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Exclusive: Utopia has acquired North American rights to Idiotka, the fashion comedy that premiered at this year’s SXSW and stars Anna Baryshnikov, Camila Mendes, Julia Fox, Owen Thiele, Benito Skinner, Gabbriette and Saweetie. Nastasya Popov directed the pic and penned the script.

“I’ve long admired Utopia’s eye for vibrant, distinctive storytelling, and I’m overjoyed to be joining the family,” said Popov. “We’re thrilled that audiences will get the chance to experience this wild ride of a comedy in a packed theater — and we guarantee it’ll be fun for the whole family, so bring everyone from your stylish grandmother to your chronically online little brother along.”

The film follows Baryshnikov as Margarita, an ambitious fashion designer who lives in a chaotic West Hollywood apartment with her Russian-Jewish family and enters a reality TV competition show called Slay, Serve, Survive in a desperate cash grab.

“Through Idiotka,...

From the moment Margarita Levlansky leans into the camera—fabric scraps strewn around her like battlefield detritus—we sense a collision between yearning and obligation. Here is a second-generation Russian American, sewing machine barely functional, yet bristling with dreams of fashion glory (and rent checks).

Margarita’s West Hollywood apartment feels less like a home than a pressure cooker: grandmother Gita’s colorful demands, father Samuel’s stoic regret over a prison sentence for health-care fraud, brother Nerses’s quiet solidarity. Into this crucible steps Slay, Serve, Survive, a reality-tv gauntlet that values tear-stained backstories over raw talent. Margarita’s ticket in? A video that showcases family chaos rather than couture prowess.

Nastasya Popov makes her debut here, casting Anna Baryshnikov in her first lead role. Popov’s eye for both absurdity and tenderness sets a tone that alternately pinches you with satire and soothes you with family warmth. There...

Writer-director Nastasya Popov finely threads a needle in her debut feature “Idiotka,” dipping into the chaotic life of Margarita (Anna Baryshnikov), an aspiring fashion designer with a barely functioning sewing machine in the tight-knit Russian district of West Hollywood. Margarita seems as much a work in progress as the eternally under-construction house she lives in. She’s been making ends meet by attaching tags taken off well-known designer labels onto her own work, then pawning them off online. But the clothes themselves show plenty of personality under the false advertising; accordingly, Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.

Like one of Margarita’s dresses, there is at least some repurposed fabric in “Idiotka.” Margarita struggles both with asserting herself in a brutal industry and with stepping out of the shadow of her feisty family, but the comedy is all...

Writer-director Nastasya Popov’s feature debut is a hilariously heartfelt reminder that immigrants make America (and cinema) great.

In the earnest comedy-drama Idiotka, Anna Baryshnikov plays Margarita Levlansky, a budding fashion designer living with her grandmother, father and brother in a tiny apartment in West Hollywood, “not the fancy part, the Russian part.”

With her family five months behind on rent, Margarita lands a spot on Slay, Serve, Survive, a new fashion competition series whose producer Nicol (Camila Mendes) takes a shine to her adversity and potential screen presence. But the role requires her to open her life up to the world, baring all her family’s struggle for a shot at the American Dream.

The clever comedy-drama spotlights post-Soviet life in L.A.’s gay capital for Jews who “weren’t considered real Russians or Ukrainians.” It’s a particularly relevant piece of representation amid the ongoing strife with Russia,...

“I would describe my aesthetic as Old World trash and treasure,” says Margarita (Anna Baryshnikov), a few minutes into Idiotka. “She’s milking a cow at five, but she needs to be at the ballet at 5:10. Loves a bargain bin.”

As a description of a style, it’s nonsense. As an illustration of an imagined wearer, it’s word salad. And yet there’s something compelling about its quirkiness — which, in its way, makes it a perfect encapsulation of Idiotka. The feature debut by writer-director Nastasya Popov is certainly messy, a mélange of contrasting tones and contradictory ideas. But darned if it isn’t bursting with enough personality to charm you all the same.

For the first act or so, Idiotka presents itself as a sendup of a certain soulless type of content. Margarita’s explaining her look in that very first scene because she’s filming a submission...

One of the predominant worries of our age is the desire to live authentically. There’s a profusion of technological developments and variables — now extending to artificial intelligence — that both help and hamstring us from achieving this, with much neurosis and self-consciousness brought on if we can’t. The 2010s and the ongoing Trump era have also intensified the clamor for identity politics, where a sometimes fragile sense of empowerment is gained by asserting difference in the face of mass American conformity.

So, the faux-inspirational outcome is that we must embrace our truth, and “Slay, Serve, and Survive,” to reference the in-film reality show contest in Nastasya Popov’s SXSW premiere “Idiotka.” Premiering in the non-competitive Narrative Spotlight section, Popov’s upbeat and genial comedy capably interrogates these ideas, with its tale of a young, aspiring LA fashion designer (from a Russian emigré background not unlike the director’s own...

Following her executive production work on Prime Video’s Música, in which she also starred along the film’s writer and director Rudy Mancuso, as well as her EP role on the streamer’s romantic comedy Upgraded, in which she starred alongside Archie Renaux and Marisa Tomei, Camila Mendes’ latest double-duty project takes place in the world of fashion. Idiotka is an acquisition title out of the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, where it will premiere Wednesday.

“This project came through a mutual friend that I shared with our producing partner, Tess Cohen, a friend that I knew from high school. It’s very random, but awesome. It gripped me,” Mendes told Deadline of the film ahead of its premiere Wednesday. “I called my producing partner right away, Rachel Matthews, and I was like, we gotta do this. She’s like, ‘Babe, I’m with you. I just read the first two pages and I’m in.

The Bricklayer, by director Renny Harlin, is better than your average espionage action thriller but just doesn’t have any real novelty to jump from that bar. It’s good that it has a great cast. Aaron Eckhart, Nina Dobrev, and Tim Blake Nelson in one film feels like it must be a heavy drama, but the plot will give you a feeling that there are a lot of stock characters in the film, tailor-made for action thrillers. The main role, which I refer to as the Bruce Willis role—a hard-boiled, old-school yet slick agent—goes to Aaron Eckhart, who does well with the bricklaying tools to kill people, as he knows how to give that steely, ice-cold look just a bit off the camera. Nina Dobrev gets a chance to essay the role of an agent, and she seems to have been cast against type, and does a good job as well.

Dmitriy Popov, the 17-year-old charged with the stabbing death of a gay, Black man, O’Shae Sibley, has pleaded not guilty to murder as a hate crime. He entered the plea in Brooklyn’s State Supreme Court on Friday, according to The New York Times. Popov will be tried as an adult and faces up to 25 years to life in prison for the murder charge, with the hate crime component increasing the minimum sentencing from 15 years to 20.

Justice Craig S. Walker ordered Popov to remain in custody without bail at a juvenile detention center.