Charles Bramesco

The one good thing that the United States Congress has ever done was pass the National Film Preservation Act in 1988, establishing a National Film Registry in the Library of Congress wherein moving pictures deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” can be securely preserved. The National Film Preservation Board can induct up to 25 new entries into the archives each year, and today Deadline brings the news of which movies will effectively achieve immortality as the Class of 2016. Lots of enduring, worthy works have made the cut, though it is with a solemn heart that I must once again report the egregious continued snub of Pauly Shore comedy vehicle Bio-Dome.

The wheels of progress turn slowly out in Hollywood. Stars can be minted overnight, sure, but the actual process of production can churn along at an extremely gradual pace; a screenwriter, for instance, can spend years trying to sell a script as it floats around the purgatory of studio heads’ desk piles. As such, every showbiz scribe dreams of landing their latest unproduced project on The Black List, an annual roundup of the hottest up-for-grabs screenplays that provides them with a highly valuable bump in publicity. In recent years, such fine films as Manchester by the Sea, Miss Sloane, Spotlight, and The End of the Tour have all begun on The Black List, and yesterday brought the official announcement of 2016’s lineup.

One of the greatest advantages of living in or around a major metropolitan area, at least for cinephiles, is the abundance of repertory screening options. Independently run theaters will run older, foreign or rare movies to impassioned audiences who may not have had access to the material otherwise, balancing their filmic diet with a healthy balance of new releases and classics. Sure, pert near everything can be found online if you’re willing to investigate some shadier torrenting sites. But the experience of seeing a movie in a dark theater on the big screen, especially a nicely lived-in celluloid print and all its endearing pops and scratches — that makes a difference.

It has become increasingly apparent that the best thing a revival of a tired ‘80s pop-culture artifact can be is the neo-21 Jump Street, judging by the new trailer for the Dwayne Johnson-fronted Baywatch. The parallels are striking: we’ve got the central odd couple in the Rock’s bombastic beach hero and Zac Efron’s hard-partying young gun, light meta touches about “reviving the brand,” some playful winks to the core goofiness of the source material (the “why does she always look like she’s running in slow motion?” line may be the best of the clip), even a scene where our heroes are dressed down by a furious black cop. You may call it derivative, but I call it a good start.

The road to the Oscars is long and winding. Though everyone’s wrapping up their coverage of 2016, formulating lists and bestowing awards, we’ve still got a little under three months until the Academy Awards telecast actually airs on February 26. But some categories do get off and running in advance of the official nominations announcement on January 24, with larger slates of films placed on a shortlist from which five selections are then culled. The race for the Best Documentary Feature prize officially began yesterday, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released their fifteen picks for the cream of this year’s nonfiction crop.

As limey wizard Newt Scamander continues to traipse about America’s magical underground at the cinema with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, another enchanted British import prepares to cross the Atlantic. Just because mega-selling novels have long since ended, the Harry Potter business hasn’t stopped booming, and its latest gold mine is the stage show Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The production has routinely sold out showings at the Palace Theatre in London’s storied West End, and the producers are now gearing up to bring the play stateside in the hopes that their fabulous success will follow them to the Great White Way.

Screenwriting can be a thankless lot. Aside from visionaries on the level of Charlie Kaufman or Aaron Sorkin who cultivate their own celebrity with distinctive storytelling, most scribes labor in obscurity while actors and directors get the credit and accolades. The work of a writer takes place in darkness and isolation, fueled by a carefully calibrated combination of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and anxiety. But that thankless lot gets a whole lot less thankless when the writer stands to become a multi-millionaire once he completes his efforts.

Whether he’s handing a plastic bag full of feces to a dinner party host, trying to coax Ron Paul into a hotel-room gay sex scandal, or getting face-raped by the massive phallus of an elephant while hiding inside the cavernous vagina of a second elephant, Sacha Baron Cohen’s a born button-pusher. His unending search for shock value has now led him to Denmark, the home nation of the excruciating comedy of discomfort Klown. A new item from Deadline notes that the prank-happy provocateur will bring his talents for awkwardness to a remake of the taboo-busting Danish cringe-fest, and more specifically, that foreign distribution rights have been snapped up by Annapurna International.

For decades, Robert Downey Sr. has been cherished as a key figure in the American film underground, directing unabashedly countercultural pictures during the ’60s and ’70s, and carrying right on through to the present day. (Most famous of all was 1969’s Putney Swope, a razor-sharp satire of advertising and race on Madison Avenue that billed itself as the “Truth and Soul Movie.”) Downey’s showbiz background got his good-lookin’ son into the industry from a young age, but a new item from TheWrap today indicates that Junior will soon join the real family business and take the director’s chair for the very first time.

Minecraft, an open-space computer game in which players can build and create anything their heart can desire, has amassed a gigantic following among youngsters who use their imaginations to give birth to expansive worlds. Universally beloved among the world’s middle-schoolers, the game has spawned every merchandising tie-in under the sun, from pixelated foam swords to T-shirts with snappy slogans to lunch boxes. And now, the youth phenomenon will permeate the mainstream even further through a feature film adaptation. The project was announced in 2014, they landed a director in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator Rob McElhenney in 2015, and this year, they’ve made moves to lock down their first star.