EXCLUSIVE: Ted Lasso‘s Juno Temple is set to lead Intimacy Party, a high-concept ensemble rom-com marking the feature directorial debut of Courtney Hoffman.

Written by Hoffman and Paul Kruse, Intimacy Party follows Cleo Kauffman, a woman determined to save her relationship by recreating the intimacy party where she first met her fiancé, only to discover she fell for the wrong guest.

Others in the cast include Richa Moorjani (Fargo), Meredith Hagner (Search Party), Michiel Huisman (Game of Thrones), Chris Pang (Crazy Rich Asians), Brandon Kyle Goodman (Big Mouth), Miles Gutierrez-Riley (Agatha All Along) and Patrick Renna (The Sandlot).

Hoffman, whose directorial work includes American Horror Stories and the upcoming Kaitlyn Dever-led feature The Sisters of Scott County, wrote Intimacy Party from personal experience.

“Before I fell in love with my best friend, I was trying everything to save a relationship that no longer worked,” she said. “That crossroads ultimately became Intimacy Party. It’s deeply personal, but I hope it’s also universal — a celebration of what can happen when we let go of control and allow ourselves to be truly seen.”

Currently in production in Los Angeles with a California tax incentive, the film is produced by Delirio Films’ Christopher Leggett and Rafael Marmor, alongside Jesse Schiller and Hoffman. Amanda Massetti and Bri Hennessey of Pasta & Tacos Productions are exec producers.

Delirio’s Leggett commented, “From the first read, it was clear Hoffman was a filmmaker with a singular point of view. We’re thrilled to help launch her feature directing career with this extraordinary cast and creative team. I have no doubt she’ll become one of the most distinctive new voices in filmmaking.”

Calling Intimacy Party “wildly entertaining and emotionally honest, with characters who are messy, complicated and deeply human,” Pasta & Tacos co-founder Massetti said, “[Hoffman] has a singular ability to find humor in vulnerability while exploring bigger questions about love, identity and the stories we tell ourselves.”

Co-founder Hennessey added, “It’s exactly the kind of bold, character-driven storytelling we created P&T to champion, and we’re thrilled to help bring Courtney’s vision to audiences.”

A four-time Emmy nominee who scored three noms for her role as Keeley Jones in Apple’s Ted Lasso, Temple can currently be seen reprising in Season 4. Recent projects include Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman, Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and the animated feature Swapped, which this year became Netflix’s eighth most popular film of all time. Most recently, Temple wrapped on Apple’s upcoming limited series The Husbands, adapted from the New York Times bestselling novel by Holly Gramazio. She is repped by UTA, Maison 2, B-Side Management and Lichter, Grossman, Nichols.

Hoffman made her directorial debut with the Western short The Good Time Girls, starring Laura Dern, and continues her focus on female-led genre and action storytelling with The Sisters of Scott County, a ’70s-set trucker film starring Kaitlyn Dever. She directed American Horror Stories‘ Season 3 finale for FX and, as a writer, has developed and sold original projects to HBO Max, Paramount, Sony, Peacock, FX and Freeform. Prior to her career as a filmmaker, Hoffman was a lauded costume designer with credits including Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. She is repped by Daniel Cohen at Brillstein Entertainment Partners and Hannah Mulderink at Goodman, Genow, Schenkman.

Moorjani is repped by UTA, Anonymous and Hayes Robbins at Goodman, Genow, Schenkman; Hagner by UTA, Sushkin/Karshan Management and Felker McGinnis & Ryan; Huisman by UTA, Authentic Talent and Literary Management, Conway van Gelder Grant and Peikoff Mahan Law Office; Pang by Buchwald, Matt Sheldon at Stride Management and Ryan LeVine at Jackoway Austen Tyerman; Goodman by WME, Julia Bodner and Kate Tressel at Envisionary Management and Ashley Briskman at Yorn Levine Barnes; Gutierrez-Riley by CESD Talent, Samantha Stoller at Brillstein and Ryan LeVine at Jackoway Austin; and Renna by John Griffin of Griffin Talent.

David Krumholtz is clarifying where he stands in his career after announcing he was taking an “indefinite break” from acting.

The Supergirl and Oppenheimer actor took to social media to explain what led to the decision.

“Firstly, I am very well. And I feel very loved,” he shared in an Instagram post. “Secondly, I never used the word ‘retiring’ or ‘quitting.’ Instead, I said that I decided to put my career on hold.”

He continued, “I don’t expect anyone to understand, but the outpouring of support for my decision has been deeply heartwarming. I am wildly grateful, as more than one of my biggest dreams have come true as a result of being an actor. Grateful to all who support and believe in me.”

Krumholtz said he is in a moment “where the weight of those dreams and ambitions has become surprisingly oppressive,” adding, “That’s a me problem, not a Hollywood as a whole problem. There are no rules that guarantee success, but I know this: an amazing career in this business consists of a small handful of triumphs, but not without a mountain of disappointments. I love my mountain of disappointments, I do, but I’m human and my mountain is starting to sting more than it used to.”

“Need time to figure that out, let it heal,” he added. “My mental health is vital to my family. My career has run the gamut. I’m in disbelief. But I find myself at a crossroads between the inherent self involvement being a professional actor requires, and a burning desire to give more of myself to others in need, in whatever way I can. And so, for the time being, I’m pursuing that goal. There’s still more work to come. Stuff to be seen. And as always, I really hope you enjoy what I’ve put out there. Just,… gimme a sec.”

Krumholtz previously took to Threads to say he was “frustrated, fed up, [and] fried,” posting that he had decided to put his acting career on hold.

“I kinda sorta put my acting career on hold the other day. It’s been something I’ve been petrified to do for years,” Krumholtz said in a now-deleted post on Threads. “Specifically, the fear was that I’d go broke and not be able to handle being out of the game. But I sent the definitive email.”

Read Krumholtz’s Instagram post below.

The good news about Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth entry in the hit horror film franchise created by Leigh Whannell and James Wan, is that it deals with a new set of victims. After all, we can all agree that the poor Lambert family has been through enough in the previous installments.

The bad news about the new Insidious movie is that, well, it’s still an Insidious movie. Which means that we have to sit through the spectacle of some unlucky individuals dealing with the Further, that purgatorial netherworld inhabited by demons and the dead that forms the basic mythology of the series.

It’s never a good sign when a horror film stops dead in its tracks to explain things to a main character and, by extension, the audience. But that’s exactly what happens here when the central character Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor), a single mother with a young daughter, visits Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), a tattoo artist and part-time medium. Clare conjures up the spirit of now-deceased recurring character Elise Rainier (series mainstay Lin Shaye) to explain exactly what the hell is going on with Clare’s mysterious encounters with three ghostly-looking alta kockers who show up at the most inopportune times. By the time the lengthy scene is over, you’ll wish you had been taking notes.

It turns out that Gemma, whose mother died under horrific circumstances when she was a little girl (an incident harrowingly depicted in the opening sequence), is not only someone who has the ability to enter the Further, which is bad enough, but also a “Courier,” meaning that she can transport things from there to the physical world. It’s a rare talent that greatly interests Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a cult-leader entity who very much wants to escape his confines. To that end, he enlists the services of the aforementioned elderly trio, his Acolytes, to move in next door to Gemma and move things along.   

Director-screenwriter Jacob Chase, who has experience with this sort of material thanks to his 2020 horror film Come Play, establishes tension in the opening moments and steadily ratchets it up from there. He certainly knows his way around jump scares, both of the cheap variety (cue the sudden loud noises!) and the more thoughtful kind. His skills are evident in the film’s two most effective sequences — the first involving Gemma venturing into a pillow fort constructed by her daughter Maya (Island Austin, very convincing at looking utterly terrified) that turns into an endless labyrinth featuring demons at every corner.

In the second, Gemma, a dentist by trade, attends to an elderly patient, one of the Acolytes, who clearly has not been paying attention to oral hygiene. The ensuing encounter, probably the most gruesome cinematic dental scene since Marathon Man, will scare you into scheduling a deep cleaning post-haste.  

Otherwise, Insidious: Out of the Further proves routine in its elaborate plot machinations that remind you how tiresome a place the Further can be. There are plenty of Easter egg references to the previous films, including the reappearance of numerous demonic entities and the Red Door that serves as an entranceway to the Further’s various portals.

The most notable carryover, of course, is Shaye’s now iconic character of psychic paranormal investigator Elise, who didn’t let her death in the original 2011 film deter her from appearing in all the follow-ups. She pops up here again to guide Gemma through her travails, carrying a lantern like an otherworld Diogenes and clearly taking no crap from a spectral punk like Cyrus. When Gemma thanks her after being rescued at one point, Elise casually responds, “It’s what I do.”

After a while the film’s sustained creepiness gives way to self-parody, with all the grotesquely made-up performers portraying the demonic figures starting to look like exhausted Comic-Con attendees after a very long weekend. It all mainly serves to indicate that this is a series that has long reached the point of steadily diminishing returns.