One scene in the special offers viewers a glimpse into the writers room, which is anchored by a large white board filled with notes and diagrams the writers used in their process of scripting “Loki.” Included on the board is an eight-point outline of a montage that didn’t make it into the final show, transcribed below by the close-watching eyes at /Film: The series’ third episode brought a poetic acknowledgment of Loki’s bisexuality, where Loki says he enjoys “a little bit of both” princes and princesses....

Eight years ago, finicky movie star Christian Bale was so impressed with Ingelsby’s script for Pennsylvania rust-belt drama “Out of the Furnace” (2013) that he signed on to play Rodney Baze, a stoic, hard-working factory welder trapped in an unforgiving steel mill town. And Ben Affleck ran with Ingelsby’s grieving, self-destructive, alcoholic high school basketball coach in “The Way Back” (2020), directed by Gavin O’Connor. Both movies feel rooted in the real world, as does “Mare of Easttown,” which grabbed the interest of Oscar-winner Kate Winslet (“The Reader”), whose commitment got the series greenlit at HBO....

“Steven had really transormed into Jacob, and I remember truly understanding the weight that my father had, and I thought, ‘What he is doing right now is very magical,’” said Lee Isaac Chung, who drew upon his own immigrant childhood growing up in Arkansas to write the script. Steven Yeun turned to his own memories of his father leaving behind a life as an architect in Seoul to come to the United States....

Season 2 director Andrew Dominik told Collider that had “Mindhunter” continued for a third installment, the show would have taken place in Los Angeles. “One of them was going to be hooking up with Jonathan Demme and the other one was going to be hooking up with Michael Mann,” Dominik said. “And it was all going to be about profiling making it into the sort of zeitgeist, the public consciousness....

“We were cognizant of the fact that the animation [from ’98] was very successful, but Niki had a new take,” Walker said. “It was important that Mulan discovers that she has this inner power and strength, and that she needs to release it and be proud of the moment when she reveals herself as a woman.” The team built the visual design around Mulan’s journey, always centered in the frame, inspired by symmetry in Chinese history, cinema (“Raise the Red Lantern” and “The Last Emperor”), art, and architecture....

Stephan James leads the charge as LaMarcus James, a quarterback who heeds a call to social justice, egged on and supported by his religious friend Emmett Sunday (Alexander Ludwig). Opening with a 72-hour countdown to the National Championship game, the film opens with the two friends reciting scripture across their gray hotel room, psyching each other out for what’s to come. Unbeknownst to Coach Lazor (a well-cast J.K. Simmons), his star QB is about to send a tweet that will throw his weekend — and hopes for his first title — into chaos....

“Nope” is found money for theaters. As a non-franchise film (though filmmaker Jordan Peele, like Quentin Tarantino, qualifies as an auteur franchise), it is among six original entries in this week’s top 10. That’s a rarity any time of the year, much less normally sequel-heavy July. Its initial take is a bit lower than the projected $50 million. We’ll need to see the final weekend total, but as of now it is $10,000 behind “Uncharted” as the best non-franchise debut take for any film since Peele’s own “Us” in early 2019....

On Wednesday, Allen will appear at a special event honoring the film’s 40th anniversary, held to benefit two local western Massachusetts arts organizations close to her heart: the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Berkshire International Film Festival (if you’ve ever seen Allen darting around another festival, she’s likely there to help scout for BIFF, her hometown festival she’s long been associated with). Has it really been 40 years already? It doesn’t feel that way to Allen....

Season 2 of the FX on Hulu series premieres with two back-to-back episodes on Wednesday, August 3. The series, co-created by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, picks up with the teen foursome positioning for their move to California. As Elora (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Willie (Paulina Alexis) prepare to run away together after the death of their best friend, the gang continues their petty crime schemes to earn money for the trip....

“Coco” story artist Octavio Rodriguez served as co-director, Julie Lockhart (co-founder and president of Locksmith) produced with Lara Breay (“Penguins of Madagascar”), VFX studio DNEG (“Dune”) made its first animated feature, and the voice cast also includes Olivia Colman (“The Crown”), Ed Helms (“The Office”), Justice Smith (“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”), Rob Delaney (“Deadpool 2“), Kylie Cantrall (“Gabby Duran and the Unsittables”), Ricardo Hurtado (“The Goldbergs”), Marcus Scribner (“Black-ish”), and Thomas Barbusca (“Chad”)....

Mack, the former “Smallville” actress, was one of Raniere’s most devout acolytes, and the women’s group was DOS, a subsidiary of NXIVM revealed in 2017 to be branding and trafficking women as sex slaves. Peck said she never answered the recruiter’s emails, but a year later Peck heard from the woman again. “She reached out and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I was in a cult and I didn’t know it....

Animation and children’s programming long have been at the forefront of disability representation. They’ve never solely been focused on introducing disability in children’s lives early — more often than not, they are creating fully-fleshed out characters to help children who might be disabled themselves. I talked in the first part of this series about watching “The Wild Thornberries” as a kid and seeing the character of Bethany, who used a wheelchair....

But it seemed like “She-Hulk” was holding back, that the early episodes were the proverbial Jen Walters (Tatiana Maslany) refusing to engage with her true power. In later episodes, especially the finale, “She-Hulk” hulks out on meta comedy and commitment to the bit — with maximum payoff. Episode 9, “Whose Show Is This Anyway?” catches up with Jen after she hulks out at a gala. She’s lost her job, moved back in with her parents, and remains the target of online (male) harassers at the website Intelligencia....

The film was thought to be lost, but a highly successful Kickstarter campaign raised over $22,000 to restore it. Backers of the campaign will finally see the effort pay off this fall when Deaf Crocodile Films’ new restoration of “Solomon King,” complete with new color grading and significant audio improvements, premieres at Fantastic Fest in September. With today’s release of the new trailer, many are taking the opportunity to appreciate what this means for the film preservation community....

“The film is tackling a few heavy existential questions,” said Batiste. “Where does our soul come from? What is our purpose in life? And I had a lot of experience as a musician that I could bring to Joe, trying to get his big break. I wanted to find some jazz music that had an ethereal and very universal, accessible form with melodies and harmonies that had that same spirit....

An audacious near-future pop fever dream under the guise of blockbuster aesthetics, “Southland Tales” starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a movie star who keeps forgetting his past, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a psychic reality show star with a background in porn, and Sean William Scott as a racist police officer and his politically active twin. It all made perfect sense in Kelly’s mind as a complex response to a paranoid, post-9/11 America....

“I had it all,” Williams laments in the film’s opening voiceover, clumsily calling up the wide variety of films that open with the similarly toned (and now meme’d to death) “you’re probably wondering how I got here?” query. The framing is cliche, setting up an unnecessary narrative artificiality to what’s clearly a real heartache. But once Leberecht throws the narrative back into his engaging subject’s hands to recount his turbulent life, from childhood to his time at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic), the documentary finds surer footing....

As reported by Vulture: “Nothing firm has been decided about a second season of ‘Squid Game,’ but Bajaria sounds upbeat about the prospect and suggests that it would depend on [creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s] schedule and his desires for how to proceed. ‘He has a film and other things he’s working on,’ she says, noting the creator likes to collaborate with ‘other writers’ who might come onboard for a new chapter....

In the Netflix documentary “Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story,” pro skater Leo Baker kickflips the script on this tedious debate, shredding preconceived notions about trans athletes with the same swagger he uses to attack the half-pipe. Beginning in 2019, the film follows Baker and his teammates on the U.S.A. National Team when they find out skateboarding will become an Olympic sport for the first time in the 2020 games....

“Succession” is too smart to try to top itself — not this soon, and not when it comes to “L to the O.G.” That thought was running through my head while Kendall (Jeremy Strong) prepped a karaoke rendition of Billy Joel’s “Honesty” for his 40th birthday bash, teasing an “epic” sequel to last season’s monument to mortification at his dad’s 50th anniversary party. Kendall is a proven stage presence, no doubt, but with the rhyme scheme still fresh in everyone’s minds (“A-1 ratings, 80K wine / Never going to stop baby, fuck father time”), how could Kendall (let alone the “Succession” writing staff) expect an encore to live up to the first show?...