U.K. outfit Curzon — part of the Cohen Media Group — is set to relaunch Artificial Eye, the arthouse distribution label that was established in 1976 and has been on hiatus for the last decade.
The label, first founded by film enthusiasts Andi and Pam Engel and part of the Curzon group since 2006, became renowned for releasing independent, foreign-language and arthouse title to U.K. audiences, including those by Béla Tarr, the Dardenne Brothers and Trần Anh Hùng. Its library boasts over 400 critically acclaimed films from directors including Wim Wenders, Michael Haneke and Claire Denis. Ruben Östlund’s “Force Majeure” was one of the last films released under the previous incarnation.
Led by managing director Louisa Dent, who has been with the company since 2008, Curzon has continued to release critically acclaimed films under the Curzon Film label — including Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever at the U.K.
The label, first founded by film enthusiasts Andi and Pam Engel and part of the Curzon group since 2006, became renowned for releasing independent, foreign-language and arthouse title to U.K. audiences, including those by Béla Tarr, the Dardenne Brothers and Trần Anh Hùng. Its library boasts over 400 critically acclaimed films from directors including Wim Wenders, Michael Haneke and Claire Denis. Ruben Östlund’s “Force Majeure” was one of the last films released under the previous incarnation.
Led by managing director Louisa Dent, who has been with the company since 2008, Curzon has continued to release critically acclaimed films under the Curzon Film label — including Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever at the U.K.
- 4/30/2024
- by Alex Ritman
- Variety Film + TV
Filmotor Nabs World Sales for Berlinale Title ‘Shahid’ Ahead of Visions du Réel Premiere (Exclusive)
Berlinale Forum entry “Shahid,” the debut feature of Iranian-German filmmaker Narges Kalhor, has been picked up by Prague-based doc specialist Filmotor ahead of its premiere at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, where it is competing in the more experimental Burning Lights section.
Described by Kalhor as a collective work between herself and other artists, including a costume artist and a painter from Iran, a German music composer and a choreographer from Berlin, “Shahid” shifts playfully between genres, challenging conventional filmmaking rules.
Set in present-day Germany, where Kalhor emigrated as a political refugee in 2009, the film focuses on her desire to officially remove the first part of her surname, “Shahid,” which means “martyr” in Farsi and was inherited from her great-grandfather, in an act of feminist resistance to patriarchal structures.
During this process, the actor who plays Kalhor travels back in time and meets her great-grandfather, but she also uncovers...
Described by Kalhor as a collective work between herself and other artists, including a costume artist and a painter from Iran, a German music composer and a choreographer from Berlin, “Shahid” shifts playfully between genres, challenging conventional filmmaking rules.
Set in present-day Germany, where Kalhor emigrated as a political refugee in 2009, the film focuses on her desire to officially remove the first part of her surname, “Shahid,” which means “martyr” in Farsi and was inherited from her great-grandfather, in an act of feminist resistance to patriarchal structures.
During this process, the actor who plays Kalhor travels back in time and meets her great-grandfather, but she also uncovers...
- 4/14/2024
- by Lise Pedersen
- Variety Film + TV
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Lee Chang-dong, Terence Davies, Shōhei Imamura, Bi Gan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villleneuve, Céline Sciamma, Guillermo del Toro, Kelly Reichardt. Those are just a few of the filmmakers introduced to New York audiences at New Directors/New Films over the last half-century across over 1,100 premieres.
Now returning for its 53rd edition at Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art from April 3-14, this year’s lineup features 35 new films, presenting prizewinners from Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, and Sundance film festivals. Ahead of the festival kicking off next week, we’ve gathered fourteen films to see, and one can explore the full lineup and schedule here.
All, or Nothing at All (Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang)
In All, or Nothing at all, director Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang employs an experimental...
Now returning for its 53rd edition at Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art from April 3-14, this year’s lineup features 35 new films, presenting prizewinners from Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, and Sundance film festivals. Ahead of the festival kicking off next week, we’ve gathered fourteen films to see, and one can explore the full lineup and schedule here.
All, or Nothing at All (Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang)
In All, or Nothing at all, director Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang employs an experimental...
- 4/1/2024
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Isabelle Huppert is open to expanding her already storied filmography to potentially even include one of the world’s biggest franchises: Marvel.
The Oscar winner said she would love to join the ranks of fellow Academy Award winners Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett as Marvel baddies, telling The Guardian that she would “love to” join a genre project, including the MCU, as a “real villain.” Even though it’s not like she hasn’t played malevolent women before.
“I would love to! I’d love to do a genre film,” the “Piano Teacher” actress said. “It must be nice maybe to be the villain, a real villain, not the villain in most of the films I do, who have a good reason to be a villain. I never get to play a pure villain.”
Huppert also reflected on her collaborations with Michael Haneke and “Elle” filmmaker Paul Verhoeven as highlights,...
The Oscar winner said she would love to join the ranks of fellow Academy Award winners Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett as Marvel baddies, telling The Guardian that she would “love to” join a genre project, including the MCU, as a “real villain.” Even though it’s not like she hasn’t played malevolent women before.
“I would love to! I’d love to do a genre film,” the “Piano Teacher” actress said. “It must be nice maybe to be the villain, a real villain, not the villain in most of the films I do, who have a good reason to be a villain. I never get to play a pure villain.”
Huppert also reflected on her collaborations with Michael Haneke and “Elle” filmmaker Paul Verhoeven as highlights,...
- 3/25/2024
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
“George Blake,” from Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald, “The Squatter” from Venice-acclaimed Erik Matti and “Sleeping Swans” from esteemed auteur Barbara Albert were the big winners from this year’s second edition of scripted incubator Seriesmakers.
Backed by Beta Group and Series Mania, the mentoring program for feature filmmakers looking to make the leap to TV will return for a third edition, organizers announced at Wednesday’s awards ceremony. The call for admissions will open soon.
Produced by Femke Wolting, the U.K./Dutch series “George Blake” looks into the wilder-than-fiction tale of the most prolific double agent in British history, asking the question of what makes a working class, former resistance fighter turn against everything they ever stood for?
The project will interrogate the multiple identities – and families – of a man who reinvented himself time and again, dying a traitor in England and a national hero in Russia. The project received in €50,000 in prize money.
Backed by Beta Group and Series Mania, the mentoring program for feature filmmakers looking to make the leap to TV will return for a third edition, organizers announced at Wednesday’s awards ceremony. The call for admissions will open soon.
Produced by Femke Wolting, the U.K./Dutch series “George Blake” looks into the wilder-than-fiction tale of the most prolific double agent in British history, asking the question of what makes a working class, former resistance fighter turn against everything they ever stood for?
The project will interrogate the multiple identities – and families – of a man who reinvented himself time and again, dying a traitor in England and a national hero in Russia. The project received in €50,000 in prize money.
- 3/20/2024
- by Ben Croll
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: Coming off his breakout role in Zone of Interest, Christian Friedel has signed with UTA for representation.
Friedel stars as the lead in Jonathan Glazer’s critically acclaimed feature The Zone of Interest, based on the book of the same name by Martin Amis. The film made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 to remarkable reviews, where it was awarded the coveted Grand Prix and has since received a number of accolades including two Oscars for best sound and best international feature film.
Friedel was recently cast in a significant role in season 3 of the Emmy-winning global phenomenon anthology series The White Lotus. He is set to star alongside Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, Aimee Lou Wood, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey and Leslie Bibb, among others. Production is currently underway in Thailand.
Friedel’s first theater engagements took him to the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich, the Munich Kammerspiele,...
Friedel stars as the lead in Jonathan Glazer’s critically acclaimed feature The Zone of Interest, based on the book of the same name by Martin Amis. The film made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 to remarkable reviews, where it was awarded the coveted Grand Prix and has since received a number of accolades including two Oscars for best sound and best international feature film.
Friedel was recently cast in a significant role in season 3 of the Emmy-winning global phenomenon anthology series The White Lotus. He is set to star alongside Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, Aimee Lou Wood, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey and Leslie Bibb, among others. Production is currently underway in Thailand.
Friedel’s first theater engagements took him to the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich, the Munich Kammerspiele,...
- 3/18/2024
- by Justin Kroll
- Deadline Film + TV
A successful photographer celebrated around the world. A writer who resorts to publishing her own novels. Each had a long history of relationships, familial and otherwise, before they met in middle age. Now he’s 84 and she’s 75, and they are facing mortality together. Will love save them? The premise for “Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other,” Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet’s quietly relatable documentary about the marriage of Joel Meyerowitz and Maggie Barrett, sounds like the real-life companion piece to Michael Haneke’s “Amour.” Soon enough, however, it’s revealed to be closer to Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” a dissection of a marriage full of resentment and hidden grievances.
Barrett and Meyerowitz met at the right time to start a lasting relationship. Both had seen strife and happiness, which led them to have a real connection. As they are presented in the film,...
Barrett and Meyerowitz met at the right time to start a lasting relationship. Both had seen strife and happiness, which led them to have a real connection. As they are presented in the film,...
- 3/16/2024
- by Murtada Elfadl
- Variety Film + TV
Few actors have embodied the full range of modern German history on screen as has Christian Friedel.
In Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest — a dark horse candidate for the best picture Oscar this Sunday (where it is also nominated in four other categories, including best international feature), Friedel plays Rudolf Höss, the notorious commandant of Auschwitz who, together with his wife Hedwig (played by Sandra Hüller), built an idyllic villa with a pretty garden for their five children right next to the death camp.
But before Zone, the 45-year-old German actor was best known for playing famed anti-Nazi resistance fighter Georg Elser in 13 Minutes, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2015 drama about Elsner’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939, before World War II and before the Holocaust. In 2012’s Closed Season, Friedel plays a young Jewish refugee hiding from the Nazis. And in his film debut, in...
In Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest — a dark horse candidate for the best picture Oscar this Sunday (where it is also nominated in four other categories, including best international feature), Friedel plays Rudolf Höss, the notorious commandant of Auschwitz who, together with his wife Hedwig (played by Sandra Hüller), built an idyllic villa with a pretty garden for their five children right next to the death camp.
But before Zone, the 45-year-old German actor was best known for playing famed anti-Nazi resistance fighter Georg Elser in 13 Minutes, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2015 drama about Elsner’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939, before World War II and before the Holocaust. In 2012’s Closed Season, Friedel plays a young Jewish refugee hiding from the Nazis. And in his film debut, in...
- 3/8/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The 2024 Oscar nominees for Best Director are Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”), Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”), Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”), Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), and Justine Triet (“Anatomy of a Fall”). Our odds currently show that Nolan (3/1) is most likely to win, followed in order by Lanthimos (4/1), Glazer (9/2), Triet (9/2), and Scorsese (9/2).
Three of these five filmmakers have been nominated at least once before, with Scorsese standing out as the only previous victor in the group. Now on his 10th bid (only two behind category record holder William Wyler), he initially triumphed on his sixth for “The Departed” (2007), which is also the only Best Picture winner in his filmography. He earned his remaining notices for “Raging Bull” (1981), “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1989), “Goodfellas” (1991), “Gangs of New York” (2003), “The Aviator” (2005), “Hugo” (2012), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2014), and “The Irishman” (2020).
Having previously ranked as the third oldest directing nominee ever...
Three of these five filmmakers have been nominated at least once before, with Scorsese standing out as the only previous victor in the group. Now on his 10th bid (only two behind category record holder William Wyler), he initially triumphed on his sixth for “The Departed” (2007), which is also the only Best Picture winner in his filmography. He earned his remaining notices for “Raging Bull” (1981), “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1989), “Goodfellas” (1991), “Gangs of New York” (2003), “The Aviator” (2005), “Hugo” (2012), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2014), and “The Irishman” (2020).
Having previously ranked as the third oldest directing nominee ever...
- 3/7/2024
- by Matthew Stewart
- Gold Derby
Prior to making headlines the next day after a short-lived health scare that required a brief stay in hospital, Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins arrived at Dublin’s Complex arts center last Wednesday to present the Dublin film festival’s highest honor to Steve McQueen. Introduced in 2007 and named the Volta Award, after the first commercial cinema set up in Dublin in 1909 by writer James Joyce, its previous recipients include Daniel Day Lewis, Claudia Cardinale and Al Pacino. The famously serious director was in high spirits, enthusing that “festivals are about passion, a passion for film.” “There’s always a buzz, isn’t there?” he continued. “[As you] go to the next picture, the next film, you tend to give people tips and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to see this, you’ve got to see that…’”
McQueen was in and out of the festival, flying home the same night, fueling...
McQueen was in and out of the festival, flying home the same night, fueling...
- 3/4/2024
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
It’s not the history so much as the anatomy of a family that is scrutinised by Jianjie Lin in his slippery psychological drama. With a cool and unsettling mood reminiscent of Michael Haneke and ambiguities that recall Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Lin offers a chiller in the shadow of China’s post-one-child policy.
Wei (Lin Muran) is a kid from a middle-class background with a biologist dad (Zu Feng) and a mum (Guo Keyu) who, having left her life as a flight attendant behind her, has poured all her energy into her son. An incident at school sees Wei take fellow teenager Shuo (Sun Xilun) home with him. It’s quickly apparent that Shuo’s background is vastly different from that of Wei with his reaction to being offered five types of soy sauce by Wei’s mum speaking volumes. He, in fact, is pretty taciturn but reveals that his mother is dead,...
Wei (Lin Muran) is a kid from a middle-class background with a biologist dad (Zu Feng) and a mum (Guo Keyu) who, having left her life as a flight attendant behind her, has poured all her energy into her son. An incident at school sees Wei take fellow teenager Shuo (Sun Xilun) home with him. It’s quickly apparent that Shuo’s background is vastly different from that of Wei with his reaction to being offered five types of soy sauce by Wei’s mum speaking volumes. He, in fact, is pretty taciturn but reveals that his mother is dead,...
- 2/29/2024
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Over three hours and five different chapters, Matthias Glasner’s “Dying” chronicles the travails of an estranged family of four: an elderly couple on the brink of death, their successful composer son and their alcoholic, ne’er-do-well daughter. The film casts a wide net over their experiences, and every leading performance is as impeccable as the last. However, Glasner’s formal rigidity prevents their stories from feeling intrinsically bound, leaving each of them with little to say.
The film opens in the German countryside with elderly couple Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and Gerd Lunies (Hans-Uwe Bauer) being found helpless by a neighbor. Lissy’s litany of ailments render her only semi-mobile, and she often ends the day by soiling herself, while Gerd’s dementia leads him to wander naked into people’s homes. They can’t help each other, and their adult children are too preoccupied with their own metropolitan lives to get involved.
The film opens in the German countryside with elderly couple Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and Gerd Lunies (Hans-Uwe Bauer) being found helpless by a neighbor. Lissy’s litany of ailments render her only semi-mobile, and she often ends the day by soiling herself, while Gerd’s dementia leads him to wander naked into people’s homes. They can’t help each other, and their adult children are too preoccupied with their own metropolitan lives to get involved.
- 2/18/2024
- by Siddhant Adlakha
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: Cannes Marché du Film has unveiled the four film industry professionals who will select the projects for the second edition of its Investors Circle initiative.
The one-day event – taking place within the framework of this year’s market, running from May 14 to 22 – is aimed at connecting elevated, international feature film projects with film financiers and high-net worth individuals with a desire to invest in cinema.
This year’s selection committee comprises Arte France Cinéma CEO Remi Burah; French film and TV biz entrepreneur Serge Hayat; Georgian cinema professional Tamara Tatishvili, who is currently head of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, and Korean co-production expert Wonsun Shin.
The projects are gathered through a combination of networking and scouting as well as direct submissions to the Cannes Marché du Film up until February 29. The Selection Committee will meet throughout March to decide the final line-up.
Aleksandra Zakharchenko,...
The one-day event – taking place within the framework of this year’s market, running from May 14 to 22 – is aimed at connecting elevated, international feature film projects with film financiers and high-net worth individuals with a desire to invest in cinema.
This year’s selection committee comprises Arte France Cinéma CEO Remi Burah; French film and TV biz entrepreneur Serge Hayat; Georgian cinema professional Tamara Tatishvili, who is currently head of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, and Korean co-production expert Wonsun Shin.
The projects are gathered through a combination of networking and scouting as well as direct submissions to the Cannes Marché du Film up until February 29. The Selection Committee will meet throughout March to decide the final line-up.
Aleksandra Zakharchenko,...
- 2/6/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Serbian director Emilija Gašić will follow International Film Festival Rotterdam premiere “78 Days” with the “atmospheric and tense” psychological thriller “Witches,” she reveals to Variety exclusively.
“I’ve always been drawn to scary elements in films — especially if there are moments of comic relief. Growing up in Serbia, I was surrounded by stories and legends. There are so many superstitions and traditions that date back to pagan times.”
Her new film will focus on a woman going through menopause, without support from her loved ones or the healthcare system. Desperate, she turns to an elderly woman for help, a folk healer from a nearby village. Soon, she is asked to perform a series of rituals in order to lift a supposed curse.
“In some villages, there are still these revered healers. I am interested in tapping into this heritage because it’s so rich and really unlike anything else we have seen,...
“I’ve always been drawn to scary elements in films — especially if there are moments of comic relief. Growing up in Serbia, I was surrounded by stories and legends. There are so many superstitions and traditions that date back to pagan times.”
Her new film will focus on a woman going through menopause, without support from her loved ones or the healthcare system. Desperate, she turns to an elderly woman for help, a folk healer from a nearby village. Soon, she is asked to perform a series of rituals in order to lift a supposed curse.
“In some villages, there are still these revered healers. I am interested in tapping into this heritage because it’s so rich and really unlike anything else we have seen,...
- 2/3/2024
- by Marta Balaga
- Variety Film + TV
A slow-cinema spin on well-burnished tropes, In a Violent Nature largely strips the artifice of the slasher formula, which dictates a deformed man must hunt down attractive teens or young adults in either the woods or suburbia. A film built around a mythology that comes to life, as our killer rises from a grave, Chris Nash’s picture could almost be the kind of film Kelly Reichardt might make if her current patron A24 asked her to make a slasher flick.
The result is a deconstruction of all of the clichés that never quite comes into its own, suffering from the same shortcomings as David Gordon Green’s more traditional slasher character study Halloween Ends. The story is told largely from the perspective of a masked killer who may or may not be the son of a rural logging town figure who was executed due to a vendetta. Like László...
The result is a deconstruction of all of the clichés that never quite comes into its own, suffering from the same shortcomings as David Gordon Green’s more traditional slasher character study Halloween Ends. The story is told largely from the perspective of a masked killer who may or may not be the son of a rural logging town figure who was executed due to a vendetta. Like László...
- 1/25/2024
- by John Fink
- The Film Stage
By now, even the most hardcore fans of French cuisine and “Chocolat” star Juliette Binoche can agree that Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” — rather than Tran Anh Hung’s “The Taste of Things” — was the one movie that could have given France its first Oscar win for best international feature in over 30 years, since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine.”
Over the last three decades, a number of French movies have earned Oscar recognition, but none have been the official French Oscar submission. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” earned five Oscar noms in 2013 and even won the best foreign-language Oscar but it represented Austria. A year before, “The Artist,” a French-directed and produced silent movie, won five Oscars out of 10 nominations, including best picture. But the movie had come out in theaters in October, past the former Sept. 30 deadline (which has since then been extended in France) to submit films for...
Over the last three decades, a number of French movies have earned Oscar recognition, but none have been the official French Oscar submission. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” earned five Oscar noms in 2013 and even won the best foreign-language Oscar but it represented Austria. A year before, “The Artist,” a French-directed and produced silent movie, won five Oscars out of 10 nominations, including best picture. But the movie had come out in theaters in October, past the former Sept. 30 deadline (which has since then been extended in France) to submit films for...
- 1/24/2024
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
With final voting complete, the 96th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 10 and air live on ABC at 8:00 p.m. Et/ 5:00 p.m. Pt. We update predictions through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2024 Oscar picks.
The State of the Race
With a fragile theatrical market for non-fiction features and a dwindling number of active documentary buyers, many Sundance 2023 films did not get picked up for distribution. As the top American film festival for docs, Sundance usually supplies as many as four out of the final five Oscar nominees each year.
And usually, by late summer, Oscar promotion is well underway. Last year, three Sundance grads — eventual Oscar nominees “Fire of Love” (Neon), “All that Breathes” (HBO), and the winner, “Navalny” (CNN) — were actively campaigning.
One Sundance World Cinema entry that built a following during the year was Pulitzer Prize winner Mstyslav Chernov...
The State of the Race
With a fragile theatrical market for non-fiction features and a dwindling number of active documentary buyers, many Sundance 2023 films did not get picked up for distribution. As the top American film festival for docs, Sundance usually supplies as many as four out of the final five Oscar nominees each year.
And usually, by late summer, Oscar promotion is well underway. Last year, three Sundance grads — eventual Oscar nominees “Fire of Love” (Neon), “All that Breathes” (HBO), and the winner, “Navalny” (CNN) — were actively campaigning.
One Sundance World Cinema entry that built a following during the year was Pulitzer Prize winner Mstyslav Chernov...
- 1/23/2024
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Hailing from the country that gave us such grim social critics as Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, Vantablack Austrian satire “Veni Vidi Vici” opens with a senseless homicide. It’s a startling scene, no less upsetting than the Scorpio killing that kick-starts “Dirty Harry” — except that in this case, the incident is calibrated as the darkest sort of comedy. Rather than picking off an unsuspecting rooftop swimmer, the serial killer does his hunting out in the open, without shame or any pretense of covering his tracks.
The movie makes no mystery of the sniper’s identity, revealing it right from the jump, the way a “Columbo” episode might. And yet the authorities show zero interest in arresting the guilty party, even going so far as to toss an eyewitness out of the police station (that man winds up offing himself in exasperation). That’s because the person responsible, Amon Maynard (Laurence Rupp), is a millionaire,...
The movie makes no mystery of the sniper’s identity, revealing it right from the jump, the way a “Columbo” episode might. And yet the authorities show zero interest in arresting the guilty party, even going so far as to toss an eyewitness out of the police station (that man winds up offing himself in exasperation). That’s because the person responsible, Amon Maynard (Laurence Rupp), is a millionaire,...
- 1/19/2024
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Comer plays a young woman whose baby arrives just as environmental crisis begins to break the society around her
Here is a post-apocalyptic drama of survival, a fiercely acted and unnerving real-time demonstration of law and order breaking down. It is all the more disturbing, credible and immediate in that, unlike other examples of genre, the narrative isn’t heading for an abyss of unknowable chaos. Rather, it envisions society’s grim normalisation of disaster and loss, an evolutionary leap downwards but one in which a kind of rebirth is not ruled out.
In contrast to the American post-apocalypse of John Hillcoat’s The Road, or the European apocalypse of Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, this film is a very British world-ending – because the populace are unarmed, or mostly. First-time director Mahalia Belo and screenwriter Alice Birch (who has adapted the novel by Megan Hunter) may have taken...
Here is a post-apocalyptic drama of survival, a fiercely acted and unnerving real-time demonstration of law and order breaking down. It is all the more disturbing, credible and immediate in that, unlike other examples of genre, the narrative isn’t heading for an abyss of unknowable chaos. Rather, it envisions society’s grim normalisation of disaster and loss, an evolutionary leap downwards but one in which a kind of rebirth is not ruled out.
In contrast to the American post-apocalypse of John Hillcoat’s The Road, or the European apocalypse of Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, this film is a very British world-ending – because the populace are unarmed, or mostly. First-time director Mahalia Belo and screenwriter Alice Birch (who has adapted the novel by Megan Hunter) may have taken...
- 1/17/2024
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Christian Friedel was overcome with shame. Days before playing Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, in Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, the German actor chose to visit Auschwitz for the first time. And since he’d already been given an undercut, Friedel had to tuck his Nazi hairdo underneath a baseball cap whilst touring the site where his character oversaw the extermination of 1.1 million Jews.
“I was ashamed with this haircut,” Friedel tells Rolling Stone. “It was schizophrenic, in a way, because I was visiting...
“I was ashamed with this haircut,” Friedel tells Rolling Stone. “It was schizophrenic, in a way, because I was visiting...
- 1/14/2024
- by Marlow Stern
- Rollingstone.com
German actor Christian Friedel melts into his roles, most recently as the commandant of Auschwitz in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.”
The Dresden, Germany-based actor and musician fashioned Rudolf Höss as an executive on the rise: he’s a snappy dresser who’s efficient and knows how to get the most out of his employees and equipment —and how to suck up to his bosses. Except that he’s running a death camp and overseeing the murder of thousands of Jews and whoever else the Nazis didn’t like. He also oversees a large family run by his equally striving and efficient wife, Hedwig.
It’s a tough role, but on one Saturday at the London Hotel in West Hollywood, Friedel is dressed in casual chic clothes while his curly hair borders on rebellion, unlike the severe cut Höss sports.
“It’s really precise. It’s like a second skin in a way,...
The Dresden, Germany-based actor and musician fashioned Rudolf Höss as an executive on the rise: he’s a snappy dresser who’s efficient and knows how to get the most out of his employees and equipment —and how to suck up to his bosses. Except that he’s running a death camp and overseeing the murder of thousands of Jews and whoever else the Nazis didn’t like. He also oversees a large family run by his equally striving and efficient wife, Hedwig.
It’s a tough role, but on one Saturday at the London Hotel in West Hollywood, Friedel is dressed in casual chic clothes while his curly hair borders on rebellion, unlike the severe cut Höss sports.
“It’s really precise. It’s like a second skin in a way,...
- 1/10/2024
- by Carole Horst
- Variety Film + TV
With the New Year upon us, it’s time for our annual tradition of looking at the cinematic horizon. Having highlighted 30 films we guarantee are worth seeing this year and those we hope get U.S. distribution, we now venture into the unknown. We dug deep to chart the 100 films we’re most looking forward to, from debuts to documentaries to the return of some of our most-beloved auteurs, along with a small batch of studio films worth giving attention.
Though the majority lack a set release––let alone a confirmed festival premiere––most have wrapped production and will likely debut at some point in 2024. Be sure to check back for updates over the next twelve months (and beyond).
100. Civil War (Alex Garland; April 26)
A storm brewed across social media with the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War. Garland, who last invigorated and disgusted audiences with Men, still boasts...
Though the majority lack a set release––let alone a confirmed festival premiere––most have wrapped production and will likely debut at some point in 2024. Be sure to check back for updates over the next twelve months (and beyond).
100. Civil War (Alex Garland; April 26)
A storm brewed across social media with the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War. Garland, who last invigorated and disgusted audiences with Men, still boasts...
- 1/8/2024
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has been relatively quiet of late and hasn’t made a film since 2017’s “Happy End,” but his exacting reputation has been coming under fire in recent weeks. First, Juliette Binoche called him a “control freak” while recalling working with the filmmaker on “Caché.” “I thought, ‘He doesn’t give a shit about what I’m doing.’ So I said that to him; I said, did you see?
Continue reading Franz Rogowski Says Michael Haneke Can Be “Cruel & Unforgiving” & Talks Terrence Malick’s ‘The Way Of The Wind’ at The Playlist.
Continue reading Franz Rogowski Says Michael Haneke Can Be “Cruel & Unforgiving” & Talks Terrence Malick’s ‘The Way Of The Wind’ at The Playlist.
- 1/2/2024
- by Edward Davis
- The Playlist
llker Çatak, the director of Germany’s Oscar shortlisted The Teachers’ Lounge with Anne-Katrin Titze on Wim Wenders, the director of Japan’s Oscar shortlisted Perfect Days: “Wim is such a nice guy! He’s not my competitor, he’s one of my teachers.”
Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Young Ahmed (Le Jeune Ahmed), Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre Les Murs), Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure Of A Man, starring the unforgettable Vincent Lindon, and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant are four of the films that inspired llker Çatak’s outstanding The Teachers’ Lounge. Shot by Judith Kaufmann, edited by Gesa Jäger (Jakob Lass’s Love Steaks with Lana Cooper and Franz Rogowski; Anna Winger's Transatlantic and Maria Schrader's Unorthodox series with Shira Haas), stars a terrific Leonie Benesch (Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon).
Ms Nowak (Leonie Benesch) in the classroom with her students...
Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Young Ahmed (Le Jeune Ahmed), Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre Les Murs), Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure Of A Man, starring the unforgettable Vincent Lindon, and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant are four of the films that inspired llker Çatak’s outstanding The Teachers’ Lounge. Shot by Judith Kaufmann, edited by Gesa Jäger (Jakob Lass’s Love Steaks with Lana Cooper and Franz Rogowski; Anna Winger's Transatlantic and Maria Schrader's Unorthodox series with Shira Haas), stars a terrific Leonie Benesch (Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon).
Ms Nowak (Leonie Benesch) in the classroom with her students...
- 12/31/2023
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
[Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Passages.”]
Franz Rogowski’s intense and offbeat appeal gets its purest expression in the despairing polycule at the center of Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” In the Euro-chic romantic drama that recalls Mike Nichols’ “Closer” through the unsentimental lens of a Maurice Pialat film, the German dancer-turned-actor plays solipsistic, emotionally arrested filmmaker Tomas Freibur. On the eve of wrapping his latest film, he strays from his taciturn husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and into the arms of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who, when Tomas later tells her he’s in love with her, replies, “You must say that a lot.”
Rogowski is a physically striking performer, here in great shape in this film after withering as a gay prisoner post-World War II for his European Film Award-nominated turn in 2021’s “Great Freedom.” His filmography has acquainted him closely with the world’s great filmmakers, from Michael Haneke to Terrence Malick (“A Hidden Life”) and Christian Petzold...
Franz Rogowski’s intense and offbeat appeal gets its purest expression in the despairing polycule at the center of Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” In the Euro-chic romantic drama that recalls Mike Nichols’ “Closer” through the unsentimental lens of a Maurice Pialat film, the German dancer-turned-actor plays solipsistic, emotionally arrested filmmaker Tomas Freibur. On the eve of wrapping his latest film, he strays from his taciturn husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and into the arms of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who, when Tomas later tells her he’s in love with her, replies, “You must say that a lot.”
Rogowski is a physically striking performer, here in great shape in this film after withering as a gay prisoner post-World War II for his European Film Award-nominated turn in 2021’s “Great Freedom.” His filmography has acquainted him closely with the world’s great filmmakers, from Michael Haneke to Terrence Malick (“A Hidden Life”) and Christian Petzold...
- 12/28/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
For many German performers, the decision about whether or not to play a Nazi proves a fraught one. To depict the history isn’t to endorse it, of course, but to delve into how humans can fall in line behind such barbarism opens the door to finding justifications for that behavior. After playing a Jewish refugee and an attempted assassin of Hitler, actor Christian Friedel now examines this dark period in his country’s history from the other side as Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Höss in The Zone of Interest.
Writer-director Jonathan Glazer, though, dispenses with traditional lines of inquiry to understand and contextualize Höss’s atrocities. The Zone of Interest finds an all-encompassing aesthetic language to show not how Nazis rationalized their genocidal actions, but how they compartmentalized them. It’s an experience better to viscerally feel than to have intellectualized in description, but Friedel’s startlingly naturalistic portrayal of...
Writer-director Jonathan Glazer, though, dispenses with traditional lines of inquiry to understand and contextualize Höss’s atrocities. The Zone of Interest finds an all-encompassing aesthetic language to show not how Nazis rationalized their genocidal actions, but how they compartmentalized them. It’s an experience better to viscerally feel than to have intellectualized in description, but Friedel’s startlingly naturalistic portrayal of...
- 12/15/2023
- by Marshall Shaffer
- Slant Magazine
Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller bravely take on the terrible challenge of being German actors playing Nazis in Jonathan Glazer’s unsparing Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest.” It’s a task each turned over quite a lot in their minds before agreeing to play Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his sociopathic wife Hedwig, who lived with their children in a hardly oblivious bucolic bubble next to the Auschwitz concentration camp at the start of World War II.
“We talked about, in a very intense way, the subject matter, about the fact that, to play these two characters documentary-style, is this right? Is this good? How can you do that?,” Friedel told IndieWire in a Zoom interview from the New York offices of A24, which releases the film this week in select theaters.
Friedel, who is warm and chipper in conversation but totally devoid of emotion onscreen as Höss, is...
“We talked about, in a very intense way, the subject matter, about the fact that, to play these two characters documentary-style, is this right? Is this good? How can you do that?,” Friedel told IndieWire in a Zoom interview from the New York offices of A24, which releases the film this week in select theaters.
Friedel, who is warm and chipper in conversation but totally devoid of emotion onscreen as Höss, is...
- 12/13/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
If executed well, twist endings can result in a fun experience. Having the rug pulled out from under you in a way that sheds new light on the entire film can make you instantly want to watch the rest of the film again. Whether it's "The Usual Suspects," "Fight Club," or "The Sixth Sense," the twist sends a blast of dopamine through your brain that leaves you walking out of the theater on a dizzying high.
Rarer are the twist endings that leave you utterly bereft and devastated, where that hit of dopamine is replaced by crushing defeat. Attempting this kind of ending can be enormously precarious, as you introduce the distinct possibility of completely alienating your audience. Sometimes that's the point, like in Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," but more often than not, you are looking to give the viewers an emotionally cathartic ending that is in keeping with the narrative.
Rarer are the twist endings that leave you utterly bereft and devastated, where that hit of dopamine is replaced by crushing defeat. Attempting this kind of ending can be enormously precarious, as you introduce the distinct possibility of completely alienating your audience. Sometimes that's the point, like in Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," but more often than not, you are looking to give the viewers an emotionally cathartic ending that is in keeping with the narrative.
- 12/13/2023
- by Mike Shutt
- Slash Film
The Irish festival runs from February 22 to March 2.
Dublin International Film Festival has unveiled its first programme highlights, with French star Isabelle Huppert to receive Diff’s career achievement accolade, the Volta Award, and That They May Face The Rising Sun set to close the festival.
Huppert’s career has spanned six decades, from early roles such as Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker, for which she received the Bafta most promising newcomer award, to recent cinema roles including Mia Hansen-Love’s Things To Come, Michael Haneke’s Happy End, Neil Jordan’s Greta, Anthony Fabian Mrs Harris Goes To...
Dublin International Film Festival has unveiled its first programme highlights, with French star Isabelle Huppert to receive Diff’s career achievement accolade, the Volta Award, and That They May Face The Rising Sun set to close the festival.
Huppert’s career has spanned six decades, from early roles such as Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker, for which she received the Bafta most promising newcomer award, to recent cinema roles including Mia Hansen-Love’s Things To Come, Michael Haneke’s Happy End, Neil Jordan’s Greta, Anthony Fabian Mrs Harris Goes To...
- 12/11/2023
- by Mona Tabbara
- ScreenDaily
Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge world premiered to acclaim in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section in February, then swept the board three month later at the German Film Awards, scooping best film, director, screenplay, editing and actress for Leonie Benesch.
The actress plays a rookie teacher whose career and sanity unravels after she becomes embroiled in a heavy-handed investigation into a series of petty thefts at her school.
Çatak, who was born in Berlin to Turkish parents, says the premise for the film was sparked by a school experience he shared with co-writer and lifelong friend Johannes Duncker.
“Three teachers came into the class and frisked us,” Çatak said discussing the film at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International. “We thought it’s a good kick-off for a story where prejudice and assumptions poison a community.”
A crucial decision in the writing process was to confine the action to the school.
The actress plays a rookie teacher whose career and sanity unravels after she becomes embroiled in a heavy-handed investigation into a series of petty thefts at her school.
Çatak, who was born in Berlin to Turkish parents, says the premise for the film was sparked by a school experience he shared with co-writer and lifelong friend Johannes Duncker.
“Three teachers came into the class and frisked us,” Çatak said discussing the film at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International. “We thought it’s a good kick-off for a story where prejudice and assumptions poison a community.”
A crucial decision in the writing process was to confine the action to the school.
- 12/9/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Isabelle Huppert isn’t always an actress who disappears into her roles because, like perhaps her American counterpart Meryl Streep, her presence is already iconic and bigger than the screen itself. But in Jean-Paul Salomé’s “La Syndicaliste,” she goes full Hitchcock-blonde, bangs and all, to play Irish whistleblower Maureen Kearney. A trade unionist who exposed corruption at multinational nuclear powerhouse Areva in 2012, Kearney was violently assaulted in her own home after she brought to light secret dealings with China, but police and press didn’t believe her, and she was accused of staging her own attack.
While the story was widely publicized in Europe, Huppert herself wasn’t familiar with Kearney’s case. Kearney, forced into confessing to fabricating the assault after a brutal and longwinded police custody, eventually retracted her statement and was cleared of charges. But “La Syndicaliste,” even if you know the story, still plays...
While the story was widely publicized in Europe, Huppert herself wasn’t familiar with Kearney’s case. Kearney, forced into confessing to fabricating the assault after a brutal and longwinded police custody, eventually retracted her statement and was cleared of charges. But “La Syndicaliste,” even if you know the story, still plays...
- 11/30/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
It was easy enough to get made, said German director Ilker Çatak over coffee at the Toronto International Film Festival. He came up with the idea and co-wrote low-budget indie “The Teacher’s Lounge” with his old school-mate Johannes Duncker. “We wanted to make a movie about a young teacher who gets into trouble,” said Çatak. “Education is a topic that everybody has a relationship with. So whether you’ve been in school, or you have kids in school, it’s a universal thing.”
Inspired by a true incident from their school days, the writers set the entire movie inside the school, cutting out the backstory of the idealistic young teacher, Carla (Leonie Benesch). “We eliminated the whole exposition, and jumped right into the action,” said .Çatak. “And another key was to just have it take place in one place. And to restrict ourselves on all kinds of levels: in the screenplay,...
Inspired by a true incident from their school days, the writers set the entire movie inside the school, cutting out the backstory of the idealistic young teacher, Carla (Leonie Benesch). “We eliminated the whole exposition, and jumped right into the action,” said .Çatak. “And another key was to just have it take place in one place. And to restrict ourselves on all kinds of levels: in the screenplay,...
- 11/21/2023
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Asking Questions.
With Spooky Season firmly in the rear view mirror, Trace and I are now mid-way through our month on Toxic Masculinity. And while we probably could have counted Apt Pupil (and maybe even Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2), we officially kicked things off with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
Things get considerably darker with our second entry: Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel‘s Deadgirl. The extreme film follows two high school teenage boys – Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and Jt (Noah Segan) – who discover a zombie girl (Jenny Spain) in an abandoned hospital and make the horrific decision to use her as a sex object rather than alert the authorities.
As Rickie struggles with his guilty conscience, Jt recruits other “friends” like Wheeler (Eric Podnar) to assault the girl. Things get out of hand, however, when a pair of jocks, including Johnny (Andrew Dipalma) – the boyfriend of Rickie’s crush,...
With Spooky Season firmly in the rear view mirror, Trace and I are now mid-way through our month on Toxic Masculinity. And while we probably could have counted Apt Pupil (and maybe even Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2), we officially kicked things off with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
Things get considerably darker with our second entry: Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel‘s Deadgirl. The extreme film follows two high school teenage boys – Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and Jt (Noah Segan) – who discover a zombie girl (Jenny Spain) in an abandoned hospital and make the horrific decision to use her as a sex object rather than alert the authorities.
As Rickie struggles with his guilty conscience, Jt recruits other “friends” like Wheeler (Eric Podnar) to assault the girl. Things get out of hand, however, when a pair of jocks, including Johnny (Andrew Dipalma) – the boyfriend of Rickie’s crush,...
- 11/13/2023
- by Joe Lipsett
- bloody-disgusting.com
Hengameh Panahi, the French-Iranian producer and sales agent who founded Celluloid Dreams and was a pivotal figure in bringing works from such auteurs as Jacques Audiard, Jafar Panahi (no relation), François Ozon, Marjane Satrapi and Todd Haynes to the world, has died. She was 67.
Viviana Andriani, a press attaché who had worked with Panahi for many years, confirmed Thursday that Panahi died on November 5 after battling a long illness.
Celluloid Dreams, which Panahi launched in 1985, was a groundbreaking sales and production company that helped build the global market for international arthouse films. Over the course of three decades, Paris-based Celluloid helped package and sell more than 800 films, including the first works from François Ozon (See The Sea), Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and Bruno Dumont (The Life of Jesus), among many others.
Alongside many European talents, Panahi, who was born in Iran but moved to Europe aged...
Viviana Andriani, a press attaché who had worked with Panahi for many years, confirmed Thursday that Panahi died on November 5 after battling a long illness.
Celluloid Dreams, which Panahi launched in 1985, was a groundbreaking sales and production company that helped build the global market for international arthouse films. Over the course of three decades, Paris-based Celluloid helped package and sell more than 800 films, including the first works from François Ozon (See The Sea), Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and Bruno Dumont (The Life of Jesus), among many others.
Alongside many European talents, Panahi, who was born in Iran but moved to Europe aged...
- 11/9/2023
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Silly Americans…
After concluding spooky season with a reappraisal of Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (the Director’s Cut), we’re moving into November by kicking off a new theme of episodes on toxic masculinity. First up is Michael Haneke‘s fourth wall-breaking film Funny Games!
In Funny Games, Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and their son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) visit their idyllic lakeside vacation home, only to be terrorized by Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), a pair of deeply disturbed young men. Paul and Peter take the family hostage and subject them to the titular “funny games,” which doubles as a critique of (American) viewers themselves.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and RSS.
Episode 254: Funny Games (1997)
Buckle up...
After concluding spooky season with a reappraisal of Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (the Director’s Cut), we’re moving into November by kicking off a new theme of episodes on toxic masculinity. First up is Michael Haneke‘s fourth wall-breaking film Funny Games!
In Funny Games, Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and their son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) visit their idyllic lakeside vacation home, only to be terrorized by Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), a pair of deeply disturbed young men. Paul and Peter take the family hostage and subject them to the titular “funny games,” which doubles as a critique of (American) viewers themselves.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and RSS.
Episode 254: Funny Games (1997)
Buckle up...
- 11/6/2023
- by Trace Thurman
- bloody-disgusting.com
Deb-o-rah.
October has been a pretty exciting month: we celebrated our 250th episode of the podcast with Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, then tackled one of Jason Voorhees’ best entries with Friday the 13th Part 2 before getting real serious with Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil.
We’re closing out the month with a seasonally appropriate film: Rob Zombie‘s 2009 return to the Halloween franchise, Halloween II. Important note of distinction, however, we’re talking about the Unrated Director’s Cut.
In the film, it’s been two years since Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) faced down Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) but she’s still suffering from serious Ptsd. Despite Annie (Danielle Harris) and Sheriff Brackett’s (Brad Dourif) claims that she’s safe, Laurie is spiraling as Halloween approaches.
Not helping matters is Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who has written an insensitive new book about the murders. As Michael returns to finish what he began,...
October has been a pretty exciting month: we celebrated our 250th episode of the podcast with Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, then tackled one of Jason Voorhees’ best entries with Friday the 13th Part 2 before getting real serious with Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil.
We’re closing out the month with a seasonally appropriate film: Rob Zombie‘s 2009 return to the Halloween franchise, Halloween II. Important note of distinction, however, we’re talking about the Unrated Director’s Cut.
In the film, it’s been two years since Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) faced down Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) but she’s still suffering from serious Ptsd. Despite Annie (Danielle Harris) and Sheriff Brackett’s (Brad Dourif) claims that she’s safe, Laurie is spiraling as Halloween approaches.
Not helping matters is Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who has written an insensitive new book about the murders. As Michael returns to finish what he began,...
- 10/30/2023
- by Joe Lipsett
- bloody-disgusting.com
Four existing central and eastern European platforms have come togethe to leverage their combined buying and marketing power.
Four streaming platforms from Central and Eastern Europe have joined forces to bring European cinema to their audiences via a service called CEEYou.
New Horizons VOD (Poland), Kviff.TV (Czech Republic and Slovakia), Cinego (Hungary) and TIFF Unlimited (Romania) have launched the service with films from directors including Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Eric Rohmer and Olivier Assayas. CEEYou will be available on each of the existing platforms.
“Creating the CEEYou network gives us an opportunity to expand our offer and promote our content through cross-border promotional campaigns,...
Four streaming platforms from Central and Eastern Europe have joined forces to bring European cinema to their audiences via a service called CEEYou.
New Horizons VOD (Poland), Kviff.TV (Czech Republic and Slovakia), Cinego (Hungary) and TIFF Unlimited (Romania) have launched the service with films from directors including Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Eric Rohmer and Olivier Assayas. CEEYou will be available on each of the existing platforms.
“Creating the CEEYou network gives us an opportunity to expand our offer and promote our content through cross-border promotional campaigns,...
- 10/24/2023
- by Martin Blaney
- ScreenDaily
Stars: Ulrich Mühe, Susanne Lothar, Stefan Clapczynski, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering | Written and Directed by Michael Haneke
An innocuous sight opens this feature from writer/director Michael Haneke, as a car travels while containing the Schober family – made up of husband Georg (Ulrich Mühe), wife Anna (Susanne Lothar), young son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski), and dog Rolfi. They pass the journey to their holiday home with a song guessing game, until one song stumps Georg. Much like the classical music playing on the car speakers, the film’s sound is then drowned out by hard rock, an effective indication of how any expectations of an arthouse feature is changed to something more hardcore.
While unpacking, the family are visited by two young men – Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering) – who ask to borrow eggs. The pair overstay their welcome as Peter clumsily breaks numerous batches of eggs and knocks the family’s phone into water,...
An innocuous sight opens this feature from writer/director Michael Haneke, as a car travels while containing the Schober family – made up of husband Georg (Ulrich Mühe), wife Anna (Susanne Lothar), young son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski), and dog Rolfi. They pass the journey to their holiday home with a song guessing game, until one song stumps Georg. Much like the classical music playing on the car speakers, the film’s sound is then drowned out by hard rock, an effective indication of how any expectations of an arthouse feature is changed to something more hardcore.
While unpacking, the family are visited by two young men – Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering) – who ask to borrow eggs. The pair overstay their welcome as Peter clumsily breaks numerous batches of eggs and knocks the family’s phone into water,...
- 10/17/2023
- by James Rodrigues
- Nerdly
MK2 Films has acquired a collection of films and TV series directed by Bruno Dumont, the award-winning French director behind “Life of Jesus” and “Humanity.”
The acquisition, unveiled during Mipcom Cannes, covers the bulk of the director’s work, spanning eight films and TV series including “Li’l Quinquin,” which premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. MK2 Films will represent rights to some of these titles, in France and/or international markets, apart from a few titles like “Slack Bay” whose global rights are still handled by Memento International.
“Bruno Dumont is, of course, a major figure of contemporary cinema,” said Nathanaël Karmitz, MK2’s chairman of the executive board. Karmitz praised Dumont for the “originality of his unusual, unpredictable [films], veering from gravitas to some unnerving, comedic tangents.” He continued, “Iconoclastic and consistently courageous in its form, his work perfectly represents the free and ambitious cinema that we are proud to promote.
The acquisition, unveiled during Mipcom Cannes, covers the bulk of the director’s work, spanning eight films and TV series including “Li’l Quinquin,” which premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. MK2 Films will represent rights to some of these titles, in France and/or international markets, apart from a few titles like “Slack Bay” whose global rights are still handled by Memento International.
“Bruno Dumont is, of course, a major figure of contemporary cinema,” said Nathanaël Karmitz, MK2’s chairman of the executive board. Karmitz praised Dumont for the “originality of his unusual, unpredictable [films], veering from gravitas to some unnerving, comedic tangents.” He continued, “Iconoclastic and consistently courageous in its form, his work perfectly represents the free and ambitious cinema that we are proud to promote.
- 10/16/2023
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
The project stars American actress/model Devon Ross.
The production of director Dominik Sedlar’s Second World War feature Vindicta is underway in Croatia.
The film stars Devon Ross (HBO’s Irma Vep), Jack Bandeira, Sam Hazeldine (Peaky Blinders), Pip Torrens, Suzanne Bertish and Anna Madeley.
Austrian producer Veit Heiduschka, who has produced several of Michael Haneke’s films including Happy End, Amour, The White Ribbon and Hidden, is producing alongside Croatia Film’s creative director Zeljko Zima, Stephen Ollendorff, Alan Green, Wendy Benge and Sedlar.
It is Croatian-born US filmmaker Sedlar’s third successive feature with a Second World...
The production of director Dominik Sedlar’s Second World War feature Vindicta is underway in Croatia.
The film stars Devon Ross (HBO’s Irma Vep), Jack Bandeira, Sam Hazeldine (Peaky Blinders), Pip Torrens, Suzanne Bertish and Anna Madeley.
Austrian producer Veit Heiduschka, who has produced several of Michael Haneke’s films including Happy End, Amour, The White Ribbon and Hidden, is producing alongside Croatia Film’s creative director Zeljko Zima, Stephen Ollendorff, Alan Green, Wendy Benge and Sedlar.
It is Croatian-born US filmmaker Sedlar’s third successive feature with a Second World...
- 10/16/2023
- by Priyanca Rajput
- ScreenDaily
Horror films and controversy often go hand in hand. Historically, no genre has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable onscreen as much as horror, with authorities like the MPAA and the BBFC constantly stepping in to protect filmgoers from extreme content.
Controversies abound in horror, with countless examples of censorship, intrusive cuts, or outright bans. Other times, films can provoke a visceral reaction from the audience; "Audition" prompted people to faint in the initial screenings, for example, while "The Exorcist" gained everlasting notoriety for the apparent hysteria it caused in cinemas.
Rather than a comprehensive list, this represents a broad spread of different types of controversial deaths in horror films. It might best be summed up as 14 of the most interesting controversial deaths, rather than necessarily all of the most obvious choices. As such, please take the order with a pinch of salt. Lots of spoilers below, so beware!
Controversies abound in horror, with countless examples of censorship, intrusive cuts, or outright bans. Other times, films can provoke a visceral reaction from the audience; "Audition" prompted people to faint in the initial screenings, for example, while "The Exorcist" gained everlasting notoriety for the apparent hysteria it caused in cinemas.
Rather than a comprehensive list, this represents a broad spread of different types of controversial deaths in horror films. It might best be summed up as 14 of the most interesting controversial deaths, rather than necessarily all of the most obvious choices. As such, please take the order with a pinch of salt. Lots of spoilers below, so beware!
- 10/15/2023
- by Nick Bartlett
- Slash Film
Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.
Immigrant stories have been big in 2023, but the troubling core of Dear Jassi is actually an emigrant story,...
Immigrant stories have been big in 2023, but the troubling core of Dear Jassi is actually an emigrant story,...
- 10/9/2023
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Screen is profiling every submission for best international feature at the 96th Academy Awards.
Entries for the 2024 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.
The 96th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 10, 2024 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.
Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between December 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The deadline...
Entries for the 2024 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.
The 96th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 10, 2024 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.
Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between December 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The deadline...
- 10/5/2023
- by Screen staff
- ScreenDaily
At the large, modern school where the contentious events of The Teachers’ Lounge unfurl, Carla Nowak is the newbie instructor, fresh-faced and eager. By the end of the film, she’s more chastened and anxious than bursting with gung-ho spirit — which is not to say she’s been defeated by the insanity around her. But she has learned a thing or two about the absurdity of organizational politics in the digital age of the antisocial socials, laid bare in İlker Çatak’s pointed yet never simplistic drama.
The outside world is barely glimpsed in the movie, and the microcosmic significance of the school premises, somewhere in Germany, couldn’t be clearer. As a smaller version of a contemporary tinderbox, the community of teachers, students, administrators and office workers that Çatak and his cast inhabit never feels overly weighted with symbolism. Its powder-keg dynamics are fully alive and infuriating, even as they transparently replicate,...
The outside world is barely glimpsed in the movie, and the microcosmic significance of the school premises, somewhere in Germany, couldn’t be clearer. As a smaller version of a contemporary tinderbox, the community of teachers, students, administrators and office workers that Çatak and his cast inhabit never feels overly weighted with symbolism. Its powder-keg dynamics are fully alive and infuriating, even as they transparently replicate,...
- 10/4/2023
- by Sheri Linden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Screen is profiling every submission for best international feature at the 96th Academy Awards.
Entries for the 2024 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.
The 96th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 10, 2024 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.
Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between December 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The deadline...
Entries for the 2024 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.
The 96th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 10, 2024 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.
Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between December 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The deadline...
- 10/2/2023
- by Screen staff
- ScreenDaily
Matteo Garrone’s talent for weaving stories out of the fabric of real events––especially those involving desperate or violent people––gets another airing in Io Capitano, an engrossing, visceral portrait of one young man’s brutal journey from Senegal to the coast of Italy. The director won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008 for Gomorrah, his defining, excoriating portrait of the Camorra crime syndicate, and he performed the trick again ten years later in Dogman, inspired by a gruesome gangland murder in Rome. He’s also had success in comedies (Reality) and fantasy (Tale of Tales), but his new film is an epic embracing the defining issue of Italian politics right now––the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean heading for Europe––making a potentially abstract, no-less-urgent topic tactile and approachable.
The migrant crisis is having a moment this year in European cinema, with Agnieszka Holland’s recent Green Border,...
The migrant crisis is having a moment this year in European cinema, with Agnieszka Holland’s recent Green Border,...
- 9/27/2023
- by Ed Frankl
- The Film Stage
When thinking of the best French movies of the 21st century, there are some titles that leap to mind immediately, even if the past 23 years haven’t appeared to be as creatively fecund as the heady heights of the New Wave period. Celine Sciamma, François Ozon, Bruno Dumont, and Julia Ducournau have all produced stunning, instantly canonical works. But what’s interesting is to consider how expansive the idea of “Frenchness” in cinema has been this century: on the list below, Austrian Michael Haneke, Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, and American Julian Schnabel appear, with the main criterion for inclusion being simply the use of the French language.
Their inclusion does call into question a bit the idea of national cinemas. And yet, even in this highly interconnected, global 21st century, France singularly remains one of the medium’s most essential guiding lights. From the pioneer era of the Lumiere brothers to...
Their inclusion does call into question a bit the idea of national cinemas. And yet, even in this highly interconnected, global 21st century, France singularly remains one of the medium’s most essential guiding lights. From the pioneer era of the Lumiere brothers to...
- 9/25/2023
- by Eric Kohn and David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
“Dead Poets Society.” “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” “School of Rock.” There are oh so many films about free-thinking educators who inspire young people to be their best selves in the face of stodgy institutions that would seek to limit the full scope of a student’s potential. İlker Çatak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge” is not one of those films. On the contrary, this lung-tightening scholastic thriller — which effectively imagines what seventh grade might be like if the curriculum were determined by Michael Haneke — tells the story of a nonconformist teacher who strives to do right by the most vulnerable kids in her class, only to fail spectacularly at every turn.
It’s not because she has some kind of secret blind spot, or because the German public school where she works is a magnet for any particularly vile behavior. And it’s not entirely because the paranoia enabled by...
It’s not because she has some kind of secret blind spot, or because the German public school where she works is a magnet for any particularly vile behavior. And it’s not entirely because the paranoia enabled by...
- 9/15/2023
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Four years ago, before Covid turned everything upside down, a new Asian masterpiece world premiered virtually unnoticed at the Toronto Film Festival. That film was “A Sun,” a multifaceted Taiwanese family saga from director Chung Mong-Hong that seemed to shift and evolve as it unfolded, challenging what audiences thought they knew about the characters. Tucked away in TIFF’s overcrowded (and under-promoted) Contemporary World Cinema section, the film easily slid under the radar.
Toronto programmers weren’t about to make the same mistake with “A Normal Family,” a film of similar force from South Korea, giving it a coveted Gala spot. Director Hur Jin-ho’s complex, complacency-shattering moral study boasts a heightened yet easily relatable premise, and strong potential to play well around the globe. Like “A Sun,” the movie comes roaring out of the gate with a shocker of an opening scene: An aggro jerk in a blood-red Maserati...
Toronto programmers weren’t about to make the same mistake with “A Normal Family,” a film of similar force from South Korea, giving it a coveted Gala spot. Director Hur Jin-ho’s complex, complacency-shattering moral study boasts a heightened yet easily relatable premise, and strong potential to play well around the globe. Like “A Sun,” the movie comes roaring out of the gate with a shocker of an opening scene: An aggro jerk in a blood-red Maserati...
- 9/15/2023
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
The 19th Zurich Film Festival promises to be a star-studded affair with plenty of Hollywood A-list talent attending.
Todd Haynes will be honored with the festival’s A Tribute to… Award and will present his film “May December.” Previous recipients include Paolo Sorrentino, Wim Wenders, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Oliver Stone, Maïwenn and Luca Guadagnino.
“It’s a real honor to celebrate this master of American cinema. Todd Haynes is renowned for his elegant mise-en-scène and his ability to get the best from his actors and actresses,” said festival director Christian Jungen.
Ethan Hawke will be present with his film “Wildcat.” As previously announced, Jessica Chastain will receive the festival’s Golden Icon Award. Diane Kruger will receive the Golden Eye prize.
The festival’s feature film competition for first, second and third works will see “Ama Gloria,” “Enea,” “Fair Play,” “Femme,” “Hesitation Wound,” “How To Have Sex,...
Todd Haynes will be honored with the festival’s A Tribute to… Award and will present his film “May December.” Previous recipients include Paolo Sorrentino, Wim Wenders, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Oliver Stone, Maïwenn and Luca Guadagnino.
“It’s a real honor to celebrate this master of American cinema. Todd Haynes is renowned for his elegant mise-en-scène and his ability to get the best from his actors and actresses,” said festival director Christian Jungen.
Ethan Hawke will be present with his film “Wildcat.” As previously announced, Jessica Chastain will receive the festival’s Golden Icon Award. Diane Kruger will receive the Golden Eye prize.
The festival’s feature film competition for first, second and third works will see “Ama Gloria,” “Enea,” “Fair Play,” “Femme,” “Hesitation Wound,” “How To Have Sex,...
- 9/14/2023
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.