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Sandra Oh is set to star in “Child’s Play,” the newly-announced psychological thriller from director Wang Xiaoshuai, Variety can reveal.

Bankside Films have boarded the film — set to start production in September and to be filmed on location in Toronto and North Bay, Ontario — and will be introducing it to buyers in Cannes.

“Child’s Play” — billed as a “haunting psychological thriller about guilt and redemption” — is written by acclaimed Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, whose play “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes” is currently playing Off-Broadway starring Hugh Jackman, and based on Alice Munro’s short story of the same name.

The film follows Marlene Lee, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents and who in 1983 attends an all-white summer camp for girls. In order to fit in and impress her new friend Charlene, Marlene crosses a line that will forever change her life. Some 41 years later in 2024 and have devoted herself to a successful political career,...

An ESPN star is coming to this week's episode of Law & Order, but he's not going to make it past the opening credits. First Take commentator Stephen A. Smith will play the victim du jour in "Tough Love," a new episode of the procedural flagship that will air on May 8. Variety reports that Smith will fulfill a longtime dream by appearing on the NBC series, which will conclude its 24th season later this month.

Smith will star as a hard-charging sports agent who's found stabbed to death in "Tough Love": with plenty of suspects and a mountain of evidence but no clear motive, prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) are stumped. It was a dream come true for the opinionated Smith, who was recruited by the episode's writer: "One of the writers, her name was Pam Wechsler, I ran across her in Los Angeles.

As a filmmaker, Sarah Polley, an Oscar-winning writer/director and former actress herself, has avoided the very pitfalls of bean-counter interference the series “The Studio” satirizes.

Her indie features, from “Women Talking” to “Take This Waltz” and “Away from Her,” have evaded executive oversight. Studio heads like Michael de Luca and Pam Abdy, at MGM circa the days of Polley’s fourth feature “Women Talking,” would check in, but they weren’t interrupting the process on her drama about Mennonite women abused and brainwashed by the men in their community.

In Episode 2 of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Hollywood lampoon “The Studio,” Polley plays an exaggerated version of herself, a director on a sprawling set with cables everywhere and a video village like ants drawing to a magnifying glass, trying to pull off a oner at magic hour in the Hollywood Hills. Rogen’s upstart Continental Studios chief Matt...

The unique joy of friendship is at the fore in helmers Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge’s “Don’t You Let Me Go.”

Produced by Uruguay-based Agustina Chiarino’s Bocacha Films, the feature clinched the Noah Ephron Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It marks Guevara and Jorge’s third collaboration with Bocacha, a production company at the forefront of pan-regional co-productions. Paris-based Alpha Violet is handling international sales.

The film opens at a wake. Adela, portrayed by Chiara Hourcade, reminisces with friends there to mark the death of her best friend Elena, dead at 39. The friends and family gathered are heartfelt, polite and emotional in this most clinical and anodyne of places. “Nothing here reminds me of my sister,” remarks one.

Waves of grief hit people at different times; Adela’s strikes as she sits in her car to leave. It’s in these opening moments that the fantastical strikes.

South Korean writer Han Kang, whose international breakthrough novel The Vegetarian was made into a film, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.

The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. The story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and homemaker, whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health struggles and problems in her familial life, was adapted as a feature film by Woo-Seong Lim and screened at Sundance in 2010.

The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Han Kang is the first South Korean to win the literature Nobel.

Just because “The Room Next Door” is in English doesn’t make it any less of a Pedro Almodóvar movie. It’s visually sumptuous, as always, bathed in saturated colors. It’s an intense, heightened drama about one woman facing death (Tilda Swinton) while her close friend (Julianne Moore) supports her journey. The Spanish director was in control, as always, even when he occasionally lost an argument with his actresses.

The 75-year-old auteur was moved by the film’s warm reception in Venice, where the jury awarded it the Golden Lion. But the fear of moving into a new language was always there.

Almodóvar had first considered shooting an English-language project with Meryl Streep, a version of “Julieta” (2016). He wrestled with how to adapt Canadian Alice Munro’s three short stories into English. He decided he’d rather set the story in Spain.

“If I would know what we all know now,...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics releases “The Room Next Door” in select theaters on December 20.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through” — and the second mounting of a Nunez book this fall season alongside David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend” — “The Room Next Door” is mannered in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful, stilted and stiff where it should be sumptuous, and aches of the feeling that the Spanish auteur passed his sensibility, and his script, through a direct-to-English transferal that lacks the nuances that, say, a bilingual literary translator would bring to a text brought from Europe to the United States. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, playing longtime...

Alice Munro, the Nobel and prize-winning Canadian author of short story collections and novels including “Lives of Girls and Women” and “The Love of a Good Woman,” died Monday night at her home in Ontario, the New York Times reported. She was 92

Munro won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2013 for her short stories, the Man Booker International prize in 2009 and the O’Henry award in 2012. Born Alice Laidlaw in Ontario, Canada, she often wrote about women living in small towns in the province.

The Booker jury wrote in its prize statement, “Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

Several of Munro’s stories were adapted for film and television,...

Receiving its world premiere in Pingyao International Film Festival’s Crouching Tigers section, Zhang Yu’s feature debut Killing The Violet is the story of a woman dealing with the aftermath of being raped after a man breaks into her apartment.

At first she appears completely calm and assures her live-in boyfriend that there is nothing to worry about. But slowly she starts to question herself and the world around her starts to disintegrate. One of the first walls to crack is her ambition to be a writer and her feelings towards her father, a famous novelist who is comatose following a stroke, but still appears to enjoy sexual relations with his younger wife.

Zhang is a Shanghai-based director and screenwriter who made Killing The Violet as her graduation film at Tokyo University of the Arts. Produced by her classmate Lu Yanqing, the film is co-written by Zhang and Marina Kikuchi.

It wouldn’t be a Cannes Film Festival without French actress extraordinaire Isabelle Huppert on the Croisette somehow. Deadline reports that a home invasion thriller set to star Huppert is making the rounds at the Cannes market today. Its title? “Free Radicals,” adapted from Alice Munro‘s short story that The New Yorker published back in 2008.

Read More: Dario Argento Says Isabelle Huppert Will Star In His Next Film

Huppert will star as an ailing woman who encounters Finn Wittrock‘s young killer on the run when he breaks into her house.

Continue reading ‘Free Radicals’: Isabelle Huppert & Finn Wittrock To Star In Home Invasion Thriller At Cannes Market at The Playlist.

Exclusive: Isabelle Huppert (Elle) and Finn Wittrock (Luckiest Girl Alive) have closed deals to star in Free Radicals, an English-language home invasion thriller based on the same-name short story originally published in The New Yorker by Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro.

With psychological twists and a Hitchockian flair, Free Radicals revolves around the harrowing encounter between an ailing woman (Huppert) and a young killer on the run (Wittrock). Xia Magnus (Sanzaru) is set to direct from his script written with Alyssa Polk. Pic’s producers are Academy Award nominee Alexandra Milchan (Tár) and Theo Vieljeux (Monica).

Charades will handle international sales for the film, following its success with a number of other titles from emerging filmmakers, including Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ Swallow starring Haley Bennett; Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary with Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley, which Neon will release in the U.S on May 19; Charlotte Regan’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize...

Gordon Pinsent, the adored Canadian actor whose career hit its peak well into his 70s with an award-winning performance as the heartbroken husband in “Away From Her”, has died.

Pinset died on Saturday evening at age 92, his friend actor Mark Critch confirmed.

The Newfoundland native, a household name in Canada for decades after his many appearances on stage and screen, became known internationally after his Genie Award-winning turn as Grant in Sarah Polley’s acclaimed directorial debut.

His dignified portrayal so impressed Daniel Day-Lewis, who went on to win the best actor Oscar in 2008 for “There Will Be Blood,” that he sent an email to Polley praising Pinsent’s performance as one of the most “astonishing” he’d ever seen.

Read more: Gordon Pinsent relives his remarkable life in ‘The River of My Dreams’

Those types of kudos tickled the modest Pinsent. Well into the final years of his life,...

Editor's Note: This article contains discussions of sexual violence and trauma.Sarah Polley's Women Talking is a drama about women in an isolated religious community struggling with their faith after facing severe continuous sexual assaults at the hands of the men in their community for a long time, featuring performances by some of the best actresses working in films today. Sarah Polley first made her name as a child actress with lead roles in films like Terry Gilliam's The Adventure of Baron Munchhausen and the TV show Ramona. In 1990, she burst into the public eye with the popular CBC television series Road to Avonlea, where she starred as Sara Stanley. She has starred in many popular feature films throughout her career, including Dawn of the Dead, Mr. Nobody, and The Secret Life of Words. In 2006, Polley directed her first feature film Away From Her, adapted from a short story by Alice Munro.

When Sarah Polley has flown from her home in Toronto to the U.S. this year for the release of her film “Women Talking”, she’s had conversations with customs officials that usually go something like this:

“What are you here for?”

“I’m screening a film.”

“What’s the name of the film?”

“Women Talking”.

“Then I get either the biggest eyeroll you’ve ever seen or I get something openly confrontational like, ‘I’ve had enough of that in my life. I’m not going to see that movie,’” Polley says. “Then I have to decide whether to take the bait and risk not getting into the country.”

Sometimes, she does take the bait. The title, she notes, isn’t “Women Shouting” or “Women Berating”. And yet she’s found it’s often received like a confrontation.

“One guy I asked: ‘So if I told you there was...

Sarah Polley’s work as a director is being recognized.

On Friday, the Palm Springs International Film Festival announced that the Canadian “Women Talking” filmmaker will receive its Director of the Year Award.

Read More: ‘We Were Part Of A Movement’: Sarah Polley On Making ‘Women Talking’

Polley will receive the honour on Jan. 5, 2023 during the festival, which will be running in-person through Jan. 16.

“Sarah Polley continues her outstanding work as a writer and director in her latest film ‘Women Talking’. She brings together a stellar cast in her adaptation of the Miriam Toews book, taking us on a cinematic journey filled with raw emotions and performances,” festival Chairman Harold Matzner said. “It is our honor to present Sarah Polley with the Director of the Year Award.”

Polley made her feature directorial debut with “Away From Her” in 2006, following a successful career as an actor from childhood. She was...

Chicago – Writer/Director Sarah Polley is back with her new film “Women Talking,” and attended a screening at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff) on October 20th, 2022. After making her name as a in-demand actor, Polley has since directed films like “Away From Her” and “Stories We Tell.”

Based on the best-selling novel by Miriam Toews – with the screenplay adapted and direction by Polley – “Women Talking” follows a group of women in an isolated religious colony as they struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony’s men. Featuring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey and Frances McDormand.

Director Sarah Polley of ‘Women Talking’

Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com

Sarah Polley îs an actor, director, producer and political activist. Born in Toronto, Canada, and after a series of film and stage roles as a child...

French novelist Annie Ernaux, whose novel Happening was the inspiration for Audrey Diwan’s 2021 Venice Golden Lion winner of the same name, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The 82-year-old writer is known for her body of semi-autobiographical works charting the lives of women and social change in France from the 1960s onwards.

Highlights of her literary career span her 1974 debut work Cleaned Out (Les Armoires Vides), A Man’s Place (1984), A Woman’s Story (1987) and her 2008 memoir The Years.

A number of her novels have been successfully adapted to the big screen, topped by Diwan’s Happening, which was adapted from Ernaux’s 2019 novella. Diwan, a novelist herself, consulted with Ernaux as she wrote the screenplay adaptation.

The powerful drama is based on Ernaux’s experiences when she fell pregnant as a student in the early 1960s when abortions were illegal in France.

Other features based on Ernaux...

Click here to read the full article.

French author Annie Ernaux, whose autobiography Happening was adapted for the screen by director Audrey Diwan as the abortion drama under the same name that earned the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding her for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her other books include The Years and Getting Lost.

Ernaux “was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents had a combined grocery store and café,” the Swedish Academy noted. “Her path to authorship was long and arduous.”

The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine,...

Fans of Pedro Almodóvar will have to keep waiting for his first English-language feature. The Oscar winner was set to switch languages when he directed “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” an adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s short-story collection starring Cate Blanchett. But Almodóvar, who is currently finishing a new Western short starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, has exited the project.

Deadline broke the news. Blanchett’s Dirty Films is still attached to produce the independent project with New Republic Pictures. IndieWire placed a call to Almodóvar’s representative, which was not returned at press time.

Almodovar has been talking about this project for years, first discussing it with IndieWire in 2019 as “five short tales by one American writer” that take place in Texas, Oakland, and Mexico, with a mixture of English and Spanish.

“It’s a wonderful book,” Almodóvar said to IndieWire in 2020. “[Berlin is] not that different from Alice Munro.

Click here to read the full article.

Philip K. Dick, the author whose works have been translated into popular movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, as well as the series The Man in the High Castle, is getting the biopic treatment.

Jon Shestack is producing Only Apparently Real, based in part on a biography written by Paul Williams, the onetime literary executor of Dick’s estate and friend of the author. Michael Richter, a former lawyer turned scribe, wrote the script and is also producing.

Dick, who died at the age of 53 in 1982, was a darling of the intellectual science-fiction crowd thanks to his works that had elements of paranoia and explored the nature of reality and perception. While he won a Hugo Award and was nominated several times for Nebula Awards, both major literary recognitions in the worlds of sci-fi and fantasy, it was only after his...

“Fire Island” ignited a viral Twitter debate on June 7 over gender representation, but now the Bechdel Test creator herself, Alison Bechdel, has issued the last word.

The conversation began after New York Magazine podcaster Hannah Rosin tweeted, “So Fire Island gets an F- on the Bechdel test in a whole new way,” citing the lack of female characters in the queer Aapi reimagining of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice,” aside from Margaret Cho’s mother hen onscreen persona.

The Bechdel Test is formally “a set of criteria used as a test to evaluate a work of fiction, such as a film, on the basis of its inclusion and representation of female characters.” The criteria tested is that a film must include at least two women, they must interact with each other, and their conversation must be about something other than a man. It originated, however, as a joke in...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Noah (Joel Kim Booster) and his circle of friends, in possession of an amazing house on Fire Island, consider their annual week together in the New York summer hotspot to be something sacred. To be fair, it’s not their house per se — it belongs to Erin (the majestic Margaret Cho!), a nurturing mother figure who bought the place using her lawsuit-settlement winnings and has hosted this gaggle of twentysomethings for ages. But all of these young, queer men consider this their collective home away from home.

This review of “Fire Island” was first published on May 23, 2022.

Jane Austen is cited just seconds into “Fire Island” — and a character later quotes everyone’s favorite “Emma” adaptation, “Clueless” — and this sparkling tale of star-crossed love affairs on a beach vacation treats “romantic” and “comedy” with equal importance. The fact that its entanglements, misunderstandings, and reconciliations occur among an almost entirely all-male cast serves merely to put a new meaning to the “Pride” in “Pride and Prejudice.”

First-time screenwriter Joel Kim Booster establishes a world in which smartphones and written correspondence can co-exist and where two unlikely partners can find each other by virtue of being the only two people for miles around who want to talk about literature. For all the hook-up apps, Charli Xcx remixes, and six-pack abs on display, “Fire Island” is still the kind of movie where arguing about the short fiction of Alice Munro counts as foreplay.

It’s a gross oversimplification of Jane Austen’s gift to suggest that her novels reduce to heteronormative matchmaking exercises, though all six end with their heroines getting hitched. (Austen herself never wed. Make of that what you will.) Gay movies have their formulas, too, few of which end in marriage. Exasperatingly, the vast majority center on one of three plots: the coming-out story, the in-love-with-my-straight-buddy dead-end romance and the coping-with-aids downer. So right off the bat, there’s something fresh about “Fire Island,” a saucy queer ensemble comedy from comedian-cum-screenwriter Joel Kim Booster about looking for Mr. Right in the spot where gay men flee to find no-strings fun, sun and sex.

Taking a page from “Clueless,” Booster had the bright idea to update a key Austen classic, putting the gay Asian pride in “Pride and Prejudice” — where nothing of the sort ever existed before — with the help of “Spa Night” director Andrew Ahn.

Second feature from the writer-director of ‘Judy And Punch’ receives Screen Australia funding.

See-Saw Films has teamed with Australian writer/director Mirrah Foulkes to produce her upcoming psychological thriller Runaway.

It marks the second feature from Foulkes, whose debut Judy And Punch played in competition at the Sundance and Sydney Film Festivals.

Runaway is based on a 2004 short story of the same name by renowned Canadian writer Alice Munro. It follows a young woman who attempts to save her marriage by leading her husband into a complex and dangerous world of sexual fantasy, entangling her older neighbours at the same time.

This story about “The Power of the Dog” first appeared in the Down to the Wire of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

She’s not even 40 yet, so why does it seem as if Kirsten Dunst has been overlooked by the Oscars for years, maybe even decades? It feels that way, of course, because we’ve been watching her since she was a child, from her startling preteen performances in “Interview With the Vampire” and “Little Women” through coming-of-age stories like “The Virgin Suicides” and “Bring It On,” hits like “Spider-Man” and critical favorites including “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Melancholia.”

And now, after 33 years of acting, almost 60 movies, 19 TV shows (including the recent “On Becoming a God in Central Florida”) and two children with her partner, Jesse Plemons, she has her first Oscar nomination for Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog.”

“Kirsten is a real woman,...

“I’m sorry,” says Kirsten Dunst, “you’re going to have to be quiet.” She’s talking to her two children—Ennis, 3, and James, who was born last May. “I’m just letting them know that I’m not talking to myself, I’m just talking about myself,” she laughs. “What were you saying again?”

Fortunately, though she’s juggling a telephone and two infants while she’s meant to be getting herself ready for Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dunst is not easily distracted. Turning 40 next spring, she’s been in the business for more than 30 years now, since her debut in the 1989 compendium film New York Stories—and where lesser talents might have flamed out or flaked out, Dunst only seems to become more focused. The proof of this is in her performance in Jane Campion’s new film The Power of the Dog, based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 Western novel,...

One of the particular pleasures of The Lost Daughter, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut feature as a director, is wondering which of the handful of sizeable female roles in the film she’d best excel at playing. Would it have been Olivia Colman’s, the literature lecturer Leda in the film’s present-day thread? Or even the younger version of the character, incarnated by Jessie Buckley, in a way that you can just about see the imperious matriarch she would grow into. There’s also a supporting role played by Succession’s Dagmara Domińczyk, with a Gyllenhaal-like gait––the kind of perky minor role she often found herself consigned to at prior stages in her career. To wit, in author Tom Shone’s recently published interview book with Christopher Nolan, the director offers the suggestion that a film’s lead actors consciously or unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of the director they’re acting for.

Exclusive: Miramax has optioned Free Radicals, a short story by Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, which revolves around the harrowing encounter between a young killer on the run and an ailing widow.

The story will be adapted by writer-director Xia Magnus and producer Alyssa Polk, with Magnus also attached to direct. Polk and Magnus previously teamed up for 2020’s atmospheric horror-thriller Sanzaru, which played at the Slamdance and Fantasia Film Festivals. Sanzaru, a horror thriller, follows a fragile home health aide who begins to question her own sanity as dementia engulfs her employer.

Free Radicals will be produced by Jon Shestack, who brought the package to Miramax.

Shestack says “The story, like so much of Alice Munro’s work, is dark and intelligent. The encounter between the main characters is so unexpected and intense, it feels like it was conceived for the screen.”

Shestack most recently produced Before I Fall...

The most interesting aspect of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Human Voice (in the Spotlight programme of the New York Film Festival), starring Tilda Swinton, is her DVD collection. Or is it his? Douglas Sirk’s Written On The Wind and All That Heaven Allows, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (Volume 1 or 2), Blake Edwards’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread - do they signal that what is to come is also a story of melodrama and revenge, loneliness and grief and powerful infatuation? Yes. On the bookshelves we see F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night and Almodóvar inspirations past (Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness; three of her short stories became his Julieta) and future (he is working on an adaptation of A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin for 2022).

Swinton, always a...

Pedro Almodóvar has a lot on his plate, with at least three new projects in the mix, but he’s not too busy to do his part during the pandemic and wear a mask, as seen in a recent photo out of Madrid shared by his brother and producing partner Agustín. In the photo, Almodóvar and his star Tilda Swinton are sporting their personal protective equipment while on the first day of shooting “The Human Voice,” the Academy Award-winning director’s latest short film and first screen collaboration with Tilda Swinton. See below.

“The Human Voice” is based on a one-act play by Jean Cocteau, written in 1928 and first mounted in France in 1930. It concerns one woman’s final phone conversation with her longtime lover, who has plans to marry another woman. Almodóvar previously alluded to interest in the material before, including as inspiration for his Oscar-nominated 1988 breakout “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown...

“The Young Pope” producer-distributor Fremantle has hired Wme’s Raffaella de Angelis to lead literary acquisitions for its global drama division.

De Angelis will also lend her expertise to Fremantle’s development and production outfit The Apartment, which is headed by “My Brilliant Friend” executive producer Lorenzo Mieli, as well as “True Detective” executive producer Richard Brown’s Passenger Pictures, with whom Fremantle has an exclusive multi-year deal.

Based in London, de Angelis will report into Christian Vesper, Fremantle’s executive VP and creative director for global drama.

At Wme, de Angelis was international literary agent and partner, working with such celebrated authors as Alice Munro, Mohsin Hamd, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lauren Groff, Jonathan Lethem, Petina Gappah, Chiara Barzini, Suketu Mehta, Timothy Snyder and Eric Schlosser, as well as on international bestsellers such as Daniel James Brown’s “The Boys In The Boat” and Paul Kalanithi’s “When Breath Becomes Air.

American Gods producer Fremantle is digging into the literary library with the hire of Wme’s Raffaella de Angelis.

De Angelis has joined the Rtl-owned producer and distributor’s global drama division in a literary acquisitions role, hunting for books to adapt into scripted series. In addition to working at Fremantle’s central drama unit, she will also work for Lorenzo Mieli’s The Apartment, which is part of Fremantle, and Richard Brown’s Passenger, which Fremantle has a multi-year deal with.

Reporting to Christian Vesper, Fremantle’s Evp Creative Director, Global Drama, she is based in London.

She joins from Wme, where she was most recently International Literary Agent and Partner and worked with authors including Alice Munro, Mohsin Hamid, Lauren Groff, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, Petina Gappah, Chiara Barzini, Suketu Mehta, Timothy Snyder and Eric Schlosser, and on books such as The Boys In The Boat and When Breath Becomes Air.

Pedro Almodóvar has spent months on the campaign trail for “Pain and Glory,” but the 70-year-old Spanish auteur is wasting no time going back to work. In an interview over the weekend, Almodóvar revealed exclusively to IndieWire his plans to direct two new projects in the months ahead — a short film starring Tilda Swinton adapted from Jean Cocteau’s one-act play “The Human Voice,” followed by a feature-length adaptation of the late American writer Lucia Berlin’s short story collection, “A Manual for Cleaning Women.”

The two projects will mark Almodóvar’s long-awaited foray into English-language filmmaking after several other attempts over the years, from an offer to direct “Sister Act” in the early nineties to his Alice Munro adaptation “Julieta,” which was originally set to start Meryl Streep before Almodóvar decided to do the project in Spanish. Sources in Almodóvar’s inner circle expressed uncertainty about the overall timeline for the two projects,...

Seasoned Wme agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh is shifting to a new role at the agency. She will focus on live events and continue developing Together Live, a separate business she founded and co-owns with the agency.

Walsh, who rose through the lit department and has branched out into representing speakers and conferences in nearly two decades at the company, opted to step away from day-to-day agenting. In recent years, after a strong run leading William Morris and then William Morris Endeavor to the top lit ranks, she handled tours for notable talent like Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington.

The move follows last Friday’s 11th-hour abandonment by Endeavor of its long-nurtured plan to stage an initial public offering. While the company, which owns Wme and a range of other businesses, still hopes to find a favorable time in 2020 to hit the public markets, the Ipo climate had worsened considerably in recent months.

Frontrunners are already forming in the Oscar race for Best Adapted Screenplay, according to early combined predictions at Gold Derby. While most films in contention have not yet been released, many were seen by film critics and industry insiders at the recent Toronto, Telluride and Venice Film Festivals. Hopping into the top 10 for the first time is “Toy Story 4” while “Downton Abbey” drops out. We’ve confirmed category placements with studios or campaigners, but — as awards season veterans know — such labels can change later.

Here are the current top 10 adapted screenplay picks according to racetrack odds based upon our users’ predictions as of Sept. 17:

1. “The Irishman” (opens Nov. 1): Oscar fave Steve Zaillian, who previously worked with director Martin Scorsese on 2002’s “Gangs of New York,” based his script on Charles Brandt‘s book, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” about Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a mob hitman with...

Frontrunners are already forming for the adapted screenplay race, according to early combined predictions at Gold Derby. While most films in contention have not yet been released, enough teaser trailers are out there, ranging from “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and “The Irishman” to “Little Women” and “Ford v Ferrari” to provide some sense of what at least feels like a worthy contender. We’ve confirmed category placements with studios or campaigners, but — as awards season veterans know — such labels can change later. And once the fall film fests commence, the standings will likely rapidly shift.

Here are the current top 10 adapted screenplay picks on the Gold Derby site, in order, as of Aug. 21:

1. “The Irishman”: Oscar fave Steve Zaillian, who previously worked with director Martin Scorsese on 2002’s “Gangs of New York,” based his script on Charles Brandt’s book, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” about...

When Greta Gerwig’s already-lauded “Lady Bird” hits limited release later this week, the actress-writer-director will join a long line of other female filmmakers who used their directorial debut (this one is Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, just for clarity’s sake) to not only launch their careers, but make a huge mark while doing it. Gerwig’s Saoirse Ronan-starring coming-of-age tale is an instant classic, and one that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has enjoyed Gerwig’s charming work as a screenwriter in recent years, bolstered by her ear for dialogue and her love of complicated and complex leading ladies.

While Hollywood still lags when it comes to offering up opportunities to its most talented female filmmakers, many of them have overcome the dismal stats to deliver compelling, interesting, and unique first features. In short, they’re good filmmakers who made good movies,...

Is this the new feminist minimalism? Director Kelly Reichart doesn’t like labels, and to her credit as a woman director, her amalgam of three tangential short stories transcends the format in a studious, low-key way. Four interesting actresses present interesting portraits that illuminate the realities of life in the great Middle America.

Certain Women

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 893

2016 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 107 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 19, 2017 39.95

Starring: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart, Jared Harris, James Le Gros, Rene Auberjonois.

Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt

Film Editor: Kelly Reichardt

Original Music: Jeff Grace

Written by Kelly Reichardt from short stories by Maile Meloy

Produced by Neil Kopp, Vincent Savino, Anish Savjani

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

One of the first things that the interesting director Kelly Reichardt says is that she’d like her movie to not be considered a ‘woman’s picture.’ We at first think she’s kidding herself,...

Pedro Almodóvar bounces back with an absorbing saga of a mother and daughter told in an interesting style. A woman feels isolated, powerless, alone and anguished about what has happened in her life. Is any of it her fault? Or is all of it her fault? How do we hold relationships together, or do they fall apart no matter what we do? Highly rewarding dramas still exist; they don’t all go begging for Oscar nominations… just learn to read subtitles and you too can find out how the rest of the world lives.

Julieta

Blu-ray

Sony Pictures Classics

2016 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 99 min. / Street Date March 21, 2017 / 30.99

Starring: Adriana Ugarte, Emma Suárez, Michelle Jenner, Darío Grandinetti, Rossy de Palma,Susi Sá Sánchez, Joaquín Notario, Pilar Castro, Tómas del Estal.

Cinematography: Jean-Claude Larrieu

Film Editor: José Salcedo

Original Music: Alberto Iglesias

Written by Pedro Almodóvar based on three short stories by Alice Munro

Produced by Augustín Almodóvar,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilovic)

Near the beginning of Evolution, there’s a shot that hangs underwater, showing a seemingly harmonious aquatic eco-system that’s glimpsed just long enough to create the sense of something that, while somewhat familiar, is distinctly outside the human world. This fleeting image though shows the promise of the film Evolution could’ve been. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix

Fire at Sea and...

In the wake of the untimely death of beloved husband and father, grief threatens the relationship between the newly widowed Julieta and her daughter Anita. Unable to bear the weight of her father’s death, Anita disappears without a trace.

Read More: Pedro Almodóvar Interview: ‘Julieta’ Director Tells IndieWire About His New Movie — Watch

Enduring the death of her husband and the trauma of her daughter’s disappearance, Pedro Almodóvar’s “Julieta” displays the painful journey of a woman struggling with uncertainty and the impracticality of fate. Abandoned by her daughter and unable to escape the obsessive reasoning as to why she left, Julieta is pushed into solitude. In the silence and loneliness, Julieta finds herself experiencing life again.

“Julieta” lives in the duality of its protagonist. She is both mother and daughter. The film speaks to the experiences of Julieta as both girl and woman, and where those learned...

Internationally acclaimed auteur and Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar (Best Writing, Original Screenplay, Talk to Her, 2002) is back in the director’s chair for his 20th feature film when Julieta debuts on Blu-ray™, DVD and digital March 21 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Emma Suárez (Vacas) and Adriana Ugarte (Palmeras En La Nieve) share the title role as older and younger versions of the same character in the story of a brokenhearted woman who faces the painful mystery of her long alienation from her daughter during flashbacks on her life and the most important events concerning her estranged daughter. Julieta also stars Daniel Grao (Julia’s Eyes), Inma Cuesta (The Bride), Darío Grandinetti (Talk to Her), Michelle Jenner (Our Lovers) and Rossy de Palma (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

Bonus materials on the Julieta Blu-ray and DVD include two featurettes. Fans join Pedro Almodóvar, Rossy de Palma and...

Left to right: Daniel Grao as Xoan and Adriana Ugarte as Earlier Julieta

@ El Deseo, in Pedro Almodovar’s Julieta. Photo by Manolo Pavón, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

2016 certainly turned out to be a good year for films, particularly dramas, and Juleta is one the last of those to come to local screens. A nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in the upcoming Oscars, the Spanish-language Julieta is simply one of director Pedro Almodovar’s best – a visually lush, beautifully constructed, haunting mystery about love and loss, tied up with a satisfying but unexpected ending.

The acclaimed Spanish director’s latest film is a drama in a familiar vein for him, a tale of a woman – a mother – in crisis, yet Julieta is brilliantly fresh at the same time. Julieta (Emma Suarez) is a successful, beautiful woman living in Madrid, who is on the verge of leaving her home...

Every year, IndieWire looks beyond the countless top 10 lists written by critics to widen the field. We turn to friends and colleagues in the independent film community — programmers, distributors, publicists and others — to give them the opportunity to share their favorite films and other media from the past 12 months. We also invited them to share their resolutions and anticipated events for 2017.

The Best of 2016: IndieWire’s Year in Review Bible

Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director, Toronto International Film Festival

I’m limiting my list to films that had Us and Canadian theatrical releases in 2016. I saw far more than 10 this year that I liked, but if I have to be brutal, I’ll limit it to the films that lifted me.

1. “Moonlight”

2. “Julieta”

3. “Toni Erdmann”

4. “Cemetery of Splendor”

5. “Arrival”

6. “Fences”

7. “13th”

8. “American Honey”

9. “Things to Come”

10. “Moana”

Michael Barker, Co-President, Sony Pictures Classics

“Now is the winter of our discontent.

Pedro Almodóvar is the wild man of world cinema, a great, flamboyant talent whose films shimmer with his own vivid and hotly sexual take on the world. Not this time. Julieta, adapted from a trio of short stories by Pulitzer-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, is more of the author than Almodóvar – the movie is a genuflection to the restraint and detail of her prose. This isn't a bad thing. It's just a different approach for the Spanish provocateur.

The plot unfolds, over three decades, in the form of a thriller.

Pedro Almodóvar should fit right in at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which was full of films that went over the top and deal with transgressive topics and lots of sex. After all, the Spanish director has been doing that kind of thing for decades. Almodóvar 20th film, “Julieta,” is inspired by three short stories from the Alice Munro book “Runaway.” And perhaps surprisingly, it didn’t really fit with this year’s lurid Cannes titles like “Slack Bay,” “The Handmaiden,” “Staying Vertical” and “American Honey” — by comparison with those films, Almodóvar has relinquished his role as the prince of transgression.

Author: Competitions

Starring Emma SUÁREZ as Adult Julieta and Adriana Ugarte as Young Julieta, Julieta is written and directed by Spanish auteur Pedro ALMODÓVAR and is based on the short stories Chance, Soon and Silence by Alice Munro. Julieta will release in the UK on Digital HD 19 December 2016 and on Blu-ray™ and DVD through Twentieth Century Fox and Pathé on 9 January 2017. To celebrate, we’re giving away 3xDVDs!

12 years ago Julieta’s daughter, Antia, abandoned her without warning and hasn’t spoken to Julieta since. When a chance encounter brings news of her daughter, Julieta returns to her former home to revive her search for Antia, whilst also examining the events leading to her daughter’s estrangement.

Writer/Director Pedro ALMODÓVAR is one of Spain’s most celebrated filmmakers with numerous accolades to his name including an Academy Award®, four BAFTAs, numerous Goyas and over 100 further wins and nominations.

Please...

Julieta Sony Pictures Classics Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya Grade: A- Director: Pedro Almodóvar Written by: Pedro Almodóvar, based on Alice Munro’s stories Cast: Emma Suarez, Adriana Ugarte, Daniel Grao, Inma Cuesta, Dario Grandinetti Screened at: Sony, NYC, 9/6/16 Opens: December 21, 2016 At one point however brief, you get the impression that Pedro Almodóvar is setting us up to watch a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Happily though, at least for people like me not particularly fond of the writer-director’s goofy comedies and lavish worship of women, “Julieta” is one of the Spaniard’s most accessible movies. Maybe that’s because Almodóvar takes as his inspiration three stories [ Read More ]

The post Julieta Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Near the end of Julieta, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, a man tells the title character that he’d been following her around for a while from a distance, but finally stopped because he realized he was turning into an obsessive stalker from a Patricia Highsmith novel. Almodóvar also wrote the film’s screenplay, and that Highsmith reference is his sly wink at viewers who’ve noticed that certain elements of Julieta—suspicious, seemingly inexplicable behavior; the recurring use of blood red; Alberto Iglesias’ urgent score—suggest the sort of elegant thriller in which the author specialized. (Famous movies adapted from her work include Strangers On A Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.) This isn’t a thriller, though, and its actual source is three connected short stories by a very different writer, Alice Munro. Almodóvar has directed what’s basically a melodrama as if it were a thriller—a...