Noticias

Studiocanal will stage at the London TV Screenings the international premiere of “Spinners,” an eight-part extreme sports action drama set on the mean streets of Cape Town’s Southside, that is not just a series but a sign of an industry zeitgeist.

As the competition for talent grows, there’s a building drive into emerging production hubs beyond the traditional powerhouse territories in Europe led by some of its most powerful players, here France’s Canal+, Studiocanal and Federation Studios, and some of its biggest TV events, such as Series Mania.

Produced by Joachim Landau and Raphaël Rocher at Federation Studios’ Empreinte Digitale, and co-created by Landau, “Spinners” is a co-production of South Africa’s Showmax, Africa’s biggest pan-continental SVOD service available in 65 countries, and Vivendi’s Canal+, rating as both a Showmax and Canal+ Original.

“Spinners” makes its market bow just months after French powerhouse Federation Studios and...

As production days notch upward across Paris, crews both local and international can sometimes find themselves competing not only for personnel and materials but also with a separate industry that predates the invention of the camera by several hundred years – the tourist trade.

In 2019, France was the world’s leading travel destination, hosting 90 million international visitors. Though obviously such numbers took a substantial hit when global travel tapered off in early 2020, much of the infrastructure and protocols meant to serve that older industry have very much remained in place.

To see one such challenge this creates, one need only look to the Château de Versailles, which keeps traditional museum hours, remaining open to the public six days a week. As the producers behind the upcoming Canal Plus series “Marie Antoinette” quickly learned – and those prepping the Johnny Depp-led, Maïwenn-directed Louis Xv project set to shoot there later this...

Apple TV+ has launched a new trailer for the immersive nine episode series ‘Calls’ featuring an all-star cast.

Directed by Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), each episode follows a darkly dramatic mystery that unfolds through a series of seemingly average, unconnected phone calls that quickly become surreal as the characters face growingly unsettling experiences.

Based on the buzzy Canal+ French series of the same name created by Timothée Hochet, the series is a groundbreaking, immersive television experience that masterfully uses audio and minimal abstract visuals to tell nine bone-chilling, short-form stories.

The stellar cast assembled to bring this Apple Original series of eerie conversations to life includes Nicholas Braun, Clancy Brown, Lily Collins, Rosario Dawson, Mark Duplass, Karen Gillan, Judy Greer, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, Nick Jonas, Riley Keough, Joey King, Stephen Lang, Jaeden Martell, Paola Nuñez, Pedro Pascal, Edi Patterson, Aubrey Plaza, Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jennifer Tilly.

Jorge Camara, the esteemed Mexico-born film critic and former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, died Friday afternoon after battling ongoing health issues, the organization behind the Golden Globe Awards confirmed Saturday. He was 84.

“It is with great regret that I have to let you know of the passing of our dear friend and colleague Jorge Camara,” the HFPA statement reads. “Jorge passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon after struggling with health issues for the past few years. As a past president of the HFPA, he was instrumental in the success of our association. Many of you have worked closely with him, and we know you will join in our sorrow.”

Camara — who served as president of the HFPA for a total of years, the most recent being from 2007-2009 — joined the organization in 1968 and was on its board for more than 20 years. He was also a member of the...

Madrid – Orange TV Spain today became the first operator internationally to launch AMC Network International’s on-demand service, AMC Selekt, bringing more than 5,000 programs to subscribers.

Promoted as the most varied on-demand service now available in the Spanish market, the service offers all the on-demand films, series, documentaries, lifestyle, kids and musical content from AMC Networks International’s 10 channels across Southern Europe. Examples include recent drama series such as “Das Boot,” “Wisting” and “Bordertown” as well as popular feature films such as the “Lord of the

Rings” franchise, “Meet the Parents” and “The Addams Family.”

In addition to AMC’s in-house productions, the offer also includes concerts from popular national artists such as Vetusta Morla, Alice Wonder and Nunatak.

Orange TV subscribers will have access to the service starting today, at no additional cost to their current subscriptions. Networks with content available on the service include AMC, Canal Hollywood, SundanceTV,...

Roman Polanski’s big win on Friday at the César Awards, the French equivalent to the Academy Awards, prompted several actresses to walk out of the ceremony.

Although Polanski, 86, did not attend the ceremony — citing planned protests outside of the venue — he won best director for his film J’Accuse, known outside of France as An Officer and a Spy.

After the win was announced, actress Adele Haenel — the star of the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who also revealed last year that she had been sexually abused by a director as a child — walked out of the ceremony.

For auteurists in New York there can hardly be a better series playing right now than "Trilogies" at Film Forum: a four-week extravaganza of 78 films comprising 26 mini director retrospectives from Angelopoulos to Wenders and 24 other auteurs in between. Many of the groupings in the series are actual sequential trilogies, like Kobayashi’s The Human Condition or Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, while others more loosely stretch the term, such as Lucrecia Martel’s "Salta Trilogy" or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s "Coming of Age Trilogy," very welcome though those are.Very few of the trilogies in the series, however, have posters that were conceived as trios themselves, the French posters for Kieslowski’s Three Colors, above, and Albert Dubout’s cartoony designs for Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy being the major exceptions. There are two terrific matching posters by Jan Lenica for the first two films in Mark Donskoy's Maxim Gorky Trilogy,...

The former head of the Polish Film Institute gave me a stunning boxed set of the works of Andrzej Wajda two years ago at the Locarno Film Festival, and I am finally watching them. Most know Wajda is a one of Poland’s preeminent film directors, an Acadmey Award winner, recipeint of an Honorary Oscar, the Palme d’Or, as well as Honorary Golden Lion and Golden Bear Awards, he was a prominent member of the “Polish Film School”. He is best known today for The Promised Land (1975), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyn (2007).

What I learned was that he was born March 6, 1926, Suwałki, Poland the ancestral town of my own ancestors on my paternal grandfather’s side.

Wadja’s first film, A Generation, originally entitled Candidate Term, was by the first post-war generation to leave Lodz Film School who worked with Wajda on his first film. One of those graduates,...

Andrzej Wajda Film School lecturer Volker Schlöndorff on the Return to Montauk set in New York Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In Volker Schlöndorff's tribute to Andrzej Wajda, who died on Sunday, October 9, 2016, he recalls the impact he had on him and the actors the legendary director worked with, including Hannah Schygulla, Gerard Depardieu, Krystyna Janda, Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak and Andrzej Chyra.

Andrzej Wajda on the set of Kanal

Volker has been teaching at the Andrzej Wajda Film School and in his remembrance he gives us an intimate portrait of a filmmaker who impressed him early on with Kanal, Ashes And Diamonds and The Promised Land, and even more later in life when he got to know the man behind the films.

Andrzej Wajda received an honorary Oscar in 2000 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

"It is going to be a heavy walk and a beautiful day...

Andrzej Wajda, an enormously influential icon of Polish cinema who received an honorary Academy Award in 2000, has died at the age of 90. According to fellow filmmaker Jacek Bromski, who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Wajda was recently hospitalized and passed away earlier today.

Read More: Marc Webb To Direct Non-‘Spider-Man’ Spy Flick, Andrzej Wajda Preps Biopic & More

Best known for his war trilogy of “A Generation,” “Kanal” and especially “Ashes and Diamonds,” he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film on four occasions over the course of more than 30 years: “The Promised Land,” “The Maids of Wilko,” “Man of Iron” and “Katyń”; “Man of Iron” won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. His most recent film, “Afterimage,” screened in Toronto and was selected as Poland’s Oscar submission; though not intended as such, it serves as the swan song of a nonpareil career that lasted more than six decades.

Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese describes the impact that the restless, dynamic films made by great Polish directors from Roman Polanski to Andrzej Wajda have had on his work

As for many other people, my introduction to Polish cinema came with Andrzej Wajda’s trilogy: Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal and A Generation – actually, they were released out of order here in the Us, and we saw Kanal first, followed quickly by Ashes, both in 1961, and then we got to see A Generation later. Among the three, it was Ashes and Diamonds that had the greatest impact on me. It announced the arrival of a master film-maker. It was one of the last pictures that gave us a real testament of the impact of the war, on Wajda and on his nation. It introduced us to a whole school of film-making, related to what was coming out of the Soviet Union but quite distinct.

A retrospective of work by the Polish cinematographer, who worked with Polanski and Haneke, to screen at the festival.

Camerimage, the cinematography festival held in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, is to pay tribute to the late Jerzy Lipman with a retrospective of his work.

Films shot by the Polish cinematographer will be screened as part of Camerimage’s Remembering the Masters series throughout the 22nd edition of the festival (Nov 15-22).

Included in the series will be Kanal (1957), Knife in the Water (1962), A Generation (1955), The Ashes (1965) and Colonel Wolodyjowski (1969).

Lipman, who died in 1983, is considered one of the most eminent cinematographers in Polish cinema history and is a co-originator of the Polish Film School movement.

Lipman endured occupation and imprisonment during the Second World War before he became a celebrated filmmaker. After his release in 1948, he joined the Cinematography Department of the National Film School in Łódź and graduated in 1952.

As a student, he was the...

Aliya's blown away by the scale of this Russian WWII movie, but feels oddly distanced from it all the same...

Is being epic a genre distinction? Even before D.W. Griffith came along there were epic films out there, either historical or biblical, with great big heroes and towering sets. And every age of cinema has had its epic presentations: The Ten Commandments gave us the plagues of Egypt with Charlton Heston to part the Red Sea, David Lean presented us with an epic desert amongst other things, and Baz Luhrmann showed off an epic Australia. It’s all to do with the sweeping music, the majestic pan of the camera, the slow motion and the grand emotions.

Stalingrad has all of these things, and I get the feeling that it set out to put itself squarely in the epic genre. I watched it in 3D and it was an enormous experience,...

Chicago – There were countless foreign films in 2011 more deserving of an Oscar nod than Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness.” The film lacks the brutal edge, gut-wrenching tension and memorable characterizations that distinguished so many similar Holocaust-era dramas. Yet the lukewarm “been there, done that” reaction of many American critics has left me rather mystified.

This isn’t a great film, per se, but it is still a harrowing and compelling portrait of resilience in the face of evil. Best known for her fact-based exploration of Hitler youth, “Europa, Europa,” Holland is skilled at creating the sort of vividly atmospheric environment that seeps into a viewer’s bones. One of my favorite films as a child was Holland’s sublime 1993 adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” which viewed the gothic interiors and lush mazes through the eyes of bewitched children.

Blu-ray Rating: 3.5/5.0

With “In Darkness,” Holland burrows beneath the chaotic streets of a Polish city,...

Plus: Do any films get the history right? How many angels can dance on a pinhead?

Which British town is furthest from the sea?

The distance from the sea depends how you define "sea". Here in Ilford, tidewater – the River Roding – is just a mile away, but we are 34 miles by rail from Southend-on-Sea, the nearest resort. However, that is an estuary resort, shown by the wide expanse of glorious mud. The nearest good, sandy, seaside beach is Clacton-on-Sea, 63 miles by train.

Towns and cities in the West Midlands conurbation are likely to be furthest from the sea. Though Birmingham is only about 40 miles from tidewater (at Gloucester), the nearest resort is at least twice as far.

Residents of my hometown of Kington, Herefordshire, considered their nearest resort to be Aberystwyth, 60 miles away. This did not stop them contributing generously to lifeboat appeals, and supporting two fried fish shops.

Roger Backhouse,...

The Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland began her career in the 1970s working with Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi before making an impressive debut with Provincial Actors, in which she used a rep company and its discontents as an image of Polish life in the run-up to the creation of Solidarity. She's since divided her time between eastern Europe and the west, where her work has ranged from Washington Square to episodes of The Wire. Her latest Polish film, the tough, unsentimental In Darkness, brings together themes from two of the most highly regarded movies about the second world war, Wajda's Kanal, about Nazi troops pursuing resistance workers through the Warsaw sewers in 1944, and Schindler's List, Spielberg's true story of the quixotic German industrialist who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jewish workers in wartime Poland.

Holland's film is also closely based on fact. Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a sewer worker in German-occupied Lvov,...

Thanks to artists such as Zbigniew Cybulski and Andrzej Wajda, the world of vintage Polish film is stranger than anything else you will ever encounter

The early 1960s were a good time to be the child of British communists. For every achievement of capitalism, we were able to point to a similar triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Half the globe lived under some kind of Marxist regime; the Ussr was way ahead in the space race and the Daily Worker reported successes all over the east in the sciences and the arts. But for somebody in their early teens obsessed with the idea of cool, this was one area where communism couldn't compete with the decadent west.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip. No matter how hard I searched I couldn't find anybody in Bulgaria,...

Masterclass: Barry Ackroyd

“The most peaceful place you can be on a film set is when you put your eye to the camera.”

On Monday night at the BFI, British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd talked to Screen International Editor Mike Goodridge about his 30 years in film and TV. It’s a shame there wasn’t a full house in NFT3 and that I had to sit at an uncomfortable 45-degree angle to see the discussion. The good news was that Ackroyd’s eloquence matches his skills behind the camera and he sounded like a poet as he alluded to the “flow” of his work.

If there’s one word you probably wouldn’t use in association with Ackroyd’s recent films it’s peaceful. This is the guy who shot Ralph Fiennes’s Balkan-set Coriolanus, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and United 93. Given his talent for depicting war zones,...

It’s another week which means another round up of all the titles Criterion has put up on their Hulu Plus page. And it’s a great smorgasbord of releases that will keep your eyes full until the next installment. Also, thanks again to everyone who has signed up for Hulu Plus via our referral page. Please sign up and let us know what you think of the service. Enough of this small talk, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Last week’s article spoke about Louis Malle’s films being put up and sure enough, only a few days later they finally released Black Moon to their page, showing a film that will be coming out on June 28th. I love that they’re doing that with releases that are coming out, just to give their audience the film itself and if you like it, you’ll want to grab the whole package.

Chicago – If “Avatar” stood as a reminder of James Cameron’s undying popularity with audiences, “Sanctum” stands as proof that Cameron’s name alone can’t always sell a picture. Though the filmmaker merely served as executive producer of this murky thriller, the screen overflows with his signature tropes: underwater landscapes, 3D photography, hokey characters and pedestrian dialogue.

It nearly comes as a shock to discover that “Sanctum” was in fact not written and directed by the technologically ambitious, proudly commercial auteur. This sophomore directorial effort from Alister Grierson (“Kokoda”) is the sort of trash entertainment that undiscerning FEARnet subscribers may appreciate. The film prides itself on being devoid of the usual knee-jerk scares in cave-bound pictures, though it’s no less formulaic or artificial than any run-of-the-mill studio product.

Blu-Ray Rating: 2.5/5.0

Viewers don’t have to be connoisseurs of clichés in order to predict every twist and turn after...

Polish film was an early frontrunner, before occupation forced wave after wave of talent abroad. Its fortitude is embodied by Andrzej Wajda – still going strong 50 years after his first feature

There aren't many traces on the internet of the early Polish pioneers: people such as Kazimierz Prószyński and Bolesław Matuszewski who were operating at the turn of the century, turning out silent short docos called things like Ślizgawka w Łazienkach (Skating-rink in the Royal Baths). (Prószyński was also a pioneering camera inventor, developing a model called a pleograph in 1894, and a handheld effort called an aeroscope in 1909.) Nor is there any link for Anton in Warsaw for the First Time, Poland's legendary first feature film, directed by and starring Antoni Fertner in 1908.

Fertner, though, went on to a respectable career as an actor in the interwar period – you can see him as an old man in Książątko (1937, above) and Gehenna...

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Fifty years after creating the first cinematic account of the Warsaw uprising with “Kanal” - a classic that put Polish cinema on the international map - octogenarian master Andrzej Wajda offers “Katyn,” the first film about another WWII tragedy. Named for the wooded Soviet region where 15,000 Polish officers were executed by Stalin’s Red Army, “Katyn” strives to bring clarity to an event long (and …...

By Michael Atkinson

When we first met Aki Kaurismäki, in 1989 when "Ariel" had its run as probably the first Finnish film to play theatrically in America since Jörn Donner's "Portraits of Women" (1970), we more or less fell in love. Lost in the hollow skull of the Reagan-Bush '80s, suffering the ascension of Spielberg and Ivan Reitman and Shane Black, wondering what remote atoll international art cinema had escaped to, and more or less completely ignorant of Finnish life, we had every reason to embrace this last of the red hot deadpan existentialists, whose films somehow altered the cellular structure of working class depression and turned it into cool comedy. His distinctively bittersweet dyspepsia established Kaurismäki, in a thick run of films that included "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" (1989), "The Match Factory Girl" (1990) and "La Vie de Bohème" (1992), as a new arthouse brand name, a kind of vodka-weary Bresson-meets-Tati.

Kaurismäki...