Noticias

The surface sheen of “Whenever I’m Alone with You” (2025), the directorial debut of Vesper Egon and Guillaume Campanacci, is so deliberately dark and familiar that it should not work at all. Set in the sunlit rot of the South of France—not far from Cannes—the film follows a suicidal Frenchman named Guillaume. He’s everything a film-school dropout’s profile picture would admire: brooding, antisocial, quoting Godard, and spilling unsolicited monologues about society’s decay. Of course, he has an ex he can’t get over. Of course, he’s unable to love.

Enter Vedrana: a woman with Sarajevo roots, dominatrix aesthetics, and a thousand untold dreams flickering behind her silence. She’s just left a stale relationship. No prizes for guessing what happens when she collides with Guillaume’s existential haze. You’ve seen this story before. Except here, the clichés wear new skin—threadbare, grainy, but sewn with a strange pulse.

The Oldenburg Film Festival, Germany’s leading all-indie fest, unveiled highlights for its 30th-anniversary edition, including several world premieres featuring Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard and Mission : Impossible star Ving Rhames.

Uppercut, a boxing film featuring Mission: Impossible star Ving Rhames, will close the festival on September 17. Director Torsten Ruether remade his own, German-language, debut Leberhaken, which premiered in Oldenburg in 2021. The Million Dollar Baby-style story sees Rhames as a disillusioned former boxer who gets a shot at redemption when a young woman shows up at his gym, begging him to train her.

Spanish genre director F. Javier Gutierrez will bring his latest horror tale, The Wait, to Oldenburg this year. Gutiérrez’s 2008 debut Before the Fall, an end-of-the-world sci-fi thriller, was a cross-over hit, and his follow-up was the big-budget Rings (2017) for Paramount, the third entry in the Japanese-inspired horror saga. But the film, despite grossing $83 million worldwide, was...