The Playlist

At this stage in Pedro Almodóvar’s career, autobiography and fiction have become increasingly difficult to separate. “Pain and Glory” turned memory, filmmaking, desire, and regret into something resembling a fragmented self-portrait. His latest, “Bitter Christmas,” pushes that impulse even further, building a movie around an artist who cannibalizes his own life—and those closest to him—to start creating again.

Twenty years later, Michael Mann still isn’t finished with “Miami Vice.” Beyond Fest has announced the world premiere of “Miami Vice: Director’s Final Cut,” a newly recut and restored 4K version of Mann’s divisive-turned-cult-classic 2006 crime thriller. Mann will attend the 20th-anniversary screening at Directors Village in Los Angeles, although the festival has not yet revealed the new cut’s runtime or exactly what the filmmaker has changed.

Surprise! Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín is back much sooner than expected. And he’s heading back into the realm of ghosts and the supernatural. Netflix has released the main trailer for “My Sad Dead,” the Chilean filmmaker’s four-part limited series based on the work of acclaimed Argentine author Mariana Enríquez, and it arrives on the streamer September 24. It’s territory Larraín has explored before, but it’s a production that wasn’t made widely public, at least not in North America.

Paul Feig, after delivering a box office hit for Lionsgate with “The Housemaid,” is gearing up to work with Paramount Pictures on a gestating “follow-up” to the 2003 heist action film “The Italian Job,” which originally starred Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, and Edward Norton in the remake/reimagining of the classic Michael Caine film from 1969, which focused on a scheme to steal a bunch of gold using Mini Coopers, the car’s most iconic use in cinema.

Writer/director Zach Cregger is making an appeal to longtime and critical “Resident Evil” super-fans who are suspicious about his new movie and identifies with that “resistance,” after revealing he himself avoided the original run of movies because it wasn’t appealing enough to him, as they didn’t look or feel like the version of Resident Evil he was familiar with.

The antitrust case over the Paramount-Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery looks to be getting a little more seedy than it already is (various meddling by the Trump administration and telegraphing that they’d get positive coverage when CNN is taken over by the Ellisons and Bari Weiss), after what appears to be an attempt to use AI through a lobbying group to drum up potentially fabricated support for the merger, specifically in the state of California.

On the surface, “Flesh Impact” might sound like a crude, brusque description of Marilyn Monroe’s effect. But on closer inspection, it captures the almost tactile quality Monroe possessed onscreen—an aura so vivid and luminous that audiences felt they could reach through the screen and touch her.

Fresh off the Venice and Telluride premieres of “Ink,” Danny Boyle is looking toward a project that has been sitting on the shelf for several years. IndieWire reports that Boyle wants to set up “Antarctica,” written by longtime collaborator John Hodge (“Trainspotting”), about two men attempting separate solo crossings of Antarctica. The project had surfaced before.

The last few years have seen a rise in lighthearted dramedies about elderly women chucking the morose routine of a retirement home for the thrills of subversive adventures.

The theatrical landscape feels stronger than ever in 2026, and another sign of that is coming from new moves by Netflix and co-CEO Ted Sarandos, after talks they had met with studios and exhibitors at CinemaCon about expanding their theatrical releases. Previously, Netflix had telegraphed that it would not humor filmmakers about securing small theatrical windows, as part of deals with directors hell-bent on trying to release their features in cinemas.