“As soon as I started to learn about people like Oonagh Guinness and how she lived, and Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill… they were bucking the tradition of their aristocratic upbringing, which would have been, you know, heirlooms and antiques. No, they didn't want any of that. They wanted to be part of the modern world. They wanted to hang out with artists. They wanted to be bohemian and they expressed that, I feel like, in their personal surroundings.”

Hedda, an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson in the title role, with Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, and Nicholas Pinnock in supporting roles. The film is all set in one location, Hedda’s majestic estate. Its look and feel are essential to reinforcing Hedda as a boundary pusher, and creating the transportive quality of the film. 

“We achieved that through just the layering that we did. We had this Italianate house that was built and cobbled together. They kept building it and building it, building it over decades, adding and adding so you have this house from the 1800s and then we put modern art in it, and then we brought in a lot of art deco silhouettes to furnishings, because that still feels so contemporary,” says Brown. 

“Because of all the layers that we have, it kind of makes it feel timeless. A lot of people have come up to me and said they wanted to know what country the house was in… and then they want to know what year it was set in. We wanted it to kind of feel timeless and transcend any specific year.”

Taking Liberties With Hedda

DaCosta took some liberties from the play, by moving the time period from the late 19th century and gender switching the role of Eilert in the play to Eileen in the film. Those liberties were important considerations for Brown and set decorator Stella Fox.

“I think for me, choosing the furniture and the pieces had more to do with the shapes and the proportions of the pieces. The shapes of the deco pieces and the shapes of ’50s pieces kind of mirror that very elegant, very shapely, just very sexy pieces of furniture. 

"And I think that when we were looking in auction houses we imported a lot of furniture from all over Europe antiques markets. It was more about just finding the perfect shape. But it just didn't matter to me and to Cara, whether it was, you know, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, even ’60s. Like, there were some mid-century pieces that obviously would have been created after them. But it really, it didn't matter, because they had that freedom of slight wildness, I think, to them,” says Fox.

“We did a whole kind of board displaying leopard print, for example, and like it was so on trend in the ’50s… and (Nia) let us put leopard print carpet in the back hallway, and also a taxidermy jaguar on the staircase, just because,” says Fox. “I remember the first time we showed Nia the leopard print carpet. She literally laughed in our face. She was like, ‘Ladies, what are you doing?’ And then, OK, OK, I got it. I got it.”

How did ideas of gender, especially in this time period, influence the set decoration and production design?

“I really think it was just another example about how boundary pushing this person is, and how bold we could be with the furnishing, I think, and the production design, because she's clearly somebody who is not afraid... I really don't know how we would have made this film, or how special this film would have felt without that gender swap,” says Brown.

Hedda’s outward and inner lives are constantly at odds in the film, but the house does offer clues to who she might really be. 

“I feel like she is grasping at anything she can, and so maybe the house is a bit of a creative outlet where she can express herself. Even though she finds that unfulfilling,” says Brown.

“I was gonna say it's for her. It was the drama… It's the show of it, the pomp of it,” says Fox.

Hedda is now streaming on Prime Video.

Main image: Tessa Thompson in Hedda. Prime Video.

The new comedy, set in 1984, gets laughs from the embarrassments and frustrations that come from being a human — especially a teenage human — but not from the typical punchlines of modern-day movies set in the '80s, like campy callbacks or inside jokes about what we know now but didn't know then.

The film is playing Friday at Dances With Films New York, and it's a perfect fit for Dances With Films, a festival that specializes in well-made films that can be hard to pin down: The festival famously doesn't care about celebrity or industry connections.

And yetThe Legend of Juan Jose Mundo director and co-writer Michael Walker has them anyway. His credits include directing the 2000 Jeff Daniels mystery Chasing Sleep and the 2012 Parker Posey comedy Price Check, as well as the 2022 Dances With Films winner Paint.

And while his three leads aren't big stars yet, all feel poised to be. Anna Mirodin has what should be a breakout role as Julie Gornick, an inexperienced high school student surprised to learn that her family will be hosting a male exchange student from Spain. Alexandro Byrd is fantastic as that student, Juan Jose, who can't help but attract seemingly every girl in school. And Cobra Kai actress Hannah Kepple is very funny as Julie's bolder best friend, Suzanne.

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo benefits from the fact that Walker was exactly the same age as his characters in 1984. His co-writer, actress Susan Gomes — the two are married — drew on her own experiences to make the film. We sent them a few questions ahead of Dances With Films New York, and Walker answered them with Gomes at his side, with both contributing to his answers.

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo Director Michael Walker on 80s Movies and His Breakout Gen Z Cast

MovieMaker: It’s very cool to see a teen movie set in 1984 that feels like it could have been made in 1984. But it has the perspective of a grown up with years of distance. I see that you were almost exactly the same age as your teenage characters in 1984 — how much did you tap into your memories?

Michael Walker: The film is based on Susan’s high school experiences growing up in White Plains, New York, and, even though I had a different high school experience, I grew up in the 80s. We spoke with a lot of her friends from growing up and a lot of the stories are in the movie.  The main story about a inexperienced girl who hosted a Spanish exchange student was based on a true story of Susan’s best friend back then.

But it’s also filled with a lot of little stories, like the Spanish teacher trying to improve the kids’ accents with a Cheech and Chong-like accent, that actually happened that were really funny and we wanted to put them in the film.

It was a lot of memories like that, but, like you said, it’s also done with the perspective of being older, so it was fun to remember what it was like to be young at that time.  Trying to remember how important a lot of dumb teenage shit can be to you when you’re that age — that feeling of being in love and obsessed, like, "I’m going to die if I don’t get with that person!” without even knowing what that means. The drama of everything, how everybody knows everybody’s business.  We also tried to keep the adults out of it.

MovieMaker: This reminded me of Savage Steve Holland crossed with Whit Stillman - I love them both but couldn’t imagine much overlap until this. And of course John Hughes is the king of '80s movies. What were your reference points, besides memory?

Michael Walker: Obviously we grew up on those movies. The biggest influence of the John Hughes movies was that he took his characters and their problems seriously.  Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a huge movie for us — it has a real female perspective and emotion and is funny as shit.  

We watched and rewatched a lot of '80s movies while writing and preparing for this, especially all the teen ones.  A lot of them are better than you think they’re going to be, like actually well-made movies.  And a lot are really bad. And then, just '80s movies in general, because our generation grew up seeing movies and we all had the same cultural references.  

MovieMaker: I don’t know if this is intentional, but you kind of flip an amusing subplot from Better Off Dead - a smart, cool, attractive French girl named Monique is trapped as an exchange student with the awful host Ricky. In your film, the exchange student is the very charismatic Juan, and host Julie feels unwanted. Were you thinking about Better Off Dead? Were there other movies you wanted to play with or subvert?

Michael Walker: We watched Better Off Dead after we wrote it but before we shot it.  I had forgotten what it was about, but it was still really funny. I didn’t want to make a broad comedy like that. I thought our plot was maybe closer to 16 Candles.  I just wanted to make it real. I just thought about a lot of '80s movies - I thought about An Officer and a Gentleman a lot.  Go figure.

MovieMaker: How did you recreate 1984 so accurately at what I assume was a tight budget? (It looks great, but most indies have tight budgets.) I was especially impressed with your version of 1984 Manhattan. 

Michael Walker: I think what makes it seem more accurate is that we tried to put a lot what it was like to live in the '80s into the script. Waiting for pictures at the Fotomat, letter writing, pay phones, phone cords. One of our pet peeves about other period movies (and TV) is that they spend all this money on these elaborate sets and create these incredible productions, and then everyone talks like they were born yesterday.  

We talked different back then. We used words we don’t use anymore. We didn’t swear as much. We weren’t snarky and ironic.  We spent a lot of time trying to get the dialogue to sound like it did then.

Kristy Tully, our DP,  tried to shoot it like an '80s film. She lit the film with lights from the '80s — and blew a few fuses in the process. We threw in '80s-style shots when we could — wetting down streets at night, or throwing some color in smoke. Our production designer, Annie Simeone, recreated porn theater Times Square 1984 outside a beautiful theater in Downtown Syracuse.  

Our movie takes place in the early '80’s, which is before the '80s really became what the '80s were remembered for, so we were careful not to just step into the cliches of “The '80s.” 

MovieMaker: One thing I loved is that the film doesn’t tone anything down — teen drinking, teens having sex lives, people saying very uncool things. It isn’t egregious or played for shock value, it’s just accurate. Were you ever tempted to sugarcoat things?

Michael Walker: We were trying to stay as accurate as we could. I don’t think you can make a movie about the '80s without some of those things, and I didn’t want to make a big deal about them either.  But we definitely thought a lot about whether or not to have the characters say and do certain things. Both Susan and I have Gen Z daughters and know that for this generation, anti-gay slurs/language is not tolerated, but in the '80s, those words were used constantly in polite conversation.  

Girls today have a different view of relationships than girls did then. We decided to keep it all in because it was real.  Nobody seems to be offended because they get it was a different time. 

MovieMaker: How hard was it to finance this? The soundtrack alone seems quite costly.

Michael Walker: It took a lot of time to find songs that we could afford that we wanted. These are pretty mainstream kids and they listened to mainstream music, which is expensive! Then again, I was surprised by some of the amazing music we did get: Rockit! Adam Ant! ABC! I had to write a few personal letters basically begging, “Dear Howard Jones…”  Our music supervisor, Peter Davis, was very patient with us and found us some great stuff.

MovieMaker: What are your distribution hopes/plans? This is such a cool and unusual film in that it’s extremely well-made but also tells a very small story - it’s not trying to save the world. It’s more like a very poignant and honest time capsule.

Michael Walker: I think you’re exactly right!  I wanted this to be a jewel box of a movie.  Distribution has always been the toughest part of making movies, and it’s never been tougher, especially for a film like this.  I know people connect with this film when they see it, but getting their attention to see it is hard.  Even in the festival world things are celebrity-driven, or issue-driven, so to be appreciated by a festival like DWF means a lot.  

MovieMaker: How did you find your awesome cast?

Michael Walker: We had the amazing Barden/Schnee casting our film.  Paul Schnee really loved the script.  We wanted to find new actors.  Our cast will be stars in the future, but they won’t get there without films like this.  We were lucky in that our finance wasn’t attached to us finding stars. Everything is so celebrity-driven, it’s really another thing that makes this film special.  

Anna Mirodin, who plays Julie, is in an amazing play, The Disappear,  in New York right now. Alexandro Byrd is a lead in the new Disney Descendants movie coming out in July.  So they are already on their way.

Also, we were really lucky shooting in Syracuse and having access to some of the theater students at Syracuse University. They really came through.  

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo plays Friday night at 7 p.m. at Dances With Films New York.

Main image: Anna Mirodin and Alexandro Byrd in The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo. Pango Films.

The festival, one of MovieMaker's 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee, will be held February 25-March 1 at the South Arkansas Arts Center, a lovely cultural hub in historic El Dorado. In a nod to the town's namesake, the mythical city of glimmering riches, the festival's slogan is "Discover stories. Uncover gold."

Decker will draw on examples from such classics as Cabaret, Chicago, and Fiddler on the Roof to share the secrets of successfully adapting from stage to screen — and vice versa.

“I saw La La Land about five times in theaters when it came out and I’m a massive fan of Broadway musicals," said El Dorado Film Festival executive director Alexander Jeffery. "I think this panel will be a unique offering for a film festival and it ties beautifully into the mission of the South Arkansas Arts Center where we host our event. I couldn’t be more thrilled for Matthew to bring his insight and expertise to El Dorado for the filmmakers and audiences alike.”

El Dorado Film Festival 2026 Highlights

Decker's panel adds to a stacked El Dorado lineup.

Guests will also be offered a sneak preview of the TV pilots Savage, with writer Connor Paolo, and Fixation, with filmmakers Jeffery and Paul Petersen and author Steve Smart. Tickets for the event can be purchased online or at the door.

Picture Pool Productions produced Savage — a six-part mystery horror epic written by and starring Paolo, who played Eric van der Woodsen on the hit TV show Gossip Girl. The logline reads: “When Manon Savage, a barely functioning alcoholic and potentially violent private investigator, is hired to solve a bizarre missing persons case in a town of 11 people; she quickly discovers that this town, and the people in it, are far more sinister than she could ever imagine.”

Fixation is produced by Bespoke Works LLC and Picture Pool Productions. The show stars Bridget Regan, Nicholas Logan, Brett Dalton and El Dorado native William Ragsdale, whose recollections about starring in the horror classic Fright Night were a highlight of last year's festival.

Fixation is written by Jeffery, Petersen and Smart. Smart, an El Dorado native, worked on Fixation as a passion project over several decades before publishing the novel in 2017. Set in Fort Riley, Kansas, it focuses on the death of a young Korean woman whose death appears routine — until an autopsy reveals something more sinister.

“I began writing Fixation, not as a novel, but as a historical document for my children about a real life event,” Smart said. “After a span of more than 20 years with periodical bursts of writing and long lapses between, it became obvious that the plot was material that justified a novel. I am thrilled that Alex and Paul, subsequently, felt the same way about the story, writing a fabulous screenplay and producing this exciting series pilot, now giving us a glimpse in this El Dorado sneak preview. They have made a dream come true for me.”

Jeffery first read the manuscript for Fixation in 2017 and immediately began dreaming about how to adapt it. He and Petersen moved from envisioning the project as a TV series to a feature film and back to TV after they saw the Savage pilot.

“Bringing this pilot to life was so joyful, despite the dark subject matter,” Jeffery said. “I got absolutely spoiled as a director with my cast, crew and producing team, getting to work with actors whose work I have admired from a distance for some time. I’m really excited to give El Dorado a taste of what we made because this project really originated in El Dorado despite being filmed in Shreveport.”

Decker is an award-winning theater director, filmmaker, and writer whose work includes new play development, reimagining classics, and original storytelling. He is the co-founder of Theatre Horizon in Norristown, PA, now in its landmark 20th season. At Theatre Horizon, Decker has directed acclaimed productions including The Few, Lobby Hero, Into the Woods, Circle Mirror Transformation, and Spring Awakening. Under his artistic leadership, the company’s 123-seat venue has helped revitalize downtown Norristown.

Decker has also served as Associate Artistic Director at Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company.

He is co-writing the stage adaptation of La La Land with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, and wrote the auto-fictional musical Wishing to Grow Up Brightly with Amanda Morton. It premiered in November 2025. He is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his work has been recognized with three Barrymore Awards for Outstanding Direction.

Main image: Matthew Decker at work, courtesy of the El Dorado Film Festival.

That said, Canada and many countries overseas are giving them some serious competition, in part because of high costs in the U.S., and because of Hollywood’s uncertainty about where and how to invest. 

Some big productions are taking advantage of other countries’ taxpayer-funded health care, for example: The Wall Street Journal noted in August that one reason many productions are moving to the United Kingdom is that “workers there are generally paid less, and studios don’t have to cover their health insurance.” 

That observation appeared in an August story headlined “Disney’s Marvel Abandons Georgia, Taking Livelihoods With It.” Marvel’s exodus is part of the reason Atlanta isn’t on our list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker this year. The lovely city of Savannah, Georgia’s other major film hub, is still very much on the list, thanks in part to the steady business that the Savannah College of Art and Design helps drive. 

Adding to the uncertainty of the U.S. film business is President Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on foreign films. 

So what’s going well in the North American film business? Plenty — if you’re Canadian. We’re thrilled to welcome the Canadian cities of Edmonton and Quebec City to this year’s list. And while U.S. production is generally down, many American communities are scoring by doubling down on their commitment to film, especially in Texas and New Mexico. And we’re very excited to welcome Louisville, Kentucky to our list.

As always, when compiling our list of Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker, we look to celebrate cities and towns where we believe you’ll have the best chance of both succeeding in the famously difficult entertainment industry, and making your own art.

We try to imagine a very particular kind of filmmaker, who we’ll call Sam: She pays the bills crewing for big productions, and writes her own screenplays at night. On weekends, Sam pitches in to help friends make indie movies, knowing that they’ll pitch in when it’s time for her to make hers. She doesn’t think she should have to sacrifice having a family or owning a home in order to do work in film, and she shouldn’t have to. Maybe L.A. is perfect for her, but maybe she’d be better off somewhere less expensive, where she doesn’t spend so much time trying to stay afloat that she never has time to tell her own stories. 

To that end, we create this list by asking cities about factors like their industry spend, tax incentives, crews, sound stages, local film scenes, and recent productions. We also take cost of living and general livability into account: Can we see ourselves being happy there? Buying a house? And how’s the food?

If you don’t want to live in certain places because of their laws or values, we get it. But we also like the idea of moving to certain places to help change their laws and values. 

Finally, as we always say: We aren’t suggesting you move to any of these places without doing your own research. And we’re sure not every place on this list will be for everyone. But we are confident that somewhere on this list is a place where you can make a good living and do great work. 

So with that, here’s our list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker in 2026.

THE BEST PLACES TO LIVE AND WORK AS A MOVIEMAKER: BEST BIG CITIES

25. EL PASO, TEXAS 

Fresh from hosting Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, El Paso is riding high and looking for more large-scale films and TV shows. It offers a close-knit, passionate film community — which comes out in force each year for the fast-growing El Paso Film Festival — as well as its inimitable location along the U.S.-Mexican border, one of the most storied regions in the world. In addition to charm, affordability and easy permitting — as well as very photogenic historic buildings you can see on display in One Battle — El Paso offers an array of production facilities, including the Rio Bravo Outpost and MindWarp Films. But the biggest recent draw may be the new improvements to the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, which now allows productions a grant rebate of up to 31% of their qualified in-state spending — up from 22.5%. (You can read more about it in upcoming entries on this list, and on page 70.) El Paso is also close to Las Cruces, New Mexico, another fast-rising film hub that returns this year to our list of the Best Smaller Cities and Towns. 

24. OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA 

Oklahoma City has recently hosted such features as New Year’s Rev — about a young punk band opening for Green Day — and the holiday film The One, featuring Martin Sheen. It’s also the home of Oklahoma City Community College, one of the most affordable options on our list of the Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada, and home to the beloved deadCenter Film Festival, which recently featured the world premiere of the fascinating 67 Bombs To Enid, a documentary by Oklahoma filmmakers about survivors of American nuclear bomb tests in the Marshall Islands who have relocated to Enid, Oklahoma, about 100 miles from Oklahoma City. Like Tulsa, 100 miles to the northeast, OKC benefits from strong tax incentives that include Oklahoma’s 20-30% cash rebate. The Oklahoma City Film and Creative Industries Office makes permitting easy, and the city has 600 crew members ready to go. It has a below average cost of living and rich cultural offerings that include the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, whose Noble Theatre screens top-tier art house films. 

23. CLEVELAND, OHIO 

A regular on our list, Cleveland had a big moment to shine this past summer as one of the cities that hosted James Gunn’s hit Superman. Recent projects have included Hulu’s Eenie Meanie and Neon’s Shelby Oaks, directed by YouTube critic-turned-filmmaker Chris Stuckman, a local. In addition to a 30% rebate on projects that spend at least $300,000, Cleveland has a deep crew base, efficient permitting, scenic locations, and a cost of living below the U.S. average. It also boasts the Cleveland International Film Festival, which routinely earns a place on our list of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. And you can enjoy lively nightlife and the pleasing shoreline along Lake Erie. 

22. EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA 

Sometimes known as Canada’s gateway to the north, Edmonton is also a gateway to moviemaking. It’s a new and welcome addition to our list, thanks to its impressive commitment to boosting filmmakers on the rise. One of the best representatives of Edmonton’s scrappy indie film scene — and DIY filmmaking in general — is Kyle Edward Ball, whose $15,000 experimental film Skinamarink earned $2 million and scored him a deal with A24 for his next film, the upcoming Land of Nod. Other recent Edmonton productions include Smudge the Blades, a comedy about an Indigenous youth hockey team from director-producer Cody Lightning, and The Great Ones, a five-part documentary series about the Edmonton Oilers, former team of Wayne Gretzky. Alberta offers a base tax credit of 22% on qualifying production and labor costs, and the Alberta Made Production Grant, focused on smaller budget, locally owned productions, covers 25% of eligible Alberta production costs of up to $125,000. The program is designed to support emerging talent. Additionally, the province’s Project Script Development Grant offers up to $55,000 per project to help local writers and producers create marketable, quality scripts. Additionally, Edmonton Screen’s Elevation Program provides direct investment into film and TV projects produced in Edmonton. And local crews have worked on everything from small productions to HBO’s The Last of Us. 

21. KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI 

Kansas City combines excellent incentives with a can-do attitude that make it a strong option for a wide range of film and television creatives.Recent projects shot in KC include Paul Schrader’s The Basics of Philosophy,and Season 4 of Ted Lasso, starring Jason Sudeikis, who grew up locally. Others with strong regional ties include director-screenwriter Kevin Willmott — an Oscar winner for co-writing  director Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman — and actor David Dastmalchian. Besides working in film and TV,the region’s versatile crews keep busy with lots of commercial work for major national brands. Missouri’s transferable tax credit for eligible expenditures ranges from 20 to 42%, and Kansas City offers its own additional cash rebate of up to 12% on all qualified production expenditures, which is stackable with the state incentive -— and gives KC one of the most competitive incentive packages in the country. The lively local festival scene includes the beloved genre event Panic Fest, as well as the KC Underground Film Fest and the Juneteenth Film Festival. No filming permits are needed, and the cost of living is below the national average. You’ve probably heard about the city’s historic 18th & Vine district, known for jazz, but did you know KC also has a vast network of limestone caves?

20. QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC, CANADA 

Quebec City is one of the most beautiful places in North America, if not the world — from the cobblestone streets of the Old Quebec District to the majesty of Château Frontenac to the views from the city walls, you’ll have a plethora of breathtaking sights to film. The city also has skilled, flexible crews and is known for top-tier animation. The terrific incentives include the Province of Quebec’s 25% Refundable Tax Credit, and 16% stackable federal tax credit, as well as a 16% credit on qualifying animation. Additionally, no permit fees are required for locations under municipal jurisdiction, and productions receive a 30% discount on municipal services. Though almost everyone speaks English, you’ll have an easier time charming the locals if you speak a little French. Appreciation for film is very strong — local theaters include Le Clap, Cinema Beaumont, and Cinema Cartier — and the city hosts the annual Festival du cinéma de la ville de Québec, which, for those of us who are behind on our language apps, means “Quebec City Film Festival.”

19. PORTLAND, OREGON 

Portland hosted one of the best films of 2025, James Sweeney’s Twinless, which showed off the region’s charm, vibrance and down-to-earth livability. The city has a 25% film rebate and just raised its annual cap to $21.25 million. Its lively, committed film culture includes the Hollywood Theater, one of the sites of the new Portland Panorama Film Festival. Both the stunning coast and mountains are close by, but the biggest draw might be the people, who value culture and creativity and foster a strong sense of community support for film and the arts in general. The film scene’s values are reflected in its many available equipment rental and post production houses, the latter of which include Picture This and Refuge VFX. Portland can support blockbusters, but treasures its indie aesthetics and commitment to handcrafted storytelling.

18. TULSA, OKLAHOMA 

Tulsa keeps building on its success: After the conclusion of local Sterlin Harjo’s FX series Reservation Dogs, he quickly unveiled an acclaimed new FX show, The Lowdown, which stars executive producer Ethan Hawke as a self-proclaimed Tulsa “truthstorian” and also features Tulsa natives Tim Blake Nelson and Jeanne Tripplehorn. The city is scoring in part due to the Filmed in Oklahoma Act, which allows a rebate of 20-30%, depending on uplifts. One of those uplifts is for using regional music, which makes sense given Tulsa’s musical legacy: It’s among the cities featured in the new CBS musician-discovery series The Road, from Taylor Sheridan and Blake Shelton. The indie scene is thriving as well: Recent success stories include “Tiger,” Loren Waters’ Sundance award-winning film, and Pretty Babies, Tyler-Marie Evans’ feature directorial debut. Near Tulsa, the ​​Cherokee Film Incentive provides $1 million annually for productions filmed within the Cherokee Nation, and the Cherokee Film Institute teaches filmmakers about best practices for filming on tribal lands. 

17. HONOLULU, HAWAII 

Honolulu has hosted many successful productions that cater to audiences’ dreams of living in Hawaii, including NCIS: Hawai’i and Magnum P.I. It was also home to the live-action Disney features Lilo & Stitch and Moana, as well as the comedy-action film Wrecking Crew with Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, and the Apple TV Momoa series Chief of War, which tells the story of the Hawaiian Islands’ unification from an Indigenous perspective. The state has a very film-friendly atmosphere — you’ve been seeing Hawaiian locales fill in for tropical hideaways all your life, in productions from Jurassic Park to Lost — and the Hawaii Production Tax Incentive is 22% on total on-island spend. The 1929 rococo-style Hawaii Theater is a one-of-a-kind place to enjoy a film, and the Hawai’i International Film Festival is one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. Not everyone likes living hours from the mainland, and that’s fine — it means more work for those who do.

16. LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

A new addition to our list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker, the home of the Kentucky Derby is very much in the race for film and TV spending. Recent projects have included Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, in which Louisville doubled for 1970s Indianapolis, and Alex Vlack’s feature directorial debut The Revisionist, with Dustin Hoffman, Andre Holland and Alison Brie. Productions are drawn to Louisville’s wide range of locations, mild four-season climate, and cash-back incentive, which goes up to 35%. State-of-the-art local theater Speed Cinema, known for curating visionary films, hosts the Flyover Film Festival, which just celebrated its 15th year. One sign of the local film scene’s innovation and growth is the Kentucky College of Art and Design launching a new film degree this year. Additionally, the Louisville Film Office and local non-profit 502 Film conduct workforce development and production assistant training programs and workshops year-round, to keep building up local expertise.They also just held Kentucky’s first-ever film incubator for local and Appalachian filmmakers. If you’re wondering why the non-profit is called 502 Film, it’s because 502 is the main area code for Louisville. Filmmakers are dialing it a lot more lately.It’s also a mere 100 miles away from the next city on our list. 

15. CINCINNATI, OHIO 

Besides hosting Superman alongside Cleveland, Cincinnati has also recently welcomed Kelly Reichardt’s art-heist drama The Mastermind, starring Josh O’Connell and Alana Haim. Film Cincinnati offers a very streamlined permitting process, honed over 30 years of service, and the commission aims to think like a producer to make productions more efficient at every stage. There’s a strong emphasis on quality of life that includes plentiful green space and an expanding network of bike trails. There are plenty of local equipment rental houses and post production facilities, and notable locations include Union Terminal, a 1932 Art Deco landmark that appears in Superman. A plethora of Italianate architecture in the historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, makes Cincinnati an especially inviting backdrop for period films. Cincinnati offers the same 30% state rebate as Cleveland, and the cost of living is similarly below the national average, so buying a house doesn’t have to be a distant dream. 

14. SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

San Antonio had more film production in 2025 than in 2024, and the future is bright: In addition to Texas’ aforementioned Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, which offers a grant rebate of up to 31%, San Antonio offers its own rebate, which was just increased to 10%, with two potential uplifts of 2% each for local hire and veteran hire thresholds. Those add up to total rebates of up to 45% on eligible costs, which means San Antonio has some of the best incentives anywhere. When the news came out in November, Krystal Jones, executive director of San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture, said it “positions our city as one of the most competitive film hubs in the U.S.,” and added that it underlines “our commitment to being a premier destination for creative professionals, storytellers, and filmmakers everywhere.” It’s also a place rich with character and history, with a cost of living that’s below the national average. Recent productions range from indies to documentaries to reality shows, and San Antonio also draws lots of commercials thanks, to its blue skies and photogenic landscapes. The number of crew and vendor listings is up dramatically this decade, and it has some locations that can stand in for a wide range of other times and places, and others, like the River Walk and the Alamo, that are wholly unique. And it’s a mere 80 miles from Austin.

13. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

New Orleans is a perennial on our annual list, and we often say variations on the same thing: You could use it to double for many other cities, but why would you? New Orleans is one of the most fascinating places on earth, where a vast array of cultures and values coalesce into an irresistible gumbo. Audiences love seeing it onscreen, because it’s a place you can taste and feel. The architecture, music and food are all unmatched, and the tax incentives are quite competitive: In addition to the 25% base credit, increases include a 15% credit on Louisiana resident payroll, and a 10% credit on screenplays by Louisiana residents. The strong local festivals include the New Orleans Film Festival, which specializes in amplifying overlooked Southern stories, and the genre-focused Overlook Film Festival. Recent productions include James L. Brooks’ Ella McKay.

12. FORT WORTH, TEXAS 

Another Texas city jumping several places since last year, Fort Worth is benefitting from the previously mentioned boost in the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program. In addition to offering filmmakers a grant rebate of up to 31% — up from 22.5% — it’s very well funded, providing $1.5 billion through 2035, or $300 million every two years. Its goal is not just to lure Hollywood productions, but to keep Texas filmmakers working in Texas. At the top of the list is Taylor Sheridan, who graduated from Fort Worth’s R.L. Paschal High School, and shoots a slew of shows in the area, including Landman, Special Ops: Lioness, the Yellowstone spinoff The Madison, and another upcoming show from the Yellowstone universe. SGS Studios, which Sheridan founded, recently partnered on a new 450,000-square foot production campus at Fort Worth’s 27,000-acre AllianceTexas development. It isn’t all Taylor Sheridan: Fort Worth also draws a healthy mix of reality TV and commercial shoots, and offers local incentives that include the You Stay We Pay Hotel Rebate, a $5 return for each room night on a minimum stay of 75 nights. Fort Worth prides itself on an easy permitting process.

11. PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA 

Although most of HBO’s The Pitt is shot on a soundstage, not in Pittsburgh, the medical drama still captures a lot of what makes Pittsburgh great: dependability, professionalism, flashes of incredible beauty. The Steel City has been a reliable Hollywood location for decades, and is among the cities on this list that reported significantly more film revenue this past year than the year before, thanks to projects including Paramount+’s Mayor of Kingstown and Apple TV’s Parallax. Recent films include Hershey — starring Finn Wittrock as chocolate pioneer Milton Hershey and Alexandra Daddario as his wife, Catherine, and directed by Mean Girls veteran Mark Waters — and How to Rob a Bank, starring Nicholas Hoult and Zoe Kravitz, and directed by David Leitch. The Pittsburgh region has a wealth of locations, from old factories to sleek cityscapes to abundant green spaces, and Pennsylvania offers a 25% tax credit for films that spend at least 60% of their total production budget in the commonwealth. It climbs to as high as 30% for shoots that use a state-eligible production facility. Pittsburgh is also affordable, can stand in for almost anywhere, and is extremely film-friendly, with easy permitting, four full crews, plenty of equipment rental houses, more than 15 post houses, and great schools including Carnegie Mellon University, known for producing some of the best actors in the country.

10. HOUSTON, TEXAS 

A filmmaking life in Houston is more sustainable than ever, thanks in part to the aforementioned increase in the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program — which, again, now offers grant rebates of up to 31%. But Houston also stands out for its arms-wide-open welcoming of the film industry. As the biggest city in Texas, and fourth biggest city in America, Houston has nearly every type of location, from cityscapes to piney woods to rolling hills to nearby farmland. It’s close to Galveston Island and the Gulf of Mexico, and car commercials love the absence of billboard advertising. The city thrives on diversity — you’ll meet a beautiful blend of humanity in Houston — and its cost of living, which is just below the national average, is the lowest of the four biggest U.S. cities. The city has enough film crew for two to three sizable features, and recent shoots have included the thrillers Eleven Days, with Taylor Kitsch, and A Love, from director Courtney Glaude, Tyler Perry Studios’ executive creator of Scripted and Unscripted. Houston is also notable for a strong contingent of films with budgets under $1 million. The many film festivals include the Houston Cinema Arts Festival, which just celebrated its 17th year, and Houston Latino Film Festival, which just celebrated its ninth. 

9. PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 

Viewers can get a strong sense of the many varied locations in the Philadelphia area from HBO’s Task, the crime drama starring Mark Ruffalo and led by Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, a local. The region has become a go-to for blue-collar dramas, but Philadelphia’s greatest advantages are its versatility and affordability. It welcomes everything from experimental films to pilots to features, and its rich history makes it a natural destination for documentaries. It can double for a slew of other cities, but also has one-of-a-kind neighborhoods and characters you’ll be hard pressed to duplicate. The crews are experienced; the rental houses, production companies, casting agencies and studio spaces are plentiful; and permitting is easy. The tax credits, as in Pittsburgh, range from 25-30%. One indication of the local scene’s strength is the fact that over half of recent tax credits went to projects produced in the region. The city’s reverence for art is made clear by the evocative murals that seem to cover every available wall. But unlike nearby New York, Philadelphia remains affordable to rising artists. Your best bet might be to live in the City of Brotherly Love and take the Amtrak to NYC for meetings and occasional jobs. Local film festivals include Blackstar, a regular on our list of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. 

8. BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS  

Boston is on the rise thanks to shows like Boston Blue, in which local Donnie Wahlberg comes home after years of playing a New Yorker on Blue Bloods. Other local TV productions include Walking Dead: Dead City, which shoots in both Beantown and nearby Brockton, among other  close locations. Boston-area film productions include Amazon’s Love of Your Life, Apple’s Weekend Warrior, and Searchlight Picture’s Super Troopers 3: Winter Soldiers. Massachusetts’ incentives include a 25% payroll tax credit and 25% production expense credit, along with a sales tax exemption on qualified purchases and rentals, with no annual or per-project caps, and credits are fully transferable or refundable at 90%. The close-knit film community includes the Massachusetts Production Coalition, which strives to bring film professionals together to innovate and problem solve. Boston University counts both Benny and Josh Safdie among its alums, and Emerson College alums include The Daniels. PBS’s Frontline and American Experience are based out of local public station WGBH and reflect a strong, highly professional documentary scene. Also, MovieMaker’s editor and publisher live just beyond the city limits, and find the region one of the most pleasant, sane, and beautiful parts of our country. 

7. DALLAS, TEXAS 

The Dallas Film Commission notes that the city is made for the spotlight, with its dazzling skyline, striking architecture, ubiquitous public art, and vast green spaces. But it’s always been about commerce as much as art: In addition to hosting many of the same Taylor Sheridan productions as nearby Fort Worth, including Landman and The Madison, it also does brisk business with commercials for a bevy of major brands. The state’s grant rebate of up to 31% is a major boon, as is Dallas’ deep crew base: Seasoned crew members go back to the days of Walker, Texas Ranger and the soapy classic Dallas. It is known for highly skilled craftspeople, and its sharp ad agencies and production companies create cutting-edge narratives for all platforms. The Dallas Film Commission recently launched its first free production assistant training course, and works with film schools and unions to expand educational opportunities. The city boasts more than 150 IATSE members, and usually has two long-format crews staffed concurrently. The strong local film festivals include the Dallas International Film Festival and Oak Cliff Film Festival. 

6. VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA 

Decades ago, Vancouver was the face of so-called “runaway productions” — films that dared go north instead of shooting in Los Angeles. Today Vancouver is an established cornerstone of the industry and the first choice of countless film and TV productions. They’re drawn to incredibly photogenic locations — from the cobblestoned streets of Gastown to the Stanley Park rain forest to neighborhoods that can emulate any time or place — as well as a deeply entrenched industry that excels in live action, virtual production, animation, VFX and post. Recent local productions have included HBO’s The Last of Us, FX’s Shogun, and AMC’s new Silicon Valley-set The Audacity. Recent features include Netflix’s upcoming Remarkably Bright Creatures, starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman, as well the horror hit Final Destination: Bloodlines. British Columbia’s Motion Picture Tax Credit Programs made major updates in March 2025, which include the Production Services Tax Credit rising from 28% to 36% — or 38% for B.C. productions with costs greater than $200 million. The many film schools include the Vancouver Film School, one of our Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada, and festivals include the prestigious Vancouver International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.We love Vancouver’s atmosphere, good public transportation, and lively nightlife, but don’t take our word for it: It was ranked the seventh most liveable city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2025. That was the highest ranking of any city in the Americas. The fact that Vancouver shares a time zone with Los Angeles just makes everything easier. 

5. AUSTIN, TEXAS 

Like local hero Richard Linklater, Austin seems capable of doing anything and making it look easy. Its recent productions include the DIY horror film Texas Cult House, the true-crime phenomenon The Yogurt Shop Murders, and Linklater’s Broadway adaptation Merrily We Roll Along, which he’s shooting over the next two decades. It may be the best city of all for festivals — including SXSW, the Austin Film Festival, and the TV-focused ATX. One of its best attributes is Austin Studios, a 20-acre complex that operates out of the former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and boasts more than 200,000 square feet of production space. It’s operated by the city in partnership with the Austin Film Society. The region has more than 1,000 crew members and many great film programs, including the top-tier University of Texas at Austin, one of our Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada. Austin also benefits from the previously noted Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, which offers a grant rebate of up to 31%. And you’ve probably heard, many times, that Austin has some of the best food, music and nightlife anywhere in the world.

4. CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA 

Calgary’s thriving film scene has helped drive growth up north for years, and recently enjoyed a major upswing in location-scouting requests. The city has plenty to offer: Its varied, affordable locations range from downtown cityscapes to stunning prairies, badlands and the Rockies. Recent productions have included Netflix’s My Life With the Walter Boys, MGM’s Billy the Kid, the long-running Canadian family drama Heartland, and the USA Network's new national-park thriller Anna Pigeon. It’s a beautiful place, especially when you need snow, and it also makes financial sense: The Alberta Film and Television Tax Credit provides a rolling 22%-30% refund for all expenses in film and television projects. The credits can also be stacked with a Canadian federal tax credit that can bring the effective refund to 35% or more. Additionally, Alberta also has no provincial sales tax. The city is known for capable, experienced crews, and is home to two beloved festivals, the Calgary International Film Festival and the Calgary Underground Film Festival. 

3. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 

Chicago has seen steady growth in recent years, thanks in part to reliable paychecks coming from TV shows including The Bear, Chicago Med, Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and more. Its many very competitive incentive offerings include up to a 30% credit on qualified Illinois production spending and a 30% credit on Illinois salaries, up to $500,000 per worker, in certain positions. Chicago also offers a vast range of locations, from the iconic Chicago skyline to the shores of Lake Michigan to historic neighborhoods, and you’re not far from prairies and farmland. Equipment rental houses and post facilities abound — this is one of the world’s great cities. But for all its epic sweep, Chicago offers human-scale, and a cost of living that’s only slightly above the U.S. average, striking for such a metropolis. Its great educational institutions include Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, and Northwestern. Yes, it gets cold and windy, but that’s a good thing — it weeds out people who lack grit and character, and makes the summers all the sweeter.

2. ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO 

Watch Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV+ show Pluribus for a great sense of Albuquerque’s versatility: The city not only doubles for other locations, but also shines when it’s playing itself, whether star Rhea Seehorn is walking through its charming airport (two words that don’t usually go together) or freaking out in her killer-view neighborhood, which the city cleared the way to allow Pluribus to build. After basing two of the best TV shows ever in Albuquerque — Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul — you might think Gilligan would try somewhere else, especially since he’s not a local and is working with a big Apple budget. But when something works, it works — and Albuquerque works. Other recent projects to shoot locally include the Duffer brothers’ Stranger Things follow-up, Netflix’s The Boroughs, the pilot for Disney’s Holes, with Greg Kinnear and Aidy Bryant, and Lone Wolf, with Lily Gladstone and returning Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. Both Netflix and NBCUniversal have made massive commitments to keep making projects in Albuquerque for the next few years, and New Mexico’s tax incentives range from 25 to 40%. Albuquerque also provides Local Economic Development Act funds for qualified production facility builds, which is one reason Albuquerque is home to Netflix Studios Albuquerque. Film commissioner Cyndy McCrossen, whose family ties go back generations, is fantastic at helping productions of all sizes find the perfect place to shoot. Finally, New Mexico’s cost of living is below the national average, meaning you can actually afford to make a life in the Land of Enchantment. 

1. TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA  

Los Angeles just barely beat Toronto in a seven-game World Series, but Toronto is also giving L.A. a serious challenge when it comes to production. Among the shows shooting in Canada’s largest city are Prime Video’s The Boys, NBC’s Brilliant Minds, Peacock’s Copenhagen Test, AMC’s Interview With the Vampire, Hulu’s The Testaments, Prime’s Reacher, Netflix’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and Paramount+’s Star Trek shows Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds. Recent films to shoot in Toronto include Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, 100 Sunset, Blood Lines, Dinner With Friends, and Nika & Madison, all of which also played at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the most influential fests in the world. Toronto’s crews, post-production facilities, and equipment rental houses are plentiful and top-tier, and robust tax incentives make Toronto a natural choice for both Canadian and international productions. The federal tax credits are stackable with Ontario’s provincial tax credits, and all are substantial. The Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit provides eligible Canadian productions with a fully refundable tax credit, available at a rate of 25% of qualified Canadian labor costs, while the Film or Video Production Services Tax Credit provides eligible production corporations, including international productions, with a 16% tax credit on qualified Canadian labor expenditures. The Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit is typically calculated as 35% of eligible Ontario labor costs for a qualifying production company, but international productions may opt for the Ontario Production Services Tax Credit, which is calculated as 21.5% of all qualifying production expenditures incurred in Ontario. Toronto is a city to delight your cast, your crew, and whoever does your accounting. It’s a thriving, vibrant city of roughly 3 million with more than 2 million square feet of studio space. It employs 35,000 industry professionals, and its many impressive film programs include the Toronto Film School — one of our 30 Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada. 

THE BEST PLACES TO LIVE AND WORK AS A MOVIEMAKER: SMALLER CITIES AND TOWNS

10. ASHLAND, OREGON 

Known for awe-inspiring trees and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland welcomes a wide range of productions from Bruce Campbell’s Ernie & Emma to indie shorts to documentaries to stop-motion animation projects. Oregon’s incentives include a 25% rebate on goods and services and a 20% rebate on labor, and they go up to 27.5% and 22%, respectively, for projects that shoot primarily outside of the Portland area, including in Ashland. There are no fees to film in state parks, and there’s no state sales tax. Additionally, the state recently approved $40 million in capital construction funds for a new Creative Industries Complex to be built in Ashland on the campus of Southern Oregon University, which is on our list of the Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada. It will include a new sound stage, digital design labs, and a large screening room, all of which will be available to local filmmakers. 

9. ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA 

Known for beaches and year-round sunshine, St. Pete is an arts-loving town that embraces a vast range of film and TV projects: Recent features include Tyler Cornack’s new indie Mermaid, which premiered to acclaim at SXSW and juxtaposes St. Pete’s pastel beauty with dark comedy, and Hats Off to Love, a Hallmark Channel movie starring Holly Robinson Peete and Ginna Claire Mason. The vibe is laid back, film permit fees are non-existent, and the many arts institutions include the Dali Museum. If this sounds expensive, it’s not: St. Pete’s cost of living is barely above the national average. Though Florida has no statewide film incentives, the St. Pete-Clearwater Film Commission offers a regional cash rebate incentive program that includes a 10-20% cash rebate on qualified expenditures  with a local spend of at least $100,000. There are some caveats, including that the project must positively portray local locations. 

8. KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE 

Nestled about an hour from the Great Smoky Mountains, Knoxville offers a lower cost of living than the national average and the kind of stunning natural beauty you can’t put a price on. You can film in plenty of gorgeous local locations for free, including the tranquil Augusta Quarry, World’s Fair Park downtown, and the charming Market Square and Gay Street, both of which have several buildings that lend themselves to period stories. Tennessee offers a cash rebate in the form of a 25% grant for projects with a qualified spend of at least $500,000, and Knoxville offers a film incentive of 5% of a film’s budget for productions inside Knox County. Recent films include director Paula Kay Hornick’s indie My Mayfly, and TV shows to shoot locally include 9-1-1: Nashville. Knoxville also draws a big basket of reality shows, including TV One’s Fatal Attraction, Oxygen’s Snapped, and ID Channel’s American Detective. Knoxville is also home to the Film Fest Knox, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. It partners with the Knoxville-based Regal Cinemas chain.

7. SAVANNAH, GEORGIA 

When you see the famous Georgia peach in the end credits, odds are good you’ve just seen some beautiful locations. Savannah is known for some of the loveliest architecture in the world, enchanting green spaces, and dreamy Spanish moss, all of which add flavor to productions ranging from Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias to the upcoming Michael Peña, Will Ferrell and Zac Ephron comedy Judgment Day. Though many comic-book projects have left Georgia, Savannah welcomed the second season of James Gunn’s Peacemaker, and it’s never bad to be on the good side of the co-CEO of DC Studios. Savannah also has a huge advantage as the home of the Savannah College of Art and Design, one of our Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada. SCAD produces a steady stream of new industry professionals, opens its substantial backlot to productions that enlist SCAD students, and hosts the annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee and 25 Coolest Film Festivals. Georgia’s impressive state tax incentive includes a 20% base transferable tax credit and a 10% uplift for including that peach logo. The cost of living in Savannah is somehow lower than the U.S. average, which is amazing when you consider its good weather, agreeable work-life balance, and boundless charm.

6. LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO 

New Mexico’s second-largest city offers some of the best incentives you’ll find anywhere: In addition to the state’s minimum base credit of 25%, filmmakers shooting outside Albuquerque and Santa Fe get a 10% uplift that can be combined with other uplifts for up to 40% credit. New Mexico and local partners are committed to expanding Las Cruces’ film footprint, including with a new $21 million studio and soundstage facility located at Arrowhead Park. Recent local projects include the Milla Jovovich action-thriller Protector, Dead Letters starring Margo Martindale and Cole Sprouse, and Night Driver, which stars Josh Lucas, Alyssa Milano and David Arquette and is executive produced by Sean S. Cunningham, best known for the Friday the 13th franchise. Notable locations include the colorful Rio Grande Theatre, which turns 100 this year, and Las Cruces can double for locations as varied as Los Angeles and the Middle East. It is also close to the inimitable White Sands National Park and the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, which includes picturesque mountains, rugged canyons and caves, and a slot canyon. As we mentioned in our El Paso entry, the Texas city shares close ties with Las Cruces. It’s not uncommon for people to travel frequently between the two and for their respective film scenes to overlap. 

5. SANTA CLARITA, CALIFORNIA 

About 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, Santa Clarita is home to more than 60 sound stages and seven movie ranches, including the 240-acre Santa Clarita Movie Ranch, which offers an array of sets ranging from a Western town to Mexican and Middle Eastern villages to a classic diner and log cabin. But Santa Clarita can also stand in for Anytown, USA with its sedate residential streets and 40 city parks. It has welcomed productions including Paradise, N.C.I.S., Doctor Odyssey, S.W.A.T., Sugar, 9-1-1, and Beef. It’s also home tothe California Institute of the Arts, one of our Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada. And since it’s in Los Angeles County, it’s convenient for when you need to drive south for in-person industry meetings. California offers a 35% tax credit for most productions, with uplifts, and funding is capped at a whopping $750 million annually.

4. KAMLOOPS, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

Located 200 miles inland from Vancouver, with even more impressive tax incentives, Kamloops offers wondrous natural beauty, from waterfalls to forests to deserts to snowy mountaintops — and the Thompson-Nicola Film Commission is happy to be your guide. Priding itself on fast and friendly support, the commission can also walk you through those incentives, which can climb as high as 58.5%. Recent projects to shoot in the region include The Last of Us and Netflix’s Untamed. The film commission has more than 3,000 film-friendly locations in its database, and if you’re wondering where something was filmed, you can visit the commission’s helpful Movie Locations Map, which shows you the exact local locations of projects from Jurassic World Dominion to Maze Runner: The Death Cure to The X Files to The Sweet Hereafter to ads for your favorite energy drink. The Kamloops Film Society holds five film festivals annually — including the Main Kam Film Fest, Indigenous Film Fest, Cineloops French Film Fest, Black Film Fest and Queer Film Fest.

3. PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

The smallest state has landed some very big productions lately, including M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological thriller Remain, JJ Abrams’ sci-fi film Ghostwriter, and two projects from Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way: the Hayden Panettiere thriller Sleepwaker, and the documentary The Real Rod Serling about the Twilight Zone mastermind. The latter two films are co-productions with local film powerhouse Verdi Productions. And you know a place has arrived when it gets a Real Housewives franchise: The Real Housewives of Rhode Island debuts this year. Rhode Island offers a 30% transferable tax credit that includes above the line, and proudly proclaims that every $1 in tax credits brings $5.44 in economic activity to the state. The home of the Farrelly Brothers is very film friendly, with a professional and experienced crew base. And Providence is very close to lovely beaches and to Boston, one of the big cities on this list. 

2. FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA 

At a time when much of the industry is struggling, Fort Lauderdale has reported an increase in films and TV expenditures for the last several years. Its glamour, beaches and year-round sunshine draw a wide range of productions, from features to TV shows like Peacock’s M.I.A. and ABC’s RJ Decker. Reality shows abound, from House Hunters to 90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After?, and there’s no shortage of commercial work for major brands. You’ll also see influencers or aspiring influencers every time you walk along the New River, sometimes dubbed the Venice of America. And if you don’t see any TikTok stars, you can at least distract yourself with the sight of some stupendous yachts. Broward County’s leadership is strongly committed to production, offering up to 30% in rebates, and the county also offers a $10,000 Emerging Filmmakers Grant to support resident filmmakers on the rise. The region is diverse in terms of both people and locations — from downtown skyscrapers to inviting beaches to the sprawling everglades to houses that look like they could be in the Northeast. The Greater Fort Lauderdale Film Commission, aka Film Lauderdale, offers attentive, round-the-clock help for filmmakers, and commissioner Sandy Lighterman also leads Film Florida, the nonprofit devoted to building a more robust and retentive film industry in the Sunshine State. Fort Lauderdale is a driving force in Florida’s achievements: Its film scene often overlaps with that of Miami, just 15 minutes away, as well as other South Florida coastal communities. 

1. SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 

Santa Fe is a quiet getaway for many Hollywood luminaries who like the privacy they’re granted in this arts-focused town of under 100,000. They get to avoid the Los Angeles and New York City crowds, but still benefit from an impressive industry presence. In recent months Santa Fe has welcomed productions including AMC’s Dark Winds, Netflix’s Ransom Canyon, Amazon’s Joseph of Egypt and Apple’s The Lost Bus, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. Santa Fe’s unflappable film commissioner, Jennifer LaBar-Tapia, can look out at the town’s rooftops and tell you the story of seemingly every downtown building. She’s also happy to tell you where to get a helicopter or trained buffalo for your production. If Santa Fe doesn’t have what you need, she’ll happily point you toward a community that does, whether its Albuquerque, Las Cruces, or Las Vegas (the one in New Mexico). But the odds are good that Santa Fe has it. In addition to the Bonanza Creek and the Mortenson’s Eaves movie ranches, it offers two 19,125-square foot sound stages at Santa Fe Studios, and northern New Mexico’s largest studio space, Aspect Media Village, which has six soundstages totaling 75,000 square feet, as well as apartments, office space, yoga, electric car charging, and more. Santa Fe’s costs are above the national average, but so is the quality of life: Locals love the endless hiking trails, skiing, and countless options for foodies. The Oscar-qualifying Santa Fe International Film Festival unifies the New Mexico film scene each year by bringing together both international award contenders and locally rooted indies, including many from Indigenous filmmakers. You can spend your free time riding the Sky Railway train line featured in Oppenheimer, watching new and classic films at the Jean Cocteau Cinema, or browsing the aisles at Beastly Books, all of which are owned by locally based Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin. The Sky Railway is co-owned by Bill Banowsky, an entrepreneur and filmmaker who also owns the Sky Cinemas, including a new state-of-the-art location at Aspect Media Village. And you’re already aware of the New Mexico tax incentives from our Albuquerque and Las Cruces entries, but let’s mention the ones specific to Santa Fe: Productions are eligible for up to 35% in refundable tax credits within the town. This is Santa Fe’s fourth consecutive year at the top of our list of Smaller Cities and Towns on our list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker.

Main image: A free outdoor screening during the Toronto International Film Festival in the top big city on our list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker in 2026. Photo courtesy of TIFF

Or does it?

There aren't a lot of car chases, murders, sex scenes, or explosions, but lives are quietly changed.

Lost in Translation (2003)

Newlywed Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and burned-out married actor Bob (Bill Murray) meet at a Tokyo hotel, talk, and sing some karaoke. Everything is melancholy and luminously beautiful.

We keep thinking maybe they'll leave their spouses — and yet we're somehow grateful when they don't. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is a celebration of small, intense interactions we'll never recapture, and maybe shouldn't.

At the end, Bob finds Charlotte in a crowd. They look in each other's eyes, embrace, and he whispers something we can't hear. They kiss in a way that feels not at all sexual. They're friends.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Jane Campion's drama looked like a likely Best Picture winner in 2022 before CODA scored the honor in an unusual, Covid-tainted year.

It is, on its surface, a slow, ponderous story about a widow (Kirsten Dunst), her kindly suitor and eventual husband (Jesse Plemons), her effeminate, intellectual son, (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and her brutal brother-in-law (Benedict Cumberbatch).

For most of the movie, we think we're watching a sensitive Western, perhaps with a revisionist take on the very 2020s theme of "toxic masculinity." But by the end, we realize it's been a different kind of movie all along — and a more ruthless one than we realized. It makes a hard, shrewd shift in genre, and we respect it.

Dazed and Confused (1993)

The ultimate hangout movie, Dazed and Confused follows a group of high schoolers on graduation night as they cruise around and make plans to go to a party at the Moontower. There's some fighting and bullying and flirting, and some mailboxes get battered. Football star Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) has to decide whether to sign a pledge. not to do drugs.

And that's it. No one dies, nothing explodes, no one pulls off the heist of the century. And yet it's a pure joy, helped launch the careers of Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, and Matthew McConaughey, and is the best hangout movie ever. Quentin Tarantino has called his favorite movie of the 90s.

Dazed and Confused is one of several deceptively simple Richard Linklater movies, where very normal days and nights turn out to be the most memorable of our lives.

And, since we mentioned Tarantino...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

A slice of life story about real-life actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), her burnout actor neighbor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Dalton's pal-stuntman-assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).

The film takes us on a pleasant meander through three days of their lives — at one point we join Sharon on a solo trip to the movies — but writer-director Quentin Tarantino knows he doesn't need to do much to move the plot along...

... Because we're on the edge of our seats the entire time, thinking about the hellish thing we know happened to the real Sharon Tate. Waiting for it to happen onscreen. Horrified.

There are little smatterings of violence before the big finale as Cliff fights both Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) and Tex Watson (Austin Butler).

And when the grim ending comes... it turns out to be not what we expected.

Perfect Days (2023)

The newest film on our list, Perfect Days follows a Tokyo bathroom custodian named Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) as he goes about his simple days, fueled by mix tapes, good books, and his love of photography.

It's a curious, transfixing film about making the most of a seemingly simple existence. People enter his life who seem poised to change it dramatically, but he takes comfort in his routines.

Its excellent movie credentials include premiering at the the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for Yakusho. It was also nominated for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards,.

Before Sunset (2004)

Another Linklater movie, and the sequel to his lovely Before Sunrise, which could also be on this list. Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who co-write the movie with Linklater and Kim Krizan) reunite in Paris, nearly a decade after the night they spent together in Vienna in Before Sunrise.

Jesse has written a book about that night, and he and Celina reminisce about what could have been and what can never be. Or can it?

The biggest event in Before Sunset comes at the very end, when instead of doing something, Jesse doesn't do something — and it changes his and Celine's lives. It also sets up the third film in the series, the beguiling Before Midnight.

Last Days of Disco (1999)

Writer-director Whit Stillman has said that during the tough days of filming his 1994 Barcelona, a rare moment of joy came while shooting a disco scene. He wondered why he couldn't just make a whole movie of young women loving the nightlife and dancing. So he made Last Days of Disco.

Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale star as aspiring book editors who eke out small salaries while looking for love or connection or something on dance floors and the sexy banquettes at their edges. At least one character considers them overprivileged and insipid, and the big climax is a debate about Lady and the Tramp.

But there's a lot happening in the subtext, including a richly detailed, nearly invisible subplot about tax fraud. And — much more importantly, from the movie's perspective — people find real meaning in the most seemingly superficial of settings. This might be your humble correspondent's favorite movie — and it's one of the most seductive movies we've ever seen.

The Brutalist (2024)

The newest film on this list, and a leading Oscar contender, Brady Corbet's The Brutalist moves as a patient, often hypnotic pace, inviting you to enjoy and appreciate its anthemic score, nuanced performances, and the brutally beautiful architecture of protagonist László Tóth (Adrien Brody).

It unfolds over 3 hours and 35 minutes that do not fly by: One of its leads, Felicity Jones as Erzsébet Tóth — doesn't really show up until after the midpoint intermission. Strikingly, for a movie with plenty of time, The Brutalist never over-explains, often waiting until years after events in the film to have occurred before the characters discuss them at any length.

Arguably the most devastating moment in the film — it occurs between László and his benefactor/antagonist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) — unfolds with such understatement that you may not immediately understand the trauma unfolding unless you catch the sound of an unbuckling belt.

Contempt (1963)

French writer Paul (Michel Piccoli) is enlisted to work with Fritz Lang (played by the real Fritz Lang) on an adaptation of The Iliad.

When Paul and his wife Camille (the recently departed Brigitte Bardot) are invited to the home of cocky American producer Jeremy Proko (Jack Palance), Proko's car only has room for one passenger. And so begins a period of intense agony for Paul.

It's all very slow — yet you wish it were even slower. Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt is one of the most gorgeous movies ever made. The visuals are sumptuous, including of Casa Malaparte, the seaside home on Capri, Italy where key scenes occur. And "Camille's Theme," by Georges Delerue, is so stirring that Martin Scorsese borrowed it for Casino.

Contempt has two very violent deaths, but they're almost an afterthought. The emotional carnage comes first.

La Piscine (1969)

TimeOut perfectly describes this one as "a deliciously languid, slinkily unsettling affair."

Director Jacques Deray spends lots of time on the uncluttered elegance of la piscine of the title (la piscine is French for "the swimming pool") and the magnetism of its four central inhabitants, played by Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin.

There's lust and jealousy, sure, though we're never sure how seriously to take it all until, about midway through the film, someone commits a rompishly casual murder. When it happens, you're almost sad to see the movie take a break from shots of people just lying around.

The Father (2020)

The setup for Florian Zeller's magnificent debut is so simple it barely seems sufficient for a movie: A daughter (Olivia Colman) is trying to move her dementia-struck father (Anthony Hopkins) from his flat and into a nursing home.

But the scenes that result are both aching and mesmerizing. Zeller designed the film, he told MovieMaker, "to make the audience feel as if they were going through a labyrinth." He envelops the audience in Anthony's confusion by moving the proportions of the apartment, changing the locations of items, and even changing the colors of a wall.

We see and feel a man losing his mind, and the film makes us share in his alternating peace and terror. Zeller was so certain that Hopkins was the only actor for the job that he named his main character Anthony and wrote the script for the Silence of the Lambs Oscar winner without ever having met him.

All worked out: Hopkins won his second Best Actor Oscar for The Father, one of the most excellent movies of recent years.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

The gold standard of movies where not much happens, Jeanne Dielman follows a widowed housewife (Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about her domestic routines over three days: cooking, cleaning, taking care of her son, and having sex with a different client each afternoon.

Yes, she has sex three times, and there is one pointed act of violence, which may sound like a lot is happening. But consider that the movie is three hours and twenty minutes long. At one point it devotes four minutes to a static shot of Jeanne making veal cutlets.

Released when writer-director Chantal Akerman was just 25, Jeanne Dielman initially drew a mixed response, but steadily gained respect. In 2020, the Sight + Sound poll named it the greatest movie ever made. It replaced Vertigo at the top of the list.

If you like this list, you might also enjoy this list of 10 Great Documentaries About Making Movies That You Can Stream Now.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image, updates Contempt item and adds follow link.

Main image: Contempt. Marceau-Cocinor 

The program highlighted the work of indigenous filmmakers in front of and behind the camera, the Los Angeles Premiere of Shakti,  writer-director Nani Sahra Walker’s narrative debut feature, and November Shorts, an offering of highlights from NFMLA’s ongoing general program.  

The line-up began with November Shorts, an eclectic mix of short narratives that offered satire, laughter, food for thought and connection. The block offered stories about cults, AI, housing, first periods and friendships.

The day’s programming continued with InFocus: Indigenous Cinema, a selection of short films by indigenous storytellers from around the world. The block offered stories about the preservation of indigenous traditions, the intentional cultivation of the next generation, sitting with grief, channeling anger and navigating a life between two cultures. 

The evening concluded with the Los Angeles Premiere of Shakti, the narrative directorial debut of Academy Award–winning executive producer and independent writer, director, and producer Nani Sahra Walker. Set in her native Kathmandu, Shakti intimately captured the journey of a mother seeking healing for her daughter for an unknown ailment, facing her own vulnerability and finding her strength in the process. 

NFMLA showcases films by filmmakers of all backgrounds throughout the year, across both our general and InFocus programming. All filmmakers are welcome and encouraged to submit their projects for consideration for upcoming NFMLA Festivals, regardless of the schedule for InFocus programming, which celebrates representation by spotlighting various communities of filmmakers as part of the NFMLA Monthly Film Festival. This project is made possible in part by grant support from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Here is more information about the films and filmmakers, provided by NFMLA.

“Color Theories” directed by Devin Jane Febbroriello

About Devin: Devin Jane Febbroriello was named one of the Top 25 screenwriters to watch in 2025 by the International Screenwriters Association and invited onto the ISA 2025 Development Slate. She has written/directed and produced award-winning music videos and short films that have screened at SXSW, Dances With Films, Pitchfork, Cinequest, Filmfort, BUFF Malmo, Nashville Film Festival, Venice VR Expanded, Portland Film Festival, Bend Film Festival, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, Tacoma Film Festival and more. Her pilot script for the episodic series "Blood is Thicker"" was a finalist in Screencraft TV Pilot Script Competition, and her feature script ""Kathleen's Sound Bath"" was an Austin Film Festival 2024 Second Rounder, a Script Lab Semi-Finalist, and a Finalist for the ISA Fast Track Fellowship 2025.

She received her Bachelor of Art in film from Emerson College, attended specialized cinema studies at FAMU (Czech Republic), and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting through the David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts at Maharishi University. Throughout her career Devin has maintained strong involvement in media activism and has developed a variety of diversity and inclusion programs, raised over $300,000 in grants for her efforts, and co-owns a production company and studio collective called Desert Island Studios focused on uplifting and mentoring up and coming filmmakers from diverse backgrounds.

About “Color Theories”: "Color Theories" is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story that follows 13-year-old Charlotte, adrift in processing the complexities of her mother's stroke while navigating her changing body and perspective the summer she gets her first period, through a symbolic exploration of the visible light spectrum ROY G BIV.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Devin Jane Febbroriello, the director of “Color Theories”:

“Kusi Smiles” directed by Sisa Quispe

About Sisa: Sisa Quispe is a Quechua-Aymara award-winning director and writer based in New York City. Her films center Indigenous knowledge and decolonial narratives, exploring identity, healing, migration, and intergenerational resilience. She wrote and directed "Kusi Smiles" (Slamdance premiere, LFI/Netflix Fellowship) and "Urpi: Her Last Wish" (The Gotham’s 2023 Student Short Film Showcase, distributed by Focus Features, JetBlue in-flight). A 4th World Media Lab fellow and TEDx speaker, Quispe is committed to uplifting Indigenous women’s voices and produces Ciaorose Lab, a film lab for Quechua youth to write and direct their own stories.

About “Kusi Smiles”: Unable to sing, a Quechua teenager returns to her Andean community, where sisterhood, music, and the land that raised her guide her through grief toward healing.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Sisa Quispe the director of “Kusi Smiles”:

“The Knowledge Keepers” directed by Peter Kirk 

About Brad: Peter Kirk is a proud Indigenous Australian director, storyteller, and creative leader with over two decades of experience across film, television, advertising, and digital media. As a multi–award-winning director and co-founder of Campfire x, Peter’s work is grounded in cultural integrity, community care, and a relentless drive for creative excellence. Peter has shaped the narrative landscape both nationally and internationally, directing powerful campaigns for some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Lynx, Smirnoff, Xbox, Netflix, Ray-Ban, Microsoft, and Greenpeace. His unique approach — bold, collaborative, and deeply human — has earned him global acclaim, including Webby Awards (Lynx Effect, Cyberbullying), ADMA Awards (Xbox, Greenpeace), W3 Awards, and film accolades such as Best Drama and Best Soundtrack at the West Hollywood International Film Festival.

A natural mentor and creative thinker, Peter is known for creating environments where teams feel empowered to take risks, believing firmly that “through failing, we succeed.” His leadership fosters trust, experimentation, and results. As a juror for Spikes Asia, Peter continues to influence the industry through a lens of cultural strength and creative bravery. Peter's feature film Hello Forever — ranked by IMDb as the #119 best indie films of 2013 — is distributed by Champion Entertainment in the U.S. and has been celebrated at international festivals including Hawaii, SOCAL, and West Hollywood. He also successfully ran a grassroots Kickstarter campaign to bring the film to life, further proving his ability to mobilize community around powerful storytelling.

About “The Knowledge Keepers”: In an age of extreme weather affecting millions, it's time we listened to the past to prepare for the future. It's time we listened to First Nations land practitioners.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Brad Cooke the producer of “The Knowledge Keepers”: 

“Cuming Out” directed by Jasmine J. Johnson

About Jasmine: Jasmine J. Johnson (“J.J.J.”) is a director, writer and producer who originally hails from Bowie, Maryland. She attended Temple University, where she received her BA in Film and Media Arts. Johnson uses magical realism, surrealism, genre and a pinch of humor to focus on themes of discovery and those seemingly modest moments that epitomize human resilience. She was selected to participate in AFI’s prestigious DWW+ program (Class of ‘25), Rideback Rise’s 2025 Circle as well as Indeed and Hillman Grad’s esteemed Rising Voices program. Her shorts have screened at SXSW, Tribeca, Hollyshorts and SeriesFest amongst others. 

About “Cuming Out”: Kennedy's desire for a heteronormative experience sees her embark on a one-night-stand. What could possibly go wrong?

Watch the NFMLA with Jasmine J. Johnson the director of “Cuming Out”:

“Shakti” directed by Nani Sahra Walker

About Nani: Nani Sahra Walker is an Academy Award–winning executive producer and independent writer, director, and producer. A native of Kathmandu now based in Los Angeles, she executive produced the acclaimed short documentaries "Kylie" (Sundance 2023), "Merman" (Tribeca 2023), and "The Last Repair Shop" (Telluride 2023), which won the 2024 Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Her feature documentary Other Nature (2012) screened at BFI Flare, Frameline, Outfest, and more than a dozen other festivals. She teaches at UC Berkeley and mentors filmmakers at the American Film Showcase held at USC. "Shakti" is her narrative directorial debut.

About “Shakti”: When her mischievous daughter falls mysteriously ill, a single mother is drawn into Kathmandu’s supernatural underworld of shamans and secrets — where resilience may be their only path to redemption.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Nani Sahra Walker the director of “Shakti”:

“Single Residence Occupancy” directed by Omer Ben Shachar

About Omer: A Chinese immigrant mother living in a Single Room Occupancy apartment grapples with telling her children their application for better housing was denied.

About “Single Residence Occupancy”: Omer Ben-Shachar is an award-winning writer/director. His short "Tree #3" won a Student Academy Award, Urbanworld’s Best Young Creator Award, and Palm Springs’ Audience Award, among others. His recent film 'Single Residence Occupancy' won first place at Imagine Entertainment & Adobe ShortFest and Atlanta Film Festival’s Academy Award-Qualifying Jury Award. An AFI Conservatory graduate, Omer participated in Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab and Project Involve, Warner Bros. TV Directors’ Workshop, and Paramount’s Viewfinder Program. Omer also directed music videos featured in Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Nowness, earning multiple Vimeo Staff Picks, a Webby Award, and a Cannes Lions Young Directors Award nomination.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Omer Ben Shachar the director of “Single Residence Occupancy”:

“We're Gonna Die Alone” directed by Portlynn Tagavi

About Portlynn: Portlynn Tagavi is a Los Angeles–based writer-director and story artist whose work blends grounded emotion with dark comedic storytelling. A CalArts Character Animation graduate and AFI Directing alum, she has nearly a decade of experience in both animation and live action. Her AFI thesis film "They Won’t Last" won the Student Emmy, was shortlisted for the BAFTA Student Film Awards, and screened at more than 50 festivals worldwide. Her recent short "Mosh" premiered at Slamdance and the LA International Shorts Festival, developed through Film Independent’s Project Involve, where she was a Directing Fellow. As a story artist, she has shaped narratives at Netflix, DreamWorks, Fox, Paramount, and the Jim Henson Company, contributing to features including Thelma the Unicorn, The Magician’s Elephant, and Steps. Portlynn is represented by CAA.

About “We’re Gonna Die Alone”:  On the night before moving in with her boyfriend, Rudy throws her recently dumped roommate and best friend one last wild night, only to realize saying goodbye is harder than expected.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Portlynn Tagavi the director of “We’re Gonna Die Alone”:

Main image: "Kusi Smiles." NFMLA

Think there's a better Bond than Goldfinger? By all means, let us know in the comments. We promise not to be too shaken or even stirred.

And now, here are 12 Goldfinger behind the scenes images.

Shine On

Goldfinger is perhaps most famous for the demented way that the titular villain kills his aide-de-camp, Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton.

He kills her by having her painted gold, which leads to her death by skin suffocation.

Above, Sean Connery ensures that the real Eaton isn’t suffering any skin suffocation despite her gold body paint. She seems fine.

Sharp-Dressed Man

For once, a Bond girl isn’t wearing the most revealing costume. Here’s Connery with Eaton and Bond creator Ian Fleming, who died the month before Goldfinger was released.

If you're interested in the dynamic between Connery and Fleming, you can read about how he ultimately came around to the idea of casting Sean Connery by reading this excerpt of Nicholas Shakespeare's terrific Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

We consider it a must-read for serious Bond fans.

Roles in the Hay

Connery and Honor Blackman, who plays, uh, Ms. Galore, rehearse an infamous fight scene in the Goldfinger behind the scenes image above.

We’re not sure if we can safely type Ms. Galore’s first name, as our stories are syndicated to lots of different media platforms with lots of understandably sensitive filters.

It's quite feline, though.

True Love

Sean Connery as James Bond with his true love: His iconic Aston Martin, one of the all-time most beautiful movie cars.

A fully restored Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 sold for $6.4 million in 2019.

Auction house RM Sotheby’s said at the time that it included such features as “hydraulic over-rider rams on the bumpers, a Browning .30 caliber machine gun in each fender, wheel-hub mounted tire-slashers, a raising rear bullet-proof screen, an in-dash radar tracking scope, oil, caltrop and smoke screen dispensers, revolving license plates, and a passenger-seat ejection system.”

Odd Job

Harold Sakata, who played Oddjob, clowns around on set and shows he’s no bad guy behind the scenes. 

He's one of our all-time favorite Bond villains, though, who set the standard for many more to come.

Though none matched the coolness of his flying hat routine.

The Fall Guy

From left to right, actor-stuntman Bob Simmons, who played Bond in the gunbarrel sequence, Connery, and Nadja Regin, who played Bonita.

The gunbarrel sequence, of course, it the opening segment in the film in which Bond, wearing a hat, walks across the screen in profile and suddenly turns to fire his gun toward the audience as the Bond theme plays.

Did you think that was Connery? We get it. So did we.

Make-Up

Eaton’s gold paint reportedly took 90 minutes to apply, but it was worth it: Her gold-painted image graced the cover of LIFE magazine as part of the promotional campaign for the film, the third of the 27 Bond movies.

If you’re a collector, her issue of LIFE is the November 6, 1964 issue.

She’s being painted above by makeup artist Paul Rabiger, who also worked on Bond films including Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and From Russia With Love.

Good as Gold

Shirley Eaton is all smiles, even covered in gold paint.

Eaton, a British actress also known for the Carry On films, retired from acting in 1969 to devote herself to family, but in 1999 she release her autobiography, perfecly titled Golden Girl.

It was a bestseller, and she went on to release three more books.

In the Club

Harold Sakata as Oddjob and Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger.

Orson Welles was among those considered to play Goldfinger, a gold tycoon who is obsessed with the soft metal, but he wanted too much money. (Shouldn’t that have made him even more qualified for the role?)

Fröbe, a German actor, was dubbed by actor Michael Collins, continuing something of a Bond tradition: Ursula Andress was similarly subbed in the original Bond film, Dr. No.

From Russia With Love

Tania Mallet, who played Jill’s sister, Tilly Masterson, poses for an amateur photographer named Sean Connery.

Mallet, and English actress and model who sometimes signed her name with two Ts, had an origin story straight out of a Bond movie: She was a descendent of Russian aristocrats on her mother’s side.

She had auditioned for the role of Tatiana Romanova in the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, but the filmmakers passed because of her British accent.

How Sean Connery Became Bond

Ian Fleming, left, didn’t initially think Connery resembled the super-suave elegant James Bond of his novels, who of course resembled Fleming himself.

But he soon saw the appeal of the Scottish actor, and in one of his novels after Connery’s casting, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he even “responded to Connery’s cinematic Bond by putting some Scottish blood into him,” as Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in the new book Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

Liked These Goldfinger Behind the Scenes Photos?

You’ll probably also love These Images From Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, featuring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress. You might also like this video of 10 Gen X Film Stars Gone Too Soon.

Main image: A Goldfinger promo image Honor Blackman, left, with an insert of Sean Connery and Margaret Nolan in Goldfinger. United Artists.

They didn't worry about good taste — they just wanted to make you laugh.

Here are some '80s movies that might not fly now.

Porky's (1981)

It will never stop amusing us that the guy who made Porky's, the great director Bob Clark, also made A Christmas Story. (He also made the horror movie Black Christmas and the kids movie Baby Geniuses. Talk about range.)

Porky's is one of those '80s movies that kids were often shielded from, which in retrospect makes sense: Though it was presented as a freewheeling comedy, it's filled with weird humiliations, and of course peeping that doesn't meet modern standards of consent.

But to call back A Christmas Story, Bob Clark didn't give a fuuuuuuuuuuudge.

Trading Places (1983)

At one point, Dan Aykroyd disguises himself as a Jamaican. That isn't great. And some people have objected to the scene where a gorilla takes a bad guy as his mate. Maybe that isn't so funny in retrospect.

But other elements ofTrading Places are incredibly good, including the film's very smart take on nature vs. nurture, and its smart observations about all the assumptions our society makes about who deserves to be rich.

We love it's then-modern update on the screwball comedies of the 1930s, and Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy and Jamie Lee Curtis are all extremely good. It's one of our favorite '80s movies.

Better Off Dead (1985)

John Cusack plays Lane Meyer, a teenager who attempts, repeatedly, to remove himself from this earth after he's dumped by his girlfriend, Beth Truss (Amanda Wyss) for cocky blonde guy Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier).

The whole plot would never fly today, nor the slapstick jokes around a teenage boy trying to end himself. But the entire movie is such masterful absurdist comedy that no thinking person could possibly take it seriously.

Also, like many of the movies of the time, it features some dicey Asian characters, but at least they're good at racing and have girlfriends. We'd say they're much cooler, at least by high school standards, than poor Lane is.

Finally, Diane Franklin (above, with Cusack) is excellent as Monique, a notably smart, capable and cool dream girl. So there's that. This is maybe the most '80s of all '80s movie comedies.

The Man With Two Brains (1983)

The whole setup of this dark screwball comedy will feel a tad misogynistic to some: Steve Martin plays a mad neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, who falls in love with femme fatale Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner), then builds up resentment as she declines to consummate their marriage.

Meanwhile, he falls in love with a disembodied brain, Anne (voiced by Sissy Spacek) and begins searching for a body in which to house her. Along the way, he roots for one attractive woman to die, and ponders killing another. It all crescendoes in a joke at the expense of compulsive eaters.

It's not in the same league as The Jerk, a previous collaboration between Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner, but it has some very funny scenes.

Heathers (1988)

Heathers is the most pitch black of '80s movies, and embodies fatalistic Gen X cool. It was written by Daniel Waters as a kind of counter-point to the generally sunnier John Hughes comedies of the day.

The film stars Christian Slater as a charismatic teen lunatic who enlists popular girl Veronica in his plot to start offing popular kids, and staging things to make it look like they did themselves in — enlisting nefarious props like mineral water to makethe crime scenes more convincing.

Remember, this was the '80s, when the idea of deadly suburban high-school kids seemed hilariously absurd. A recent attempt to revive Heathers as a TV series was delayed and derailed by multiple incidents of real-life school violence that may the idea seem very unfunny to modern viewers.

Coming to America (1988)

There's something to offend everyone in the brilliant comic grotesquerie of Coming to America, a movie that goes after almost every demographic but respects all variety of hustles. Eddie Murphy takes the Richard Pryor trick of playing several characters in the same scene and, with the help of make-up, perfects it.

Coming to America has countless jokes that young, modern audiences may find shocking, but hey: They were also shocking when the movie came out. Eddie Murphy and his collaborators just didn't care. They wanted hard laughs, and they got them.

Airplane (1980)

Airplane is loaded with questionable jokes, including June Cleaver herself speaking jive. It's deeply inappropriate — and also one of the funniest things that has ever happened in a movie.

Kudos to David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — synonymous with '80s comedies — for coming up with the idea of Barbara Billingsley delivering the line, "Oh stewardess? I speak jive." And also for the 7,000 other great jokes in Airplane, one of the all-time greatest comedies that don't care if you're offended.

The ZAZ team also came up with two more of the all-time great comedies on this list.

More on Airplane (and the Next Two Movies on This List)

"When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today,” David Zucker, one-third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, recently said in an interview with PragerU. “The first thing I could think of was, ‘Sure, just without the jokes.’"

He also complained that modern Hollywood is "destroying comedy because of nine percent of the people who don’t have a sense of humor.”

That wasn't the case for '80s movies.

Top Secret (1984)

This film, the second Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker classic on our list, features muscle-bound, gun-totin' Black French character named Chocolate Mousse. At one point a bad guy is mounted by a bull. An extreme facial disfigurement gets one of the movie's biggest laughs.

Top Secret is also, for our money, maybe the funniest movie ever made: It's an absurdist caper that crosses a Cold War spy thriller with an Elvis movie, with perfectly orchestrated sight gags that get better with ever watch. The backward bookshop scene? Mesmerizing.

Top Secret also includes one of the all-time best jokes of '80s movies: "My uncle was born in America. But he was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency." That's a great setup and payoff, whatever your politics.

The Naked Gun (1988)

The final Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker film on our list, The Naked Gun features a dizzying, hilarious array of risque jokes, all of which are terrific. The building statues sequence is a standout.

It's also the only film on this list to co-star a man once accused of double homicide — a rarity among '80s comedies.

No one is apologizing. We enjoyed the recent relaunch, too, but prefer the original.

Sixteen Candles (1984)

John Hughes' Sixteen Candles has gotten a lot of criticism, in retrospect, for the stereotypical Long Duk Dong character (played by Gedde Watanabe) and a scene that makes Anthony Michael Hall's character seem predatory, in retrospect.

Watanabe told NPR in 2008 that he was a "a bit naive" about taking on the role of Long Duk, though he still has affection for him.

As for the other thing: Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), who is presented as the dream guy of our heroine, Samantha (Molly Ringwald), passes off his unconscious girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), to another guy, Ted (Anthony Michael Hall, with Morris, above). Jake tells Ted, “Have fun.”

The next day, Caroline and the Ted conclude that they had sex. He asks if she enjoyed herself, and she says, “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” which is the movie’s way of justifying the guys’ behavior.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Fast Times is the one of those '80s movies that is may be more offensive to religious conservatives than people on the left, because it takes the side of a high school student, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, above right, with Phoebe Cates), who has an abortion after a smooth talker gets her pregnant and then turns out to be a worthless deadbeat.

Like the next film on this list, this was one of those movies that kids in school yards spoke of in whispers — as one of those '80s comedies that parents definitely didn't want them to see.

It may have just been because of the famous Phoebe Cates pool sequence, but we don't think so. The movie's presentation of teen realities was a much bigger threat to the Moral Majority, the religious fundamentalists who thrived through the 1980s.

If you like this list, you might also like this list of Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Main image: Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

DocuSlate began with the Los Angeles premiere of Street Smart: Lessons from a TV Icon from director and Emmy-nominated TV writer Ernie Bustamante. The film is a behind-the-scenes look and cultural analysis of how Sonia Manzano became the beloved and groundbreaking “Maria” on Sesame Street, the first Latina with a regular role on American TV, and the impact her career had on millions of children.

“Sonia Manzano is truly a pioneer. I made this film to reveal the person behind the character, to cement her place as an American icon, and to remind us why representation still matters,” said Bustamante.

The program continued with the Los Angeles premiere of Moses, the heartfelt and remarkable story of one man’s life on the streets of San Francisco, filmed over the course of fifteen years by award-winning director Francisco Guijarro.

“Being homeless is being behind the fog — you are invisible. People don’t see who you really are because they just see a category. But homelessness is not your identity and you need to show that,” Moses told Guijarro, and the director delivered.

The programming continued with short documentaries, and then with Loulwa Khoury’s timely portrait of the Lebanese diaspora, We Never Left, in its Los Angeles premiere. The film follows people caught between the revolution in their homeland and their lives in New York.

“It’s important for me to shed light on what’s happening in my country and tell the story of my people, but it’s also cathartic for me and the protagonists to talk about this constant duality in our lives. We found each other through these circumstances and our relationships grew since then, finding common grounds to fight for,” said Khoury.

The line-up contuied with more shorts, and concluded with the Los Angeles premiere of Encuerados by Orlando Bedolla. Bedolla originally shared the short version of this film at NFMLA, and the NFMLA proudly welcomed him and his team back with the feature-length project. It documents Latino men in the leather scene in Los Angeles.

NFMLA showcases films by filmmakers of all backgrounds throughout the year, across both general and InFocus programming. All filmmakers are welcome and encouraged to submit their projects for consideration for upcoming NFMLA Festivals, regardless of the schedule for InFocus programming, which celebrates representation by spotlighting various communities of filmmakers as part of the NFMLA Monthly Film Festival. This project is made possible in part by grant support from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Here is more information on the films and filmmakers, as well as interviews, provided by NFMLA.

“Cirilo, A Legacy Untold” directed by Justin O'Shea Cooper

About Justin: Justin O. Cooper is a Los Angeles–based filmmaker and founder of JOCMedia & Entertainment. He directed and produced the Oscar-qualifying documentary Cirilo, a Legacy Untold, which has screened at international festivals, including Diversity in Cannes, the Seattle Latino Film Festival, and the Detroit Black Film Festival. Cooper also consults for the Royal Film Commission – Jordan, liaising with Hollywood productions filmed in the Kingdom, such as Aladdin and Dune: Part One. A former film liaison in Georgia and ASCAP Plus Award–winning writer, his career bridges film, music, and global production.

About “Cirilo, A Legacy Untold”: The inspiring story of Cirilo McSween, who rose from poverty in Panama to become a civil rights leader and pioneering entrepreneur whose legacy bridged the Americas.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Justin O’Shea Cooper, the director of “Cirilo, A Legacy Untold”:

“Handwoven” directed by Dasha Levin, Mason Cazalet, Mihika Das and Matthew Wisdom

About Dasha: Dasha Levin is an award-winning Mexican-American documentary filmmaker from San Diego. As a graduate of Dodge College of Film and Media Arts with a Bachelor's Degree in Documentary Filmmaking, Levin has a passion for sharing stories based on social issues, underrepresented communities, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, and equality. Levin's films have screened at many Academy qualifying festivals, winning the Grand Jury Prize for Best Student Film at Flicker's Rhode Island International Film Festival, nexGEN Filmmaker Award at the Berkshire International Film Festival, and the American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at Cannes Student Documentary Jury Award.

About “Handwoven”: A lyrical portrait of Nikyle Begay, a non-binary shepherd and weaver; working to preserve their way of life through the traditional art of weaving.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Dasha Levin, one of the directors of “Handwoven”:

“Encuerados” directed by Orlando Bedolla

About Orlando: Orlando Bedolla is a filmmaker and LGBTQ activist working to create LGBTQ content to increase LGBTQ presence in the media. He produced and directed two short documentaries: "Preserving LGBT History" (a history of the ONE Archives) and "Coming Out: The LGBT Cultural Revolution Before Stonewall," in which participants from the early days of activism in Los Angeles were interviewed and their stories told. Orlando Interned at GLAAD, working to advance LGBTQ representation and participation in the media. He worked as a production coordinator for The Ellen Show and as a creative marketing production manager for Disney+.

About “Encuerados”: "Encuerados" is a documentary highlighting the underground subculture of the Los Angeles Latino LGBTQ+ Leather community. 

Watch the NFMLA interview with Orlando Bedolla, the director of “Encuerados”:

“Memoria Y Pérdida (Memory & Loss)” directed by Wilfredo Chavez

About Wilfredo:  Wilfredo Chavez is a filmmaker and graduate of the Cinematic Arts program at California State University Long Beach. His work focuses on stories rooted in memory, migration, and social justice. With a background in archival research and a commitment to storytelling centered around the Latin American experience, Wilfredo seeks to illuminate the often-overlooked stories of the migrant's journey through an intimate and humanistic lens. His recent project explores the emotional toll of border crossings and the resilience of humanitarians navigating the hostile terrains of the border.

About “Memoria Y Pérdida (Memory & Loss)”: Amid the unforgiving U.S.–Mexico borderlands, volunteers provide lifesaving aid to migrants confronting deadly terrains.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Wilfredo Chavez, the director of “Memoria Y Pérdida (Memory & Loss)”:

“My Neighbor's Yard” directed by Kara Grace Miller

About Kara: Miller is a producer and director working in narrative film, documentary television and commercial production. Their independent work has screened most notably at SXSW, Fantasia Film Festival, Urbanworld Film Festival, Sitges Film Festival, and Palm Springs ShortFest, as well as had a run on the underground and horror film festival circuit. Their documentary development work with Public Record (Hustle, We the Animals) is awaiting release across multiple streaming platforms, they traveled the country working as a testimonial producer for the Harris-Walz campaign, and they were thrilled to be a Bend:Film Basecamp Fellow in its inaugural year. You can view their work online through Vimeo Staff Picks, Director's Notes, Girls in Film, and Film Shortage.

About “My Neighbor’s Yard”: Neighbors from Pennsylvania’s divided capital region use signs, flags, and halloween skeletons to turn their yards into opposing campaign endorsements leading up to the presidential election. 

Watch the NFMLA interview with Kara Grace Miller, the director of “My Neighbor’s Yard”:

“Over the Kitchen Table” directed by Nisha Burton 

About Nisha:  Nisha Burton has been a filmmaker for over 15 years. As a documentary historian of Oregon, she has been commissioned by organizations like the Oregon Humanities Council and numerous foundations to make films about Oregon’s history centering on the experiences and stories of BIPOC residents. Her most recent film about the fires in Southern Oregon — which destroyed 2,800 homes and affected so many lives — reached thousands of people during its festival run, winning awards and eventually making it onto PBS. Being in the film industry for so long, she's had many amazing opportunities like working at Sundance, having her short film screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and teaching filmmaking at universities.

About “Over the Kitchen Table”: After years of being silenced through violent opposition, Norma Burton, one of the key founders of the first women’s shelter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, tells an untold story of the battered women's movement.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Jessica Daugherty, the producer of “Over the Kitchen Table”:

“We Never Left” directed by Loulwa Khoury

About Loulwa: Loulwa Khoury is a New York based filmmaker and film editor born and raised in Beirut. She edited Paradise Without People (2019), Dusty and Stones (2022), Joy Dancer (2024) and Traces of Home. She also directed her first award-winning feature documentary, We Never Left (2024). Her other work includes award-winning documentaries City of Ghosts (2017), Some Kind of Heaven (2020) and It Will Be Chaos (2018). She was also one of the mentees of the Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship Diversity Program of the year 2019-2020, a fellow in the Sundance Co//ab Art of Editing Fellowship 2020, and the DOC NYC x VC Storytelling Incubator, as well as a winner of the Creative Power Award.

About “We Never Left”: Set during the Lebanese revolution, We Never Left portrays a heart-wrenching duality between Beirut and New York, an impassioned testament to the Lebanese diaspora’s unrequited but irrepressible love for their homeland. 

Watch the NFMLA interview with Loulwa Khoury, the director of “We Never Left”:

“Love Birds” directed by Elliott Kennerson and Angel Morris

About Elliott: Elliott Kennerson is a San Diego-born writer and producer specializing in post production. He has received three Regional Emmys for Deep Look, a KQED and PBS Digital Studios co-production, and created Animal R&R, an Emmy-nominated wildlife rescue series for KPBS San Diego. At Day’s Edge Productions, Elliott has contributed to San Diego: America’s Wildest City for PBS Nature and Human Footprint, a six-part national PBS series on ecology and evolution hosted by Shane Campbell-Staton. He earned an M.F.A. in natural history filmmaking from Montana State University and a B.A. in archaeology from Yale. He lives in San Diego with his partner Matt and their dog, Magnolia.

About Angel: Angel Morris (they/them) is a San Diego-based producer and editor specializing in natural history and archival documentaries. Their work spans film, broadcast, and digital media, with credits including National Geographic, NBC, and PBS. In 2021, they produced their award-winning debut, Diving for Rays, on WaterBear Network. After winning the Original Voices Pitch competition by If/Then and NBCU in 2023, they began their sophomore project, Love Birds. Angel is currently a full-time editor at Day’s Edge Productions, where their work on PBS’s Human Footprint earned a Jackson Wild nomination. They’re also part of Think Lemonade Productions.

About “Love Birds”: The research expedition that altered gay history.

Watch the NFMLA interview with Elliott Kennerson, the director of “Love Birds”:

Main image: Street Smart: Lessons from a TV Icon, directed by Ernie Bustamante.

The appintment, effective last month, came after a national search for a successor to Rob Davis, who retired as RiverRun’s executive director at the end of 2024. Morin was a key figure at Slamdance, producing eight editions and overseeing its relocation from Park City to Los Angeles. He also oversaw new revenue streams including Slamdance Channel VOD.

Morin has also produced, coordinated, and managed more than 25 productions, including films, TV shows and music videos. Morin also recently wrote This Time Each Year, Hallmark’s first Christmas movie centered on a character who struggles with alcoholism.

Earlier in his career he worked as David O. Russell's executive and writing assistant, contributing to The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook.

“We’re thrilled Michael is joining us as executive director,” said Denise Gunter, Chair of RiverRun’s board. “Michael’s film festival experience is deep and varied, and we believe that he is the right person to lead RiverRun forward.

“Michael is building on a strong foundation established by Dale Pollock, who brought RiverRun to Winston-Salem, our previous executive directors, our outstanding staff and volunteers, and our dedicated board,” Gunter added.

“What draws me most to RiverRun is its deep community involvement and commitment to education. Throughout my career, I’ve prioritized inclusive programming, industry engagement, and artist-first principles—strengthening local ties while maintaining a global reach,” Morin said. “My experience managing multi-format festivals, supervising diverse staff and volunteers, and launching long-term sponsor relationships would translate seamlessly into RiverRun’s collaborative ecosystem."

He added: “My belief in the power of film as a catalyst for social understanding and creative innovation guides everything I do. ... Regional festivals like RiverRun are uniquely positioned to inspire dialogue, foster inclusivity, and strengthen the communities they serve. With deep industry experience and a genuine passion for building transformative artistic spaces, I’m committed to working collaboratively across the region to ensure RiverRun grows boldly and vibrantly in the years ahead.”

The next RiverRun will be held April 17–25. Founded in 1998, RiverRun showcases new films from established and emerging filmmakers around the world, offering narrative, documentary, short, student, and animated films, offering both audience and jury prizes in competition.

Main image: Michael C. Morin. Courtesy of RiverRun.

Bah's escape from Gambia — and what happened next — is the subject of the new documentary Unbowed, by Mae Gammino and David Helfer Wells. It recounts how Bah started a new life in Rhode Island, and founded the Refugee Dream Center, a nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees find jobs, education, employment and housing — as well as a sense of community.

The film, which airs Friday on Rhode Island's Ocean State Media/RI PBS and will also be available on the station's site, follows Bah through a crucial year, and arrives at a perilous time for refugees and all immigrants to the United States.

Gammino, who previously produced the documentary Being Thunder, came to filmmaking after owning a manufacturing business and then becoming a photographer — skills that proved essential to making Unbowed. She realized Bah's story should be a film, and enlisted Wells, a photojournalist and filmmaker who had helped her when she was starting out in photography.

One of the biggest challenges they faced was just getting time with the very busy Bah — who in addition to his careers as an activist and journalist, earned a doctoral degree in neuropsychology in 2020, and ran for Congress in 2022.

We asked Bah, Gammino and Wells about authoritarianism, parallels between Gambia and the United States, and how sharing Google calendar access made Unbowed possible.

MovieMaker: Omar Bah became a journalist by walking into the office of a small newspaper in his native Gambia and offering to work there. Contrary to popular belief, high-stakes journalism is a skill with rules and best practices that most people can't just do, just walking in off the street. What are the remarkable qualities that enabled Omar to have an impact despite having no experience?

Omar Bah: At the time of walking into the offices of The Independent Newspaper, my only qualification was passion and vision for a free Gambia devoid of corruption, repression, and human rights abuses; a Gambia where everyone had a voice. I grew up in a small rural village. At the time, there was no running water, electricity, or school. I was one of the very few children who had access to education and had to walk long distances to get to the nearest school.

I am from a collectivist, extended family system where my father had three wives and about 20 children. My mother alone had eight children. Because my mother is the first wife, I am the second child for both my mother and father. This position in terms of child seniority comes with a huge responsibility. My older brother was battling with an epilepsy condition. By default, as a child, I had to step in to act as the first child.

As a result, I helped my mother with babysitting, pounding grains and wheat, running errands, fetching water, and almost every hard labor I could do. My mother was being subjected to domestic violence. I deeply sympathized with her and would cry along with her, and support her at every moment of distress. As a woman who was married as a young teenager, my mother went through untold suffering.

This experience imbued in me a strong sense of advocacy, a sense of justice. I did not want to see other young women like my mother marry in their teens rather than be in school. I did not want to see young women like my mother experience domestic violence and extreme levels of hard labor.

This orientation took me to an undergraduate pre-law program because I wanted to be a lawyer to advocate for those who were experiencing struggles similar to those of my mother. Once I started these studies, and realized that the maximum I could study was two years for lack of a complete law program in the country, I devised a means to continue my advocacy and promotion voices of the people, and justice. This led me to walk into that newspaper office in the year 2000. 

Mae Gammino: I believe it was the conditions of Omar’s upbringing that shaped his need to help others have meaningful lives. Omar is highly perceptive, especially with understanding how systems work, any system. This, coupled with his superior intelligence, boundless energy, curiosity, empathy and equanimity, helps him devise strategies to achieve goals successfully.

And — two traits that don’t receive enough credit as important to success — Omar is sincere and earnest. So it’s no surprise to me that he had the self-confidence to walk into an editor’s office, as an inexperienced young person, and pitch himself for a reporting job, and then harness grit to learn how to do it to excel. He recounts this story in the film, and it’s one of my favorite scenes.

David Helfer Wells: I can’t speak for Omar, but I will point out that I did a somewhat similar thing to what he did when I started as a photo journalist four decades ago. I had the technical skills as a photographer, but I certainly needed to learn the basics of journalism, because I didn’t actually study those in college. I learned those things on the job at a small newspaper in Southern California, where I got my start.

I quickly realized that my primary strengths, which I think Omar also had, were curiosity, empathy, lots of energy, a willingness to listen to people, and a desire to share what I learned in that process. As I got to know Omar, I saw all of those things in him, so it wasn’t a surprise that he had succeeded as a journalist.

MovieMaker: Do you see parallels between what Omar dealt with in Gambia and what's happening in the United States now?

Mae Gammino: Omar can speak to this in a more informed way because he lived under a brutal and repressive dictatorship for about 22 years, and now has lived in the U.S. for 18 years, which included Trump’s first presidency. That said, I see a parallel in that we have a president, administration, and congressional majority that support the Unitary Executive Theory, which is being used with countervailing measures minimally present. Unless one feels protests and lawsuits have been effective, they’re pretty much continuing unimpeded. It’s mind-boggling. 

Omar Bah: I see parallels between what I dealt with in The Gambia and what is happening currently in the United States, although differently. Back home, in The Gambia, I was arrested and tortured by government forces on several occasions. I still have torture marks, and I still peel dead skin from one of the deep wounds I got from such tortures.

Media houses were firebombed, forcibly shut down and several journalists including myself eventually fled the country into exile. It is slightly different in the U.S. as one can argue about a hostile media environment where journalists have been disparaged and disrespected by members of the presidency. However, they still continue to separate freely and the extremes have not been realized yet. However, the signs are all there for a deterioration into a chaotic situation. 

David Helfer Wells: I certainly see parallels between what’s going on in this country and the anti-democratic political culture that Omar came of age in, and then that he eventually reported on the inequities of. 

MovieMaker: How did you all first meet?

Mae Gammino: I met Omar first in 2016 at a Refugee Policy conference in Providence — David was working overseas and could not attend. Trump’s language about immigrants and refugees was gaining significant press coverage. I wanted to learn more about refugee policy and what I could do in Rhode Island to help our local refugee community, though not as a journalist, as a private citizen.

Omar was a panelist, and his words were captivating. I was interested to know more about him, his wife, and the organization they had recently created, the Refugee Dream Center. I pitched David on the idea to do some sort of project about Omar, and then arranged for us to connect with him and his wife at their office. After this meeting, we discussed making a small profile piece that would involve a handful of shoots, but as we spent more time with them we realized a deeper story existed.

We filmed the majority of the footage over one year and then made a small profile piece for Omar to use on his website. We had intended to cut a longer film too, but other projects and work commitments put this plan on hold. However, we kept in touch with Omar and over the years filmed more, including some very recent footage after Trump was elected. Strangely enough, it the downtime of Covid that provided us time to revisit footage and make a plan to finish the film.

David Helfer Wells: I met him early in the development of the organization that he now runs, the Refugee Dream Center.  We initially were thinking of doing a short film/profile on him, but as we got to know him and learned about his life in the Gambia, the new life he was building in the U.S., and then when we met his family, we realized there was a much deeper and richer story there.

Omar Bah, Subject of Unbowed, on the American Dream

MovieMaker: As an immigrant who saw the United States as a place of refuge — and as the founder of the Refugee Dream Center — how does Omar feel about the recent ICE actions and the state of the U.S.?

Omar Bah: It has been 18 years since I arrived in the U.S., and still cannot fully believe that I am actually deserving and/or really that special to be given such a special opportunity. Imagine being a torture survivor, wallowing in distress in the stress of another country, Ghana, and then, out of all the countries of the world, and out of the millions of refugees displaced across the world, I was among few that got the once in a lifetime opportunity to be resettled in the U.S.

I have been particularly grateful for that. I am also particularly grateful for the opportunity for my children to be born in the U.S.A. That is why I started the Refugee Dream Center. To continue my lifelong passion and vision of advocacy and social justice, but also to imbue the sense of the American Dream of hard work and success on fellow refugees, hence the name of the center.

I believe this is my special way of expressing gratitude to the country, but also ensuring I contribute to the continued economic and social growth of our society. Thus, it pains me to see how ICE and our government has been scapegoating immigrants and treating them in a very dehumanizing way. 

Mae Gammino: Personally, I find their actions appalling and inhuman. I believe this administration’s objective is to control by promulgating fear and intimidation. 

David Helfer Wells: As someone who is now married to an immigrant, I find the entire anti-immigrant/anti-refugee political posture of the Trump administration to be appalling.

MovieMaker: What was your biggest challenge in making Unbowed? How did you overcome it?

Mae Gammino: This was my first go at making a documentary — David had made a few shorts before this experience. Personally, I was figuring it out as we went along. It was later in the editing process that I really understood and appreciated which of my inclinations, during production, had been correct and those which had not.

That said, the biggest challenge was getting time with Omar (I say this with true affection). He’s always in motion and does more in one day than most folks accomplish in a week. After becoming frustrated with trying to figure out how to get Omar to commit to filming, not because he was reluctant, he was just too busy to help us organize things, I realized that other than the product I was making — a film — my prior business experience had given me transferable skills to handle situations like this. Before becoming a photojournalist and filmmaker I owned a manufacturing company for  20 years.

I adjusted my thinking and reached out to his assistant to suggest I be added to his Google calendar, and presto — I was able to see his entire schedule months in advance. This allowed me to target specific events, and helped us have a complete picture of his activity, personal and business. Once the burden of having him help us schedule things was removed, it was easy to arrange what we wanted to film.

It was also the game-changer for us and Omar, especially because the more time we spent together he was increasingly less formal and began to notify us of things we might want to film.

The other impediment, which we could not completely overcome, was that David and I we making this film in our spare time, which meant we could not film as often as we needed and wanted. However, with these challenges met, the wonderful result for us and Omar was the warmly received international premiere in Nigeria last month. Their media celebrated it as story of triumph over repression and violence through an African’s magnanimity towards his fellow refugees prominently featured in an uplifting documentary. 

David Helfer Wells: We were able to film the situations we needed. In hindsight, we should've filmed even more of his life, because when it came to editing, we still came up short on B-Roll and on showing all the interesting aspects of his life.

MovieMaker: During Omar's 2022 run for Congress, he pledged not to attack or disparage any other candidates. How is that approach working for him? Does he remain committed to it? 

Omar Bah: I stayed through to my pledge, as I saw politics differently. Actually, my campaign slogan was to "Defend The Dream," and thus, my only objective was to contribute civically and socially to the augmentation of the lives of the people in my district and the country at large.

Thus, I was not interested in the disparaging tactics of the many political actors. I remained positive in my campaign. Despite not winning, I felt like participating in such a large political platform was a way of further expressing gratitude to the country, but also promoting equal opportunities for everyone who sees this country as a beacon of hope for all.

I do not see politics as a career, and thus, such a run was not meant to be a lifetime of candidacy. I am, however, glad I did pave the way for others and proved that anyone can be anything in this country. 

MovieMaker: Finally, Mae and David, can you detail how you became filmmakers?

Mae Gammino: I made a career change a little over a decade ago, from manufacturing business-owner to photojournalist, and film producer/director more recently. I’ve shot assignments as varied as a U.S. Joint Military Humanitarian Aid Mission in Indonesia to stills photography for a film in Utah, as well as assignments for local and national newspapers and magazines. My training involved some adult ed evening photography courses at RISD — I have no formal training in film and producing.

Over the years I gained exposure to the film industry as the staff festival photographer for the Provincetown International Film Festival and attending Sundance. I’d always had a desire to make documentaries but did not believe I could without attending film school. However, being around filmmakers at these festivals was the needed catalyst, and they became my film school though meeting filmmakers, attending panel talks, and simply being inspired and motivated by what I’d been exposed to. I even met the director of my first documentary, Being Thunder, on a shuttle at Sundance. 

I also can’t dismiss the importance of having had a full career before this as a manufacturing business-owner. It provided a perspective about business and practical skills one needs in any industry. 

I also was fortunate to find David. He was my mentor when I first started as a stills photographer, and through the years we’ve collaborated on commercial jobs and helped each other on some of our respective projects.

Even though I came into this business late in life, it’s not been an impediment, many of my initial film opportunities came from Get X and Millennial filmmakers. And, to date, I’ve been able to complete two films of my own, both of which I am very proud because they’ve introduced two remarkable Rhode Islanders to many people across the country and world. 

David Helfer Wells: I’m an award-winning visual storyteller based in Providence, Rhode Island, and my path to filmmaking grew naturally out of a lifelong commitment to visual journalism and human-centered storytelling. I began my career as a photojournalist, spending decades reporting deeply researched photo essays for publications such as National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

One of the most formative moments of my career was a Pulitzer Prize–nominated photo-essay on the pesticide poisoning of California farm workers for The Philadelphia Inquirer. That work, and many projects like it, shaped my belief that images can bear witness, demand accountability, and illuminate lives too often pushed into the margins.

Over time, still photography no longer felt sufficient to capture the complexity, silence, motion, and emotional rhythms of the stories I was encountering. I turned to documentary filmmaking as an extension of my visual practice, drawn to the way light, shadow, stillness, and movement could deepen narratives. My films champion intercultural storytelling and explore urgent social issues through an immersive cinematic language.

Unbowed airs Friday on Ocean State Media/RI PBS and will also be available on the station's site.

Main image: Omar Bah in a scene from Unbowed.

Casino Scenes Redefined Gambling As A Cinematic Character Study

Casino scenes are effective because they make gambling into a shortcut for us to know the true nature of the character, and not his/her luck. The stress is not on the cards but on control, ego, and restraint as soon as Bond sits at a card table in Dr. No or Casino Royale, and the camera is fully aware of it. By observing how they shape their bet, how they wait, bluff, or their refusal to react, a lot similar to behaviors that you typically find when you actually play on top-rated Canadian casino sites, you can really know a lot more about a character in the film instead of just being provided with their entire backstory, and this factors in a lot when it comes to making films to be shown in cinemas. Casino scenes break down the characters as people who are deciding under pressure, which is just cinematic psychology in its purest form, and that converts gambling scenes into character studies rather than just decorative set pieces.

James Bond Films Codified The Casino Scene Formula

The film industry has an idea of what a casino scene should appear and feel like, mainly due to James Bond, and Hollywood has been using this template since then. Many elements in casino scenes, from tuxedoes, sophisticated body language, to clean, balanced framing, serve to slow down everything so that even the slightest look has meaning. You are being conditioned to observe faces instead of hands when Bond doesn’t even react at the table, and these moments feel really tense even if no one is shouting. A managed production like James Bond can make casino scenes into a film formula that future crime movies and prestige films can use to build pressure by using behavior instead of action.

A Distinct Visual Language Emerged Around Casino Cinematography

Casino scenes are a distinctive aspect of film since they employ a highly particular cinematography that commands you to hunch down and listen. Directors prefer close-ups, low-key lighting, and slow-moving shots so that you are locked on the character’s faces, instead of the chaos in the background. This visual decision converts inner calculation into something you can literally see, and this is why these scenes seem tense without anything even happening. As opposed to action sequences that depend on speed and magnitude, casino cinematography is concerned with control and observation, and this is what draws these moments further as psychological thrillers rather than traditional spectacle-focused cinema.

Martin Scorsese Expanded Casino Scenes Into Institutional Narratives

Martin Scorsese usually captures casino scenes and then zooms out, making it clear to us that it’s not necessarily who wins a hand, but who actually owns the room. The back rooms, cameras, and tables are as significant as the gamblers, as shown in Casino (1995), making Las Vegas a working system rather than simply a beautiful setting. You are clearly seeing the exchange of cash, the power being imposed, and the authority being transferred in real-time, underneath the guise of polite gambling behavior. It’s this institutional approach that transformed film history by making casino scenes focus on forms of organized control and economic machinery, and not only about personal risk or manly bravado.

Casino Scenes As One of Film’s Most Effective Narrative Spaces

Casino scenes have become their own genre because they built their own special cinematic language that focuses a lot more on psychology, control, and performance. These scenes have become a really flexible tool in narration, from the formal restraint in James Bond to the systemic commentary of Martin Scorsese. Because they still feature in movies goes to show how far they can show us character and power in a closed and highly charged setting. It has made casino scenes leave a lasting impression on cinema storytelling.

Perhaps you may wonder what we mean by a post-apocalyptic movie. We're referring to any film that takes place after the fall of civilization, whether due to a nuclear war, or any other cataclysmic event.

There are different flavors of post-apocalyptic movies, from sci-fi horror stories to silly comedies. Many are darkly entertaining, though the best tend to be philosophical — and perhaps even to inspire us to avoid destroying ourselves.

And with that, here are the 12 best post-apocalyptic movies we've ever seen.

The Matrix (1999)

The premise of The Matrix feels realer every day: Robots have created a fantasy world to distract humans from the real world. (Our only quibble with that notion is that the robots are using humans as power sources, and... why? Wouldn't electricity work better?)

Be it the bullet-time special effects or the reinvention of Keanu Reeves, The Matrix was monumental. A lot of the action stuff still holds up, and there are fun moments to be found in the computer simulation of it all.

One of the coolest things about The Matrix, like a few other films on this list, is that it doesn't immediately reveal itself to be a post-apocalyptic movie. Neo's world looks a lot like our own... at first.

12 Monkeys (1995)

It’s impressive to turn an adaptation of an experimental French short film into a hit sci-fi movie, but Terry Gilliam did it. You might say, “Sure, but he had Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt!” Yes, but this was just at the beginning of Pitt’s prominence. This is one of the films that broke him through into the mainstream.

In 12 Monkeys, a widespread pandemic has wiped out most of human civilization. Humans have access to time travel, though, so they send a convict back in time. Crucially, they don't try to change the future — that’s not possible. They simply want to be able to mitigate the death going forward.

Sadly, then they send Willis’ prisoner back too early, and everything gets messed up.

Also Read: The 12 Most Voyeuristic Movies We've Ever Watched

A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place takes the unique frame of just focusing on a family, and notes that children are, well, the only hope for the future.

John Krasinski starred alongside his wife Emily Blunt, and also directed. This is the first full-on horror film on this list, but horror and the apocalypse go hand in hand.

Aliens have come to Earth with a taste for humans. However, their senses are poor, including being effectively blind, but have a tremendous sense of hearing. Survival means being quiet. Silent even. Sure, that makes it easy to ratchet up the tension, but you have to execute. A Quiet Place definitely does that.

Children of Men (2006)

What if the apocalyptic event was anodyne and slow moving? It’s not a shark biting you in half, but a boa constrictor slowly squeezing the life out of you. For two decades, no new children have been born. This has caused society to slowly unravel. The youngest humans have become celebrities. The world is ceasing to function, and falling into war.

Clive Owen plays a man who, you’ll never believe this, has grown cynical. Then, he finds out something remarkable. There is a pregnant woman.

Now, there is almost nothing he won’t do to save her and her unborn child. Directed by the acclaimed, Oscar-winning Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men is high-quality filmmaking.

Night of the Comet (1984)

We figured a cult classic should be in the mix, and Night of the Comet is our choice. It’s the kind of movie that has Mary Woronov in a supporting role. If that sentence means anything to you, well, you’ve probably already seen Night of the Comet, or at the very least are running out to watch it. It’s kind of comedic in the way it winks at sci-fi disaster movies of yore.

A comet’s fly-by proves fatal, turning the vast majority of people into dust. Some are left dying more slowly, becoming almost crazed zombies. Thanks to the protection of solid steel, though, two Valley girl sisters survive, as does a truck driver.

Now they have to try and survive. What’s impressive is that Night of the Comet manages to wink without feeling wink-y, you know? Also, Catherine Mary Stewart is a delight as one of the leads.

Also Read: 10 Movie Sex Scenes Somebody Should Have Stopped

WALL-E (2008)

A masterpiece of show-don't-tell filmmaking. WALL-E is also the gentlest movie on this list by a wide margin. WALL-E is a sweet movie about a couple of lonesome robots who just might be able to resurrect a long-trash planet Earth.

It starts simply, with no dialogue: Humans have abandoned Earth because it has been polluted to the point of being uninhabitable. WALL-E has been left behind to clean up all the garbage. Then another robot, EVE, arrives. Thus begins a robotic love story, animated majestically.

When we finally meet the humans, fairly late in the film, they're not entirely impressive. But WALL-E and EVE rescue them anyway.

The Omega Man (1971)

Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend has been turned into a movie three times, and parodied in a Simpsons episode as well. Vincent Price was in The Last Man on Earth in 1964, and Will Smith starred in a 2007 version called I Am Legend, but The Omega Man is the best of the bunch.

This is the first Charlton Heston movie on our list, and he was no stranger to post-apocalyptic movies. His character has spent years believing he is alone. Well, alone other than some violent mutated plague survivors.

But what if he's not the last man on Earth? What if there is more left for him than isolation and killing mutants?

Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Tie) (1984)

Hear us out: We'll grant you that much of the action in the Terminator movies takes place before the apocalypse. But the films also give us glimpses of Skynet’s assault on humankind, and the charred world that results from said attack.

We would be remiss not to include at least one Terminator film, given how often people worry about the possibility of a Skynet-like entity wiping out life on our planet.

Also Read: 11 Bad Sequels That Should Never Have Been Made

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Two film icons joined forces to make A.I. a reality. Stanley Kubrick worked on adapting “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” into a film for years. He felt like he needed technology to advance enough to make it.

Eventually, Kubrick realized he had gotten too old to work on it any longer, and in 1995 handed the project over to Steven Spielberg. When Kubrick died in 1999, Spielberg finally was able to get the project rolling.

Haley Joel Osment plays an android programmed to love who is acquired to replace a dead child. Unaccepted, he finds himself on a journey alongside other androids. Eventually it takes us far, far into a future beyond the existence of humanity.

At the time, A.I. was accepted a little tepidly. Now, many consider it a sci-fi classic.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Pretty much every zombie movie is a post-apocalyptic movie, and the modern conception of the zombie movie began with Night of the Living Dead, which depicts the first hours of the end of civilization as we know it.

George A. Romero took a budget a little over $100,000 and skills learned working on industrial films and made a horror movie in his hometown of Pittsburgh. While the movie doesn’t use the word “zombie,” it so clearly is the progenitor of the zombie genre.

At the time, people didn’t know what to make of Night of the Living Dead. Now, it’s considered a seminal horror movie. Of course, it helped that due to an error in submitting the copyright it ended up in the public domain. Hey, that helped make it a cult classic, and Romero a horror movie icon.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Fury Road is perhaps the antithesis of Night of the Living Dead. The latter is low-budget and simple. The former is one of the most bananas movies ever made, in a good way?

George Miller got his start with Mad Max, about a world barely clinging to civilization. By the events of Fury Road, most remnants of our world are long gone, save for a few salvaged weapons and vehicles. The result is perhaps the most-thrilling action extravaganza…ever?

Sure, there is some silliness to Miller’s Mad Max world, with some truly dark dystopian elements undercut by names like “Doof Warrior.” There’s nothing silly about the action, though. Relying largely on practical effects, Fury Road has to be seen to be believed. The car chases, the action, it’s all so riveting. By the way, not only was Fury Road a hit, but it won six Oscars.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Planet of the Apes was not the first movie to have a twist ending. It certainly was not the last. But almost none have nailed it like Planet of the Apes. The film's final shot reveals why is belongs on this list.

Until that moment, you think Charlton Heston’s astronaut, George Taylor, has traveled through time and space to a planet where apelike creatures have advanced to human levels of intellect.

Then, well, it turns our the truth is much worse.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of A.I. Movie Villains Ranked.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Planet of the Apes. 20th Century Fox

Editor Evan Schiff got hired on Frankenstein by putting himself out there: Though he hoped his representatives and his resume would be enough to capture the attention of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, Schiff also DM'd the director directly to tell him how much it would mean to him to edit his monster epic.

Del Toro remembered Schiff from his work as an assistant editor on the director's 2006 film Pan's Labyrinth and his 2008 Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Since working on those hits, Schiff had also become a high-profile editor of films including Nobody, Birds of Prey, The Marvels, John Wick: Chapter 2, and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.

"I think everybody is looking to help everybody else rise up the ladder, but if they don't know what you want, they can't help you do that," he says in our interview about hand-crafting the Oscar contender, which you can watch here or above.

After his extensive experience with action movies, Schiff was eager to work on an "epic drama — and a Guillermo del Toro movie on top of it."

While many editors shape a film after shooting, Schiff had a significant hand in Frankenstein even on the set. Del Toro likes to show his cast and crew scenes from the film very soon after he shoots them, which meant Schiff would routinely start editing the past days' footage four hours before the crew call, and del Toro would arrive after two hours to look over his edits.

"And we would spend those two hours, usually from like six to 8 a.m., refining the cut and getting into the state where it's actually pretty solid," Schiff recalls.

About three months into shooting, del Toro invited the entire cast and crew to start looking at edited footage each morning.

"The next day, there were like six people outside my office door at 6 a.m., and it was great," Schiff recalls. "And that lasted for like the whole next month."

Because Schiff edited so much on the Toronto and Scotland sets of the film, the film was fairly far along in the editing by the time it finished shooting. He edited on Avid Media Composer software, and praised his first assistant editor, Brit DeLillo, as "a genius."

Evan Schiff on Understanding Every Department on a Film

As the Syracuse native recounts on his website, EvanSchiff.com, he started interning at Stan Winston Studio (now Legacy EFX) at the age of 16. He later attended USC's film production program, where he developed his love for editing. Then he worked in VFX and became an assistant editor, which led to his work as an editor.

Understanding other departments helps him be a better team player.

"Working with sound crews and script supervisors and talking with DPs and things like that is all very informative to me as I start editing, because it allows me to not only have knowledgeable conversations with those department heads when I need something from them, but also to keep an eye out for things that they're sending my way that may need a little bit of love from me, in order to make them the best that they can possibly be," he says.

Early in his career, he learned a lesson from reading interviews with another of Syracuse's favorite sons, Tom Cruise. The actor talked about how when he first started working on film sets, he would talk to everyone about what they did, in order to better understand the entirety of filmmaking.

In 2011, Schiff worked on Cruise's film Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and was dispatched on a secret late-night mission to Pittsburgh, as part of a team showing Cruise edits from the film.

"So that was pretty fun," Schiff laughs.

Frankenstein Editor Evan Schiff on the Limits of AI

Last year, as del Toro accepted the Vanguard Tribute for Frankenstein at the Gotham Awards, the director famously quipped, “F--- AI.” He noted: “I’d like to tell the rest of our extraordinary cast and our crew that the artistry of all of them shines on every single frame of this film that was willfully made by humans, for humans."

That's certainly true of Schiff's work. While he says AI might be capable to some elements of editing, it isn't capable of heart or the complexities of understanding what a filmmaker — or an audience — wants and needs.

"So much of my job is managing the politics of what goes on in my room, managing multiple interested parties, people who have conflicting notes," he says. "This is not Guillermo, but sometimes you get a director that doesn't know what they want, and you've got to kind of interpret the note behind the note. Or they just come in like, 'Something feels wrong here, but I don't know what it is.' And I don't think that artificial intelligence is that intuitive. It's also trained on past problems and past scenarios, and that, by definition, prevents it from coming up with something new."

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Evan Schiff while editing Frankenstein. Courtesy of Evan Schiff and Netflix.

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But why? What’s drawn moviemakers across the world and across the years to this game that, let’s face it, relatively few members of the audience are likely to have direct experience with? Let’s figure it out!

Poker Has Innate Drama

If you’ve ever played online poker, you’ll already be well aware of this. Poker has an innate sense of drama, a “cool” feeling that has allowed this game to survive across the centuries. There’s just something inherently thrilling about gathering around the table, cards clustered close to your chest, trying to figure out what your opponent might be doing and how you can outwit them.

And it’s definitely true that an in-person poker game has a very atmospheric look to it too; with a dark but luxurious casino backdrop, plus bright lighting above the table, casting mysterious shadows across the players’ faces… well, it’s pretty much a dream come true for any director looking for a high-power scene with lots of punch. 

And even online, it carries a lot of that weight and energy, perhaps because there’s so much psychology hinging on every moment. Is your opponent bluffing? Are you bluffing? Are you successfully fooling those around you? Was that a double-bluff you just detected?

We never seem to get tired of the mental challenge poker offers, whether we’re playing in person or rooting for our favorite characters on the screen.

And after all, most societies value intellect very highly, so there’s something even more satisfying about watching your favorite character prove beyond a shadow of doubt that they can best the villain, whoever it might be!

Lying Is Acceptable

One of the other appeals is perhaps that poker creates a scene in which the hero can lie with impunity. While we don’t usually condone a lie, there’s something really satisfying about knowing a protagonist can lie effectively, and what better place to demonstrate this than in the world of poker - where even the most scrupulous tell untruths as a part of the game?

It adds a pleasing layer of complexity and nuance that we don’t get to see in many other situations, and it’s definitely a compelling reason for adding this sort of scene to these movies. Plus, there’s an opportunity to include that “loveable rogue” vibe that’s so successful for so many reasons, and showcase that vibe in its element.

Poker Is Relatable

One of the challenges of creating a really good, dramatic scene is making it feel both spectacular and unusual, and at the same time ensuring that it is relatable. One of the fascinating things about poker is that it’s easy to up the stakes, while keeping the situation highly relatable. Even audiences who don’t play poker themselves are likely to be familiar with the game and to be capable of placing themselves in the character’s shoes. 

This makes it an excellent opportunity for them to really feel part of the drama, to imagine themselves holding those cards, sweating over those decisions… movie gold, as far as directors are concerned! There are few better ways to really drive home tension than to make the audience feel they could be facing just such a scene.

There’s A Degree Of Glamour

Finally, who can deny that poker is a glamorous game? Imagine the characters sitting down to play Snap or Happy Families as part of the plot… it just couldn’t happen! But poker is a serious, luxurious, secretive game. It has the qualities to make a really good story because of the associations we give it, and that again makes it excellent movie fodder.

Add in the fact that you can dress your characters to the nines for such scenes, and you’ve got a setup that is immediately aesthetically pleasing, with a great sense of drama built in. Whether it’s a high-quality suit, a glitzy ballgown, high-end accessories, or anything else, this is an opportunity for characters to adopt a “persona” that isn’t their own, again creating nuance and depth.

Indeed, glamour is pretty much innate to the concept of poker for a whole range of reasons, and perhaps to an extent, this flows both ways. There’s no doubt that poker’s inbuilt luxury is what first helped it claim a place on the silver screen, but that association has crossed back in the other direction too, elevating poker in our eyes thanks to its connections with high-stakes moments that make your heart beat faster, that absorb you in the universe of the film. All in all, that’s a win-win situation, with no question!

Ruffalo was asked by a USA Today reporter about a black-and-white pin Ruffalo wore on his tuxedo that stated simply, "Be Good." The actor, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his work on HBO's Task, didn't hold back.

"It's for Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered," he said, referring to the 37-year-old Minnesota woman shot by an ICE agent Wednesday. He was one of several celebrities who wore similar pins to celebrate Good and reject ICE.

The Avengers actor went on to assail Vice President J.D. Vance' claim that the shooting was self-defense: "We have a vice president is lying about what's happening," Ruffalo said. (No charges have been filed in Good's killing.)

The actor added: "We're in the middle of a war with Venezuela that we illegally invaded," and continued by saying that Trump is "telling the world that international law doesn't matter to him. The only thing that matters to him is his own morality." (Trump told The New York Times this past week, when asked if there were any limits on his global power, "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”)

Here is the video:

Ruffalo said Trump's "morality" may not be the best barometer: "The guy is a convicted felon, or convicted rapist. He's a pedophile. He's the worst human being. If we're relying on this guy's morality for the most powerful country in the world, then we're all in a lot of trouble."

A quick fact check: Trump is indeed a convicted felon, but has not been convicted of rape. Rather, a jury in a civil case found that he had sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll, which Trump denies.

Also, Trump has not been convicted of — or even charged with — any crimes involving minors. But some online critics have called him a pedophile while accusing his administration of a lack of transparency surrounding the Epstein files.

More on Mark Ruffalo and Renee Good at the Golden Globes

Ruffalo continued, gesturing to his pin and referring to Good: "So this is for her. This is for the people in the United States who are terrorized and scared today. I know I'm one of them. I love this country, and what I'm seeing here happening is not America."

Asked why he thought the Golden Globes was a useful platform for a political message, Ruffalo replied: "Listen, I want to pretend like this — I want to be here to celebrate, and I am here to celebrate, and I'm proud to have a Golden Globe nomination. But also, this is not normal anymore, and so I don't know how I how I could be quiet, and I'm feeling a little sick, so it's hard to BS right now."

Ruffalo ended up losing in his category to The Pitt star Noah Wyle — but it seems like winning awards isn't really Ruffalo's top concern at the moment.

Main image: Mark Ruffalo on the Golden Globes red carpet.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

It was a bluntly political start to the ceremony, which mocked the Trump Administration's slow-roll release of heavily redacted Epstein documents, and new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss' overhaul of the once-revered CBS News.

She also mocked the A-listers in the room, joking about Leonardo DiCaprio's fondness for much-younger women and Sean Penn's willingness to look old onscreen. Both co-star in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.

And Glaser repeatedly referenced the sale of Warner Bros., opening her monologue by joking, "We set the bidding for Warner Brothers at $5." Later she called Sinners the movie that "single-handedly saved Warner Bros. — for about a month." Netflix and Paramount are currently jousting to take over the storied studio.

Glaser also poked lots of fun at herself, saying that like Frankenstein — subject of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein — she was "pieced together by an unlicensed European surgeon."

This was Nikki Glaser's second-time hosting the Golden Globes. She scored last year, and received a very warm reception for her opening jokes Sunday night.

More of Nikki Glaser's Jokes at the Golden Globes

Glaser's speech signaled an overtly political Golden Globes onstage, but the political statements started well before the ceremony.

On the red carpet, several stars — including Mark Ruffalo, Wanda Sykes and Natasha Lyonne — wore black-and-white pins declaring "BE GOOD" and "ICE OUT" to protest ICE and memorialize Renee Good, the unarmed 37-year-old woman shot Wednesday by an ICE agent.

Protests nationwide have shared that sentiment, calling for accountability for Good's killing, which the Trump Administration has justified by saying Good tried to intentionally run over an ICE agent. (Judge for yourself.) CNN has reported that at least 1,000 demonstrations were planned this week.

Ruffalo told USA Today on the red carpet that he was wearing the pin "for Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered." He also called Trump a "rapist" and "pedophile."

Trump has not been convicted of rape. Rather, a jury in a civil case found that he had sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll, which Trump denies. Also, Trump has also not been convicted of — or even charged with — any crimes involving minors.

Main image: Nikki Glaser at the Golden Globes on CBS.

Editor's note: Corrects typos.

Protests nationwide have shared that sentiment, calling for accountability in her killing, which the Trump Administration has justified by saying Good tried to intentionally run over an ICE agent. CNN reported that at least 1,000 demonstrations were planned this week.

Ruffalo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his acting on HBO's Task, told USA Today on the red carpet that he was wearing the pin "for Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered." He also called Trump a "rapist" and "pedophile."

Nelini Stamp of Working Families Power, which helped coordinate the anti-ICE pins, said the celebrity support helped spread the message.

“We need every part of civil society, society to speak up,” she told The Associated Press. “We need our artists. We need our entertainers. We need the folks who reflect society.”

Demonstrators have called for justice not only in Good's killing, but in a a separate shooting in Portland in which Border Patrol agents wounded two people.

They're presented in no particular order. Some are from long ago, but some are still going strong.

Starting with...

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

This pretty-much always funny FX series about the idiot proprietors of a very unhygienic Irish pub has covered a gamut of topics that make people uncomfortable, from race to abuse to religion to child beauty pageants. What other sitcom staged a (fake) baby funeral?

Audiences can't get enough: It's the longest-running live-action sitcom on television, after recently surpassing The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.

The Righteous Gemstones

The brilliant story of a televangelist family with a slew of secrets mixes sex, violence and very big characters in endlessly inventive and unexpected ways, taking direct shots at the hypocrisy of many who preach the prosperity gospel.

It also got huge laughs out of gratuitous sequences like one last year that started with a home invasion, then turned to a guitarist spending some quality time with himself in bed, and escalated to a brutal brawl.

But the most unexpected thing about the show, starring co-creator Danny McBride and a stellar ensemble cast, is that it actually seemed to believe in God. It never made fun of anyone's faith — just their hypocrisy.

Euphoria

Another HBO series, Euphoria has drawn shock from the start for its blunt (and some would say exploitative) portrayals of teenage drug use and sexuality.

In a 2022 story at the end of the show's second season, The New York Times noted that many of the show's young fans love the characters and plotlines, but not the man who created them, noting that Levinson "wrote all 18 hourlong episodes and directed all but three of them," and that fans routinely go on social media "to criticize his visions of the characters."

Levinson has said the show is very autobiographical: "I feel like I’m watching a version of myself navigating the world at a young age,” Levinson said in a clip promoting the show when it debuted in 2019.

After making stars of Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi, it returns soon for its long-delayed third season.

All in the Family

Loudmouth Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor), an unrepentant bigot, was only really offensive to people who didn't understand we were supposed to laugh at him, not with him.

But the show's intentions were clear: All in the Family creator Norman Lear, who passed in 2023 at age 101, was one of Hollywood's most outspoken liberals, and wanted Archie Bunker to speak freely to show how ignorant his closed-minded notions sounded. But All in the Family also had the grace to present him as vulnerable character, capable of change.

In one of its most famous episodes, 1972's "Sammy's Visit," Archie gets to know Sammy Davis Jr., who, to Archie's alarm, not only Black but Jewish. Davis highroads him by giving him a kiss on the cheek at the end of the episode, hilariously violating all kinds of bigoted taboos.

The show gained renewed appreciation last month with the terrible death of another of its stars, Rob Reiner.

Married... With Children

The show was criticized for its countless dirty jokes and risque storylines, as well as for the piggish tendencies of Al Bundy (Ed O'Neill) and the portrayal of Peggy Bundy (Katey Segal) as lazy and selfish.

OK, but Married... With Children has aged very well as a sendup of saccharine-sweet sitcoms.

It knew exactly what is was doing, and never endorsed or asked us to sympathize with the Bundys — who shared a name, after all, with a serial killer.

The Simpsons

The Simpsons debuted not long after Married... With Children on the then-fledgling Fox network. Yet it's somehow still going. In fact, it's the longest-running sitcom.

The Simpsons inspired debate with many topics — from guns to drugs to politics — and also took a stand by presenting gay characters in a sympathetic light long before the majority of TV shows did. It tends to offend people on the right more than people on the left, and has never shied away from mocking Fox News.

But we bet if offends random restaurant chains the most, with out-of-nowhere zingers like, "I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's!" (That joke is from Season 9's "Das Bus," above.)

We also love that The Simpsons even gives big moments to minor characters.

South Park

When South Park decides to take on a target — from Kanye West to Harry and Megan to Kristi Noem to sex education in schools — everyone involved should prepare to be savaged.

The show's animation process is so streamlined that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone can quickly weigh in on divisive and hot-button issues before other shows can even begin to process them. It's been going shamelessly strong since 1997.

And it's almost never gotten as much attention as it has with its latest season.

Chappelle's Show

Dave Chappelle left no stereotype unmocked in brilliant sketches like "The Racial Draft," in which various races tried to claim people of mixed ethnicity. Every episode of Chappelle's Show had something to offend you, from Rick James' catchphrase to homeless crack addict Tyrone Biggums.

Even Chappelle wasn't always sure people were laughing at the right things — he left while shooting the show's third season after an incident in which a white spectator laughed at a sketch about stereotypes in the wrong way, and made Chappelle question whether his show was subverting stereotypes, or adding to them.

"When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable," Chappelle told Time. "As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f---ing time out after this. Because my head almost exploded."

Chappelle, of course, is one of the most successful standup comedians of all time, and continues to offend people. He continues to not care.

The Boys

This magnificent Amazon Prime Video show is like an R-rated Avengers, where almost all the superheroes are in it for the fame and fortune, sexual harassment runs rampant, and some are outright racists.

The antiheroes known as The Boys are dead-set on stopping them, but even their leader, Billy (Karl Urban) is an antihero prone to saying offensive things and doing much more damage than he needs to.

The mix of sex, violence, comedy and gore will be a huge turnoff to people who don't love it. But not us: We love it.

Family Guy

Over 25 years, Family Guy has made jokes aplenty about race, religion, gay panic and even... Star Wars. Along the way its been accused of racism, homophobia, and sexism.

It's utterly ruthless in pursuit of laughs and audiences have rewarded it not only with one of the longest runs on television, but also three spinoffs.

24

The Kiefer Sutherland counterterrorism drama was criticized from the beginning for seeming to endorse and even encourage the use of torture to interrogate suspects. Many have argued that besides being reprehensible and inhumane, torture can in fact be counterproductive, and endanger Americans abroad.

It's not just liberal critics making these arguments.

In fact, The New Yorker reported that in November 2006, military and FBI interrogators met with the 24 creative team to "voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers.” 

24 executive producer Joel Surnow shrugged it off, telling The New Yorker: "“We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ‘You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.’ They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that.”

More on 24

last year, 24 star Kiefer Sutherland defended the show again, telling the Independent:

“If the United States military can be derailed by a television show, we’ve got a much bigger problem than 24. ... To use 24, a television show, as a scapegoat for the behavior of the United States military is just absolutely asinine.”

Saturday Night Live

As you're probably aware, the show just celebrated its 50 anniversary. It has had some of the most debated moments in TV history, and creator Lorne Michaels has made sure it weathered them all.

In 1990, for example, the presence of host Andrew "Dice" Clay, known for a misogynistic in-character routine, led cast member Nora Dunn and scheduled musical guest Sinead O'Conner to sit out the show.

But Clay's presence was nothing compared to the 1992 episode in which O'Connor delivered a stunning performance of Bob Marley's "War" — before tearing up a picture of the Pope to protest abuse in the Catholic Church. (A decades later, an investigation by The Boston Globe would reveal that sexual abuse in the church had indeed been covered up.)

SNL has also drawn criticism for booking polarizing hosts from Donald Trump to Elon Musk, and provided plenty of envelope-pushing moments with guests from Sydney Sweeney to Katy Perry. We could do a whole gallery devoted to its controversies... So we did.

You might also like these two other lists about one of our favorite TV shows: the 13 Best Saturday Night Live Sketches Ever.

Main image: Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney hosting SNL. NBC

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$100 no deposit bonuses are casino promotions that give players bonus funds, usually up to $100, without requiring an initial deposit. These bonuses allow users to play real money games, most commonly slots, while using casino-provided credits instead of their own funds. Any winnings generated from the bonus can typically be withdrawn once wagering requirements and withdrawal conditions are met.

$100 no deposit bonuses still matter because they allow players to:

• Test real money gameplay without upfront risk
• Evaluate withdrawal rules and payout behavior
• Experience slot volatility and bonus mechanics firsthand
• Walk away without spending money if expectations are not met

How 200 Free Spins Translate Into Real Money Play

Free spins are often bundled with $100 no deposit bonuses, but their real value depends on how they function once gameplay begins. In most cases, payouts generated from free spins are credited to a bonus balance rather than a withdrawable cash balance. 

Free spins often favor players who enjoy structured slot play and steady pacing. Because bets are predefined, players can focus on game mechanics and volatility rather than managing stake sizes. 

How No Deposit Bonuses Actually Become Withdrawable

No deposit bonuses and free spins only become valuable when players understand how winnings move from promotional balances into withdrawable funds. 

The key point is that winnings from no deposit offers are not immediately withdrawable. Instead, they must pass through defined stages that confirm eligibility, apply limits, and ensure compliance with the casino’s terms. 

Step 1: Bonus Winnings Are Tracked Separately

When free spins or no deposit credits generate winnings, those amounts are placed into a bonus balance. This balance is restricted and exists solely to track promotional play.

What this means for players:

• Winnings cannot be withdrawn instantly
• Progress toward cashout is monitored
• Bonus-specific limits are applied

Step 2: Conversion Rules Determine Cashout Eligibility

Before winnings can move into a withdrawable balance, casinos apply conversion rules. These rules often cap how much can be withdrawn from no deposit play, regardless of total winnings.

Common conversion conditions include:

• Maximum cashout limits
• Eligible games only
• Completion of basic playthrough requirements

Step 3: Verification Is Required Before Withdrawal

Even when conversion conditions are met, withdrawals are typically paused until verification is completed. This step confirms account ownership and payout eligibility.

Verification usually involves:

• Identity confirmation
• Account detail checks
• Payment method validation

Players who understand this progression are far more likely to complete successful withdrawals. Treating no deposit bonuses as evaluation tools rather than instant cash opportunities helps set realistic expectations and reduces delays when it comes time to cash out.

$100 No Deposit Bonus 200 Free Spins Real Money Casino Offers

The casinos listed below stand out for offering $100 no deposit bonuses and free spins that function reliably within real money environments. 

Freespin.com - No Deposit Casino With Flexible Free Spins Value

Freespin.com is known for combining no deposit bonuses with free spins that mirror real slot behavior. The platform emphasizes transparency around limits, making it easier for players to understand what portion of winnings can actually be withdrawn.

Key strengths:

• Clear maximum cashout limits applied upfront
• Free spins tied to stable, slot-focused gameplay
• Predictable bonus tracking and conversion flow

Megafrenzy.com - Reliable No Deposit Bonus With Consistent Rules

Megafrenzy.com appeals to players who want to test a wide range of slots without committing funds. Its no deposit bonuses are structured to avoid sudden rule changes once winnings are generated.

Key strengths:

• Simple bonus terms without layered conditions
• Steady handling of no deposit winnings
• Slot library suited for controlled bonus play

Jackpota.com - No Deposit Free Spins for Jackpot-Style Slots

Jackpota.com offers no deposit bonuses alongside free spins that emphasize higher-variance slot play. While payouts can fluctuate, the platform maintains consistent rules around how no deposit winnings are handled.

Key strengths:

• Transparent cashout caps for no deposit play
• Jackpot-style slots available with free spins
• Clear separation between bonus and cash balances

Peakplay.com - Casual-Friendly No Deposit Free Play Casino

Peakplay.com is designed for players who prefer smaller, steady sessions. Its no deposit offers are well-suited for casual slot testing rather than aggressive wagering.

Key strengths:

• Low-pressure bonus structure
• Smooth conversion of smaller winnings
• Straightforward withdrawal requirements

CrownCoinsCasino.com - Sweepstakes No Deposit Credits With Predictable Redemptions

CrownCoinsCasino.com operates under a sweepstakes-style model, using no deposit credits to introduce players to its prize redemption system. The focus is on clarity rather than volume.

Key strengths:

• Sweepstakes-based no deposit credits
• Clearly published redemption thresholds
• Consistent prize approval behavior

Sweeplasvegas.com - Free Spins No Deposit Offers With Defined Limits

Sweeplasvegas.com pairs free spins with no deposit access in a way that highlights how its slots perform under real conditions. Limits are enforced consistently, helping players plan withdrawals realistically.

Key strengths:

• Free spins with fixed bet values
• Stable slot performance during bonus play
• Clearly outlined withdrawal caps

Full List of No Deposit and Free Spins Real Money Casinos

These platforms vary in structure and payout speed, but each has demonstrated a functioning system for converting promotional play into redeemable winnings when conditions are met.

• Chumba
  Chumba is one of the most established sweepstakes casinos, offering daily free bonuses and a redemption system built around consistency rather than high-pressure wagering.

• Pulsz
  Pulsz combines modern slot titles with frequent promotional rewards, allowing players to explore gameplay using free bonuses without making an upfront deposit.

• Chanced
  Chanced focuses on social-style casino mechanics, distributing bonus credits that can be used toward prize-based redemptions under a sweepstakes model.

• Zula
  Zula offers a casual casino environment with regular free bonuses and a straightforward approach to converting bonus play into real prize value.

• LuckyLand
  LuckyLand Slots is popular for its accessible slot games, daily login rewards, and long-running sweepstakes redemption framework.

• Stake
  Stake operates globally and is known for transparent gameplay and fast withdrawals, occasionally offering free spins or bonus credits tied to promotions.

• Funzpoints
  Funzpoints uses a points-based system where gameplay rewards can be exchanged for prizes, aligning closely with no deposit-style casino play.

• Crown Coin
  Crown Coin provides sweepstakes-style slot play with recurring free bonuses and a clearly defined prize redemption process.

• McLuck
  McLuck Casino delivers daily free play incentives and a large slot catalog, making it a common choice for players testing no deposit gameplay.

• Spree
  Spree emphasizes promotional casino play, offering bonus credits and social-style events linked to prize redemption opportunities.

• Hello Millions
  Hello Millions features frequent free bonuses and a sweepstakes payout model designed for repeat engagement rather than one-time play.

• Fortune Coins
  Fortune Coins blends social casino elements with sweepstakes mechanics, allowing players to redeem winnings earned from bonus play.

• Funrize
  Funrize focuses on relaxed slot gameplay with consistent free bonuses and redemption rules suited for smaller, steady cashouts.

• Mega Bonanza
  Mega Bonanza highlights themed slot events and promotional bonuses that can be used without an initial deposit.

• Real Prize
  Real Prize emphasizes transparency, offering free bonus play with clearly outlined redemption steps.

• High5
  High5 Casino is known for polished slot titles, daily free bonuses, and a sweepstakes framework that supports real prize redemptions.

• WOW
  WOW Vegas delivers visually engaging slots and frequent bonus offers within a sweepstakes-style redemption system.

• Ace
  Ace Casino targets slot-focused players with regular bonus drops and a simplified prize redemption structure.

• Jackpota
  Jackpota specializes in jackpot-style slot games and offers occasional no deposit-style promotions tied to prize-based payouts.

• Rolla
  Rolla blends social casino mechanics with real prize opportunities, rewarding activity through free bonus credits.

• Lonestar
  Lonestar Casino caters primarily to US players, offering sweepstakes gameplay with recurring free bonuses and accessible redemption rules.

• Rich Sweeps
  Rich Sweeps emphasizes free-to-play access and frequent bonus rewards within a steady redemption framework.

• Spinfinite
  Spinfinite provides a broad range of slot-style games and daily free bonuses designed for predictable, low-friction redemptions.

How to Choose a Legit No Deposit Casino Without Getting Stuck

Choosing a no deposit casino should be treated as a screening process, not a shortcut to free money. In 2026, legitimate no deposit offers are designed to let players evaluate a casino’s systems under real conditions, while unreliable platforms often use vague terms or friction-heavy rules that make withdrawals unnecessarily difficult.

Step 1: Check How Clearly the No Deposit Rules Are Explained

Legit casinos outline no deposit conditions upfront, including cashout limits, eligible games, and verification requirements. If key details are buried or missing entirely, that’s often a warning sign.

What to look for:

• Clear maximum cashout limits for no deposit winnings
• Straightforward explanation of how winnings become withdrawable
• Visible separation between bonus balances and cash balances

Step 2: Look for a Track Record of Paying No Deposit Winnings

No deposit casinos that actually pay tend to have consistent player-facing behavior rather than one-off success stories. Platforms that regularly approve small no deposit withdrawals build credibility over time.

Indicators of legitimacy include:

• Repeatable withdrawal approvals at modest amounts
• Consistent enforcement of the same rules across players
• No sudden rule changes after winnings are generated

Step 3: Avoid Platforms That Push Aggressive Upsells Too Early

Some casinos use no deposit bonuses mainly as funnels into deposits. While depositing is optional, pressure tactics often signal that the no deposit offer is not designed to stand on its own.

Red flags include:

• Forced deposit prompts before cashout eligibility
• Sudden changes to bonus terms mid-play
• Confusing conversion steps introduced late

Step 4: Complete Verification Before You Need It

Many players get “stuck” simply because verification is triggered at the worst possible moment. Legit casinos allow verification to be completed early, reducing delays later.

Best practice:

• Verify your account soon after registration
• Ensure your details are accurate and consistent
• Avoid changing information right before withdrawal

Top 3 Takeaways

• Freespin.com and similar platforms provide no deposit bonuses that balance free spins value with realistic withdrawal conditions, making them useful tools for evaluating real money gameplay.
• No deposit bonuses remain the lowest-risk way to test casino reliability, offering insight into payout behavior and bonus handling without requiring an upfront deposit.
• Best real money casinos in 2026 are those that treat no deposit offers as transparent trial experiences, not as traps, giving players clear paths to withdraw winnings or walk away.

Using no deposit bonuses as intended-carefully, methodically, and with realistic expectations-allows players to explore real money casinos on their own terms while minimizing frustration and unnecessary risk.

Glamour and Style as a Narrative Device

Casinos often symbolize luxury and exclusivity. Directors use them to immerse viewers in worlds of wealth, elegance, and temptation.

• James Bond films like Casino Royale and Skyfall feature opulent casino settings where style and strategy collide. Bond’s poker face and tailored tuxedo are as iconic as the games he plays.
• Ocean’s Eleven showcases the glitz of Las Vegas, using casino interiors to stage elaborate heists and highlight the contrast between surface glamour and underlying tension.

These scenes create visual spectacle while reinforcing themes of control, deception, and risk.

Tension and Psychological Drama

Casinos are natural arenas for suspense. The unpredictability of gambling mirrors the emotional stakes of the characters involved.

• In Rounders, poker becomes a metaphor for personal redemption and strategic thinking. The casino table is where characters reveal their true selves.
• Casino by Martin Scorsese uses the gambling floor as a battleground for power and corruption, with every bet reflecting deeper conflicts.

These films use casino scenes to explore character psychology, often placing protagonists in moments of intense decision-making.

Comedy and Chaos

Not all casino scenes are serious. Some use the setting for comedic effect, highlighting the absurdity and unpredictability of gambling culture.

• The Hangover features a chaotic blackjack sequence that blends humor with unexpected success, turning the casino into a playground for misadventure.
• Rain Man uses the casino as a turning point, where Dustin Hoffman’s character showcases his mathematical brilliance in a memorable card-counting scene.

These moments balance tension with levity, making casinos a versatile backdrop for storytelling.

Symbolism and Transformation

Casinos often represent turning points in a character’s journey—places where fortunes change and identities shift.

• In The Sting, the gambling hall becomes a stage for deception and revenge, with every move choreographed for dramatic payoff.
• Molly’s Game uses underground poker scenes to explore ambition, legality, and personal resilience.

These scenes are rich in symbolism, portraying casinos as crucibles of fate and transformation.

Influence on Real-World Gaming Culture

The cinematic portrayal of casinos has influenced how people perceive gambling. The glamour and drama of movie scenes have inspired interest in online gaming, where features like free daily spins offer players a taste of the excitement without the high stakes.

• Online platforms often mimic movie-style aesthetics, using sleek visuals and dramatic soundtracks.
• Promotions like free daily spins echo the idea of risk-free engagement, allowing users to experience the thrill without financial commitment.

This crossover between film and gaming culture continues to shape how audiences engage with both mediums.

Final Thoughts

Casino scenes in top movies are more than visual indulgences—they’re narrative engines that drive plot, reveal character, and evoke emotion. Whether through suspense, comedy, or transformation, these scenes capture the essence of gambling and its cultural significance. As online gaming grows, features like free daily spins offer a modern echo of the cinematic casino experience, bringing the drama of the big screen to everyday play.

Obviously, these things are subjective. So if you think we missed one, let us know in the comments.

And now, the best SNL sketches, in our estimation, ever.

The Olympia Restaurant (1978)

Early Saturday Night Live sketches often felt seat-of-your pants and tended to lag at times as everyone tried to find the same pace. Not this one: A typical morning in the life of a Greek diner that refuses to adapt, it has a simple, recognizable hook and sweet slice-of-life simplicity. The rhythm is as pleasing as a morning routine.

SNL is sometimes known for big characters, but almost everyone in this sketch plays it straight and real, which adds to its charm. Gilda Radner is especially good as the one customer who seems to understand the place, and Bill Murray gets the funniest moment with his panicked nodding, using only a single word.

The sketch is a little more poignant when you know that star John Belushi's immigrant dad operated a struggling restaurant when Belushi was growing up in Wheaton, Illinois.

Key line: "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, four Pepsi, two chip."

Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute (1979)

The great Margot Kidder, playing a bank vice president on a business trip, receives a visit from a profoundly Midwestern, profoundly decent, assuredly unsexy sex worker: Fred Garvin, male prostitute.

Dan Aykroyd brings big dad energy to the role of a kindly, folksy gigolo, and Kidder is a perfect straightwoman. The setup is absurd, but everyone plays it with endearing vulnerability. Like many Aykroyd characters, Fred Garvin would provide the template for many played-straight ridiculous characters to come.

This one doesn't always turn up on lists of the best SNL sketches, but it should. It also gets referenced throughout the terrific new movie Saturday Night, in which Aykroyd is played, impressively, by Dylan O'Brien.

Key line: "Ma'am, you're dealing here with with a fully qualified male strumpet."

Buckwheat Dead and America Mourns (1983)

A high-flying, edgy satire of breathless coverage of President Reagan's attempted assassination in 1981.

This sketch is the clear highlight of the years after the departure of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players. Eddie Murphy is brilliant not only as Buckwheat, but also as the man who shot him, John David Stutts.

It also foreshadowed decades of round-the-clock news coverage with just as little self-awareness as Joe Piscopo's take on Ted Koppel.

Key line: "It's good to see you all. Hi! I killed Buckwheat."

First CityWide Change Bank

With maybe the simplest concept of any Saturday Night Live sketch, this piece by legendary writer Jim Downey (above) — who also stars as an eager-to-please service representative — masterfully ridicules seemingly sincere corporate ad campaigns.

The execution of a very basic idea is perfect. Downey can currently be seen in a key role in One Battle After Another.

Key line: "We will give you the change, equal to... the amount of money that you want change for."

Chippendales Audition (1990)

A sketch where everyone else plays it straight so Chris Farley can give it 2,000 percent as Barney, a young man determined to be a Chippendales dancer.

Some — including the brilliant former SNL writer Bob Odenkirk — believe that the sketch was cruel to Farley. But listen to his many friends in interviews on Dana Carvey and David Spade's Fly on the Wall podcast and you'll hear that Farley was very much on board with the premise of the sketch — and no one has ever been more committed to a sketch.

The sketch works not because of the jokes about Farley's weight, but because of how sweetly and sincerely everyone plays the situation.

Key line: "I wish I could just flip a coin and be done with it, but we can't. We're Chippendales."

Matt Foley: Van Down by the River (1993)

Everyone else — from Julia Sweeney to Phil Hartman to David Spade to Christina Applegate — just tries not to hold it together as Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley at his best, absolutely takes over.

The original Matt Foley sketch was a carryover from Farley's time working with writer-performer Bob Odenkirk at Chicago's Second City. By the time it came to SNL, it was at its full frenetic brilliance. It's also a sketch with heart — we end up sympathizing with everyone involved.

Key line: "He's been down in the basement drinking coffee for about the last four hours so he should be ready to go."

Dillon-Edwards Investments (1999)

Another sketch you probably won't fall on many lists of the best SNL sketches, but this is the perfect mix of stupid and smart. Chris Parnell plays it straight as a father concerned with his financial future.

It's also perfectly timed at less than 90 seconds, which makes us love it even more.

Key line: "A lot of investments companies rushed onto the internet. But Dillon-Edwards took their time."

More Cowbell (2000)

Passions run high in August 1976 as The Blue Oyster Cult records their hit song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" under the watchful eye of rock legend Bruce Dickinson (Christopher Walken). Also, let's save you a Google: Gene Frenkle, the percussionist played by Will Ferrell, is not a real person.

This one turns up on almost every list of the best SNL sketches for a reason. Lots of reasons, actually.

Key line: "I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell."

Debbie Downer: Disney World (2004)

Debbie Downer (Rachel Dratch, always outstanding) proves that she can even ruin breakfast at Disney World.

It's a flawlessly written sketch that only gets funnier as everyone involved understandably falls apart with laughter. At one point, host Lindsay Lohan has no choice but to flee the sketch altogether. We're not fans of people breaking on camera, but this one is the gold standard of breaking on camera.

Every Debbie Downer sketch on SNL is great, but this is our favorite. It's one of the best SNL sketches and best SNL moments.

Key line: "It's official: I can't have children."

Meet Your Second Wife (2015)

A brutal jab at men who marry much younger women, "Meet Your Second Wife" is a very dark, very funny sketch with a solid premise and plenty of perfect small jokes packed in throughout. The unstoppable Tina Fey and Amy Poehler anchor a basically perfect, sharp-elbowed sketch. Bobby Moynihan and Aidy Bryant especially stand out with subtle, skillfull turns.

Fey and Poehler are responsible for many of the best SNL sketches and performances, but this one's our favorite.

Key line: "Actually it's seven."

Black Jeopardy With Tom Hanks (2016)

A lovingly detailed, laughs-in-the-specifics sketch that suggests maybe isn't America isn't so racially divided, after all. Exquisitely acted by everyone — Kenan Thompson (pictured), the longest-serving SNL castmember ever, is superb.

But Tom Hanks is especially surprising as a MAGA-hat wearing conspiracy theorist who comes off as a pretty good guy. This is one of those best SNL sketches where you catch sharp new insights every time you watch.

Key line: "What is: I don't think so. That's how they get ya."

Live Report (2016)

Saturday Night Live has done multiple sketches in which a local news anchors get caught up in a very curious detail seemingly irrelevant to the major breaking story they're covering. This is the best.

Newscasters Beck Bennett and Cecily Strong – as well as reporter on the scene Kenan Thompson — are ostensibly covering a Tampa sinkhole, but also can't understand why a local shopper played by Margot Robbie is married to a regular-guy Matt Schatt (Mikey Day).

One of the best SNL sketches of recent times and all time, this one is a perfectly written and acted game of change-the-subject.

Key line: "So... you two are married to each other."

If you enjoyed this list of the best SNL sketches, you might also like these 12 Wild Stories From Behind the Scenes of Saturday Night Live.

Also: We understand these things are subjective. So again, please share your own list of the best SNL sketches in the comments.

And please follow us for more stories like this.

All images from NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Of course, it's hard to generalize about a multibillion-dollar industry that has existed nearly as long as film itself, headquartered for decades in the San Fernando Valley over the Hollywood Hills from the mainstream Hollywood studios.

When Hollywood looks to its Valley neighbors, it often does so by sugarcoating things — treating the industry as silly and amusing — or playing it for horror, with the implication that the adult film industry leads inevitably to violence.

The following films are noteworthy for their blunt presentation of the industry. For the most part, they present it as an underground, unregulated economy where some people get along just fine — but others find themselves disappointed or worse.

Hardcore (1979)

Hardcore — recently part of a Paul Schrader retrospective on the Criterion Channel — is a fascinating but not completely successful film. George C. Scott plays Jake Van Dorn, a very religious Midwestern dad who has to travel to seedy Los Angeles when he learns his daughter, Kristen (Ilah Davis) has entered the adult film industry.

The film is a fascinating look at how the adult entertainment business functioned in the late 1970s. But Scott's transformation from everyman to shrewd undercover avenger isn't totally convincing. And it feels a bit melodramatic that Kristen descends so quickly into very violent films.

Still, Season Hubley is excellent as Niki, Jake's guide into the seedy underworld. it's fun to imagine an older and more accomplished Schrader remaking this film with someone like Liam Neeson, the master of dad-on-a-rampage movies.

Videodrome (1983)

David Cronenberg's 1983 film fairly brilliantly presages the rise of the internet and our willingness to surrender some of our humanity in the service of technology, but it starts with a journey into old-fashioned adult entertainment.

Max Renn (James Woods), president of a small UHF station, stumbles upon a broadcast signal of very alarming videos. This leads him to Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) an explicit radio host with dark predilections.

Max's investigation of her disappearance leads to him having a Betamax cassette inserted into his torso, and his eventual effort to transcend our sick sad world and "leave the old flesh." It's all very metaphorical, but feels especially relevant in the age of artificial intelligence.

Boogie Nights (1997)

You knew this would be here. For about the first half of Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful second film, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg, in his best role) finds a chosen family under the tutelage of Valley filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Jack's partner Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and rising starlet Rollergirl (Heather Graham) even have kind of a mother-daughter dynamic.

But as drugs and — gasp! — video take hold, Dirk descends into darker and darker stuff, and it quickly becomes apparent that the romanticized good times of the '70s aren't sustainable in the '80s.

Lots of people would love to live Dirk's high-flying '70s life, but no one would want his wretched existence in the '80s.

Demonlover (2002)

This French neo-noir corporate drama by Oliver Assayas stars Connie Nielsen as a sneaky, ice-cold executive involved in a French company's acquisition of a Japanese company that makes very gross anime.

The film is surprisingly frank in its presentation of said anime, but all the executives involved in the negotiations seem to see the material merely as a product, not a thing to be judged. There's a great metaphor here about transactional relationships.

As is often the case in dramatic portrayals of the industry, the more mainstream films portrayed in Demonlover (we use the phrase "mainstream" very loosely here) are a gateway into violent content in which people really get hurt. Or worse.

After Porn Ends (2012)

Documentarian Bryce Waggoner released three volumes of this excellent series with a simple but arresting concept: Adult film industry performers simply explain what they've been doing since leaving the industry. (Waggoner directed the first two, and the third was directed by former adult performer Brittany Andrews.)

The series removes artifice and fantasy to reveal the people of the industry as just people — some of whom are thriving, and some of whom are mightily struggling.

It raises questions about stigma, exploitation and reinvention, without telling anyone how to think or feel.

Lovelace (2013)

Amanda Seyfried (above) is excellent as Linda Lovelace, one of the most contentious figures in the history of the adult film industry.

She became a sex symbol for starring in what became one of the most mainstream and profitable of all adult films. But years later she wrote in her memoir, Ordeal, that she was violently forced into the business and all sorts of animalistic degradations.

Lovelace handles her story sensitively and sympathetically, never crossing the line into the kind of exploitation the real Linda Lovelace tried to escape.

King Cobra (2016)

One of the most common criticisms of the industry is that it exploits women. King Cobra is all about gay adult product, so the gender component is removed.

But that brings into more stark relief other potential forms of exploitation: namely older people exploiting younger people, and people with money exploiting those without it. (These are also problems, of course, in supposedly respectable fields.)

King Cobra is based on a true story — the source material is the book Cobra Killer by Andrew E. Stoner and Peter A. Conway, about the the life and early career of former adult actor Sean Paul Lockhart (Garrett Clayton, above).

Written and directed by Justin Kelly, it's a little-seen but captivating film with a top-notch cast that also includes Christian Slater, Molly Ringwald and James Franco, who is also a producer on King Cobra.

American Porn (2002)

Journalism doesn't get more serious than PBS's Frontline, and in 2002 the Oscar and Emmy winning documentary program investigated the business of adult entertainment, charting its rise and the reason for the demand.

If Hardcore provides a fascinating but melodramatic look at the industry in the late 1970s, this Frontline doc is a fascinating investigation of the state of the industry in the early 2000s, when the internet was radically shifting the dynamics of the business and making adult product more accessible than ever before.

You can watch the entire documentary — and every episode of Frontline — for free online via your local PBS station.

Red Rocket (2021)

One of the best films on this list, Sean Baker's Red Rocket is a judgment-free portrait of Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) an adult semi-star forced to return to his Texas hometown while on the outs from the industry.

Mikey believes he can wheedle his way back in by convincing Raylee (Suzanna Son), a 17-year-old donut shop employee who goes by the name Strawberry, to join him. He also strings along his ex, Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mom Lil (Brenda Deiss), so he can live with them while he gets back on his feet.

Packed with excellent first-time actors, the film feel visceral and alive, adroitly blending comedy and sadness. It avoids moralizing, yet you'll probably come to hold some strong opinions about Mikey.

Baker is one of our greatest filmmakers, who uses stories about sex work to make broader points about hard work in general. His latest, Anora, is up for six Oscars, including Best Picture.

Starlet (2012)

Almost every Sean Baker film involves some element of investigating sex work, always empathetically and evenhandedly.

Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch came up with the concept for the Mikey Saber character in Red Rocket while doing research for Starlet, when they realized how many male actors live off of female talent.

Starlet follows Jane (Dree Hemingway), a 21-year-old rising star who strikes up an unlikely friendship with 85-year-old Sadie (Besedka Johnson).

Money Shot (2023)

Director Suzanne Hillinger's documentary about one of the most prominent websites for adults isn't interested in anything salacious. It just sets out to normalize — and humanize — the people who just happen to make adult content for a living.

"To me, it was really important the way that we shot the interviews, for example — that the environment around each interview subject is very much a part of the frame, that these are people in their homes, with details and lives and plants and pets and shoes in the background," Hillinger told MovieMaker.

Again, about the dashes — we know there's nothing wrong with the word "shot," but algorithms don't, particularly when it's paired with the word "money," and we want people to be able to see these articles rather than having them buried by robots.

Pleasure (2021)

A Sundance darling that gained lots of initial attention for its blunt depictions, director Ninja Thyberg's Pleasure is the story of Linnéa, a small-town Swede played by Sofia Kappel (pictured) who travels to Los Angeles to try to break into the industry.

The film is notable for its multifaceted presentation of the adult world. Some of Linnéa's experiences are good, but others are horrible, including a scene in which she technically consents to a violent scenario but does so only under considerable coercion and pressure. She soon finds herself contributing to the abuses.

Bonus: X (2022)

All three films in Ti West's X trilogy — the other two are 2022's Pearl and 2024's Maxxxine — seek to demystify the adult entertainment industry while exploring the stigma around both sex and violence.

X is the most blunt about it. The film takes place on a very DIY adult film location — a Texas farm — where the older couple who own the place seem to disapprove of the young people's shenanigans. But things are more complex than they seem.

In all three X films, the main protagonist is a young woman — always played by Mia Goth — trying to use her sex appeal to get ahead. It doesn't usually work out as she planned.

Liked This List of 12 Movies About the Adult Film Industry That Don't Sugarcoat Anything?

You may also like this list of movies about the world's oldest profession that sugarcoat things quite a bit.

Main image: Red Rocket. A24

These 10 went out of bounds in alarming ways.

Here we go.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

A master class in how not to direct sex scenes. Thirty-year-old director Bernardo Bertolucci and 48-year-old star Marlon Brando decided the morning of the movie's most infamous sex scene to incorporate butter into it, but didn't tell 19-year-old lead actress Maria Schneider about it until the cameras were rolling.

“I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” Bertolucci, who died in 2018, later said. “I wanted her to react humiliated.” Schneider, who died in 2007, said she did indeed feel violated by the scene.

When the scene gained renewed scrutiny in 2016, Bertolucci clarified that Schneider was aware that the scene would be violent, and that it was in the script, but that the "the only novelty was the idea of the butter. ... And that, as I learned many years later, offended Maria. Not the violence that she is subjected to in the scene, which was written in the screenplay.” He also clarified that the sex in the film is all simulated. 

Pretty Baby (1978)

The recent Hulu documentary Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby catalogues the countless ways that Hollywood men sought to sexualize Shields from an early age. The film takes its title from Pretty Baby, the Louise Malle film based on a true case of a 12-year-old, raised in a brothel, and forced into exploitation by her mother.

The film sympathizes with Shields' character, Violet, but raised understandable alarm because it shows Shields undressed. The film was deemed so problematic even by 1978 standards that it sparked countless articles debating its decency, and the British Board of Film Classification carefully debated whether it should be legal.

One dubious scene: a kiss between Shields, who was 11 at the time, and 28-year-old co-star David Carradine — though Shields said recently on The Drew Barrymore Show that Carradine was "gracious" and "protective" of her on set.

Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

You could write whole articles about the problems with Revenge of the Nerds, and many people have, but one of the main ones is a scene in which nerds use hidden cameras to watch sorority women in various states of undress.

It's a felony, nerds.

Revenge of the Nerds, Again (1984)

The most troubling part of Revenge of the Nerds is a scene in which lead nerd Lewis (Robert Carradine), the supposed hero of the movie, wears a mask to trick a fellow student into believing he's her boyfriend. After they have sex, she's delighted by how good it was, which is the movie's way of justifying the criminal deception. Terrible lessons all around.

Screenwriter Steve Zacharias has said he regrets both the mask scene and the hidden camera scene, and he removed them when he sat down to write a musical adaptation of the film.

Also Read: 12 Shameless '80s Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended

Sixteen Candles (1984)

Sixteen Candles is another film in which the awfulness of a character's behavior is compounded by the movie expecting us to like him. Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) is presented as the dream guy of our heroine, Samantha (Molly Ringwald). But at one point Jake passes off his unconscious girlfriend, Carloline (Haviland Morris), to another guy, Ted (Anthony Michael Hall).

Jake tells Ted, “Have fun.” The next day, Caroline and the Ted conclude that they had sex.

He asks if she enjoyed herself, and she says, “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” which is the movie's way of justifying the guys' behavior.

Basic Instinct (1992)

Sharon Stone wrote in her memoir The Beauty of Living Twice that she was tricked into the most revealing scene in Basic Instinct by a crew member who told her she needed to remove her underwear because it was “reflecting the light.”

She said she was so shocked by the end result that she slapped director Paul Verhoeven and immediately called her lawyer — but that she eventually agreed to the release of the scene. Verhoeven later said Stone was a willing participant in the scene and "knew exactly what we were doing," which she disputes.

Stone told the Table for Two podcast recently that she lost custody of her child in a 2004 court case because of her role in the film.

"I lost custody of my child," she said. "When the judge asked my child — my tiny little tiny boy — 'Do you know your mother makes sex movies?'"

She lamented "this kind of abuse by the system... that I was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie."

Poison Ivy (1992)

We don't think depictions of bad behavior are endorsements of it, and Poison Ivy in no way suggests that there's anything OK about the relationship between Ivy (played by a then-16-year-old Drew Barrymore) and her friend's dad (a then-58-year-old Tom Skerritt).

The film wasn't intended as gross exploitation — it even premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

Director Katt Shea has said she and Skerritt were well aware of the potential problems inherent in the relationship between Ivy and the much older character, and that she was protective of Barrymore, using a body double for her in certain scenes.

Nonetheless, she said in 2022 interview with Yahoo: "I don't think that movie would be made today, period."

L----a (1997)

We can't even type the name of this movie, based on the masterful Vladimir Nabakov novel, without freaking out internet censors. You can blame gross people who use it as a euphemism for despicable criminal conduct.

Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Navabov's novel proved that you didn't need to be explicit to tell the mortifyingly sad story of Humbert Humbert, who abducts and abuses his young stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, while lying to the audience and himself that it's a consensual love affair instead of a series of horrendous crimes.

Adrian Lyne's 1997 version decided that relaxed standards in the 1990s would allow him to finally adapt Nabakov's novel without leaving things to the imagination — but his timing was very bad. President Bill Clinton had just signed the Child Pornography Prevention Act, which banned depictions of sexual activity by minors. Though Lynn was using an adult body double for 15-year-old lead actress Dominique Swain, distributors were so spooked that the film debuted not in theaters, but on Showtime.

Lynn may have just gone about the whole thing wrong: Nabakov's novel contains not a single dirty word. Kubrick's adaptation was up to the challenge of adapting it with similar restraint, and Lyne's artistic endeavor felt unnecessary and misguided.

Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

The film by Abdellatif Kechiche led a Cannes Film Festival jury to give the Palme d'Or prize to not only the director, but also his two lead actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. 

But Seydoux said soon after that the long takes of intimate scenes were "kind of humiliating sometimes, I was feeling like a prostitute."

Kechiche said of the critcism: “If Seydoux lived such a bad experience, why did she come to Cannes, try on robes and jewelry all day?” he said. “Is she an actress or an artist of the red carpet?”

He also said the film shouldn't be released, because it was too "sullied." But it ultimately was released.

Romeo and Juliet (1968)

The two stars of 1968′s Romeo and Juliet sued Paramount Pictures in 2023 for more than $500 million over a scene they shot as teenagers.

Olivia Hussey, who was 15 at the time and died last year at 73, and Leonard Whiting, then 16 and now 75, said director Franco Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, misled them by saying they would wear flesh-colored undergarments in an intimate scene, but informed them on the morning of the shoot that they would wear only body makeup.

A judge dismissed the case in May 2023, but Whiting and Hussey filed a second lawsuit against Paramount, claiming the studio had digitally redistributed the film without their permission.

Liked This List of Movie Sex Scenes Someone Should Have Stopped?

Here's a story about the Best Picture winner Anora, which features lots of sex scenes that were carefully communicated between director Sean Baker and the film's actors.

You might also like this list of 12 Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember, featuring the sequel to Revenge of the Nerds.

Main image: Romeo and Juliet. Paramount Pictures.

For the latest episode of the Low Key podcast, we were asked what 2026 pop culture events we're most excited about. At the top of the list, at the moment, is the fact that two of our favorite shows are returning to HBO back to back. (We're interested in the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, too. More on that soon)

If you like, you can listen to us explain our love for The Pitt and Industry wherever you get your podcasts, or here:

Why We Recommend The Pitt and Industry

The Pitt quickly hooked us and many others last year, earning Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series, as well as acting awards for lead Noah Wyle, supporting actress Katherine LaNasa, and guest star Shawn Hatosy. It's the story of a Pittsburgh ER, with each episode unfolding in real time across one horrible 15-hour day.

It also sneakily — and not preachily — underscores how big-picture policies fall on the shoulders of doctors and nurses who show up every day trying to do their best.

A more somber — but even more addictive — view of humanity comes from Industry, the story of Gen X and Gen Z finance professionals in London. Myha'la stars as Hannah, an American fish out of water who quickly proves herself to be as ruthlessly efficient as any of her colleagues. Her mentor-turned-enemy-turned-who-knows is Eric (Ken Leung), a middle-aged man who isn't ready to hand over the reins to the next generation. The stellar cast also includes Marisa Abela and Harry Lawtey, our dark-horse pick for the next James Bond.

The Industry, as we've said before, is basically about young people trying to make money on the end of the world. It's our current favorite show.

The new edition of the Low Key podcast isn't just about The Industry and The Pitt — which your humble correspondent starts praising around the 28-minute mark. On the pod, we also discuss Stranger Things, whether Avengers: Doomsday will be more than nostalgia, and many of the other big entertainment stories of our young new 2026.

Main image: Myha'la in The Industry Season 4, premiering on HBO Sunday.

The next Bond film in the long-running series will be directed by Denis Villenueve, who also has his hands full with the upcoming Dune: Part Three.

As we wait to see where he'll take the franchise — and who will play Bond next — let's look back at some unforgettable photos from the very first James Bond movie.

Welcome to Jamaica

Dr. No wasn't the first of Ian Fleming's novels about James Bond — that was 1953's Casino Royale — but Dr. No was the first to be made into a feature film.

Set in London, Jamaica and the fictional island of Crab Kay, it shot on location in Jamaica in 1962.

The plot concerns Agent 007 traveling to Jamaica to investigate the death of MI6 station chief John Strangways. But that's just an excuse to bring together Bond (Sean Connery) and Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), above.

Take 007

Sean Connery (above) earned the role of 007 in part because of his walk, according to the new Nicholas Shakespeare book Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

He quotes producer Albert Brocolli saying of Connery, "He walked like the most arrogant son of a gun you’ve ever seen," which led him to realize: "That’s our Bond."

Shakespeare's book follows the life of Fleming, whose novels inspired the series of 27 Bond films that started with Dr. No.

Ursula Andress and Ian Fleming

Above: Ursula Andress on set with Bond creator Ian Fleming. As Nicholas Shakespeare's book recounts, Bond was based in part on Fleming, who dramatized and heightened his own experiences with love and spycraft.

Andress' character, Honey Ryder, is often considered the first "Bond girl," although she doesn't make her iconic bikini-clad entrance until about halfway through Dr. No.

She is preceded onscreen by Sylvia Trench and Miss Taro.

Enter Bearing Shells

Honey Ryder's job is shell diving, and appropriately she enters Dr. No bearing shells. If her opening costume in the film — a white swimsuit and belt — seems a little revealing, consider that in the novel upon which Dr. No is based, she wears only the belt.

The shells sequence turned around the expectations for the film, according to Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

“‘It was going to be a low-budget flop,’” says Blanche’s son Chris Blackwell, son of Ian Fleming’s muse and love, Blanche Blackwell, in the book. “It all changed when we watched the rushes of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea.”

He added: “It was electrifying. We suddenly felt, ‘Gosh, we’ve got a movie.’”

Bad Boys

According to Shakespeare’s book, Fleming almost spoiled a take of the iconic beach scene. He was leading two friends on a walk along Laughing Waters — the name of the beach where the scene was filmed — and almost walked into the shot.

Director Terence Young yelled at them to “Lie down!” which they did. Shakespeare writes: “The composer Monty Norman had arrived in Jamaica to write the music and he watched Young shout at them — ‘They were shooed off like little boys.’

"Ian and his friends were left lying behind a dune, forgotten, until someone remembered to release them an hour later.”

That's Fleming, right, with Andress and Connery.

Chemistry, Raw Chemistry

What comes through most of all in the publicity photos for Dr. No is the radiant, transcendent chemistry between Connery and Andress. Which, we suppose, was exactly the idea.

"He was very protective towards me, he was adorable, fantastic," Andress said in a 2020 interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera after Connery's death at 90. "He adored women, He was undoubtedly very much a man.''

She added: “We spent many evenings together and he would invite me everywhere, Monte Carlo, London, New York, from when we met until now we always remained friends. Friends, friends.'"

At Sea

Andress and Connery are all smiles, relaxing on a boat offshore.

Connery brought plenty of life experience to the job of being Bond.

Among other jobs prior to taking on his most famous role, Connery was a naval boxer, lifeguard, and art class model, according to Shakespeare's Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

Director Terence Young at Work

Making the film wasn't all fun in the sun — here are Connery and Andress discussing a scene with director Terence Young.

Young not only brought Bond to the screen for the first time with Dr. No, but directed the second 007 film, From Russia With Love, released a year after the first film, in 1963.

Guy Hamilton directed the third film, Goldfinger, but Young returned for his third and final Bond film, Thunderball, in 1965. It's safe to say that no director did more to shape the aesthetic of the early franchise.

Keep Your Friends Close

Sean Connery as Bond and John Kitzmiller as Quarrel.

When 007 arrives in Jamaica to investigate the murder of M16 Station Chief John Strangways, he is tailed by Quarrel — but Quarrel soon turns out to be aiding the CIA.

He soon introduces Bond to Felix Leiter, a CIA operative who becomes one of James' closest friends. The first actor to play him was future Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord.

Sean Connery and Ursula Andress

The actors show off their athleticism and chemistry while frolicking on a Jamaican beach during filming.

Nice work if you can get it.

Andress told Corriere della Sera that when she joined the film, “I didn't know Sean, and I thought it would be my first film and maybe my last.

"But instead it took off, the chemistry between us worked and it was the perfect combination.”

Ursula Andress and Sean Connery

Did they have any idea people would be watching their movie and writing about them, more than 60 years later?

Or did it just seem like a fun, beachy spy thriller? You have to wonder.

 ''It was a very small budget production and I agreed to do it thinking not many people would see it," Andress told Corriere della Sera.

More Connery and Andress

Here's another picture of Sean Connery and Ursula Andress.

Too many? We're sorry.

If you liked this story, you might also like this excerpt from Nicholas Shakespeare's Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (which you can learn more about here)....

And we'd love for you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Ursula Andress on the set of Dr. No. United Artists

“In my twenties I didn’t understand the concept of gut and instinct because I hadn’t had enough life experience yet,” says the star of Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water.

Poots also believes actors face a false pressure to take jobs they think will lead to bigger and better roles in the future. But she says one thing she’s learned as an actor is that the only thing you really control is what projects you agree to do. 

“I work predominantly in independent film and that was always my dream,” she explains. 

One of her favorite parts of indie filmmaking is the element of risk.

“The cool thing about independent cinema is when you’re working with someone like Kristen and these other wonderful directors, you don’t know if it’s going to work or not but we all feel the same bone and dust. Our intentions are the same,” she continues. “You hope this is a long road and there are all of these pressures to ejaculate yourself, for lack of a better term, around the world and it’s very easy to let that happen when you’re younger, even if you feel something is not for you.”

If other actors have another approach, that’s fine with her. 

“You should go out and have fun and earn money, and take care of yourself and the people you love,” she says. “I just can’t do shit. I’d rather find another way to make money than do that.”

Imogen Poots on Her Emotional Investment in The Chronology of Water

Poots has played plenty of great roles — one of her most acclaimed films was for Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 horror film Green Room — but is on a career high thanks to roles in Nia DaCosta’s new Hedda and The Chronology of Water.

Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, healing, survival, pain, sexuality, queerness and art. Anything but chronological, the film is a scrapbook of raw emotions, and a story Poots has long wanted to tell.

She was attached to the film for roughly two-and-a-half years before Stewart was able to bring all of the pieces together to create the project she wanted to make, without concessions. 

Poots said she appreciated her director’s journey from acting in a massive franchise like the Twilight saga to making a very personal film, largely about interior emotions.

“To be seen by someone in this way and be given the chance means so much that I get emotional and it’s ineffable to talk about,” Poots says. “I’m very proud of this movie, and I’m very proud of Kristen, and it feels separate from other things I’ve done because of that emotional investment and love for the person I made it with.”

One of the greatest acting challenges is that she delivers most of her performance in silence. 

“You shouldn’t ever really play tone or images. It’s more like capturing the life of a person. I wasn’t thinking about fragments other than maybe abstract shots,” Poots says. “One of my favorite things about Lydia is that she can write and she’s thinking all the time. There is this idea that an introvert is not thinking at all, but of course an introvert is often thinking the whole time. You can mistake silence for not thinking, which in this day and age is a real problem.”

Audience members have been approaching her after screenings to share their own stories. Poots says Stewart was adamant that the character in the film isn’t Lidia the real person, but a fusion of that person, Stewart and Poots who is meant to reflect every woman. 

“It’s incredible to see those reactions happen but it’s also nice because there is nothing about this movie that feels indulgent,” Poots says. “We made this and people are having reactions to it in their bodies and finding release from it. When you go to the movies and spend your money, you want to see something that does something and matters to you. That this does that meant a lot. That’s cinema.”

Imogen Poots on Her Training to Play Lidia Yuknavitch

Shot on film by cinematographer Corey Waters, The Chronology of Water presents fragmented images and sounds, juxtaposed with memories and present-day reality. Poots’ character, Lidia, emerges in bits and pieces.

“One of the things that makes Kristen such a great filmmaker is she’s thinking about the edit,” says Poots. “It’s quite old-school; a lot of ‘70s directors were like that.”

To embody Lidia for the intense six-week shoot, Poots carved out a swimmer’s back through extensive training in New York City pools. She got a hernia, but feels grateful for the opportunity. 

She also read everything she could by Yuknavitch, and by the authors who influenced her. And she corresponded with the writer, though they didn’t meet before filming. 

“Her writing reads in quite a beatnik fashion, with a lack of punctuation,” Poots explains. “It was amazing to see she was telling the same story again and again. Like most writers are, she’s sort of orbiting the same themes, and she’s on a quest.”

Poots appreciates that the film puts audiences in sometimes uncomfortable positions, and asks questions, rather than recreating Lidia’s journey in a “tame and clinical” fashion. 

“It’s important these indie, independent films get made,” she adds. “It’s cool to give people a chance to be excited again and have the kinds of films we had growing up. Audiences are far more intelligent and imaginative than the current industry believes them to be.”

The Chronology of Water is now in theaters, from The Forge.

Main image: Imogen Poots trained to develop a swimmer’s back for The Chronology of Water. The Forge.

1. The Hangover (2009)

Let’s kick things off with a film that redefined the comedy genre: The Hangover. Set against the backdrop of Las Vegas, this movie follows a group of friends who travel to the city for a bachelor party. After a wild night of debauchery, they wake up to find the groom missing and no recollection of the previous night’s events. One of the most entertaining aspects of The Hangover is Alan, played by Zach Galifianakis, who manages to fund the rescue of their friend Doug. With a mix of luck and his unique approach to the game, Alan finds himself at the blackjack table, where he leverages his quirky charm and unorthodox strategies. His ability to read the room, count cards and make bold bets leads to a surprising winning streak that completely surprises his friends. This subplot not only adds humor and excitement to the film but remind us that sometimes, a little risk can lead to the success you need, even in the most chaotic situations. The camaraderie and resilience of the characters make this film a classic, reminding us that sometimes, the best stories come from the wildest nights. The film brilliantly balances humor and chaos.

2. Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Next up is Ocean’s Eleven, a stylish heist film that combines wit, charm, and thought-provoking moves, not only on the tables but away from them too. This remake of the 1960 classic features a star-studded ensemble led by George Clooney as Danny Ocean, who assembles a team of skilled con artists to pull off an audacious plan: robbing three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously. The film is a masterclass in planning and execution, with each character bringing their unique talents to the table. The tension builds as they navigate the glitzy world of the casinos, where every move counts. The thrill of the heist, coupled with the glamorous setting, makes this film a riveting exploration of high-stakes high-reward theory. With clever twists and a satisfying conclusion, Ocean’s Eleven reminds us that with the right strategy, success can happen. 

3. 21 (2008)

Based on a true story, 21 takes us into the heart of the world of blackjack card counting. The film follows a group of MIT students who are trained by their professor to count cards and beat the casinos at their own game. Led by the ambitious Ben Campbell, played by Jim Sturgess, the team heads to Las Vegas, where they deploy their skills at various tables. Popular in 2008, live, in-person betting was the norm, but behaviours are changing, and people now much prefer to use online platforms Sweeps Coins Casino, from the comfort of their own home. The adrenaline rush of their gambling exploits is palpable, as they win big but also face the consequences of their actions. The film captures the excitement of gambling while also delving into the ethical dilemmas associated with manipulating the system. With a blend of suspense and drama, 21 showcases how intelligence and strategy can lead to triumph.

4. Rounders (1998)

*Must Watch*

Rounders is a cult classic that delves deep into the underground poker scene. Starring Matt Damon as Mike McDermott, a talented poker player who is trying to leave behind his gambling days to pursue a more stable life, the film explores the tension between passion and responsibility. When Mike’s friend, played by Edward Norton, gets into trouble with a dangerous loan shark, Mike is pulled back into the world of high-stakes poker. The film beautifully captures the thrill of the game, the strategies involved, and the risks that come with gambling. As Mike navigates through life, the stakes get higher, and the tension builds. Rounders is not just about gambling; it’s about friendship, loyalty, and the pursuit of success against all odds. The film’s sharp dialogue and intense performances make it a must-watch for any film fanatic.

5. Casino Royale (2006)

Finally, we have Casino Royale, a thrilling entry in the James Bond franchise where every move can have serious consequences. Daniel Craig makes his debut as the iconic spy, tasked with thwarting a terrorist financier during a gripping game of poker. The film is a visual spectacle. There are scenes that are filled with tension, strategy, and unexpected twists, making viewers feel every heartbeat as more and more drama is added to the situation. What sets Casino Royale apart is its blend of action, romance, and the psychological warfare that takes place at the poker table. Bond’s journey through the world of gambling is not just about winning money; it’s about outsmarting his opponents and securing the safety of the world. This film perfectly encapsulates the thrill of overcoming your opponent, making it a standout in the genre.

Gambling Responsibility

While these films portray the excitement and allure of gambling, it’s essential to recognize the importance of responsible gambling. The thrill of winning can be amazing, but it’s crucial to approach gambling with caution and awareness. Understanding your limits, setting budgets, and knowing when to walk away are vital aspects of enjoying gambling as a form of entertainment rather than a way to solve financial problems. Many casinos and online platforms promote responsible gaming practices, offering tools and resources to help players make informed decisions. By gambling responsibly, you can ensure that your gaming experiences remain enjoyable and safe.

These films showcase the diverse and thrilling world of gambling, each offering a unique perspective on success and the risks involved. These movies remind us that the world of gambling is not just about luck; it’s about strategy, and sometimes, a little chaos. These films are highly ranked amongst film enthusiasts and a must-watch if you have yet to see any of them.

Blake Slatkin started performing Ed Sheeran and John Mayer songs on his guitar as a 10-year-old. Now he's in the Oscar conversation for "Drive," a song he recorded with Sheeran and Mayer for the soundtrack of Apple's Brad Pitt racing drama F1.

His advice for people who want to be musicians for a living?

"Just be a fan. Be the biggest fan of music, be a lover of music, and work harder than anyone," he says in an interview you can see above or watch here.

"The best advice I was ever given was by my mentor, and he said, 'You have to think of your career like a snowball, and you just keep packing on and packing on and packing on. And eventually it's big enough that it just has to roll down the hill.'"

That mentor was record producer Benny Blanco, for whom Slatkin worked as an intern before becoming one of music's most successful producers himself. He didn't play Blanco his music for four years, because he wanted to make sure it was good enough.

'Drive' Producer Blake Slatkin on What a Record Producer Does

Slatkin, who grew up in Los Angeles, started out as a fan himself — with aspirations to be more.

"I just wanted to be a rock star. And honestly, it was Ed and John and their music, who made me pick up a guitar in the first place. They both inspired me, and I used to cover their songs, and I learned guitar by copying them. ... I used to play on stage and sell tickets to my friends, my teachers and stuff, and do little gigs around town.

"And then when I found out what a producer was, and I found out that there are people making all of my favorite music that I didn't even know about, and they were behind the scenes, and they could, like, switch genres and do this for years and years — the second I even found out what that was, it was like, 'That's what I'm gonna do.' There's never anything else I wanted to do."

Being a producer has worked out very well for him.

Slatkin's collaborators have included Justin Bieber, Lizzo, Lil NAS X, Gracie Abrams, Omer Fedi, 24kGldn, The Kid Laroi and many more. He won a Record of the Year Grammy for Lizzo’s About Damn Time.

For "Drive," Slatkin assembled and played in a supergroup for the song that also included Dave Grohl on drums, Pino Palladino on bass and Rami Jaffee on keys.

Slatkin says the role of a record producer is simply "to make sure that the best song possible happens, by any means necessary to get there — whether that's by assembling the right group of people, whether that's doing it yourself, whether that's being a therapist to an artist and having a conversation so meaningful that they end up writing a perfect song all themselves."

He adds: "It's completely different with every artist I work with. And that's why I love my job, is because no day is the same," he adds.

Blake Slatkin on Making 'Drive' for F1

Making Drive started with just getting Sheeran and Mayer, longtime friends, into a room together. Their first efforts were pretty similar to what ended up on the record.

"Ed said, 'John, give me a rock riff.' The first thing John played on guitar was that riff," says Slatkin. "Then the first thing Ed sang into the little scratch microphone was the verse, and then he went into the hook, and and that's the demo that we came away with, with just the melodies and some scratch lyrics. Later, Ed and I finished the lyrics. John and I worked on the production."

The song closes out F1, and it's a clean, exhilarating anthem that feels like a wave of release and a fresh start, packed with promise and adrenaline. You can listen to it here.

"I try the hardest to make it sound like we don't try hard," Slatkin says. "That's the biggest thing — making it seem like it's like a magic trick.... making it seem so effortless and like everything just happens when you want it to. But getting to that point is hard. It's work."

Main image: Blake Slatkin. MovieMaker.