of work comedy is, and what they did as pioneers for television.
But we succeed and fail based on how much we care about their love story.”
Poehler was also keen to tell the story of how Ball and Arnaz completely turned the television world upside down, Sinclair notes. “Amy came to this with a very strong point of view about who Lucille Ball was — an insurgent or a disruptor of the business.
They shot in L.A. They shot it on film; they used three cameras; they cast a man of color in the leading role for a national sitcom. This isn’t just a story of ‘funny’ — it’s a story of disrupting the T.V. business, and of a relationship that breaks and makes.”
Another key part of their story for Poehler quickly became evident. “One of the themes that I grasped onto very early on was the idea of ‘rupture and repair,’ which is something that comedy can do really well. It’s what people turn to when their own lives are chaotic. And I Love Lucy was one of the early adopters of that genre: you have a problem, let everything unravel, but, don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay.”
This is the extraordinary true story of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Wain’s playful, sometimes even psychedelic, pictures helped to transform the public’s perception of cats forever.
CLAIRE FOY and BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH in THE ELECTRIC LIFE OF LOUIS WAIN
Photo: Jaap Buitendijk
Moving from the late 1800s through the 1930s, we follow the incredible adventures of this inspiring, unsung hero as he seeks to unlock the “electrical” mysteries of the world and better understand his own life and the profound love he shared with his wife, Emily Richardson, played by Claire Foy.
Co-written and directed by Will Sharpe, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain follows the extraordinary life of Wain, who painted incredible images of cats. These paintings inspired the public to view cats as domestic pets instead of feral animals that eliminate rodents.
Sharpe describes the challenge of capturing Wain’s inner world as most exciting. “I immediately felt a connection to his pictures, which are full of humor and delightful little details about daily life, but also, sometimes, seemed to have an undercurrent of restlessness and worry, or even sadness.”
“I wanted to take the spirit of those pictures — the wild colors and patterns, the funny tableaux, even the psychedelia — and to fold it into the world of our movie. The more I read about his life, the more I was struck by his courage in facing multiple challenges and how heroically he seemed to face them. It felt like an epic Odyssean life, and I knew there was a story here that could be really uplifting, transporting, and, hopefully, relatable for many people.”
Sharpe’s primary roadmap through the artist’s life came with the love story between Wain and Emily when developing the script.
“I thought the way that the love story was structured, in a slightly unusual and on the surface of it in an unfortunate way, left space for a lot of beauty to be mined,” Sharpe says.
Louis met Emily when she was the governess to his sisters. They had quite a controversial relationship and subsequent marriage. “They had to fly in the face of convention, and there would have been a lot of pressure on them not to be together,” says Sharpe
With the death of his wife so early in his life, Louis Wain’s story also deals with grief, another facet of the love he holds for Emily, which acts as a catalyst for realizations he makes during his later years in life.
“Grief is a theme in this movie, and all of it is tied together under the umbrella of love,” explains Sharpe. “What Louis realizes is that the reason he felt pain is because he loved Emily and that his love for her and Peter (the cat) has inadvertently helped him to appreciate the love that was around him—his friends and family and the people who enjoyed his work.”
Sharpe wanted to present Emily as the person who helped Wain learn what love is — so that he had something to reconnect with at the end of the story.
Cumberbatch feels that Wain’s is a moving story, who leaped at the chance to take the leading role. “I was drawn to him because of his artistry. I also found him incredibly persuasive in a very gentle way. And the fact that he was so talented and lived through so much tragedy, I found that whole journey just extraordinary.”
The rest of the cast includes Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Sharon Rooney, Aimee Lou Wood, Hayley Squires, Phoebe Nicholls, Adeel Akhtar, Asim Chaudhry, Richard Ayoade, Julian Barratt, Sophia di Martino, Taika Waititi, Nick Cave and Olivia Colman.
