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Outlander season 7 part 2 ended on a very surprising note that I honestly still don't know how to feel about. In season 7 episode 16, "A Hundred Thousand Angels," the writers allude to the fact that Jamie and Claire's stillborn daughter from season 2, Faith, may have actually lived. And she went on to have two daughters we met last season, Jane and Fanny. Just like in season 2, Claire and Faith were interconnected with a certain mysterious character that has confirmed he'll come back in season 8.

Master Raymond is the one who came in and saved Claire's life after she'd given birth, helping her deliver the placenta. He had ominously told her then that they would see each other again. It's been a long time since then, but then the elusive character popped back up in the season 7 finale when Claire was between life and death for another time. Now whether she was dreaming or imagining Master Raymond,...

Delicatessen

Delicatessen, Mubi, streaming from today

Cannibalism has rarely been as much fun as it is in Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's surreal feature debut. Former clown and excellent saw player Luison (Dominique Pinon) takes a job as an apartment block odd-job man for a butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), little realising his new boss has a murderous sideline to help keep the residents fed. Caro and Jeunet construct a detailed world around this and the charming romance that develops between Louison and the butcher's daughter (Marie-Laure Dougnac), filled with grotesques but with humour always to the fore. Although you can see echoes of the likes of Monty Python and Terry Gilliam here, this is a singular world that rattles along to an imaginative conclusion that, for all its outlandishness, retains an inherent sweetness. Jeunet is currently adapting the book Fresh Water For Flowers (Changer L’Eau Des Fleurs) starring Leïla Bekhti in.

A snail-obsessed introvert struggles with loneliness, hoarding and personal tragedy in Adam Elliot’s bleak stop-motion epic. Here’s our Memoir Of A Snail review.

Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) is not one of life’s winners. Born with a cleft lip and the playground bullying that often comes with it, she spends a lonely, but contented childhood with her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and paraplegic, alcoholic father, Percy (Dominique Pinon). When circumstances find her separated from both and sent to live with a pair of swingers in Canberra, she copes about as well as you’d expect.

Australian stop-motion whizz Adam Elliot’s sophomore feature is an Aardman tale with the edges left rough. The Claymation style is thick, dirty and often borderline disturbing – more in line with the genre’s uncanny origins than the higher framerate aesthetic coming out of the medium’s biggest players. There are some...

[Warning: The below contains Major spoilers for Outlander Season 7 Episode 16, “A Hundred Thousand Angels.”] Outlander‘s Season 7 finale, “A Hundred Thousand Angels,” brought tears to eyes and shock to fans as the episode insinuated the possibility that Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) first daughter Faith had actually lived. But how could that be possible? Faith was stillborn in France decades earlier and seemingly buried before the couple returned to Scotland ahead of the fateful Battle of Culloden. That’s something showrunner Matthew B. Roberts promises will be answered in the show’s upcoming final season. Whether Faith lived or not is for fans to learn in time. The installment also saw Claire revisited by Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon), the apothecary owner she met in France, who asks for forgiveness for some unknown act. Meanwhile, Jamie teams up with son William (Charles Vandervaart) to try and save Jane (Silvia Presente) amid her imprisonment, only to...

This article contains spoilers for Outlander season 7, episode 16, “A Hundred Thousand Angels”

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon shares her candid thoughts about the game-changing season 7 ending. The closing minutes of the finale, titled "A Hundred Thousand Angels", sees Claire (Caitríona Balfe) making the connection that her stillborn daughter Faith actually lived into adulthood, becoming the mother of Fanny Pocock (Florie Wilkinson) and Jane (Silvia Presente). It's an unexpected note to end Outlander season 7 end, precisely because it departs from the novels that the Starz show is based on.

In an interview with Parade, Gabaldon shared her thoughts on the latest Outlander ending. She begins by saying that the twist is not part of the book, explaining that the Starz adaptation based its twist on the fact that Fanny's mother is also named Faith. She adds that the connective song, "I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside", is also an invention...

This article contains Spoilers for Outlander season 7, episode 16, “A Hundred Thousand Angels”Outlander stars Sam Heughan and Caitríona Balfe react to that massive season 7 cliffhanger. For most of its runtime, the Outlander season 7 finale looked as though it would follow a roughly familiar template for the long-running historical drama. Claire (Balfe) is fighting her way back from another life-threatening situation, with Jamie (Heughan) by her side. But the episode's final scene is a true game-changer, departing from the Outlander novels to reveal that Claire and Jamie's daughter, Faith, actually lived and had children of her own.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Heughan and Balfe reacted to the twist involving Faith. Heughan talked about how the revelation stretches all the way back to Outlander season 2, teasing how the discovery could impact Jamie. Balfe, meanwhile, praised Florrie Wilkinson, who plays Fanny Pocock, and who is key to how the discovery unfolds.

[Warning: The below and video above contain Major spoilers for Outlander, Season 7 Episode 16, “A Hundred Thousand Angels.”] Outlander‘s penultimate season went out with quite a bang in its final chapter, “A Hundred Thousand Angels,” which saw the Frasers following a collision course toward a mind-blowing family revelation, in which Jamie’s (Sam Heughan) biological son, William (Charles Vandervaart) played an integral role. We’re referring, of course, to the cliffhanger which hinted Jamie and Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) first daughter, Faith, actually survived and was the mother of their new ward, Fanny Pocock (Florrie May Wilkinson), and her sister, Jane (Silvia Presente). As viewers will recall, in Season 2, Claire gave birth to a stillborn Faith after Jamie was caught dueling Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies). In this episode, as Claire was recovering from her high-risk surgery at the hands of Denzell Hunter (Joey Phillips), she was visited by Season 2’s Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon), the apothecary owner who mysteriously...

Sam Heughan in ‘Outlander’ season 7 episode 16, the season finale (Photo Credit: Starz)

We’re about to sink into a mini-droughtlander with the arrival of Starz’s Outlander season seven episode 16, the season finale. We’re labeling it “mini” because fans of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander world only have to wait until this summer for the arrival of the prequel, Outlander: Blood of My Blood.

Episode 16, “A Hundred Thousand Angels,” begins with Jane (Silvia Presente) being questioned about the murder of Captain Harkness. She jokes that the devil was whispering in her ear and argues that unlike his description of the murder as “abdominal,” she believes it was glorious. Her face has a look of defiance as she admits she has no regrets.

Jane refuses to tell her inquisitor her story until he brings up her sister. He suggests it’s better that Fanny reads a story told by Jane rather than himself.

Modern Films has released the UK trailer and artwork for the award-winning stop-motion animated feature ‘Memoir of A Snail.’

Grace Pudel is a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and an intense love for books. At a young age, when Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert, she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst. Despite a continued series of hardships, inspiration and hope emerges when she strikes up an enduring friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky, who is full of grit and lust for life.

Featuring the voice talents of Sarah Snook (Succession) as Grace with Kodi Smit-McPhee as her estranged twin brother Gilbert, this is another incredibly rich and moving feature-length “clayography” from one of the world’s most admired animation auteurs – part seven of Elliot’s Trilogy of Trilogies. The voice cast also includes Eric Bana, Nick Cave, Dominique Pinon...

Gwendoline Hamon as Cassandre, in the French TV crime drama “Cassandre” Season One. Courtesy of MHz Choice

The premise of the French TV crime drama, “Cassandre,” is nothing new to fans of the genre. A police detective from Paris moves to a much smaller city due to some sort of scandal/personal problem that made him/her want/need a change of scenery badly enough to take a big step down the career ladder. But based on the two episodes comprising first half of its debut season that were available for review, the scripts and casting still make this one a fine entry into your realm of viewing options. I must not be the only one thinking that way. After starting in 2015, it’s now up to 30 episodes (and still counting), with the same principal cast.

Gwendoline Hamon stars in the title role as an ambitious, successful detective who asks...

Throughout the Alien franchise, several characters have served as protagonists as the series took increasingly bold, varied directions with their storytelling. While most audiences are familiar with Ripley and her adventures through the original movies, shes not the only character that deserves to be associated with this franchise. Many other actors have made their contributions to the franchise just as unique and memorable, giving this series a sense of longevity that few sci-fi sagas achieve. Alien may be one of the best sci-fi movies ever made, but its the characters that allowed it to continue into the future.

The Alien franchise has reinvented itself several times throughout recent years, first with the Prometheus prequel series and later with Fede Alvarezs long-awaited spin-off Alien: Romulus. It's also clear the series has no plans to stop there: Ridley Scott is developing another Alien movie, and the story is shifting to televised storytelling with the upcoming Alien: Earth.

Adam Elliot's latest film, Memoir of a Snail, is a stunning addition to the filmmaker's "clayography" and the best reason to go to the movies this week. Without spoling anything, check it out on the big screen right now and be whisked away to a world that is not entirely dissimilar to ours. It's a work that's both crude and polished, funny and terribly sad (often simultaneously), and one of the loveliest films of 2024. Featuring the voices of Sarah Snook (Succession), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom), Eric Bana, and Nick Cave, the musician and writer who penned The Proposition (2005), Memoir of a Snail is nothing short of a miracle, a feature-length claymation film for grown-ups that ironically has more life in it than most of this year's live-action films.

Memoir of a Snail follows Elliot's earlier works, which include well-known and highly...

Memoir of a Snail is the latest project from writer-director Adam Elliot, who has made his name on tragicomedies like his new animated feature. Memoir of a Snail joins his ranks of stunning stop-motion animated movies that include Mary and Max and Harvie Krumpet, both of which share the melancholy and cautious optimism of Memoir of a Snail. Though there are bright spots throughout the film's 94-minute runtime, Memoir of a Snail pulls no punches and isn't afraid to make you cry. However, a few tears never hurt anyone, and there are hidden opportunities for joy.

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

Director Adam ElliotRelease Date October 25, 2024Writers Adam ElliotCast Craig Ross, Bernie Clifford, Luke Elliot, Jub Clerc, Selena Brennan, Davey Thompson, Charlotte Belsey, Mason Litsos, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Eric Bana, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Sarah Snook, Nick Cave, Jacki WeaverRating RRuntime 94 MinutesGenres Drama, AnimationCharacter(s) Owen Appleby, Bill Clarke,...

There is a light at the end of writer-director Adam Elliot’s claymation tunnel, though it’s a cold and artificial respite from its lifelong suffering. Though Elliot’s sadsack bookworms persist through their hardships, Memoir Of A Snail piles on the pain. By the time its Series Of Unfortunate Events finally relents,...

That Memoir of a Snail is a catalog of bleakly unfortunate events shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who’ve seen Adam Elliot’s previous feature, Mary and Max, and his Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet before it. This stop-motion animated film—part seven of a “trilogy of trilogies”—opens with Grace Pudel witnessing the last gasp of an elderly pal, Pinky (Jacki Weaver). As she goes to scatter Pinky’s ashes in the garden, Grace narrates her life in a shy whisper to a pet snail, sparing no tragic detail.

Grace’s mother died in childbirth, and her alcoholic father was left paralyzed from a traffic accident. She loves her twin brother, Gilbert, a budding pyromaniac who defends her from school bullies, but even this relationship doesn’t last, as they’re separated and shipped off to foster homes at separate ends of Australia once their father passes.

The 68th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (Lff) is wrapping up Sunday night with Piece by Piece, the animated Lego biopic of Pharrell Williams by Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, 20 Feet From Stardom) following the unveiling of this year’s various competition winners, led by Adam Elliot’s claymation feature Memoir of a Snail.

Set in Australia in the 1970s, the movie, which had already won the animation-focused Annecy Film Festival, stars Succession‘s Sarah Snook as Grace Pudel, a shy girl born with a cleft palate who grows up with her wild and occasionally pyromaniac twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) but eventually becomes a lonely hoarder of ornamental snails. Her only friend is a wild octogenarian named Pinky (Jacki Weaver). Eric Bana, Dominique Pinon, and Nick Cave provide supporting voice work. IFC Films has set an Oct. 25 U.S. release date.

Memoir of a...

"We have over 200 characters in the film and every single one of them has been handmade." This is what sets stop-motion films apart. Everything is handmade by amazing craftspeople! Madman Films in Australia has revealed a series of 5 mini-featurettes for the acclaimed stop-motion animated film called Memoir of a Snail. It's the latest creation from animation maestro Adam Elliot, and it just premiered to rave reviews at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival, with a US release set for October (watch the main trailer). I'm a huge fan of this film! Set in 1970s Australia, it's a bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel – a hoarder of snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs – and her brother after they're separated. Featuring the voices of Sarah Snook as Grace, with Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dominique Pinon, Magda Szubanski, with Nick Cave. This one is a winner - I wrote a glowing...

Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot, who is showing his second stop-motion animation feature aimed at adults, “Memoir of a Snail” at Telluride and Toronto, hasn’t been diagnosed with Ocd, “but I am probably at the very tip of it,” he told IndieWire on Zoom. “I love the number nine.” Thirty years ago, when he was at film school, he thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to make a trilogy of trilogies? I’ve always loved a triptych of paintings, the number three? And I thought, ‘I’ll do three short shorts, three long shorts, and three features.’ I never thought it would happen. But I’m getting close.”

So far, he has completed seven of the nine films, with two left, including one feature. Elliot, like Guillermo del Toro, is proving that animated films do not have to only be aimed at children. Many of his films deal with outsiders,...

"I believe in glasses half-full and silver linings..." IFC has revealed the official US trailer for the wonderful stop-motion animated film Memoir of a Snail, the latest creation from animation maestro Adam Elliot. It's set for a US release in October this fall. Adam won an Oscar in 2004 for his short Harvie Krumpet, but he is best known for his exceptional stop-motion film Mary and Max, which premiered at Sundance 2009. He's back again 15 years later with his second feature. A bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel - a hoarder of snails, romance novels, & guinea-pigs. Set in 1970s Australia, her life is troubled by misfortune & loss. After their mom dies during pregnancy, she and her twin brother, Gilbert, are raised by their paraplegic-alcoholic former juggler father, Percy. Despite a life filled with love, tragedy strikes when Percy passes away in his sleep. The siblings are separated and thrust...

A new episode of the Revisited video series has arrived online this morning – and since the latest entry in the Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus, is currently in theatres, we decided this would be a good time to look back at one of the least popular Alien movies, the 1997 release Alien: Resurrection (watch it Here). In the video embedded above, you’ll hear how this film’s odd and wacky tone managed to kill the franchise. For a while, anyway.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet from a screenplay written by Joss Whedon, Alien: Resurrection has the following synopsis: The saga continues 200 years after Ripley sacrificed herself for the sake of humanity. Her erstwhile employers long gone, this time it is the military that resurrects the one-woman killing machine through genetic cloning to extract the alien from within her, but during the process her DNA is fused with the queen and then the aliens escape.

Despite its ups and downs, I’ve always respected the Alien franchise for daring to try something new with every new entry. From Vietnam allegories to reimagining Chariots of the Gods as a Lovecraftian origin story for the Xenomorphs, the series challenges the very concept of genre as it explores what might go wrong when humanity comes into contact with a truly perfect organism.

And with Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus paying homage to the most underrated movie in the franchise during its horrific final act, today I’d like to look back on Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s unfairly maligned Alien: Resurrection and dive into why I think this oddball gem of a film deserves more love.

Like many sequels, the story of Resurrection begins soon after the release of its predecessor. Desperate for a course-correction after the grimdark prison story of Alien³ left audiences feeling frustrated, Fox attempted to recruit established filmmakers like Danny Boyle,...

Amélie, the 2001 fairy-tale romance from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, has arguably done more than any film before or since in promoting the Parisian tourism board version of the City of Lights. The quirky, irresistibly charming story of a shy Parisian do-gooder — Audrey Tautou in her breakout role — determined to bring joy to the lonely citizens of the French capital was an instant classic.

The movie, co-starring Mathieu Kassovitz, Jamel Debbouze, Isabelle Nanty and Dominique Pinon, was an awards season darling, receiving 13 nominations and four wins, including best film and best director, at France’s Césars, and picking up five Oscar nominations, including for best international film. It was also a box office phenomenon, selling some 9 million tickets in France and more than 30 million worldwide, for a $175 million global gross.

Amélie

Now, tourists heading to the city for the 2024 Summer Olympics will get a chance to revisit Amélie in Paris. Local distributor...

As a small child, motherless Grace started keeping snails in a jar, writing names on their shells and watching their life cycle — mate, breed, die — with loving fascination. “They were my friends,” she muses in voiceover in Memoir of a Snail, which this week had its premiere at the Annecy International Animation Festival. “I knew they’d never leave me, hurt me — or die.” Moments before, we saw Gracie’s huge ovoid eyes, spill over with tears as the aged Pinkie, her only human companion, breathed her final death rattle. “I’m so alone,” says Grace, not for the first time. “Goddamn life! Such a stupid, stupid puzzle!”

Pathos laid on with a shovel, you may be thinking — but you would be wrong. Following 2009’s Mary and Max, Memoir of a Snail is only the second Claymation feature from Australia’s Adam Elliot, who won an Oscar for his short...

When you’re looking for more than defiant princesses, Minions, and martial arts-wielding animals, indie animation is where you can experience something outside the box. Fortunately, Madman and IFC Films are here to present the Memoir of a Snail teaser trailer, which previews a wonderfully strange-looking animated feature from Academy Award-winning director Adam Elliot.

In the Memoir of a Snail teaser trailer, Grace Pudle is separated from her twin brother Gilbert following their parents’ deaths. Unfortunately for Grace, things don’t get much better after that, and the only one who will listen to her tragic tale is a garden snail named Sylvia.

Here’s the official synopsis for Memoir of a Snail:

“Grace Pudel is a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and an intense love for books. At a young age, when Grace is separated from her twin brother Gilbert, she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst.

"Life isn't about looking backwards, Gracie, it's about living forwards." Madman Films in Australia has unveiled the first trailer for the stop-motion animated film Memoir of a Snail, the latest creation from Australian animation filmmaker Adam Elliot. He won an Oscar in 2004 for his short Harvie Krumpet, but he is best known for his exceptional stop-motion film Mary and Max, which premiered at Sundance 2009. He's back again 15 years later with his second feature, which is premiering at the 2024 Annecy Film Festival before screening at the Melbourne Film Festival soon, too. A bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel - a hoarder of snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs. Set in 1970s Australia, Grace’s life is troubled by misfortune & loss. After their mom dies during pregnancy, she and her twin brother, Gilbert, are raised by their paraplegic-alcoholic former juggler father, Percy. Despite a life filled with love, tragedy strikes...

There’s a single brief shot in Memoir of a Snail showing a sleepy koala lounging in a tree fork that exemplifies the incredible attention even to the most casually observed details in this proudly analogue assembly of thousands of handcrafted objects. It also serves to show the very specific Australian-ness of Adam Elliot’s second feature, a young-adult chronicle of outsider existence that would feel intimately personal even without the meta aspect of a principal character who aspires to be a stop-motion animator.

With its morbid, often brashly salty sense of humor — we’re barely into it before learning that a homeless alcoholic voiced by Eric Bana is in fact a former magistrate defrocked for masturbating in court — and its refusal to shrink away from the darkness of death, depression, cruelty, loneliness and misshapen naked bodies, this is unlikely to be a parent-approved entertainment for young children.

Connoisseurs of...

You could call Adam Elliot the Australian Nick Park. But while the British Wallace and Gromit creator and his Aardman studio have gone from award-winning claymation shorts to big-budget animation features made with the likes of Dreamworks (Chicken Run, Flushed Away) and Netflix (Chicken Run: The Dawn of the Nugget, the upcoming Wallace and Gromit movie), back in Melbourne, Elliot has kept things small.

His entire filmography: The three shorts Uncle (1996), Cousin (1999), and Brother (2000), two mid-length films Harvie Krumpet (2003) and Ernie Biscuit (2015) and his two features: Mary and Max in 2009 and Memoir of a Snail, together clock in at around 4 hours. You can become an Elliot completist in a single afternoon binge.

Three decades into his career, with an Oscar to his name (best animated short for Harvie Krumpet in 2004), Elliot continues to tell the same sort of stories: Semi-autobiographical dark and funny tales of outsiders, mostly living in 1970s Australia,...

“Norway” director Yannis Veslemes’ “She Loved Blossoms More,” which will world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, has unveiled its first teaser.

The film follows three brothers who build an unusual time machine in order to bring their long-dead mother back to life. When their delusional father comes into the picture, the experiments go awry, and they descend into a psychedelic hellscape where the past and present fuse in a comedic yet disturbing exploration of grief.

“Norway” had an extended festival run including Karlovy Vary and Fantasporto and won a Fipresci prize at Thessaloniki.

“She Loved Blossoms More” is produced by Fenia Cossovitsa (“Two Tickets to Greece”) and executive producers include Christos V. Konstantakopoulos (“The Lobster”), Ant Timpson (“Come to Daddy”) and Andreas Zoupanos Kritikos (“Knock at the Cabin”).

The cast includes Panos Papadopoulos, Julio Giorgos Katsis, Aris Balis, Sandra Abuelghanam Sarafanova, Alexia Kaltsiki and Dominique Pinon.

Veslemes is also a...

Unspooling May 18 as part of an overall Swiss Focus at the Marché du Film, Solothurn Film Festival Goes to Cannes marks the first collaboration between the long-standing Swiss festival and the Cannes market, but also a first for many of the talents and producers carefully picked for the event.

Two of Switzerland’s top documentary filmmakers Jacqueline Zünd, winner of a 2019 Crystal Bear nominated for “Where We Belong,” and Nicholas Steiner, director of “Above & Below”, ranked among Variety reviewer Peter Debruge’s Top 10 films of 2015, are set to attract buyers, sales agents and programmers’ attention with their star-stubbed fiction debuts.

In “Do You Believe in Angels, Mr Drowak,” Steiner has hired Karl Markovics, star of the 2008 Oscar winner “The Counterfeiters”, rising acting talent Lune Wedler, Lars Eidinger and Dominique Pinon.

“After two cinematic documentaries that ran worldwide and an original Netflix series [“Dig Deeper-The Disappearance of Birgit Meier”], I was excited to create this technically demanding,...

Exclusive: The in-demand Sarah Snook has boarded Oscar-winning Australian director Adam Elliot’s upcoming stop-motion drama Memoir of a Snail as the lead voice and narrator.

Snook will voice the feature animation’s protagonist Grace Puddle, a lonely misfit who hoards ornamental snails and is addicted to romance novels.

Paris-based sales and production company Charades and London-based production and financing studio Anton, which announced last Cannes that they were co-selling the movie, have released a fresh image for the production in the lead-up to the EFM where they will show a new promo.

Memoir of a Snail (c) Arenamedia

News of Snook’s casting comes as the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Succession star sets forth on a 14-week run of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray at London’s Theatre Royal in which she plays all 26 characters.

Memoir of a Snail marks Snook’s first lead voice role in a feature animation.

Alien and Aliens are two of the most highly respected and beloved sci-fi horror films ever made… and all of the films that have followed have either been divisive in one way or another, or just flat-out poorly received. One of the least popular entries in the franchise is the 1997 installment Alien: Resurrection (watch it Here), which put some fans off with its wild and weird tone and its crazy ideas. Decades down the line, Alien: Resurrection director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is currently doing the press rounds to promote a theatrical re-release of his very popular 2001 romantic comedy Amélie, and JoBlo’s own Tyler Nichols took the opportunity to ask him about the making of his Alien sequel. Here’s how it went:

Tyler Nichols: I’m also a big horror fan, so I have to ask you about your work on Alien: Resurrection. Because I still think of the underwater...

Studiocanal are proud to release Delicatessen the wonderfully dark, critically acclaimed surreal comedy from directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, in a sumptuous new 4K restoration, and making its Uhd debut.

Directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro dazzling fantasy adventure The City Of Lost Children was released earlier this year by Studiocanal.

Delicatessen is set in a distant, apocalyptic future, conventional society has reached a state of collapse. Grain is now used as currency and meat has become a rare commodity. Meanwhile an unemployed clown finds work as a maintenance man in a squalid apartment block situated above a butcher’s shop.

Having fallen in love with the owner’s daughter he soon discovers the sinister truth behind the ominous landlord’s unsavoury intentions. Between blossoming romance and disappearing tenants his only hope for survival could be the members of a subterranean militia of vegetarian freedom fighters. Or is it too late already?...

Exclusive: Paris-based sales and production company Charades and London-based production and financing studio Anton are partnering on the worldwide sales of Oscar-winning Australian director Adam Elliot’s upcoming stop-motion drama Memoir Of A Snail.

The poignant tale of a young lonely misfit is the second feature after the award-winning 2019 animation Mary And Max for Elliot, who won an Oscar for the 2004 short Harvey Krumpet.

The partners have unveiled a first image as well as some first members of international voice cast featuring Jacki Weaver (Yellowstone), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Elvis), Dominique Pinon, Magda Szubanski, and Eric Bana (The Dry).

The lead cast has yet to be announced.

The animated feature is produced by Arenamedia, with Liz Kearney (Paper Planes) as producer, and Robert Connolly (The Dry) and Robert Patterson as Executive Producers.

The film is currently shooting in Melbourne, Australia, with an expected release date...

The deaths of Newt, Corporal Dwayne Hicks, and Ellen Ripley in 1992’s Alien 3 created a significant obstacle to the franchise’s continuation. Five years later, Alien: Resurrection answered this problem by resurrecting central heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as a clone, spliced with xenomorph DNA thanks to the alien queen embryo gestating within the actual Ripley before her death. How Resurrection handled this pesky problem, and the return of the xenomorphs proved extremely divisive upon release, with one notable, unifying exception: the mesmerizing underwater chase sequence.

Resurrection takes place two centuries after Alien 3 and follows the mercenary crew of the starship Betty. The mercs deliver their human payload to the Usm Auriga, a military ship deep into their extensive scientific study of the xenomorphs. So much so that they’ve cloned Ripley numerous times over and have full-grown xenomorphs in captivity, which happen to break free while the Betty crew are on board,...

Jean-Pierre Jeunet was hailed a hero in France for directing 1997’s Alien Resurrection – the divisive (if misunderstood) fourth Alien film. “It was like I’d won the World Cup alone,” says Jeunet, who also directed the human butchery black comedy Delicatessen and later Amelie. “I had five stars on every magazine. Even I thought, man, it’s too much! The script is not so good... it’s a little bit stupid!”

Alien Resurrection, which premiered on 6 November 1997, was less celebrated elsewhere (“The American people hate it!” laughs Jeunet) and remains shorthand for the series’ critically dubious crash into franchise fodder – a comically dark space romp in which Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is reborn as a part-alien superwoman and almost smooches with a human-alien hybrid, the much-ridiculed “Newborn”, which also happens to be her grandchild.

Alien Resurrection was a tough gig from the start. At the end of 1992’s Alien 3...

Jean-Pierre Jeunet put his stamp across the 1990s and 2000s with a unique blend of zany personality, thoughtful character portraits, and sharp, multi-dimensional humor. So much was running in films like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, both co-directed with Marc Caro, that they could have boiled over, yet somehow remained focused works that played completely as the ownerships of their creators. After a brief misfire when stepping into the world of Hollywood blockbusters with 1997’s Alien: Resurrection—an early forebear of the “indie director to studio tentpole” pipeline that gobbles up every promising young filmmaker these days—Jeunet found his peak as a solo director in the early aughts: Amélie and A Very Long Engagement brought his particular style into a new era with remarkable sophistication and retention of his characteristic charm.

Then a curious thing happened. Despite being a beloved international director arguably at the height of his career,...

After earning much acclaim for his early features Delicatessen, Amélie, and The City of Lost Children, it’s now been nearly a decade since the last fully-fledged feature from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. The French director is now returning next month with his Netflix movie Bigbug and the full trailer has now arrived.

Starring Dominique Pinon, Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Youssef Hajdi, Alban Lenoir, and François Levantal, the sci-fi comedy is set in the year 2045 in which a group of bickering suburbanites find themselves stuck together when an android uprising causes their well-intentioned household robots to lock them in for their own safety. With a characteristically vibrant palette, the director doesn’t seem to be breaking any new ground, but hopefully it’s a fun, satirical romp.

See the trailer below.

Bigbug arrives on Netflix on February 11.

The post Bigbug Trailer: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Stages...

Having highlighted 30 films we guarantee are worth seeing this year and films we hope get U.S. distribution, we now venture into the unknown. One expects more pandemic-related delays, but there’s still plenty of currently under-the-radar movies that will hopefully make a mark in 2022.

Though the majority lack a set release—let alone confirmed festival premiere—most have wrapped production and will likely debut at some point in 2022. Be sure to check back for updates over the next twelve months (and beyond).

100. Babylon (Damien Chazelle; Dec. 25)

Damien Chazelle’s obsession with the magic of cinema seems to be reaching its natural apex: a detailed recreation of the era where silent film transitioned to sound. For collaborating with the biggest cast of his career, including Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, this should mark a big leap for the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Chazelle’s greatest strength is his ability to capture the...

Bigbug Trailer — Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s Bigbug (2022) movie trailer has been released by Netflix. The Bigbug trailer stars Dominique Pinon, Isabelle Nanty, Claude Perron, Francois Levantal, Youssef Hajdi, Elsa Zylberstein, Claire Chust, and Alban Lenoir. Crew Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant wrote the screenplay for Bigbug. Raphaël Beau created the music for the film. Thomas [...]

Continue reading: Bigbug (2022) Movie Trailer: Four Robots Take Their Masters Hostage in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Dystopian Film...

Academy Award-nominated “Amelie” and “A Very Long Engagement” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet hasn’t released a feature film since 2013’s “The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet.” But the always visually bonkers director of films including the swooningly odd “Delicatessen” and the gonzo “Alien Resurrection” is back with his latest film, “Bigbug.” The artificial intelligence comedy is hitting Netflix on February 11, and the streamer has released a first trailer for the film. Watch below.

Here’s the appropriately weird synopsis, courtesy of Netflix:

In 2050, artificial intelligence is everywhere. So much so that humanity relies on it to satisfy its every need and every desire – even the most secret and wicked…

In a quiet residential area, four domestic robots suddenly decide to take their masters hostage in their own home. Locked together, a not-quite-so-blended family, an intrusive neighbour and her enterprising sex-robot are now forced to put up with each other in an increasingly hysterical atmosphere!

Watch the Trailer for Mandibles: "When simple-minded friends Jean-Gab and Manu find a giant fly trapped in the boot of a car, they decide to train it in the hope of making a ton of cash."

Written and Directed by Quentin Dupieux

Starring Gregoire Ludig, David Marsais, Adele Exarchopoulos, India Hair, Romeo Elvis,

Coralie Russier, and Bruno Lochet

Magnet Releasing will release Mandibles everywhere July 23rd, 2021

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Third Killer Shorts Screenwriting Competition Announced: "Calling all horror writers! The third annual Killer Shorts Horror Short Screenplay Competition is accepting entries from July 1st, 2021.

The Killer Short Contest celebrates horror short screenwriters from around the world, connecting them with managers, producers, and filmmakers. The Top 10 scripts will be read by a star-studded panel of judges, with over $5,000 worth of prizes up for grabs including Final Draft 12 screenwriting software, Shudder subscriptions, career consultations, memberships to Stan Winston’s School of Creative Arts,...

Betty Blue (The Criterion Collection) Blu-ray Contest — FilmBook is running a Claudine (The Criterion Collection) contest for one copy of the Oscar-nominated film. Betty Blue, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, stars Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Darmon, Consuelo de Haviland, Clémentine Célarié, Jacques Mathou, Vincent Lindon, Jean-Pierre Bisson, Dominique Pinon, Claude [...]

Continue reading: Contest: Betty Blue (1986) Blu-ray (The Criterion Collection): The Jean-Hugues Anglade & Béatrice Dalle Romance Film...

Israel Horovitz, a playwright, screenwriter and director whose career was tarnished by sexual assault allegations in the late 2010s, died from cancer on Monday at his Manhattan home, his wife told The New York Times. He was 81.

Horovitz’s best-known plays include “Line,” “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard,” “The Primary English Class,” “The Widow’s Blind Date,” “What Strong Fences Make” and “The Indian Wants the Bronx.”

In 2017, nine women accused Horovitz of sexual misconduct in a New York Times article. Some of the women were actresses in plays he had directed or employed. One woman alleged he had raped her and another alleged he assaulted her when she was 16.

Horovitz responded to the accusations in the Times and apologized, saying he had “a different memory of some of these events. I apologize with all my heart to any woman who has ever felt compromised by my actions, and...

Stars: Kristanna Loken, Michelle Ryan, Dominique Pinon, Delphine Chaneac, John Robinson,Tiphaine Daviot, Sebastien Lalanne, Dorylia Calmel, Slimane Baptiste Berhoun, Loup Denis Elion, Julien Pestel, Florent Dorin, Thierry Fremont | Written and Directed by Guillaume Lubrano, François Descraques

I’ve been a fan of horror anthology films for a long time, since the first time I laid eyes upon freaky treats like Creepshow and such, so I’m always intrigued when another pops up, in this case a French horror anthology that started life as a TV series, but has been reshuffled into an anthology feature here.

Dark Stories takes five horror stories and injects them into our veins with horror, suspense and thrills galore, with alien life, zombies, ghosts and ghouls to tickle the taste buds of any horror lover, it manages to change pace and tone regularly to keep things from becoming tedious or samey, which I thought really set it apart.

FrightFest, the UK horror festival that was forced to move online this year because of pandemic disruption, has unveiled a lineup for its 21st edition (August 27-31) including seven world premieres.

The event opens with the UK premiere of Sky Sharks, which features Nazi zombie-piloted airborne killer sharks.

World premieres include Logan Thomas’s There’s No Such Thing As Vampires, Patrick Rea’s I Am Lisa, Ruben Pla’s The Horror Crowd, G-Hey Kim’s Don’t Click, Toby Watts’ Playhouse, Airell Anthony Hayles and Sam Casserly’s They’re Outside, and Francesco Giannini’s Hall.

Industry-focused events will include a panel hosted by Den Of Geek’s UK editor Rosie Fletcher about how the horror genre has been affected by the pandemic.

All online film screenings will be geo-locked to UK audiences and available through FrightFest’s website.

“We will desperately miss seeing all of you in person...

The Spaniard is directing this psychological thriller based on the famous novel by France’s Amélie Nothomb; it will star Marta Nieto, Tomasz Kot, Athena Strates and Dominique Pinon. Toro, a movie toplined by Mario Casas, Luis Tosar and José Sacristán, was released four years ago, and nine years have passed since the futuristic Eva collected three Goya Awards after first being unveiled at the Sitges Film Festival in 2011. At that same Catalonian gathering, which specialises in fantasy and horror fare, but at its upcoming edition, set to unspool in autumn this year, audiences will get the chance to see the new film by Kike Maíllo, who directed both of the aforementioned flicks. This one will bear the international title A Perfect Enemy, and it is an adaptation of the best-selling novel The Enemy's Cosmetique by French author Amélie Nothomb. It stars an international cast comprising Spanish actress Marta Nieto.

Even tantalizing glimpses of 20th-century Anglo-Irish modernist Eileen Gray’s most iconic designs, including scenes shot in the seminal E-1027, a seaside villa she built for her former lover Jean Badovici on France’s Côte d’Azur, fail to compensate for the rest of the treacle comprising “The Price of Desire.” Essentially a recounting of how envious Swiss architect Le Corbusier effectively undermined Gray’s artistry and for many years obscured her place in the design pantheon, this tedious 2014 production from Irish multi-hyphenate Mary McGuckian (“Man on the Train”) receives a belated digital and on-demand release via Giant Pictures on June 2.

Gray’s remarkable life, talent and legacy receives more inspiring treatment in “Gray Matters,” a companion documentary helmed at the same time by Marco Antonio Orsini, available on iTunes.

“It’s the price of desire,” quips the collector queried about the unprecedented $28 million she pays for Gray’s sensual...

Shoot is underway on Euro co-production thriller A Perfect Enemy starring Tomasz Kot (Cold War), Athena Strates (The Good Liar), Marta Nieto (Madre) and Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen).

The English-language film follows a sophisticated and successful businessman who is approached in an airport by a chatty woman with sinister intentions. Cameras are due to roll until February 2020 in Reus, Barcelona, Paris and Frankfurt.

From Spanish firm Sábado Películas, French outfit The Project Film Club and German’s Barry Films, the feature is an adaptation of novel Cosmétique de l’Ennemi by Amélie Nothomb, which was translated into 24 languages.

Spanish helmer Kike Maíllo directs. Screenplay comes from Cristina Clemente (Eva), Fernando Navarro (Verónica) and Maíllo. It marks the filmmaker’s third film. His debut Eva was awarded a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best New Director.

Also aboard are Rtve, TV3, Treehouse Pictures and recently-launched Paris-based international sales firm Pulsar Content. The film is supported by Icaa,...

As fizzy as a freshly poured glass of Perrier-Jouët, though considerably less complex, writer-director Alexis Michalik’s “Cyrano, My Love” . Part fancifully fictional account of the play’s conception, and part “Waiting for Guffman”-style depiction of the wild antics behind its first production, “Cyrano” was released in France earlier this year, and its undemanding immersion into flashy Belle Époque settings and farcical hijinks with the thinnest topcoat of literary credibility could well earn it an audience Stateside.

According to Michalik’s telling, twentysomething playwright Edmond Rostand (Thomas Solivérès) is a talented wordsmith who nonetheless couldn’t be more out of step with the theatrical tastes of 1890s Paris. Fastidiously mustachioed, stubbornly highbrow and eternally agitated, we’re introduced to him as his latest play has just folded, with a passer-by helpfully identifying him to a companion as “a young poet who writes flop plays.”

A few years later, Edmond...

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is going back to his roots. While visiting Los Angeles for a retrospective of several of his films at the American Cinematheque and the USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, the idiosyncratic French director shared details of his plans to make a mockumentary about the production of his beloved 2001 romantic comedy “Amelie” in anticipation of the movie’s 20th anniversary.

Jeunet, whose last completed feature was 2013’s “The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet,” also revealed that he was in the early stages of developing a sci-fi animated feature and a futuristic comedy.

“The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet” received a botched released in the U.S. in 2015 after distributor Harvey Weinstein decided to shelve it as retaliation for the director’s refusal to make cuts.

Since then, Jeunet has been trying to get a project off the ground with mostly discouraging results. “I’ve been fighting to make a...