The Hollywoodland Revue

The Sea Beast opened on January 15, 1926, to one of the biggest advance advertising campaigns in silent film history. In terms of billing and enthusiasm, The Sea Beast was no ordinary prestige picture: it was a project expressly tailored to the needs of an actor in the prime of his day-stealing career, John Barrymore, and to the requirements of an adaptation of one of the nation's most daunting masterpieces, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, for popular consumption. The result was not a faithful adaptation but a bold, romanticized reinvention that captured the spirit of obsession and the scale of the sea, even as it reshaped the story into something unmistakably Hollywood.

The surest sign that a movie star is serious is not when everyone likes what they’re doing. It’s when they can ignite resistance. Over the past few years, Timothée Chalamet has emerged as one of the few actors in a current Hollywood landscape with that capacity. In performance after performance, he triggers arguments over questions of taste and morality and gender and even the very purpose of acting. That friction, in Chalamet’s work, is not a defect. It’s fuel. The roles that cleave his audience most often are the ones that offer the least reassurance, the least likability, the least desire to make any unease go away. They are, also, the roles that are likely to last.

George Zucco was born for the stage. The refined British actor, who would eventually become one of Hollywood’s most familiar purveyors of silky menace, first began his career in the classical theater before moving toward motion pictures in the 1930s. Possessing hawk-like features, impeccable diction, and the ability to suggest both intelligence and moral rot with the slightest narrowing of an eye, Zucco quickly found a place for himself in the studio era’s increasingly thriving market for sophisticated villains.

Walking into Great White on Larchmont, you immediately sense why it has become such a talked-about dining destination in Los Angeles: the light-filled, airy interior and relaxed indoor/outdoor vibe feel like they dropped in from a breezy Australian café onto a walkable neighborhood street. Drawing inspiration from the all-day café culture of Australia and coastal California, Great White has earned a reputation as a stylish brunch and lunch spot with strong coffee, fresh ingredients, and contemporary breakfast and lunch fare that leans into healthy takes without skimping on comfort.

When the lights dimmed and the cameras flashed on Sunday night at the Beverly Hilton, the 83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards delivered a blend of glamour, emotion, and theatricality that set social media alight and sharpened the focus on the season ahead. From bold fashion statements on the red carpet to speeches that mixed gratitude with candid reflection, this year’s ceremony was a vivid reminder that Hollywood’s storytelling power extends far beyond the screen—it thrives in the conversations that follow.

Some movies seek to scare. Others, to get under your skin. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, first screened at Sundance earlier this year, is the latter kind of film. Conjuring the Deep South in all its heat, music, and memory, the movie is a midnight sermon for the age of waking, a horror tale gasped out between clutches of air. It’s horror not as a novelty but an inheritance, a story about power and survival and the long American tradition of draining blood in the name of salvation.

For as long as Hollywood has existed, it has been shadowed by a parallel industry of whispered speculation. The private lives of actors and actresses—especially their romantic lives—were often treated as fair game for rumor, interpretation, and invention. In an era when being openly gay could end a career overnight, stars guarded their intimate lives fiercely, leaving historians to navigate a maze of coded language, studio-crafted narratives, and secondhand accounts. As a result, many of the stories that circulate today about the sexuality of classic-era performers remain unproven folklore rather than documented fact.

Opposite the Hollywood Bowl, in an unpromising clump of tour buses and parking-lot traffic, is a small wooden building whose importance far outweighs its scale. These days it's a museum, known as the Hollywood Heritage Museum, but for many years it was known as the Lasky–DeMille Barn. It's one of the few places in Los Angeles where legend and geography match exactly, with a precision that's not metaphorical or made retroactive. It's the place where Hollywood, as a working motion-picture industry, first began to come into being, in a sustained, organized way, and take a more or less permanent shape.

January has long been Hollywood’s testing ground—a month where studios quietly release genre films, prestige experiments, and international imports to see what connects—and this weekend’s lineup reflects that tradition with striking variety. From globe-spanning disaster and stripped-down survival horror to intimate drama, flamboyant fantasy, and true-crime tension, the new releases arriving in theaters offer a snapshot of how contemporary cinema continues to balance spectacle with introspection. What follows is a closer look at the five films opening this weekend, each approaching fear, survival, and human pressure from a distinctly different angle.

The history of the British film industry is older, richer, and more globally influential than it is often given credit for—an industry that helped shape the very grammar of cinema, nurtured some of the screen’s greatest performers, and quietly educated Hollywood long before Hollywood became a global empire. Britain was not a follower in the birth of motion pictures; it was present at the creation, experimenting with moving images at the same moment cinema itself was being invented.

Long before Hollywood learned to manufacture scandal, Marguerete Favar had lived a life that was enough to make a dozen scripts. A dancer whose beauty blazed across the vaudeville circuit from sea to shining sea, her life ended in a murder that remains one of the decade’s most sensational unsolved crimes. It was also one of its most decadent.

In November 1928, Hollywood was already expert at manufacturing illusion. By day, the studios hummed and the stars smiled for the cameras. By night, the city belonged to shadows, unpaved roads, stalled automobiles, and men who knew where the streetlights ended. It was in that darkness—just as the silent era was gasping its last breath—that Lottie Pickford, younger sister of Mary Pickford and Jack Pickford, became the unlikely name at the center of one of Hollywood’s most disturbing police blotter stories.