Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film, Mother!, is opening in theaters but there is more new work from the Oscar-winning actress to look forward to. On Thursday, September 14, 20th Century Fox released the first trailer for Red Sparrow, an upcoming spy thriller starring Lawrence as a spy who seduces, manipulates, and kills.
The movie is based on Jason Matthews’ 2013 novel of the same name. While it is a work of fiction, Matthews was a real-life CIA operative, giving the book a unique perspective. Both the novel and the movie center on Dominika Egorova (played by Lawrence), a former prima ballerina who joins a secret intelligence service after an injury ends her dance career.
As we see in the trailer, Egorova becomes a deadly weapon for the Russian government. A so-called “sparrow,” she has to go to extremes to do her job, including seducing her targets. She is not, however, completely ruthless. Having become a spy as a way to take care of her mother, she grapples with the choices she has made. Her inner conflict is heightened when she meets an American CIA agent (Joel Edgerton), who works to convince her that he is trustworthy.
The trailer only offers a snippet of what is to come, of course, but it shows both how dangerous and conflicted Egorova is. Although Lawrence doesn’t speak at all in the one-and-a-half-minute preview, she nonetheless clearly conveys her character’s complex emotions. For example, with she lacks total composure the first time we see her in action, making it seem like she could be second-guessing herself.
While the preview is short, the movie looks promising given its intriguing plot and Lawrence in the starring role. Red Sparrow reunites her with director Francis Lawrence, who helmed three of the four Hunger Games films. They are joined by a solid cast that also includes Mattias Schoenaerts, Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jeremy Irons.
The film’s screenplay was written by Justin Haythe, and it is produced by Peter Chernin, Steven Zaillian, and Jenno Topping.
We still have a wait ahead of us, as Red Sparrow doesn’t hit theaters March 2, 2018, but the first trailer has piqued our interest.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?