News

On Wednesday February 19 2025, aspireTV broadcasts Style Kings!

Styling For Queens Episode 3 Episode Summary

The upcoming episode of “Style Kings,” titled “Styling For Queens,” promises to be an inspiring and transformative experience. Dedrick and Dr. Lesia Crumpton Young take center stage as they launch the Greatness Collection. This special collection aims to celebrate and uplift female greatness, breaking through barriers and shining a light on the achievements of women. Viewers can expect a focus on empowerment and creativity as Dedrick and Dr. Young work to showcase the strength and influence of women in the community.

In this episode, Justin shares his experiences from sourcing visits where he carefully selected lighting and wallpaper for a businesswoman named Corrina. These choices are not just about aesthetics; they reflect Corrina’s personality and professional aspirations. Justin’s journey highlights the importance of thoughtful design in creating spaces that resonate with those who inhabit them.

“Style Kings” returns with an exciting new episode titled “Styling For Queens.” In this third episode, Dedrick and Dr. Lesia Crumpton Young take on a special project called the Greatness Collection. Their mission is to highlight and celebrate female greatness by breaking through barriers and shattering glass ceilings. Viewers can expect inspiring stories and stunning designs that showcase the strength and achievements of women.

Meanwhile, Justin shares his experiences from sourcing visits he made to find the perfect lighting and wallpaper for a businesswoman named Corrina. His journey takes him through various design options, and he reflects on how these choices can transform a space. The combination of Dedrick and Dr. Lesia’s empowering mission with Justin’s design adventure promises to create a compelling episode.

As the clock strikes 8:00 Pm on Wednesday, February 19, 2025, on aspireTV, fans of “Style Kings” will not want to miss this blend of empowerment and creativity.

Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” swept France’s 30th Lumiere Awards, the local equivalent to the Golden Globes, at a ceremony held on Monday in Paris at the Forum des Images auditorium.

“Emilia Pérez” dominated the show, winning a whopping five awards: best film, director, script, actress for Karla Sofía Gascón, and music for Camille and Clement Ducol. The awards were voted on by France-based journalists from 38 countries.

The Spanish-language, Mexico-set crime musical stars Gascón as notorious cartel leader Manitas del Monte, who fakes her own death to live authentically as a trans woman. The supporting cast includes Selena Gomez, who plays Manitas’ tormented wife Jessi, and Zoe Saldaña, who portrays Rita, a talented but overworked lawyer recruited by Emilia to help her start a new life. Since winning Cannes’ jury prize and an award for its female ensemble, “Emilia Pérez” has received a flood of international laurels and is now leading the U.

For many of us, the war in Ukraine seized our attention with the 2022 invasion, but for Ukrainians, warfare has been a daily reality since 2014. With national funding focused primarily on military and healthcare demands, European sources and film festivals have turned their attention to supporting and sustaining Ukrainian film production, particularly documentaries—essential records of the varied and complex implications of war.

Such is the case with “Dad’s Lullaby,” the docudrama by Lesia Diak. Lesia, the ex-partner of a war veteran and a friend of another, pays tribute to the internal distances created by war and the irreversible damage it inflicts on communication within families, friendships, and romantic relationships. Her sensitive film explores a detailed and subtle layer, often overlooked yet profoundly challenging for everyone involved.

The film had its world premiere in the Documentary Competition section at the 2024 Sarajevo Film Festival and was also screened at DocLisboa 2024. It...

Vertigo Releasing has acquired U.K. and Ireland distribution rights to “The Kingdom,” directed by Corsican filmmaker Julien Colonna. The organized crime thriller and coming-of-age drama is set for theatrical release in spring 2025.

The film, which bowed in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes, centers on a teenage girl named Lesia who discovers her father, a crime boss, hiding out at a remote villa with his clan. Set against the backdrop of Corsica in 1995, the narrative follows the father-daughter pair as they’re forced to flee when violence erupts in the criminal underworld.

The picture introduces newcomers Ghjuvanna Benedetti and Saveriu Santucci in the lead roles of daughter and father, respectively, with the production featuring a predominantly Corsican ensemble cast.

Reviewing the film at Cannes for Variety, critic Peter Debruge wrote: “In his sure-handed and chilling first narrative feature, director Julien Colonna examines the personal cost of the gangster...

Sarajevo Film Festival has unveiled the programme for its four competition sections at its 30th edition (August 16-23), including five feature world premieres.

Eight films will play in the feature film competition, including the world premiere of Vuk Rsumovic’s Dwelling Among The Gods, about a young Afghan migrant woman who comes to Belgrade and learns her brother drowned in the river, so attempts to bury him under her full name.

Scroll down for the full feature selection

The film is a co-production between Serbia’s BaBoon Production, Croatia’s Kinorama and Italy’s Nightswim.

There is one out of competition title,...

An incisive look into the mafia’s presence in Corsica, Julien Colonna’s “The Kingdom” is an even-handed debut, filtering a war between rival gangs through the prism of a coming-of-age narrative. While well aware of the tropes associated with mafia films, Colonna’s decision to place his point of view alongside Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti in her first role) creates a fascinating window into connections between real and created families.

Continue reading ‘The Kingdom’ Fuses Coming-Of-Age & Gangster Tropes into An Exciting Debut [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

“Why do they want to kill you?” At 15, Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) is still daddy’s girl. She knows but doesn’t want to know the answer to her question, just as she has always known what Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci) does for a living — a very good living — but doesn’t acknowledge it to herself. “Money. Power. You don’t talk to these kinds of people,” her father shrugs. You wouldn’t want to talk to him either, not without an invitation.

Julien Colonna’s robust story of Corsican rule by the Mob is set in the ’90s, when the island was so thick with revenge killings that they were a nightly news feature. As The Kingdom opens, there has been peace between the Corsican crime families for years, but the eruption of a car bomb aimed at the president, who also happens to be Pierre-Paul’s closest friend, is a...

Exclusive: Following a buzzy debut this week at the Cannes Film Festival, Parisian-based filmmaker Julien Colonna’s debut feature The Kingdom has been picked up by Metrograph Pictures, who will release the film in North America.

The Kingdom screened in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar and has been widely touted on the ground in Cannes as a surprising festival standout. Metrograph Pictures has said it will distribute the film theatrically, with additional release details to be announced later.

Set over one sweltering summer on the French island of Corsica, The Kingdom follows a Corsican mob family on the run. The central character is Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti), a teenager who reconnects with her father, Pierre-Paul, a local mob boss in hiding. As Pierre-Paul’s crimes catch up with him, the two go on the run from both mobsters and the police, forging an increasingly close-knit bond that will ultimately...

At first, the violence seems limited to news reports. Every time a gangster is gunned down or a car bomb goes off in the streets of Corsica, the local channel flashes footage of the crime scene. So long as the killings are confined to television, it’s easy for 15-year-old Lesia to pretend they’re neither real nor relevant, that the people involved aren’t members of her father’s inner circle. But as “The Kingdom” unfolds, the attacks keep getting closer, slowly infiltrating the film itself, until finally, they’re happening right in front of her face.

Corsica, like nearby Sicily, has a serious problem with organized crime, which escalated dramatically in the 1990s, when “The Kingdom” is set. The birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, it’s an unusual island: technically part of France, but too independent-minded to let outsiders manage its affairs. The Corsican flag depicts a decapitated Moorish...

One of the finest films ever made about organized crime, “The Long Good Friday” (1980) sees the world of a London gangster abruptly destabilized by bomb attacks and murders of his associates. He and his henchmen attempt to uncover the attackers’ identities, all whilst trying not to worry their visitors in town for the weekend, who are members of the American mafia looking to invest in redevelopment in the area. This British mob classic may seem an odd film to evoke up top in a review of a French-language, Corsica-set debut feature. But one of the main strengths of director Julien Colonna’s “The Kingdom” is how it successfully pulls off a loosely similar, paranoia-driven fall-of-an-empire story within the context of a condensed time period.

The time frame in question is not quite as tight as “The Long Good Friday’s” 24-ish hours of mayhem, but instead a few weeks of...

The shadow of The Godfather looms large over French director Julien Colonna’s formidable feature debut, The Kingdom (Le Royaume), and not only because one of the characters in it is literally called “Godfather.”

Set in Corsica in 1995, at a time when the island was wracked by warfare among nationalist groups and crime families, the film focuses on one mafioso clan that’s beset by enemies on all sides and needs to survive by any means necessary. The head of that clan is a very casually dressed Don Corleone named Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), and he needs to both preserve his leadership and protect his teenage daughter, Lesia (the illuminating Ghjuvanna Benedetti), as they run from cops and mobsters alike.

So yes, it’s a very Godfather-like scenario — but it’s as if the Coppola classic were told from the viewpoint of a young Connie, chronicling how a girl on the...

Un Certain Regard is always a time to explore new, daring films from first- and second-time feature filmmakers at the Cannes Film Festival. They’ll eventually be eligible for the Camera d’Or, the Un Certain Regard equivalent of the Palme d’Or. So if you’re looking for something to see outside the main competition at Cannes this year, Julien Colonna’s Un Certain Regard entry is a simmering and intense coming-of-age story about a teenage girl coming of age amid a criminal family. And that family is maybe one she doesn’t want to reconnect with but is forced to over one summer in Corsica, 1995. Watch an IndieWire exclusive clip from the film below.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Corsica, 1995. It’s Lesia’s first summer as a teenager. One day a man bursts into her life and takes her to an isolated villa where she finds her father,...