Sierra ShortFest winners Sander Joon top gun: maverick woody allen
A still from "Sierra" directed by Sander Joon, courtesy of ShortFest

Alec Baldwin will interview Woody Allen on Tuesday, and doesn’t want any judgment; Carol Burnett will make a surprise appearance on Better Call Saul; Top Gun: Maverick  has officially hit $1 billion at the box office. Plus: Notes from the Nantucket Film Festival, a neighborly island incubator. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.

First: Our Tim Molloy took the ferry to Nantucket this weekend to get to know the Nantucket Film Festival, and finds it to be “a place where scrappy indie filmmakers chat and mingle with some of the most successful people on earth, trying to make good things happen.” Yes, he ate a lobster roll.

Carol Burnett Is “Thrilled”: To be a part of her favorite show, Better Call Saul. MovieMaker was the first to report that the six-time Emmy winning Burnett will make a guest appearance on the sixth and final season of the series as a character named “Marion.”

Box Office: In another sign that theaters are recovering, Top Gun: Maverick officially hit $1 billion at the box office this weekend, making it the highest-grossing movie of 2022 so far and only the second movie to pass that milestone during pandemic times following Spider-Man: No Way Home,  according to Variety. The sequel to the 1986 Top Gun is also Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing film of his career, ahead of his second-highest, 2018’s Mission-Impossible: Fallout, which hit $791.1 million worldwide.

More Box Office: (Updated) Elvis earned $31.1 million in its opening weekend, and The Black Phone earned over $23 million, according to IndieWire. Top Gun: Maverick earned $29.6 million, Jurassic World: Dominion earned $26.4 million, and Lightyear earned $17.7 million this weekend.

ShortFest Winners: The 2022 Palm Springs International ShortFest announced its winners on Sunday night. The Estonian short film “Sierra,” directed by Sander Joon, won the Visit Greater Palm Springs Best of Festival Award. “The Cave” (South Korea) directed by Kim Jinman and Chon Jiyoung won Best Animated Short,  and “The Sentence of Michael Thompson” (USA) directed by Kyle Thrash and Haley Elizabeth Anderson won Best Documentary Short. Read the full list of winners here.

Baldwin and Allen: On Tuesday, Alec Baldwin is planning to interview Woody Allen on Instagram Live. And he’s made it very clear that he does not want any judgment from anyone. “Let me preface this by stating that I have ZERO INTEREST in anyone’s judgments and sanctimonious posts here. I am OBVIOUSLY someone who has my own set of beliefs and COULD NOT CARE LESS about anyone else’s speculation. If you believe that a trial should be conducted by way of an HBO documentary, that’s your issue,” Baldwin wrote in an Instagram post.

Okay Then: He is, of course, referring to the HBO documentary Allen vs. Farrow, in which Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow renews her 1992 allegation that Woody Allen sexually abused her as a child, which Allen denies. The interview will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

Feature Film Shoot in Ukraine: For the first time since the war began on Feb. 24, there is a feature film being shot in Ukraine, according to The Hollywood Reporter. There have been plenty of documentary and non-fiction films shot throughout, but no fictional features until The Day I Met Spider-Man, which follows a war volunteer who discovers she has supernatural powers. It’s been filming in several Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv and Lviv, since early May.

Surface Trailer: Apple TV+ just released the trailer for its new psychological thriller series starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Oliver Jackson-Cohen. I never get tired of watching this man play the baddie. He and Mbatha-Raw play a husband and wife for whom things go sour when Mbatha-Raw’s character falls — or is pushed? — off a boat, resulting in a traumatic head injury and memory loss. As she puts together the pieces of what happened, it turns out somebody might be lying to her… and I think you know who that somebody might be. But hey, if we learned anything from The Haunting of Hill House, it’s that when it comes to Jackson-Cohen’s characters, looks can be deceiving. Watch the trailer below.

 

Main Image: A still from “Sierra” directed by Sander Joon, courtesy of ShortFest

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