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A work-in-progress participant at the 2023 American Film Festival in Wroclaw (which turned out to be a vintage edition with Indie Donaldson’s Good One and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point also being selected) Sarah Friedland was putting the finishing touches on her feature debut which would be selected for the Orizzonti (Horizons) section at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and leaving with a trio of prizes: the Luigi de Laurentiis Lion of the Future prize for best first film, the Best Director award, while Kathleen Chalfant won the Best Actress award. Described as a new kind of coming-of-age story (for the octogenarian set), Familiar Touch is a poignant drama confronts the limitations imposed by dementia, but works with different set of narrative parameters — it’s not a portrait solely on the setbacks of memory loss, but what the functions we gain and how that manifests itself.…

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After launching just two months ago with a splash from Berlin, upstart distributor 1-2 Special has made two key hires, both of whom are former industry veterans from Mubi.

Amanda Trokan and Nico Chapin have joined 1-2 Special to bolster the distributor’s presence ahead of Cannes. Trokan will serve as Senior Vice President of Acquisitions, and Chapin will be Vice President of Publicity.

Former Sideshow executive Jason Hellerstein founded the company and wants to acquire and release films from top-tier domestic and international festivals. The first feature it acquired and plans to release is Radu Jude’s “Kontinental ’25,” which made its premiere at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival and won the screenplay prize.

The team will have a strong presence in Cannes as they look to strategically expand the current slate.

Trokan led the North American programming team at Mubi, overseeing platform curation and licensing and negotiating a...

Fledgling New York-based distributor 1-2 Special has made two announcements heading into Cannes, appointing Amanda Trokan as SVP of acquisitions and Nico Chapin as VP of publicity.

Former Sideshow executive Jason Hellerstein launched the company in February to champion international and US festival films and recently pick up its first feature, Radu Jude’s Berlinale dark comedy Kontinental ’25. The team will be attending Cannes as they look to strategically expand the current slate.

With nearly two decades of experience, Trokan joins 1-2 Special after leading the North American programming team at Mubi. While overseeing platform curation and licensing, Trokan...

New York-based distribution company 1-2 Special has appointed Amanda Trokan as senior vice president of acquisitions and Nico Chapin as vice president of publicity.

The company was founded in February by former Sideshow executive Jason Hellerstein with the goal of acquiring and releasing films from top-tier domestic and international festivals. The company recently acquired its first feature, “Kontinental ‘25,” from director Radu Jude, out of the Berlin International Film Festival. The hires come as 1-2 Special is gearing up for Cannes.

Trokan joins 1-2 Special after leading the North American programming team at global streamer Mubi. While overseeing platform curation and licensing, Trokan negotiated deals for new films from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Quentin Dupieux, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Alex Ross Perry, Rebecca Zlotowski, Albert Serra, Tyler Taormina, Martín Rejtman, Vera Drew, Alonso Ruizpalacios, Radu Jude and others.

Trokan joined Mubi as a decade-plus HBO veteran, spending eight years as an executive on the company’s film acquisitions team.

Fusion Entertainment has signed actor and producer Sophie von Haselberg for management. Von Haselberg is the daughter of Bette Midler and has performed in television, film, and theater. Her notable appearances on TV and streaming include roles in several Ryan Murphy productions including “Pose,” “Versace: American Crime Story,” “American Horror Story” and “Halston.”

She made her feature film debut in Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” and went on to appear in Sony Pictures Classic’s “Equity.” She recently starred in the romcom “Love…Reconsidered” from Carol Ray Hartsell and also starred in the one-woman film “Give Me Pity!” directed by Amanda Kramer.

Von Haselberg will next appear in Amanda Kramer’s “By Design,” Matthew Shear’s “Fantasy Life” and the short film “Poreless,” directed by Harris Doran. She also recently starred in the world premiere of Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” at...

Dead Lover has become the inaugural feature acquisition from a new distribution venture between Cartuna and Dweck Productions, marking one of the first deals from the 2025 SXSW Film Festival.

The film from writer-director Grace Glowicki was purchased by Cartuna x Dweck out of SXSW, where the movie made its Texas debut on March 9 after its world premiere at Sundance’s Midnight section earlier this year. Glowicki stars alongside Ben Petrie, Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow in the Frankenstein-themed project that blends elements of horror, comedy and romance.

Dead Lover stars Glowicki as a gravedigger whose whirlwind affair with her perfect match (Petrie) ends tragically when he drowns at sea. This leads her to attempt to resurrect him through cutting-edge scientific experiments.

Cartuna x Dweck is planning a theatrical release, although details about a release date have not yet been shared. Glowicki (Tito) helmed the feature from a script she co-wrote with Petrie.

New York indies Cartuna and Dweck Productions have acquired North American rights for Grace Glowicki’s thriller Dead Lover as the first acquisition of their newly announced joint distribution venture Cartuna x Dweck.

The partners acquired the film out of SXSW where the Canadian thriller made its Texas debut after world premiering at Sundance in the Midnight Section.

In between times, the film has also played the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Göteborg Film Festival, with forthcoming stops at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans and the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.

Glowicki also stars in Dead Lover as a lonely gravedigger who stinks of corpses. When she finally meets her dream man (Ben Petrie), their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.

Dead Lover...

Cartuna x Dweck, the new distribution venture formed by Cartuna and Dweck Productions, has acquired North American rights to Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover following screenings at SXSW.

This is the first all-rights buy from the new company, which plans a theatrical release and aims to champion bold visions and emerging voices. The deal comes less than two weeks after Oscar-winningAnora director Sean Baker issued a clarion call urging support of independent filmmaking and the theatre-going experience.

Cartuna launched a distribution arm last year and found success with the Sitges and Morbido slapstick fantasy comedy Hundreds Of Beavers, which grossed...

Diamonds Are Not Forever: Lund Looks Beyond America’s Favorite Pastime

Even with a full count of three balls and two strikes, it may seem like the stakes are low, but the never-mentioned patriarchal foundations are rife with uncertainty in filmmaker Carson Lund’s feature film debut. As a regular contributor to Tyler Taormina’s recent cinema of suburbia and nostalgia, working with the same reflections of the past in a short and very present window — it would be a huge oversight to peg this simply as a pinstripes and leather glove essay. Working within masculinist traits and rural mindsets parameters, Eephus is reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s seminal walk-and-talkathon Slacker.…...

“The eephus pitch is a type of curveball so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter—makes him lose track of time,” explains Nate Fisher’s Merritt Nettles in Carson Lund’s Eephus. This pitch perfectly describes Lund’s winning filmmaking strategy. That’s not to say his depiction of a recreational baseball game in Eephus is unnatural or slow—only that Lund manipulates time in a way that accentuates our awareness of his manipulating its passage.

With equal parts wittiness and wistfulness, Eephus chronicles the final game at an ordinary recreational baseball field in New England. Two multigenerational teams of men gather for one last outing of community, conviviality, and a little healthy competition over nine innings of baseball. It’s less a hangout movie as it is a hanging-on movie, what with all the players finding ways to prolong the game and linger in the comforting ritual.

Lund,...

Exclusive: Fusion Entertainment has signed actor, writer, and director Mary Neely for management, Deadline has learned.

Neely rose to prominence during the Covid lockdowns with her viral reenactments of love duets from classic musicals. Singing both the male and female parts, her lip-syncs caught the attention of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Andrew Lloyd Webber and were named by The New York Times and The Washington Post as among The Best Theater of 2020.

Neely most recently completed production on 20th Century Studios’ untitled Bumble Movie opposite Lily James, Myha’la, Jackson White, and Dan Stevens, which is slated to premiere on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in all other territories in 2025. She will also appear alongside Bob Odenkirk in Acting for a Cause’s rendition of Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic The Room.

Next month, Neely will see the SXSW premiere of Stars Diner, an indie TV pilot that she co-wrote...

The Oscars are meant to celebrate the best of the year, but they are just as infamous for the movies they ignore. Every year the Academy releases a list of films that can be nominated in most categories (this year’s list features 323 films) and a shorter list for best picture (207 in 2024).

Not all films make the lists. Movies that didn’t open in certain US cities and didn’t show in theaters for long enough, premiered on streaming, screened outside of the year, or didn’t pay the fees aren’t eligible. Then there’s also a slew of genre and low-budget movies from all over the world that just don’t win awards. Some of these omissions are surprising. They have big stars, got some of the best reviews of the year, made money at the box office, or set the streaming world afire. But, in the end,...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

When reflecting on any year in movies, the theatrical experience rings most memorable. From driving across the border to Ohio with friends to watch No Country for Old Men in 2007, to a 35mm screening of Stalker at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2011, with so rapt an audience I was terrified to swallow for fear it would disrupt their experience—each year holds it own special memories and 2024 was no different. There was a lively afternoon matinee of Between the Temples in which I was the youngest present by about 25 years, and a sold-out Wednesday screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum with Elizabeth Berkley in person. But judging from reactions on X.com, I’m not alone in my favorite 2024 theatrical screening being witnessing Interstellar in 70mm IMAX.

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

The point is not to be fair, but to deliver gut-level reactions; to find the films that made me swivel my head and throw up my arms in frustration. 2024 was an uneasy year and I was naturally attracted to films that disquieted me. Well-made exercises in genre craft and compact auteurist style like Juror #2 and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga often failed to deliver more than easy admiration and placid acknowledgment of their skill. One of the biggest runner-ups to my top 10 list, The Brutalist, won me over not as the epic statement on American identity that it has been advertised as, but as a punkish anti-film with a grating penchant for blunt transgression and risible politics. The world is at war and politics have failed us.

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

Perhaps in a year where wars are raging, the planet is burning, and the cruelest people are elected to the highest offices, we don’t deserve the best movies. You can find plenty of films that bring joy over the past twelve months, for sure. But if we’re talking about the overall level of awesome-ness of the cinematic offerings, about works that feel undeniable, it seems to me that 2024 did not deliver the way, say, 2023 did.

Then again, maybe that’s just me being grumpy and anxious from all the ways the world offscreen is going wrong, because who can deny the electrifying energy and humanist glow of Sean Baker’s Anora? Or the funny, phantasmagoric family portrait that is Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point?...

Before awards season gets its annual wrap with the Oscars, the Sundance Film Festival ushers in a new year of movies every January, although it is increasingly less like the tastemaker it once was. What was once the touchstone of discovery that launched the independent film boom of the '...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Banel & Adama (Ramata-Toulaye Sy)

A directorial debut programmed into the main Cannes competition is typically viewed with suspicion, if not overlooked altogether. Very rare is that lightning-in-a-bottle moment like the arrival of Son of Saul some years back. Typically, the only conversation these debuts generate is the critical debate as to why they’ve been elevated to the top of the pile when there are far more striking debuts buried deeper within the festival. This often means that accomplished films are overlooked and underappreciated by those on the ground, who may be subconsciously comparing a striking feature to the work of more established names it’s competing against for the Palme d’Or, approaching each debut with a “show me” attitude it...

Featuring Francesca Scorsese (daughter of Martin) and Sawyer Spielberg (son of Steven), it’s hard not to go into Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point with curiosity piqued as to what the next generation might have helped to create, beside the point though that might be. Happily, Taormina’s atmospheric film turns out to be a rich slice of retro-styled Americana, replete with the classic movie flourishes of their forebears, from the distant wails of an Amtrak horn, to the precarious picket-fence perfection of a dime-a-dozen suburb.

The set-up is simple. Several generations of the Italian-American Balsano family are heading back to matriarch Antonia’s (Mary Reistetter) home on Long Island to break bread together across one long, eggnog-soaked Christmas Eve. While nominally sharing in the festivities, though, each subset has its own priorities: the little kids, never far from a fractious meltdown, are all about the...

Tyler Taormina’s latest film Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point is a refreshing departure from the typical high-stakes, disaster-driven Christmas offerings. Taormina offers a tender, observational look at a sprawling Italian-American family as they gather in their ageing matriarch’s suburban home for one last time.

Taormina forgoes a traditional plot in favour of vignettes, weaving together snippets of conversation and lingering on small details that paint a vivid picture of the festivities. Cinematographer Carson Lund uses a dreamy mix of vintage Christmas colours, twinkling fairy lights and close-ups of toy trains to evoke a sense of nostalgia.

What makes Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point so compelling is its commitment to capturing the small, often banal moments that define family gatherings. The adults debate whether it’s time to move their ailing mother to a nursing home, masking their grief with forced smiles. Meanwhile, the youngsters, particularly teenage...

Some films are there to tell stories, some to explore themes. Some ask questions and some deliver messages. Tyler Taormina’s are there to be experienced.

Since the breakout success of Ham And Rye in 2020, Taormina has been gradually acquiring a cult following. Much of this has been through word of mouth because, frankly, his films are difficult to review, and they certainly don’t lend themselves to the snappy soundbite culture through which most are promoted. Once seen, however, they are hard to forget. That’s because they plunge the viewer into the centre of what feels like a complete world. Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point is no exception.

For many people today, Christmas is first and foremost about family, and here we find ourselves attending a family get-together. We reach it by way of an energetic, playful opening sequence which sees credits collide and veer around one another on the screen as.

Christmas movies are a thing on their own. They tend to be heartwarming dramedies akin to slice-of-life movies that make us emotional but also offer us a sense of warmth and comfort. Centred around the year-end festival, these movies often speak about the spirit of togetherness and are drenched in a cosy, celebratory spirit of the festival. From Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ to Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’, we have seen the festival bringing people together, literally or emotionally. Tyler Taormina’s ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ is the latest, charming addition to this list that uses its big ensemble to offer a time capsule to a a bygone era.

While Christmas is a cause for celebration, it may not be the same for everyone everywhere. Some may cherish getting together and sharing the same space with their families. For some, it can be pitch-perfect like...

Intimate, disparate moments of an annual holiday tradition are artfully portrayed in director Tyler Taormina’s latest, the Long Island-set Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point. The audience ostensibly tags along to a chaotic yuletide party hosted by the matriarch of the Balsano family, which is attended by every conceivable far-flung relative.

Filmmaker Tyler Taormina quickly fell in love with IFC Films’ idea for how to market his merry-and-bright feature. The indie distributor’s trailer for “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” plays as a full-on throwback to how holiday season comedies used to be advertised, complete with baby boomer doo-wop, a long list of grinning cast members and a warm narrator promising that, “It’s more than a holiday. It’s a gift for the whole family.” But the nostalgic packaging came with an unforeseen side effect.

“A lot of the people online are like, ‘Oh, I thought it was a horror movie.’ It was a very common reaction that was not at all thought of,” Taormina shares. “Earnest nostalgia is not able to be detected. The irony is expected. It bummed me out.”

No killer is mucking up the holiday in “Miller’s Point,” now playing in theaters after premiering...

At the American Film Festival in Wrocław, teams behind the projects selected for the U.S. in Progress—a festival industry event—pitched their films to potential buyers, film festival programmers, and Poland-based post-production companies. Under the guidance of Artistic Director Ula Śniegowska, the event acts as a matchmaking platform — think tinder-like linking between Polish post-production talent with American indie producers. Last year’s edition proved highly fruitful: several selections went on to make waves in the 2024 film festival circuit. We began the year with India Donaldson’s critical darling Good One preeming at Sundance and Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, where Tyler Taormina also screened Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.…...

At the end of Peter Godfrey’s “Christmas in Connecticut” — the greatest Christmas movie of all time (don’t fight me on this) — beloved character actor Sydney Greenstreet, having just emerged from a comedy kerfuffle of epic proportions, can think of nothing more to do than throw his mighty head in the air and declare “What a Christmas! Ho ho, what a Christmas!”

I could also think of little else to say, at first, about Tyler Taormina’s peculiar and lovely “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.” What a Christmas indeed. The film is an eclectic hodgepodge of realism and dreamlike, dare I say Lynchian mannerisms. It’s set in the 2000s but it belts wall-to-wall mid-20th century pop hits, like a family-friendly cousin to Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising.” When Peggy March’s “Wind-Up Doll” drowns out the family playtime, you can half imagine the leathery biker tinkering in the garage.

No Sleep Till.According to its website, Omnes Films wants to “fill a void” in modern cinema. A collective of filmmakers based for the most part in and around Los Angeles, its productions “favor atmosphere over plot” in an attempt to shed light on “the many forms of cultural decay in the twenty-first century.” Two of those, Carson Lund’s Eephus and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, among the finest titles to premiere at Cannes earlier this year, understand that as an erosion of certain ways of being among others. Crucially, both also tether that decline to the loss of physical, brick-and-mortar places. In Eephus, a gang of middle-aged amateur baseball players meet at the local field for one final match before the site will be cleared for a new middle school; in Christmas Eve, an Italian-American family gathers at Grandma’s Long Island house for...

Box office darling Anora, Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner from Neon, goes wide Friday after a slow platform, expanding to 1,104 screens as indies continue to bust onto screens. Searchlight Pictures’ A Real Pain adds eight locations, with Focus Features’ Conclave and A24’s Heretic continuing, and launching, respectively, in wide release.

A Real Pain starring Kieren Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed, adds theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto after a strong opening last weekend, when it took the third-highest per-theater average of the year. It goes to 900+ theaters across all major markets next week.

Opening in moderate release: Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate’s launch of Artist Equity’s Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy at 795 theaters.

Directed by Tim Mielants and written by Enda Walsh, the film is based on the bestselling book of same name by Claire Keegan. It...

The below interview was originally published May 20, 2024, during the Cannes Film Festival, where Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point premiered in the Directors Fortnight section. It is being republished today, as the film is released nationally by IFC Films, including at New York’s IFC Center. — Editor Whether the sprawling fantasia that is Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point proves heartwarmingly reflective or personally destabilizing in its near-ethnographic study of American holiday ritual will depend, largely, on the composition and size of your own Xmas memories. It’s a strength of the film, however, that Taormina’s expansive […]

The post “I Actually Feel Like the Firefly Was Caught in the Jar”: Tyler Taormina on His Cannes-Premiering Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The below interview was originally published May 20, 2024, during the Cannes Film Festival, where Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point premiered in the Directors Fortnight section. It is being republished today, as the film is released nationally by IFC Films, including at New York’s IFC Center. — Editor Whether the sprawling fantasia that is Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point proves heartwarmingly reflective or personally destabilizing in its near-ethnographic study of American holiday ritual will depend, largely, on the composition and size of your own Xmas memories. It’s a strength of the film, however, that Taormina’s expansive […]

The post “I Actually Feel Like the Firefly Was Caught in the Jar”: Tyler Taormina on His Cannes-Premiering Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It was the day after Halloween, and at The Grove in Los Angeles, Christmas decorations had already been rolled out and strung up. It was fitting for the interview I was about to have with filmmaker and musician Tyler Taormina, who was in between travels for his most recent work, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” but rather than sit outside and enjoy the ambience, I asked if he’d like to head to Barnes & Noble for the first day of their annual November Criterion Collection sale. Seeing his eyes light up with excitement, I realized I had my answer.

Taormina and I were a few years apart at Emerson College in Boston, and though we’d never met, I found an unmistakable familiarity with him as we started to chat and look through Blu-rays and DVDs. Perhaps it resulted from being shaped at the same institution, or maybe...

The logline of Tyler Taormina’s third feature might make it sound like Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point has the trappings of a standard-issue holiday movie. The far-flung members of a large family descend on their ancestral family home in Long Island for what many realize could be the final time. That gradually beckoning awareness of tradition fading into transience provides the animating tension of the film, though it seldom rises to the level of standard narrative conflict driving the events of the plot.

Instead, Taormina’s mosaic-like approach to capturing characters and spaces coalesces into what he’s dubbed “ecosystem film.” It’s a cinema defined by his attunement to the vastness of experiences and energies contained within a space, whether a single home or an entire suburb.

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point extends the tonal register of Taormina’s first two films about American alienation, the...

The best Christmas movies of all time seem like a tough list to break into. It's a collection that seems etched in stone with little-to-no wiggle room: It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Elf, etc. But with fresh angles taken, one can come close and leave it to budding auteur Tyler Taormina to churn out a uniquely endearing, fun, weird holiday film ensemble for his latest achievement. Any indie buffs who tuned into his previous feature Ham on Rye are perhaps better primed for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point and probably wont be surprised to learn that the characters in focus here are a loudmouthed New Yorker clan on Long Island.

Luckily, if youre not familiar with Taormina's work, the holiday-centric nature of his new feature certainly has that family-friendly, more commercial appeal, and it remains relentlessly entertaining along with being artsy all the way through.

With just three features to his name, Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of small-town America. His 2019 debut, Ham on Rye, tracked a gaggle of high school seniors as they geared up for prom night and life away from home. Shot by Taormina’s regular cinematographer, Carson Lund, the film heralded two motifs that would haunt the director’s cinema. On the one hand, an interest in immortalizing perfectly anonymous stretches of US suburbia as dreamlike, surreal terrains; on the other, an unresolved tension between our need for communion and the forces that inevitably pull us apart.

Everyone longs to connect in Taormina’s films, but few ever manage––a tragic state of affairs that was basically the plot of Happer’s Comet (2022), a nocturnal snapshot of a US town and a few of its residents, all of them captured as they wait, alone,...

Look out, The Holdovers. You have some real competition in the Christmas-film-so-cozy-it-should-have-been-made-for-vhs category. Grab your hot cocoa with all the little marshmallows and settle in under some fuzzy blankets for Christmas Eve In Miller's Point, this year's snowiest (but also maybe its warmest) family comedy.

"On Christmas Eve, a family...

The 2024 edition of the Valladolid International Film Week, also known as Seminci, wrapped on Saturday (October 26), giving its top award, the Golden Spike, to Misericordia by Alain Guiraudie.

Misericordia tells the story of a man who returns to his hometown for the funeral of his former boss, the village baker, and decides to stay for a few days with the man’s widow, getting involved in a series of unexpected events.

Guiraudie also won the best screenplay award.

The members of the Valladolid jury, Greek director Sofía Exarchou; Spanish actress Aida Folch; American critic Devika Girish; Spanish filmmaker Luis López Carrasco...

Carlos Marques-Marcet’s Toronto-winning musical drama They Will Be Dust, will open the 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Week, also known as the Seminci, on October 18.

The end of life drama starring Alfredo Castro and Angela Molina won the Platform section at TIFF last month.

Valladolid, headed by José Luis Cienfuegos for a second year, is a key launchpad into the Spanish market for local and international films.

There are a total of 22 titles in the running for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Spike that comes with a €70,000 award for the Spanish distributor. The Silver Spike...

The 32nd Hamptons International Film Festival (Hiff) has officially unveiled its 2024 winners.

The festival, which took place from October 4 through October 14, marked the U.S. premiere of John Crowley’s “We Live in Time,” with screenings of “Nightbitch,” “A Real Pain,” “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” and R.J. Cutler’s Martha Stewart Netflix documentary “Martha” among the acclaimed features.

Now, IndieWire can exclusively announce the films that the Hiff jury and audience members selected for the top awards. “Armand,” also Norway’s 2025 Oscar submission, won the Hiff Award for Best Narrative Feature. “Armand” stars “A Different Man” and “Worst Person in the World” breakout Renate Reinsve as a mother of a seemingly disturbed six-year-old; the film debuted at Cannes before screening at Hiff. “Armand” is directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, the grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. IFC Films has U.S. distribution rights for “Armand.”

“’Armand’ is...

If you have a large family, you probably have experienced one or two wild Christmas celebrations in your time. And if that’s the case, there’s a lot to recognize in the upcoming comedy film, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”

Read More: 2024 Fall Film Preview: 50 Movies To Watch

As seen in the delightfully retro trailer, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” tells the story of a family who gathers for what might end up being the last big holiday in their home.

Continue reading ‘Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point’ Trailer: Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher & More Star In Tyler Taormina’s Holiday Comedy at The Playlist.

The best holiday movie of the season, Ham on Rye director Tyler Taormina expanded his star power with Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which brings together Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Sawyer Spielberg, Francesca Scorsese, and many more. After premiering at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, IFC Films picked it up for a November 8 release and now the first trailer has arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “On Christmas Eve, a family gathers for what could be the last holiday in their ancestral home. As the night wears on and generational tensions arise, one of the teenagers sneaks out with her friends to claim the wintry suburb for her own.”

Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “The setting and production design are so rich with authenticity and detail that fans of The Bear might be tempted to draw comparisons with a famous episode in season two, but...

Every conceivable trope and tonal variant of a Christmas movie appears to be accounted for in Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. There’s a boisterous family gathering, where characters bask in nostalgia. Romances and rivalries abound. Grievances are aired. There’s physical comedy and a crisis that could alter the nature of Christmases to come. Oddball family members who could fit comfortably in a movie as broadly drawn as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation mingle freely with those more subtly and melancholically rendered, who might fit in among the atmosphere of Sofia Coppola’s sad and lovely A Very Murray Christmas.

In Taormina’s Ham on Rye, a dance stood in for all coming-of-age rituals in a blend of past and present America. In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest...

Exclusive: Empirical Evidence’s management division has signed American filmmaker Carson Lund, who directed Eephus, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight section.

Eephus was acquired by Music Box Films out of Cannes for U.S. distribution and will release the film theatrically in March 2025. The film is set to have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival this week.

The comedy-drama, which uses amateur baseball to reflect on the passage of time, charts how a men’s veteran baseball game stretches to extra innings on a beloved field’s final day before demolition.

Lund is a founding member of the LA-based filmmaker collective Omnes Films. Eephus marks the second project from Omnes Films to screen in the Directors’ Fortnight section along with Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which Lund shot.

Next up, Lund is producing Omnes Films’ Raccoon...

It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball in October. Even as America’s signature “national pastime” has taken a backseat to football and basketball in recent years, the end of the marathon regular season and the start of the playoffs still induce a twinge of nostalgic passion in even the most cynical sports fan. With the MLB Wild Card series beginning this week, it’s fitting that Music Box Films has announced a release date for “Eephus,” Carson Lund’s baseball drama that charmed Cannes when it debuted in the 2024 Directors’ Fortnight.

IndieWire can exclusively reveal that “Eephus” will open at Film at Lincoln Center and the IFC Center on March 7, 2025, with a national rollout to follow. That means that New York cinephiles will have a chance to watch the film during Spring Training, and audiences across the country will be able to catch the expansion just as the regular season is beginning.

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.As the vaporetto pulled out of San Marco and veered east toward the Lido, I decided I’d kick off my tenth trip to the Venice Film Festival doing something I’d never done before: visit its Extended Reality section. Tucked away on a little island that once served as a leper colony, Venice Immersive is home to dozens of VR projects slotted in competitive and non-competitive programs every year. I had no idea what to expect from this edition, though a cursory glance at the menu suggested a motif. Aside from titles that vowed to explore new formats and ideas around spectatorship, there were several that felt true to our era of anxious, restless doomscrolling. Catastrophes, tragedies, and crises were at the cornerstone of the handful of works I saw, including Asio Chihsiung Liu and Feng Ting Tsou’s Somewhere Unknown in Indochina, a study...

The world premiere of Liu Juan’s A River Without Tears is set to open this year’s Pingyao International Film Festival, which has revealed its full line-up.

The eighth edition of the festival, founded by acclaimed director Jia Zhangke, is scheduled to run from September 24-30 in the picturesque city of Pingyao, in China’s Shanxi province.

Sections include Crouching Tigers, made up of emerging international filmmakers; Hidden Dragons, featuring the first or second films of Chinese directors; gala films by renowned directors; and Made-in-Shanxi, comprising titles by local filmmakers or films shot in in the province.

Opening film...

US filmmaker Carson Lund’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title Eephus has landed sales across Asia, ahead of its screenings at the New York Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival, for Film Constellation.

The baseball comedy drama has sold to Japan (Transformer), Indonesia (Falcon) and India (BigTree), as well as to Encore for inflight/ships.

It has previously sold to Capricci for France and the Music Box Films for the US.

The New England-set comedy drama unfolds as a construction project looms over a small-town baseball field, leaving a pair of Sunday league teams to face off for the last...

‘Bob Trevino Likes It’ y ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ competirán por la Espiga de Oro. © Seminci

La Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid (Seminci), que se celebra del 18 al 26 de octubre, ha anunciado nuevas incorporaciones a su programación.

Dos nuevos títulos se han añadido a la competición por la Espiga de Oro: Bob Trevino Likes It y Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.

Bob Trevino Likes It, dirigida por Tracie Laymon, está protagonizada por John Leguizamo y Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria). La película sigue a una joven solitaria, separada de un padre narcisista y manipulador, que encuentra consuelo emocional conectando a través de Facebook con un hombre que comparte el nombre de su padre. Este filme recibió el Gran Premio del Jurado y el Premio del Público en el South by Southwest Film Festival.

También a competición en la Seminci está Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, segundo largometraje de Tyler Taormina,...

Pingyao International Film Festival (Pyiff) has announced the line-up for its eighth edition, including its Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons sections, and opening film A River Without Tears.

The festival also announced that it is screening a restored version of Chen Kaige’s award-winning Yellow Earth, to mark the 40th anniversary of the film, one of the first major titles of China’s Fifth Generation movement, which won a Silver Leopard at Locarno as well as best cinematography for Zhang Yimou at Nantes Three Continents Film Festival.

Opening film A River Without Tears, the second feature of female director Liu Juan, is the story of a father who insists on finding out the truth of his daughter’s suicide. Executive produced by Chinese auteur and Pingyao festival founder Jia Zhangke, the film will also screen as one of 12 titles in the festival’s Hidden Dragons section for emerging Chinese filmmakers (see full list below).

Meanwhile,...

A restored edition of Chen Kaige’s “Yellow Earth” is one of the highlights of the selection for the 8th edition of China’s boutique Pingyao International Film Festival. The film, which helped put Chinese art-house cinema on the map overseas and signaled a new era of Chinese directors, now referred to the FIfth Generation, was originally released 40 years ago.

The festival, which runs Sept. 24-30, will open with the world premiere of Liu Juan’s “A River Without Tears.”

The festival’s Hidden Dragons section of Chinese-made films includes: the Asian premiere of Ma Lanhua’s “Hello, Spring”; the Asian premiere of Tang Yongkan’s “Stars and the Moon”; and world premieres of Wang Lina’s “Village Music”; Zhu Xin’s “A Song River”; Yang Suiyi’s “Karst”; Luka Yang Yuanyuan’s “Chinatown Cha-Cha”; Shen Tao’s “Floating Clouds Obscure the Sun”; Siu Koon-ho’s “True Love, For Once...

Poland’s American Film Festival is continuing to bet on U.S. independent films, ignoring the Hollywood blockbusters and bigger budget auteur films from the mini-majors.

“The fest selects a very precise type of project – they are real independent films, not in that Independent Spirit Award, less-than-$40 million sense,” says director and producer Rob Rice.

“The people that come with them have a kind of shorthand with each other. We are all up against the same things and we are all trying to trick the industry into mistaking our films for ‘real movies.’”

“There are always lots of interesting things happening in American independent cinema. It’s enough to mention three alumni of [fest’s industry sidebar] U.S. in Progress: Anu Valia (“We Strangers”), India Donaldson (“Good One”) and Sarah Friedland. These are great examples of new female voices speaking about female experiences, and keeping things intimate and personal,” says artistic director Ula Śniegowska.

The challenge is on: the industry sidebar of Poland’s American Film Festival, U.S. in Progress, is ready to top its “exceptionally successful” 2023 edition in November.

“U.S. in Progress alumni are taking festivals by storm,” says Aff’s artistic director Ula Śniegowska.

Presented as works-in-progress, India Donaldson’s “Good One” – awarded at the event last year – went on to premiere at Sundance and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in May. Tyler Taormina’s “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” was also shown at the French fest, described by Variety’s Jessica Kiang as “a sweet, nostalgic love letter to suburban holiday-season rituals.”

“We Strangers” by Anu Vaila and Cutter Hodierne’s “Cold Wallet” screened at SXSW, and “Familiar Touch” was shown in Venice. Monica Sorelle’s “Mountains” and Shane Atkinson’s “Laroy, Texas” were selected for Tribeca, Georden West’s “Playland” for IFFR, while “Falling Stars,” directed by Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki,...