The Machines Are Back: Hollywood Runs Out of Ideas Again

There is a version of this week in cinema that feels like progress. Paweł Pawlikowski's *Fatherland* — the film that earned him best director at Cannes — opens the Sarajevo Film Festival in August, with Sandra Hüller at its centre, and the whole thing centres on Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika. That's a sentence with weight in it. That's cinema doing what cinema is supposed to do: finding the architecture inside a life and making you feel the walls.

And then there is the other version of this week, which is the version we actually got.

A Britney Spears biopic is in development at Universal, produced by the *New Girl* co-creator and the director of *Wicked*. The logic is nakedly financial — *Michael* made nearly a billion dollars globally and every studio in Hollywood immediately looked at its IP shelf and started calculating. Britney's story is genuinely complex, genuinely painful, genuinely worth examining. Which is exactly why a machine built to replicate the *Michael* formula is probably the wrong instrument for it. Jon M. Chu is talented. Liz Meriwether is sharp. The combination might surprise me. But the origin story — we made this because *that* made money — will sit underneath every frame.

Meanwhile, Bradley Cooper's 1960s-set Ocean's 11 prequel has added Vicky Krieps, George MacKay, and Omar Sy to its cast, which is an objectively excellent group of humans to put in a room together. Krieps especially — there is nobody working right now who does controlled unravelling quite like her. If Cooper gives her something real to do with it, that's a film worth caring about.

Christopher Nolan, on *The Odyssey*, says using modern English was a no-brainer because he wanted something earthy. He adds that it might bite him. It won't. Nothing Nolan does bites him. He has constructed a persona so impenetrable that even his gambles read as inevitabilities before the film releases. Whether that's genius or brand management by this point is a question I ask at 1am and don't answer.

And *Terminator 2* returns to cinemas for its 35th anniversary in August. Some films don't need re-releasing because they never actually left — T2 lives in the body of cinema permanently, the liquid metal still moving, the morphing still unsettling, the John Connor arc still the most efficiently constructed character turn of its era. Go see it on the biggest screen you can find. That's not nostalgia. That's just correct.

The week belongs to Pawlikowski and Hüller, even if most of the money is pointed somewhere else entirely.