Natalie Portman

When an actor works with Terrence Malick it means throwing out everything they’ve ever learned in drama school or on a film set. Whatever script they might have initially read goes out the window, and Malick asks his performers to just, be. Maybe he’ll hand an actor a scrap of paper with am aphorism written across it. Maybe he’ll give them some minor stage direction, then let the camera follow from there. Michael Fassbender recently described Malick’s style as giving his cast “flavors as opposed to direct commands or instructions.” Some actors love it; others notoriously hate it.

Between huge franchise projects, Ridley Scott is the kind of director who likes to cleanse his palate with a self-contained drama like The Counselor or Body of Lies now and again. After completing Alien: Covenant, that’s exactly what he plans to do: Scott is finalizing a deal to direct All the Money in the World, a Black List script dealing with the high-profile kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, and Natalie Portman might star.

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: The new Terrence Malick film opens with a Die Antwoord song. The past several years have been the most productive of the reclusive filmmaker’s career as he’s been churning out more movies now than in the first three decades of his time as a director, but they’ve also been his most surprising.

What would an Oscars hosted by Jimmy Kimmel be without a new edition of Mean Tweets?

You know the old saying about how it’s an honor just being nominated? It is. An Academy Award nomination is a win no matter the final outcome on Oscar night. For one thing, it guarantees a major boost in profile and an upgrade in the caliber of roles an actor gets offered. There’s no way, for example, that any Oscar nominee will accept the sorts of roles you’re about to see below.

It’s that time of the year again where we must set aside our personal opinions and favorites to try and guess which movies the Academy will deem the most culturally significant. A lot had changed since our initial Oscar predictions last December. Manchester By the Sea is no longer a Best Picture frontrunner, a race dominated by La La Land with Moonlight shortly behind. The days of calling Natalie Portman a Best Actress shoe-in last fall feel like a distant dream, and Lion and Hacksaw Ridge might just lend this year’s Oscars some surprising upsets.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a great time to be a Terrence Malick fan. After making only six films between 1973 and 2012, the reclusive filmmaker released two films last year (one of which has three different versions) and has two more on the way this year. The first up is his much anticipated rock and roll-infused drama Song to Song, starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman.

The gender pay gap continues to be a problem, even for top-paid Hollywood actresses like Natalie Portman. In a new interview, Portman, who was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in awards season favorite Jackie, called out the “crazy” disparity between her salary and that of a certain male co-star — who earned three times what Portman did back in 2011, despite the fact that she was an Oscar-nominated actress on the verge of securing the statue for her role in Black Swan.

Austin, Texas native Terrence Malick shot his latest movie in and around the Austin music scene. And earlier this week, news broke that the film, freshly retitled Song to Song, was ready for release and coming to theaters in March. So we probably should have seen this announcement (via The New York Times) coming: Song to Song will open the 2017 South by Southwest Film Festival. So you know what this means: A glitzy opening night red carpet, complete with Terrence Malick posing for lots and lots of photos and interviews. Or the exact and total opposite of that.

A brief personal anecdote: I had the good fortune of attending the Austin City Limits music festival in 2012, where I caught an outdoor set by Atlanta indie rock outfit the Black Lips. During the performance, I spotted an unfamiliar figure gripping a guitar onstage, a young woman who looked suspiciously similar to Rooney Mara. I’d find out the next day that she, Ryan Gosling, and Terrence Malick had come to town to slyly shoot some footage for an untitled project about the Austin local music scene. It was neat at the time, but over the past five years, I had forgotten all about it.