Sydney Sweeney Boxes Free Of Her Jeans-Ad Thing

We could argue September is the cruelest month for producers, actors and directors, what with two of the global “Big Five” film festivals — Cannes and Venice, now done and dusted, and right on the heels of that, the annual Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF. Why that, you may reasonably ask.

The not-so-subtle launching of Golden Globes/BAFTA/Oscars buzz around this or that theatrical product is difficult to ignite, and the producers need a toehold in North America. Though British and American films often premiere in Cannes and Venice, Toronto is the 21st-century approximation to what “opening in Chicago” was to Broadway producers in the 1930s.

On cue then, pretty much the instant the curtains rang down on Venice’s Lido, the Toronto curtains parted, and on September 5, the ingenue-of-the-second Sydney Sweeney, pictured above, popped up on the arm of the original tough-girl and legendary boxer Christy Martin (no relation), to present the premiere of the eponymous Christy. Given the fifteen-minute standing ovation at the raucously well-received Venice premiere of Dwayne Johnson as mixed martial arts pioneer Mike Kerr in The Thrashing Machine, it seems the clear-cut, rough-and-tumble narratives of fighters’ lives seem to be au courant, non?

Coming on the heels of Sweeney’s bumptious Summer 2025, the last month of which she spent batting back the public critiques of her American Eagle jeans advertisement, the early-September release of the actress in a resolutely physical, no-holds-barred role running so heavily against type (of a notable female boxer in an abusive marriage) was a godsend. Among its many other deft and occasionally very blunt messages, the film, directed by Australian David Michod, definitely telegraphs the hey-get-a-load-of-this-serious-actress-here-ladies-and-gentlemen transmission. In a word, a professinoal bullseye for Ms. Sweeney and not least, for the formerly embattled Ms. Martin, pictured below, second from left and third from left, respectively, pictured below with their director, right, and other cast members.

A far less buttoned-down Daniel Craig popped up in fabulously sloppy-cut beige linen suitings to premiere his appearance as the world-weary detective in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives-Out Mystery, pictured below on the red carpet at the headline Princess of Wales theatre on September 6. The Knives-Out franchise is a perfectly heady, complex small-screen landing place for an ex-Bond on the lookout for more suspense, courtesy of Netflix, and it will be entertaining to see what the Craig man will do next.

That noted, as the eminently sovereign actor stands in front of the red-carpet press pack, as captured here, it’s easy to see that his departure from Barbara Broccoli and the Broccoli family franchise more or less brought the Bond house to its recent epochal regime change. The actor may no longer be Commander Bond, but Craig’s exquisitely weathered mien is a commanding presence, on screen or off.

There are film folk that are front-row fashion-show denizens, and film folk that otherwise dabble, and even occasionally create, fashion, and then there is the legendary iconoclast and fashion-man-down-to-the-core Baz Luhrmann, whose leather gear and rather splendid “Elvis” buckle are the subjects pictured below. It’s apt that Luhrmann is also an opera director, because, no matter what the man wears, limning whatever century, his style is resolutely out of an opera-house costume department.

The best guess is that this peacock owns his clothes and must have vast acreage set aside for closets in Hollywood, New York and/or New South Wales, but in the eventual biopic on him, it might be more cinematically comedic if he just kept his clothes at whatever opera house and went there to pull his outfits together every day. His habitual shades are operatic, his shock of white hair is operatic (for a dastardly opera villain), and, in this man-groin-shot, his clearly bespoke diamond-studded Late-Elvis-in-Vegas rodeo buckle is operatic.

Premiered in Toronto on September 6, director Luhrmann’s film EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert could not have a more operatic subject. Everything about Elvis, including his death-by-cardiac-arrest at 42 in Graceland, is the stuff of opera.

Pictured below, director/actor/executive producer Jason Bateman and his co-star Jude Law are in the clinch of a classic big-time Hollywood-leading-man wattage-throwdown. In effect, that is a battle not unlike a World Wrestling Entertainment match with backflips and rope bounces and body slams and whatnot, but carried out in exquisite Zenlike silence using the elements of man-style, posture and a certain theatrical sort of glint in the eye ginned up for a camera, still or moving. In fact, a red-carpet old-Hollywood wattage throwdown may be a lost Zen art. How to compete with the regulation low-cut white wife-beater-and-silk scarf under Law’s awesome peaked lapels? Wear a jet-black high-necked tee under your super cool pressed-wool hunting shirt. Both gentlemen have turned on what we can call the full Attention-Getting Glint. The message? Watch us, goddammit!