Festival favorites Musk, Misty Green and Fjord debut in limited release in a crowded indie market with awards season rolling along.

Bleecker Street’s documentary by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney opens in four theaters in New York (Angelika and Lincoln Square, and LA (AMC Century City and Burbank). The buzzy portrait of Tesla, X and SpaceX chief Elon Musk premiered at Venice to critical acclaim, currently sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (off 28 reviews, see Deadline’s here). The world’s richest person, MAGA donor, chainsaw waver, baby daddy and would-be Mars colonizer takes a thrashing. He didn’t participate in the doc and has trashed it on X but wanders across the frames as CGI avatar speaking words that Musk has spoken.

Weekend Q&A screenings with Gibney were sold out in NYC and selling fast in Los Angeles, featuring producer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ronan Farrow, journalist Zoe Schiffer, and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who shares a child with Musk and appears in the film. She refused to accept a financial settlement after her split with the multi-billionaire that would have required her to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

The doc, which also screened at fests from TIFF to Zurich, Hamptons, Mill Valley Film Festival, Beyondfest and more, is a hefty 225 minutes long – plus a ten-minute intermission – which limits showtimes. Expands to about 300 screens next week.

Musk has converged with Sony’s wide release this weekend of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a sequel to The Social Network focused on the dangerous, sordid side of Facebook under founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a damning look at OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman isn’t coming out until December but has been making headlines since its world premiere at the New York Film Festival this week.

Filmmakers clearly have big tech on their minds, especially AI, which is everywhere in the national conversation heading into the mid-term elections.

Neon launches Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning drama Fjord starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve at four theaters in NY and LA. A devout Romanian Norwegian couple named Gheorghius resettle in a village in a distant fjord where they become close to their neighbors, the Halbergs. Their children bond. When adolescent Elia Gheorghiu shows up at school with bruises, the community questions the traditional education the Gheorghiu children are getting from their parents. Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh at 91%. Deadline’s review here.

The film reps the second Palme d’Or for Mungiu and the seventh consecutive win for Neon. The film also took the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes and is Romania’s Oscar entry for Best International Feature.

A24 debuts Chris Rock’s Misty Green at six theaters across New York (Lincoln Square, Alamo, Union Square) and LA (Grove, Burbank, Century City). The TIFF-premiering original indie drama has a first-time lead in Rosalind Eleazar and sees Rock as a filmmaker returning to the director’s chair after more than a decade. Eleazar stars as a talented actress whose career has stalled fighting for a second act years after her Hollywood breakthrough. See Deadline review.

Cohen Media Group is out with Winter Of The Crow starring Lesley Manville in 30+ markets and 63 screens, a mix of AMCs, Landmarks and arthouses. Manville’s U.K. professor Dr. Joan Andrews is invited to Warsaw to give a lecture in 1981 just as martial law is being imposed. As chaos engulfs the city, she witnesses a murder by the secret police and becomes a fugitive on the run fighting for her life and those of the students with whom she has allied. Directed and co-written by Kasia Adamik from a short story by Nobel and Booker Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk. Premiered at TIFF 2025. Agnieszka Holland (Adamik’s mother) is an executive producer. At RT 94% off 16 reviews.

More to come

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell were a perfect double act at the BFI London Film Festival premiere of Wild Horse Nine Friday night.

The pair livened up a British audience with a well-received screening of the film at the city’s Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank, though both actors declined to talk to too many reporters on the carpet.

Rockwell said on stage about what drew him to the film: “Martin’s annoyingly handsome but very talented,” as laughter erupted across the room. “What drew me to the film is reading the script,” added a polite but enigmatic Malkovich — sporting a beanie, no less.

Malkovich, riding the wave of immense Oscar buzz, has already claimed Venice’s prestigious Volpi Cup for best actor for his performance. British-born Irish filmmaker McDonagh, who has taken Wild Horse Nine on the festival circuit but is finally on home turf at the London Film Festival, told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet that he thinks Brits will enjoy the movie’s dark humor. He was spotted sharing a kiss with long-time partner Phoebe Waller-Bridge shortly before the lights went down.

Wild Horse Nine stars Malkovich and Rockwell as Chris and Lee, longtime CIA partners stationed in Santiago, Chile who are dispatched to Easter Island by their bureau chief (Steve Buscemi). Against the surreal backdrop of the island’s monumental Moai statues, the pair begin reckoning with their murky shared past. At the same time, Chris forms an unexpected bond with two rebellious Chilean students, played by Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas — an encounter that threatens to unravel the agents’ friendship and the conspiracy in which they have become entangled.

Buscemi said to THR about preparing for the role of his CIA boss MJ: “I don’t know any CIA agents, but Martin recommended a book, which was helpful to a certain extent. But really, I get everything I need from the script. It’s so well-written from Martin and working off the other actors [helps], because when it comes right down to it, [MJ] is a boss and he has bosses and he’s under a lot of pressure.”

He added about the London crowd: “I think they’ll get a kick out of it. I think they’ll enjoy it. I think audiences all over will get a lot out of it because it’s so well-made. It’s Martin McDonagh, and it’s got a great cast, and it’s a great story.”

When asked about which movie he’d like to have starred in this year, Buscemi threw us a curveball. “I haven’t seen Wicker, but that’s something that looks like it’s a lot of fun to be in. So I’m looking forward to seeing that one.” (Wicker, also screening at LFF, stars Olivia Colman as an ostracized, single fisherwoman in a conservative medieval seaside town who commissions the local basket-maker to weave her a husband, played by Alexander Skarsgard.)

The BFI London Film Festival kicked off with an emotional and fervent screening of Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman’s Elsinore on Wednesday night. The Irishman — looking like Malkovich’s main rival in the Oscar race so far — had attendees on their feet as he welcomed the real-life people who inspired particular Elsinore characters, including Colman’s Professor Margaret Johnson, a pioneer of HIV/AIDS treatment in the late ’80s.

The 70th edition of the BFI London Film Fest runs Oct. 7-18 and is set to continue with a run of star-spangled galas including screenings of Artificial, Bunker, Behemoth!, Ink, Club Kid, A Long Winter, Ray Gunn and Paper Tiger.

The Social Reckoning stars Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White each had their own unique anxieties about following up 2010’s beloved The Social Network.

When I last caught up with Madison in February 2022, I made a meal out of the overlap between her roles in Scream (2022) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). She was a great sport about it, but two points she made stuck with me. She was eager to move beyond the kinds of roles audiences had come to associate her with, and she actively sought out parts that scared her. She clearly meant it. Just three years later, she won the best actress Oscar for Anora, in which she delivered one of the most audacious performances in recent memory.

Naturally, the pressure of revisiting the world created by Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher in The Social Network — which her Once Upon a Time in Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino has called the best film of the 2010s — certainly weighed on Madison.

“I definitely felt that way,” Madison tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of The Social Reckoning’s Oct. 9 theatrical release. “I often have minor panic attacks before starting a movie, but the idea of being scared to start something means that I could potentially be doing some interesting work that is pushing me outside of any comfort zone.”

Madison was all set to undergo a major transformation into Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who, in 2021, blew the whistle on the company’s continued prioritization of profit over public safety. But Sorkin, now serving as both writer and director, threw her for a loop when he advised her against trying to mirror the real Haugen.

“I assumed that would be the vision. But after hearing Aaron very adamantly say that he did not want me to do that, it took me a while to wrap my head around it,” Madison says. “Ultimately, I did fall in love with the character that he had written on the page. So that approach did allow me to have more creative freedom in a sense, which I’m grateful for. But in the future, I look forward to possibly having the opportunity to authentically and faithfully represent a real person.”

Two-time Emmy winner White plays former WSJ tech reporter Jeff Horwitz, who helped Haugen expose Facebook’s wrongdoing through The Facebook Files, a series of reports based on data from the 22,000 documents she leaked. Unlike Madison, White wasn’t as overwhelmed by the reputation of The Social Network, largely because he viewed The Social Reckoning as more of a companion piece than a direct sequel.

“My focus and real place of interest was, Is this a movie I would want to see? Is this a compelling film? Is it saying something? Are the characters interesting?” White says.

White did hesitate at the prospect of playing another real-life figure so soon after his intimidating portrayal of Bruce Springsteen in Scott Cooper’s underappreciated gem, Deliver Me from Nowhere. However, the same creative freedom that initially irked Madison actually intrigued White. Compared to Springsteen or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Horwitz and Haugen were largely unfamiliar to the public, giving White more room to make the role his own.

“I shared with [Sorkin], ‘I’m really hesitant about playing another real person next. I’d like to do a new story about a character that I can create on my own and not feel handcuffed to other people’s ideas about this person,’” White recalls saying. “So Aaron just said, ‘At the end of the day, this is my version of Jeff. This is my story. I want you to use the text in my script.’ So it was the best of both worlds. I got to gather a lot of extra information [about Horwitz], but I also had a tremendous amount of freedom on set.”

Below, in a conversation with THR, Madison and White also discuss their near-total absence from social media and how The Social Reckoning only reinforced their decisions to stay away.

***

Actors tell me all the time that the jobs they want the most are often the ones that terrify them the most. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than making a companion film to what might be the greatest film of the 21st century, The Social Network. Did fear motivate both of your commitments to The Social Reckoning?

MIKEY MADISON That’s a good question. I often have minor panic attacks before starting a movie, but even though it’s torturous, the idea of being scared to start something means that I could potentially be doing some interesting work that is pushing me outside of any comfort zone. I never want to play a character where I’m like, Yeah, this is inside my wheelhouse. I’ve done it before. I want to push myself outside of limits that feel comfortable. So, yeah, I definitely felt that way.

JEREMY ALLEN WHITE I agree that The Social Network is a great film, but I don’t think I necessarily attached the two films too much. Aaron wrote both of them, so they’re obviously attached in that way. They’re in the same world, and there’s one character [in common] played by another actor [Jeremy Strong] in our film. But my focus and real place of interest was, Is this a movie I would want to see? Is this a compelling film? Is it saying something? Are the characters interesting? Is this film a good film? Does it have the capability of being a really good film? It does, and it did.

Mikey, you’ve always been a ghost as far as social media is concerned. And Jeremy, you have one or two accounts, but you seem to do the bare minimum. They feel obligatory.

WHITE That is correct.

Has this story only validated your existing beliefs about social media?

WHITE Yeah, I think so. You’re right that I have a distant relationship with my social media account. I was late to the game, too. I waited a long time before getting any of that stuff. It wasn’t for any moral reasons. It was more just out of self-preservation. I’ve had seeds of doubt and fear about the effects of social media for a long time, just an uneasy feeling around it. In recent years, it’s become clear why, and those fears and doubts have been more easily realized. Then, though the process of preparing, learning and making this film, all those ideas have been reinforced even further.

So I’m comfortable at my distance, but outside of my personal relationship with social media, I think more about young people, my children and kids their age. We have a responsibility as the adults in the room to make sure they can enter this world safely and comfortably — and then form their own relationships with these apps at a certain point. But hopefully, we’re able to keep their worlds as small as possible for as long as we can.

Mikey, once you read this script, did you playfully gloat to your reps that you were right to not be on social media all this time?

MADISON (Laughs.) Honestly, I’m really lucky in that my agents and managers have always respected my decision to not be on social media. Maybe they saw it as slightly stubborn at first, but it’s just the best decision for me overall.

WHITE It turns out you don’t need TikTok when you have an Oscar. It’s fine.

MADISON & WHITE (Laugh.)

Touché. Jeremy, you went from playing one of the most famous people on the planet in Bruce Springsteen to playing another real guy named Jeff Horwitz who most people couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Was your blood pressure a lot lower playing this real-life person?

WHITE For sure. When I met with Aaron, Deliver Me From Nowhere was about to come out. I had a really great time making that film and spending so much time with Bruce. But it was a tremendous amount of pressure, and I was a nervous wreck as I was meeting with Aaron. I shared with him, “I’m really hesitant about playing another real person next. I’d like to do a new story about a character that I can create on my own and not feel handcuffed to other people’s ideas about this person.”

Aaron heard me and immediately spoke to my hesitation, saying, “Look, I understand you had to play Bruce that way.” He was already speaking to Jeremy Strong about playing Zuckerberg, and he said, “Mark Zuckerberg is a very public person like Bruce, and people already have ideas of each person. They know how they move and how they speak. They already have their own interpretations.”

While Jeff and Frances are public people to an extent, you’re right that the majority of people do not know who they are. So Aaron just said, “Look, read as much as you want, watch videos, listen to his voice and do all the work you want. But at the end of the day, this is my version of Jeff. This is my story. I want you to use the text in my script.’” So it was the best of both worlds. I got to gather a lot of extra information because Jeff is a real person who’s left an imprint in this world, but I also had a tremendous amount of freedom on set.

Mikey, you were fully prepared to transform into Frances Haugen, but Aaron pulled you back from going too far with it. Do you think that was partially because Jeremy Strong was already doing such a hardcore replication of Zuckerberg? Do you think Aaron wanted his two leads to be freer and looser in comparison?

MADISON I think that’s a possibility. I was prepared [to transform] and was very open to doing so. I assumed that would be the vision. But after hearing Aaron very adamantly say that he did not want me to do that, it took me a while to wrap my head around it. Ultimately, I did fall in love with the character that he had written on the page. I was like, The most important thing is that I just tell this story as honestly and truthfully as I can tell it. I hope that when the real Frances watches The Social Reckoning, she feels the integrity and love we put into it. So that approach did allow me to have more creative freedom in a sense, which I’m grateful for. But in the future, I look forward to possibly having the opportunity to authentically and faithfully represent a real person.

***
The Social Reckoning is now playing in movie theaters.