Elle Fanning has friends in high places! “The Great” star tells Access Daily’s Mario Lopez and Kit Hoover that she and sister Dakota get a special treat from Tom Cruise every Christmas – and the superstar also sends Dakota a new pair of shoes for her birthday! Elle also reveals why the chance to work with Angelina Jolie on “Maleficent” was so special and teases that her upcoming series, in which she portrays Catherine the Great, is “not your classic period piece.” “The Great” premieres May 15 on Hulu.

Oscar-nominated writer and showrunner Tony McNamara doesn’t reckon he’ll get any warm, fuzzy letters from historians about his upcoming Hulu series The Great, a deliciously ahistorical take on the rise of Catherine the Great. The series, which stars Elle Fanning as the titular Russian monarch, traces the outline of Catherine’s life, then colors it in with lurid details and wild dialogue dreamt up by McNamara—who also wrote 2018’s The Favourite, a punk period piece about Queen Anne.

“I find period shows too polite on the whole,” he said. “They’re so drowned in their own historical facts.”

In a new trailer for the series, available exclusively on Vanity Fair, Catherine begins settling into life with her new husband, the immature Peter III, played by Nicholas Hoult. “She’s an extreme optimist in the beginning, and has this kind of beautiful look on life and love—and then is in for a real big rude awakening when she gets to Russia,” Fanning said of her character.

Through tears, Molly (Elle Fanning) searches the eyes of her father, Leo (Javier Bardem), but he’s simply too far away, as distant as castaway wandering some distant dark shoreline. It’s an especially evocative moment in the just-released trailer for Bleeker Street’s The Roads Not Taken, the latest drama from writer-director Sally Potter. “No matter how far away you go,” the anguished daughter says, “you were always you.”

It’s an especially evocative moment in a existential road trip that premieres at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival (which gets underway February 20) and opens in the U.S. on March 13. The R-rated drama takes its title from Robert Frost’s near-namesake poem, The Road Not Taken. Like Frost’s 1916 expedition through the dense woods of yearning regret, the Potter film roams the treacherous expanse that lies between the life that Leo has lived and the life that Leo could have lived. The movie takes place in a single day (although Leo, with his fractured perceptions of time and place, might say otherwise) and looks to feature a strong core ensemble with Laura Linney, Salma Hayek, Branka Katic, and Milena Tscharntke.

The official synopsis: “Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken follows a day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning) as she grapples with the challenges of her father’s chaotic mind. As they weave their way through New York City, Leo’s journey takes on a hallucinatory quality as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future.” [Source]