Latest in The Contenders

Deadline on Monday launched its streaming site for Contenders Film, featuring all panels from the ambitious two-day virtual awards-season event that took place over the weekend. The annual kickoff highlighting movies in the conversation for kudos put the spotlight on 49 films from 16 distributors, streamers and…

To follow up his 2017 breakout indie hit God's Own Country, Francis Lee found inspiration in the story of a little-known British fossil collector named Mary Anning. For Ammonite, he embellished what little is known about Anning, fashioning a romantic story for her, and cast Kate Winslet as the enigmatic heroine and…

Oscar winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley says he had a simple reason for wanting to turn his play, Outside Mullingar, into a movie: location, location, location. "Sometimes you are doing a play and you want to make it into a movie and people don't think it is a good idea. But when you are doing a play set in…

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold's The World to Come takes her into frontier country, as two put-upon farmers wives—played by Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby—unexpectedly find love in the drudgery of 1850s America, despite their strained relationships with their husbands, played by Casey Affleck and Christopher…

John Lee Hancock's hunt for a serial killer script The Little Things drew a killer cast of Oscar winners Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto. In Deadline’s Contenders Film panel for the Warner Bros drama that premieres January 29, Hancock explains why it took nearly 30 years to make a movie he wrote when he…

In Judas and the Black Messiah filmmaker Shaka King dives deep into the story of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and William O’Neal, who served as an FBI informant to help silence Hampton and the BPP. King, who co-wrote the movie with Will Berson, tells the overlooked story…

When Amazon released it in the heat of presidential election season, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm captured the zeitgeist as Sacha Baron Cohen and his breakout co-star Maria Bakalova acted out a father-daughter story with the unwitting help of QAnon followers, Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump's lawyer…

For all the praise of how great ’70s cinema was, when you come to think about it, many of the great crime classics like Straight Time, The Godfather and Thief were all testosterone-driven, with female characters resigned to second- or third-class status. Unfortunate, considering an era known for its sense of…

Coming off the heat of the first DreamWorks Animation movie Trolls, a bonanza musical that saw its tune “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Justin Timberlake get nominated for a Best Song Oscar on top of going quadruple platinum, the sequel Trolls World Tour was always going to be more music, more color, more glitz and more…

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, which won the New York Film Critics' Association award for best picture of 2020, significantly centers on food and food preparation two centuries ago in the Pacific Northwest region we now call Oregon, four decades before the area became an American state. Fish, game and vegetation were in…

Our Friend is a triangular narrative based on an Esquire article by journalist Matthew Teague about the death of his wife, Nicole. Before Nicole succumbed to cancer at age 36, an unusually intimate bond formed among the couple and mutual friend, Dane. Despite the ravages of fate, Dane offered a preternatural degree of…

In a wide-open year for Best Actor nominations, the buzz has been consistent around one performance in particular: Anthony Hopkins' turn in Sony Pictures Classics’ The Father as an elderly man whose confused descent into dementia has heart-rending consequences for himself and his daughter. Co-starring Olivia Colman…