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Benicio del Toro And Cameron Diaz To Star In 'Reenactment'
TV & Streaming

Benicio del Toro And Cameron Diaz To Star In ‘Reenactment’

by jummy84
written by jummy84

EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off his critically acclaimed performance in One Battle After Another, Benicio Del Toro has found his follow-up project as he is set to star in Reenactment with Cameron Diaz in talks to co-star. Grant Singer wrote the original screenplay and will direct.

Production is set to begin soon in Los Angeles and plot details are being kept under wraps. Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill and Thad Luckinbill of Black Label will produce along with Patrick Wachsberger of 193, a Legendary company. Black Label’s Rachel Smith will executive produce along with Ashley Stern of 193 and LBI’s Rick Yorn and Scott Greenberg.

Patrick Wachsberger’s 193 will also handle international sales. This project reunites Grant Singer with Black Label Media and Benicio Del Toro following Singer’s 2023 directorial debut Reptile. Following its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, the film was released by Netflix where it topped streaming charts.

Del Toro can most recently be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. He is repped by LBI Entertainment, Range Media Partners and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller.

Diaz can most recently be seen in the 2025 Netflix action comedy Back in Action opposite Jamie Foxx. Netflix recently reported the feature was the most watched film of 2025 so far. She is repped by LBI Entertainment and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.

Black Label is also in development on The White Van, with Singer attached to direct. He is repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment and attorney Steve Burkow.

Black Label Media is behind the highly anticipated Lynne Ramsay film Die, My Love starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. The film, which they also financed, premiered at Cannes, where it was acquired by Mubi in a bidding war for $24 million. It will be released in theaters on November 7. Next up, Black Label will reteam with director JD Dillard for The Strange, for which casting is underway.

193 is a stand-alone joint venture with Legendary and has support from Legendary’s resources and divisions. At its inaugural Cannes Film Festival in 2025, 193 secured international sales for four marquee films, reflecting the quality of its burgeoning slate. These included the biggest sale of the festival for psychological thriller Die My Love, from four-time Cannes prize winner Ramsey.

193’s other 2025 Cannes sales were: drama biopic Scandalous!, the directorial debut of two-time Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo, starring Sydney Sweeney and David Jonsson; action franchise-starter The Surgeon, starring Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh, from physician and acclaimed filmmaker Roshan Sethi, reuniting Wachsberger with his John Wick collaborator Basil Iwanyk; and The Toxic Avenger, a darkly comedic reimagining of the 1984 cult classic. Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Macon Blair wrote and directed the film, which stars four-time Emmy winner Peter Dinklage alongside Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, and Jacob Tremblay.

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Madi Diaz 2025
Music

Madi Diaz Leans Into the Anguish on ‘Fatal Optimist’ » PopMatters

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Songwriter Madi Diaz’s third record and final entry in what may be considered her heartache trilogy is a piece she considers her rawest yet. Fatal Optimist comes in the wake of a serious relationship ending. Diaz purposefully spent more time alone, sitting with the heartbreak, allowing for a more stripped-back approach and confessional tone to emerge in her music.  

Getting the album just right was more of a process than it initially appeared. The original recording didn’t mirror Diaz’s experience, so she scrapped those sessions and reworked the material with co-producer Gabe Wax (Soccer Mommy, Zach Bryan) and a few studio musicians. The decision was bold but has mostly paid off. While the overall impact of Diaz’s collection of songs can be exhausting, Fatal Optimist also allows her to lean into what she does best: laying bare her heart and making striking yet subtle observations that linger well after the notes end. 

If it seems like Diaz is always experiencing heartbreak, she is well aware of the optics; however, this time around felt different, as this person could have been the one. Listeners are invited to experience the push and pull of the relationship, one that took all of her energy, even after it ended. She experiences a myriad of feelings, from longing (“Time Difference”) to despondency (“Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers?”) to resignation (“Lone Wolf”). Subtle differences emerge until it feels like she is recounting the various stages of grief. 

Diaz was in a vulnerable state when composing these compositions, but also forthcoming about her inner turmoil. There is a certain wisdom that comes from heartbreak. “Ambivalent” features Diaz with an acoustic guitar front and center. She sings “You’re a lover but you are not my friend / Here for the party but never the ending / A free fall, you’re just not the landing.” In “Feel Something”, she wishes she had never known his middle name. Occasionally, as on the beautiful “Heavy Metal”, she takes a long view, despite mainly being amazed at how she remains unbroken. 

Her lyrics can be brutal, especially when it comes to her forthright take on sex. In “Feel Something”, she sings, “I used to think I needed to read your mind / I’m only gonna find what I’m gonna find and then we’ll fuck and then we’ll fight.” The song describes how she doesn’t feel anything but might if they hook up, a far cry from her previous standout “Think of Me”. She was once spiteful about her former lover sleeping with somebody new, but now surrenders to the occasional fling. 

The tendency toward more candid confessions is perhaps what makes Madi Diaz stand out among her peers, as musically, she does little to separate herself from the ever-growing number of singer-songwriters with Nashville ties. The tracks skirt the edges of alternative country but can also lean into it, as on “Good Liar”. Not until the closing title track does Diaz infuse much energy. On that number, she proves how she is on the level of a musician like Lucy Dacus but has chosen to wallow in more melancholy moods.  

Some musicians have made a career out of struggling in love. What makes Diaz different from an artist like, say, Maggie Rogers is her consistent tone throughout and willingness to lean into the anguish. Nobody is telling Diaz she can’t do something different, but this is also the artist we have come to appreciate. Despite—or maybe thanks to—her hopeless disposition and constant surrender, we find ourselves rooting for her. On the rare occasion, we get the sense that perhaps she does, too.  

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Album Review: Madi Diaz, 'Fatal Optimist'
Music

Album Review: Madi Diaz, ‘Fatal Optimist’

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Singer-songwriter’s new Fatal Optimist scales back her sound, but not her devastating emotional honesty

Madi Diaz has a talent for brief, yet devastating observations: “Looking at who you are and what I can live with/I can imagine myself as a picture of something different,” she whisper-chokes on “Hope Less,” the situationship-rationalizing opening track to her seventh album. The lyric’s power is heightened by the arrangement surrounding it — just Diaz and her acoustic guitar, in a room so silent its settling is nearly audible. The same goes for much of Fatal Optimist, which largely eschews the more robust instrumentation of 2024’s Weird Faith in favor of stripped-down recordings that thrust her lyrics to the forefront.

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Diaz, a songwriter’s songwriter who has spent time in Harry Styles’ backing band, began working on Fatal Optimist after a post-breakup seclusion on an island, where she immersed herself in writing about the frustrations she’d experienced. That extended catharsis led to acceptance, a journey mirrored by the album’s progression. “Feel Something” seethes with exasperation over a relationship locked in an increasingly anhedonic cycle, Diaz wishing she was “someone who doesn’t know your middle name” as an electric guitar that’s blown out like a bruise shimmers around her. Diaz has a rounded, plainly emotional alto that adds pathos to the more downtrodden lyrics — like those on “Flirting,” a morning-after breakdown of a rupture in trust with a spare voice-and-piano arrangement that has the weight of knowingly receiving the silent treatment. “Heavy Metal,” meanwhile, is a stunner, Diaz unpacking the ways her resilience and her hardness meld together with growing intensity until the song’s end, when she repeats the word “heavy” enough times to make it fold in on itself.

On the closing title track, light begins to filter in even as Diaz keeps her emotions close. She tempers the thrill of meeting somebody with whom spending time “might be hot, and it might be fun” with her “fatal optimist” tendencies of seeing where things could end, and for the first time, a full band comes in to help propel Diaz along the path to openness. Even though she’s wary — “I hate being right,” she sing-songs, repeating it enough times for it to feel like a mantra — she’s letting her doubts fall, and letting the world become just a bit more filled-in. The arc of Fatal Optimist and Diaz’s perceptive, insistent songwriting make that movement, even with its hesitation, feel like a victory. 

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