If you take a look at the picture above, that is Tom Cruise. Yes, the same handsome, big screen superstar who you know and love from the "Top Gun" and "Mission: Impossible" movies. And he appears ready to challenge himself once again as an actor in the upcoming black comedy, "Digger" which he teams up with Oscar-winning filmmaker, Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a wealthy oil tycoon, who wants to be viewed as the savior for humanity before an impending disaster that he's responsible for causing destroys the entire planet. With echoes of Stanley Kubrick's wild political satire, "Dr. Strangelove", "Digger" looks like the perfect showcase to remind audiences that he is quite capable as a character actor in a comedic role. Cruise is surrounded by an impressive cast that includes John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and Sandra Hüller.
Where & When: Landmark Theatres Sunset, West Hollywood, CA. July 14, 2026 4:20 PM
"Maddie's Secret" tells the story of a woman living in Los Angeles who seems to have a good life: a loving husband, a close friend and contentment at her job. But Maddie secretly dreams of becoming a professional chef. An opportunity comes her way but the pressures from this success reopens the door to an even darker secret that she had been suppressing, creating chaos and despair for Maddie and her loved ones.
Loosely inspired by a 1980's television-movie-of-the-week, writer and director, John Early has put an amusing queercentric spin on this melodramatic parody for his feature film debut. Early also plays Maddie as an actual woman in the film: not trans or non-binary. Make of this what you will but I believe he took on this role less as a political statement and more about an opportunity to play a fascinating character.
Maddie (Early) and her best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant) work as dishwashers for Gourmaybe, a video test kitchen program. And while the haughty Emily (Claudia O'Doherty) might be the star of the show, Maddie would love to have a chance to be in front of the camera as a cook. After Maddie's husband, Jake (Eric Rahill) films his wife preparing one of her best vegetarian meals, he posts the clip online despite her protests. The next day, the video blows up, going viral and her crass boss, Zack (Conner O'Malley) quickly makes her an on-camera personality on the program.
Maddie achieves much of the success and popularity that she's ever wanted yet this also creates new problems for her. Cruel comments from viewers about her weight triggers the bulimia she once had under control. Maddie starts to act manically, pushing herself hard in dance classes while purging all of the food she does consume. After her husband catches her retching into a toilet, she tells him she's pregnant and Jake is thrilled since he has been wanting to start a family for sometime. And Deena starts feeling neglected by her friend with Maddie fearful in confiding to her what's actually going on.
Early has been working as an actor, stand-up and sketch comedy performer for a number of years, participating in several sketch programs and created content with Berlant. He had his own HBO musical-comedy special, "John Early: Now More Than Ever" in 2023 and released a studio album with songs from the program. With his feature film directorial debut, Early brilliantly takes on those earnest dramas that had an important message, one that is told through wacky hysteria and overheated emotions.
As Maddie, the actor dives all the way in, expressively capturing all of the fears and trauma of this tortured woman in a wild and darkly hilarious performance. After a cardiac health crisis, Maddie's eating disorder is discovered and she's checked into an inpatient treatment program. During a session with a doctor and her overbearing mother, Beverlee (played by the comedy great, Kristen Johnston), Maddie confronts her parent about how she was treated about her weight since she was a small child, revealing how she's the root cause of her complicated relationship with food.
With an open-ended conclusion and a classic freeze-frame on the face of a triumphant Maddie, "Maddie's Secret" has taken us on an amusing, emotional adventure, handling a health disorder with outrageously dark humor yet still finding some room for thoughtful candor. Early has admitted he was greatly influenced by a variety of offbeat cinema that includes the singular works by John Waters and Paul Verhoeven to create this film. Yet he stands tall with his own sense of stylish, eccentric comedy, proving to be a modern craftsman of deranged camp. Following the hilarious, "Maddie's Secret", I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what else Early has in store for us on the big screen, hopefully in the very near future.
Sam Neill, the charismatic character actor turned movie star, has sadly passed away on July 13th. The New Zealand actor had been struggling with stage 3 T-cell lymphoma over the last three years but he had recently revealed that the chemotherapy was no longer working. Neill died from pneumonia in Sydney, Australia at the age of seventy-eight.
Neill began his professional career on the stage in the 1969 production of "Marat/Sade" in Wellington, New Zealand. He would find work in several television and film productions with a standout performance in the New Zealand feature, "Sleeping Dogs" in 1977. After moving to Australia, Neill would appear on the popular television drama, "The Sullivans" and a co-starring role in Gillian Armstrong's 1979 feature, "My Brilliant Career" with Judy Davis, which achieved international acclaim. This helped Neill land roles in the third "The Omen" film, "The Final Conflict" and "Possession", Andrzej Żuławski's psychological horror drama with Isabelle Adjani that has since gone on to become a cult classic.
"Dead Calm", the psychological thriller set in Australia, would be a major breakthrough for Neill as well as for co-star, Nicole Kidman and director, Phillip Noyce. This helped Neill be viewed as a leading man and would go on to star in "A Cry in the Dark (Evil Angels)", "The Hunt for Red October", "Jurassic Park", "Sirens", "Event Horizon", "In the Mouth of Madness", "Hunt for the Wilderpeople" and "The Piano", the Oscar-winning film from Jane Campion.
He was born Nigel John Dermot Neill on September 14th in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, to an English mother and a New Zealand father. When he was five, the family relocated to New Zealand and settled in the Christchurch suburb of Cashmere. As a child, Neill had a stammer but would outgrown this condition. He began calling himself "Sam" because there were several other boys named "Nigel" in grade school.
It had been said that Neill had been one of the leading contenders to succeed Roger Moore as James Bond, but the role would ultimately go to Timothy Dalton. He would reprise his role of Dr. Alan Grant in "Jurassic Park III" and for the final time in "Jurassic World Dominion" in 2022. He wrote a Memoir, "Did I Ever Tell You This?" which was published in 2023.
Where & When: TCL Chinese Theatres, Hollywood, CA. July 7, 2026 4:00 PM
Near the conclusion of the latest reboot of "Superman" from writer/director, James Gunn, we were briefly introduced to Kara, played by Milly Alcock, who is a relative of the hero from Krypton and the only other survivor from their dead planet. This has led to a movie, "Supergirl" that spotlights this other super-powered visitor from Krypton. Unlike her cousin, Supergirl is edgy, disheveled and far from what many would consider heroic. Yet this coming-of-age, sci-fi adventure from Craig Gillespie winds up feeling disappointing due to a lack of an inventive style and persuasive thrills.
We first see Kara (Alcock) traveling the galaxy with her dog, Krypto, bar hopping from planet to planet, drinking heavily in a solitary celebration of her twenty-third birthday. Her cousin, Clark (David Corenswet) attempts to contact her to check in, concerned that she's having difficulty adjusting to life on Earth, but she tries to avoid his call.
On one of her stops, Kara's partying is interrupted by Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young girl searching for someone to help her kill Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), the ruthless leader of the space pirates, Brigands who murdered her entire family, in exchange for the majestic sword her father designed. No one in the bar is interested, particularly Kara. But an imposing alien decides to just take the sword from Ruthye which causes Kara to forcefully get it back, solely on principal.
But Krem had been following Ruthye. After disabling Kara's spacecraft, Krem shoots a charging Krypto with a deadly poison that will slowly kill him within three days. Now she must track down the dangerous space pirate for the antidote to save her dog while reluctantly taking Ruthye along who still wants revenge.
As Supergirl begins her pursuit of Krem, she discovers that these pirates are kidnapping young girls to use as sex slaves while another entire family is wiped out by trying to save their child from this murderous crew. I usually appreciate when these super-hero films make an effort to expand beyond the expected plot beats of this genre. But this all just feels far too dark and bleak, creating a harsh and unpleasant tone that just drags this movie down. This isn't helped by the screenplay from Ana Nogueira, which was adapted from the comic-book mini-series, "Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow", that fails to drive up the thrills with its plodding narrative filled with clunky one-liners and underdeveloped characters.
We are given Kara's back story, told throughout the film, where her parents, scientist, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and his wife, Alura (Emily Beecham) manages to save a large section of Argo City with a force field system that separate and protects the city after Krypton explodes. Kara is born eight years later but is sent to Earth after the survivors in Argo City are slowly being poisoned from exposed Kryptonite. Alcock certainly captures a scrappy, party girl vibe as Kara but her character is not fully fleshed out enough to help us really understand her brooding, self-serving nature.
Gillespie has a history of making engagingly quirky films like "Lars and the Real Girl", "I, Tonya" and "Cruella", each elevated by an offbeat charm and unhinged humor. However I don't know what happened with "Supergirl". Perhaps the studio gatekeepers held him back on a firm leash but this movie feels constrained, needing a serious infusion of wacky levity and weirdness to offset the overly grim setting. Supergirl repeatedly getting drunk at a bar and showing her severely hungover the next day is about as wild as the film gets. We do get Jason Momoa who shows up as the shadowy bounty hunter, Lobo to apparently add more menacing gruffness and star power to the film. But the striking actor, in his brief appearance, doesn't end up really contributing much that is crucial or memorable.
The first time "Supergirl" made it on to the big screen was back in 1984 with a solid Helen Slater as the girl from Krypton and a grandiose Faye Dunaway as the glamourous villain. This banal, campy movie ended up being a critical and box-office flop. The new filmed version of "Supergirl" seemed like an opportunity to give this character another fighting chance to soar high above this previous cinematic misstep. Yet this latest attempt from Gillespie has run into much of the same problems as the first film with "Supergirl" having an aimless narrative, inconsistent characterizations and a serious lack of entertaining fun.
After beginning a new chapter last year, OutfestNext returns with a summer film festival that celebrates LGBTQ+ experiences through cinema. For four days, July 23 to July 26, the fest will offer independent queer feature films, shorts, documentaries and engaging conversations. The screenings will be held at the LGBT Center Renberg Theater and Micro Cinema in Los Angeles.
Some of the films that will be featured include "I Want Your Sex", the first feature film in over a decade from filmmaker, Gregg Araki, one of the pioneers of the New Queer Cinema movement. This erotic comedy stars Olivia Wilde as an art-world provocateur and Cooper Hoffman as her new young assistant that she turns into her sexual plaything. Charli XCX, Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville also star. "Test" from director, Sam McConnell follows an amateur bodybuilder (Brock Yurich who also wrote the screenplay) in working-class Ohio who is working hard to achieve his dream of becoming a champion. But to afford his daily regime of meds required to bulk up, he discretely performs on the web for men.
William Friedkin’s 1980 film "Cruising" was the controversial mainstream movie to depict gay life which involved a cop going undercover to solve a murder. The documentary from Jeffrey Schwarz, "Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders" examines the real-life killings that inspired the main narrative of "Cruising" while also exploring the legacy of this film today. This year's winner of the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival from director, Brydie O'Connor, "Barbara Forever" looks at the life and work of the late, pioneering lesbian filmmaker, Barbara Hammer. "Maspalomas", from Spanish directors, Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga, tells the story of an elderly man (José Ramón Sorois) who came out late in life and is now making up for lost time in the gay paradise of Maspalomas in the Canary Islands. But a stroke changes his life with his daughter moving him against his wishes into a conservative nursing home. And "Dreamboi", an erotically charged horror film set in the Philippines from director, Rodina Singh that was recently banned by that country's motion picture review board.
For the complete list of films and to purchase tickets, please click below:
As the United States has reached it's two hundred and fifty years as a nation today, the New York Times has assembled ten of their writers to select a film that best represents this country and why. Each of these films manages to capture a little insight into how we might view ourselves as a country and how the rest of the world possibly perceives us because of our cinema. The nation is currently in a severely political divided state of mind (with a perfect example being the muddled events that have been put together to celebrate our country's milestone) but I still believe that we still remain united, bound by our shared history, a deep love of country and a strong desire for a more perfect union.
Please click below to read the selections and here are a few trailers for some of these films:
"Klara and the Sun", based on the popular novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, will be coming to movie screens this fall. Jenna Ortega plays Klara, a solar-powered, artificial friend who is in search of the perfect home. When Klara is purchased for an ailing Josie (Mia Tharia), they immediately make a deep connection with each other. But Josie has a complicated relationship with her mother (Amy Adams) but Klara’s positive energy and unwavering loyalty begins to help heal the family. Taika Waititi, the Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker behind "Jojo Rabbit", has adapted the book with Dahvi Waller and directed the film. Natasha Lyonne and Steve Buscemi also star.
"Klara and the Sun" is due in US theaters on October 23, 2026
