Joel Edgerton

Jennifer Lawrence returns to work under the helm of her Hunger Games director, Francis Lawrence, in the challenging role of a reluctant Russian operative in Red Sparrow, based on the 2013 book by ex-CIA operative Jason Matthews. Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova, a rising young Bolshoi ballerina who suffers a debilitating injury and, facing a bleak future, chooses to take the only option offered to her, entering the state-run Sparrow School, who brutally trains a new generation of ruthless sexually manipulative spies.

"I'm from a relatively small town and a rural place, and I think you see that in my hands and my face," says Australian actor Joel Edgerton, a Golden Globe nominee as Best Actor for his part in the interracial drama Loving. It's this earthbound quality that appealed to Loving's director Jeff Nichols, who also cast Edgerton in another 2016 movie, Midnight Special.

Richard Loving was a shy, quiet young man from a rural community in early 1960s Virginia. No one would probably remember him today had he not fallen in love and married his neighbor Mildred Jeter.

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Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) showed his fifth feature at this 69th Cannes and Loving immediately garnered plenty of buzz, with some unequivocally declaring it one of the festival's best. Loving is a quietly understated telling of one of the lesser known and yet crucial episodes in the American struggle for civil rights: the landmark (and never more  appropriately titled) case of Loving v.

Actors Joel Edgerton and Isla Fisher talk about director Baz Luhrmann's vision of the classic The Great Gatsby as an (more…).