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In case you haven't heard, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is getting a sequel series — and an Oscar-winning director is attached to the project. Chloe Zhao — the director known for "Eternals," "The Rider," and "Nomadland" — is on board to direct Lilla and Nora Zuckerman's pilot episode, which will introduce a new slayer to the universe. What's more, Sarah Michelle Gellar has credited the filmmaker for getting the series off the ground, claiming that Zhao's passionate pitch was strong enough to make her dust off her old stake.

Of course, the sequel/reboot will arrive with some lofty expectations to live up to. Many of us have spent years hoping to see more episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," but history has shown that revival series can be hit or miss. The original series is one of the best shows of the '90s, and it ended strongly, so resurrecting...

Exclusive: Oscar winner Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise), emerging young actress Everly Carganilla (The Chair), and Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Aubrey Plaza (The White Lotus) are leading under-the-radar drama The Accompanist, a magical realist story from Sound Of Metal and The Rider producer Caviar.

Actor, writer, director and comedian Zach Woods, who starred in the U.S. version of The Office and HBO’s Silicon Valley, is making his feature directorial debut.

Mister Smith Entertainment is handling international sales on the film, which is currently in post-production. CAA Media Finance and Gersh are handling North American sales.

The synopsis reads: “When 9-year-old Emily (Everly Carganilla) accidentally tells her school nurse that her dementia-stricken grandpa almost got them killed, a rookie child-welfare agent Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) is sent to their house to investigate. A botched extraction ensues and Emily is taken and placed with Sylvia, a new foster parent. Sylvia (Susan Sarandon) is mysterious,...

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

This famous line from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” rings particularly apt now that Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” has been slated for an awards-friendly November release. This adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s own award-winning historical novel stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes. Focus Features has set a limited theatrical release for the Elizabethan-era drama on November 27, followed by a nationwide expansion on December 12.

In addition to landing within the window for an awards season play, the film also seems to be setting itself up as an “adult option” for moviegoers during the holiday season. It hits select theaters the same time as “Zootopia 2” and expands right as “Avatar: Fire & Ash” and “Spongebob: Search for Square Pants” begin their rollouts. It also marks a return for Zhao to independent filmmaking after helming...

Chloe Zhao’s next film “Hamnet” has secured a prime awards season release date.

Focus Features, which is backing the Shakespeare-era historical drama, will open in limited release on Nov. 27 before expanding nationwide on Dec. 12. “Hamnet” lands in select theaters on the same day as Pixar’s “Zootopia 2” and hopes to serve as counterprogramming when the film widens its footprint in mid December, a week before James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and Paramount’s “SpongeBob: Search for SquarePants.”

Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “Hamnet” fictionalizes the life of the Bard’s son who died at a young age and recounts the powerful love story that inspired the creation of “Hamlet.” Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley will star in the film as William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes alongside Joe Alwyn as Bartholomew and Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet.

Zhao wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell, whose book...

Hollywood has always been a tough industry to crack, but women are proving time and again that they belong behind the camera just as much as anyone else. From science to business to filmmaking, women have been making history for centuries, pushing boundaries and leaving their mark. In Hollywood, female directors are doing just that—reshaping the industry, one film at a time.

Back in the early days of cinema, trailblazers like Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber took the director’s chair, paving the way for future generations. Their work inspired legends like Ida Lupino, Madeline Anderson, Agnès Varda, and Penny Marshall—women who brought fresh perspectives and unforgettable storytelling to the big screen. Today, female directors continue to break barriers, bringing their creativity and unique vision to audiences worldwide.

Whether they’re redefining genres, telling bold new stories, or giving underrepresented voices a platform, these women are changing the game.

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired “East of Wall,” a critically acclaimed look at a marginalized, neglected corner of the American West that marks the feature debut of writer and director Kate Beecroft. The film was inspired by real people, with Beecroft convincing Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, ranchers from the Badlands, to play versions of themselves. “East of Wall” won the Audience Award at Sundance in the Next category.

Variety‘s Peter Debruge praised the film as an “artful debut” and compared it to Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” which Sony Pictures Classics also distributed. Other critics agreed with The Austin Chronicle writing, “As a first-time feature filmmaker, Beecroft’s storytelling technique could stand greater development, but her sense of place and mood is spot-on. Her film will definitely make you want to scrape the mud off your boots before you leave the theatre.”

Tabatha Zimiga stars as a horse trainer who,...

Chloé Zhao proved she could handle franchise IP in Marvel Studio's Eternals, and her next project has her taking on another beloved pop culture title.

The Academy-Award-nominated director has helmed only five feature films throughout her career but has left a lasting impact thanks to her vision for titles like The Rider and Oscar-winner Nomadland. 

In 2020, Zhao pivoted into the franchise world with the Gemma Chan and Angelina Jolie-starring Eternals, which she landed after winning over Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige with the best pitch he'd ever heard. 

Read full article on The Direct.

So much of the American cowboy mythos — the way they talk, the silhouette they cut, the clothes they wear — has been codified, if not invented wholesale, by Hollywood. From first shot to last, Kate Beecroft’s “East of Wall” expands our perception of those iconic horse wranglers to consider the women so often overlooked. In the tradition of Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” this eye-opening 21st-century Western was inspired by real people: Debuting writer-director Beecroft convinced the Zimiga family — most notably single mom Tabatha and her daughter, Porshia, a TikTok star and rodeo queen — to participate in a drama extrapolated from their own lives, all but rewriting the genre with the result.

Beecroft derives unquantifiably rich scenic value from the stunning South Dakota backdrops, whether handheld footage of magic-hour vistas or weightless drone shots through the vast, corrugated folds of the Badlands. But it’s the tough, sun-blasted faces of...

No, April Fool’s Day has not arrived nearly three months early. Yes, there’s going to be a “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” sequel series show. Yes, Sarah Michelle Gellar will reprise her role as Buffy and get this, two-time Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao will direct. Is this really odd news, or what?

Sort of. First, let’s look at the obvious: Zhao is known for “The Rider” and 2021’s Oscar Best Picture winner “Nomadland,” for which she also won Best Director; she is generally a lyrical, poetic filmmaker with a taste for the simple beauty of very human stories.

Continue reading ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’: Chloé Zhao To Direct Sequel Series Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar at The Playlist.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is seemingly being brought back from the dead…again!

More than two decades after the series ended with Season 7, a reboot of the fan-favorite TV series in the works and nearing a pilot order from Hulu, with Sarah Michelle Gellar expected to reprise her signature role as Buffy Summers, via Deadline.

Oscar winner Chloé Zhao, a “self-professed lifelong Buffy fan,” is set to direct the pilot, written by Poker Face‘s Nora and Lilla Zuckerman.

Chloé is known for work including Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider, Nomadland and Marvel’s Eternals.

Keep reading to find out more…

“I hear the reboot is starting a writers room soon, a sign that Hulu and the studios have high expectations for the project going to series. It is unclear yet whether other original Buffy cast members would return; that is considered likely,” Deadline reports.

Plot details are still being kept under wraps,...

In every generation, there is a chosen one — again.

Variety has learned from sources that a sequel series to the beloved show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is nearing a pilot order at Hulu.

Sources say that Sarah Michelle Gellar is in final talks to once again play the iconic title character in the untitled project, although it would focus on a new Slayer and Gellar would appear in a recurring role rather than leading the series.

Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman are attached to write, showrun, and executive produce. Chloé Zhao is attached to direct and executive produce under her Book of Shadows production banner. Gellar would also executive produce along with Gail Berman. Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui will executive produce via Suite B, while Dolly Parton will executive produce via Sandollar. 20th Television and Searchlight Television will produce. Berman, the Kuzuis, and Parton were all executive producers on the original “Buffy” series.

Coralie Fargeat bet big on herself and won, as her decision to turn down a big MCU director gig to focus on her passion project, The Substance, led her to an Academy Award nomination. Fargeat's The Substance has become one of the ultimate underdog stories of the awards season race, as the movie's original financer, Universal Pictures, dropped the project before being picked up by a smaller distributor, Mubi. The body horror film, starring Demi Moore, seemed like a tough sell on paper, but it has since gone on to gross $76 million worldwide and defied expectations. The Substance is a full-throttle gore fest that scored a Best Picture nomination at the 97th Academy Awards, with Fargeat earning a Best Director and Best Original Screenplay nomination.

Things might have gone very differently if Fargeat had considered Marvel Studios' offer. According to Variety, Fargeat was in consideration to direct Black Widow. Despite being broke at the time,...

When the first audience to see Kate Beecroft’s feature directorial debut, “East of Wall,” files into its Friday morning premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, they won’t be the only ones seeing it for the first time. Its own stars, including Tabatha Zimiga and her daughter Porshia Zimiga, have yet to view the film. After all, they lived it, sort of.

“I thought about this long and hard,” Beecroft told IndieWire. “If I was going to show it to them at home? South Dakota is like, you walk in the door and no one says hi to you, you don’t want to show emotion. No hugs, nothing. I’ve changed that in them. I’m always like, ‘Get up and hug me.’ But I don’t think it would have that support that Sundance carries, and I think what Tabby and these kids need is to know how amazing they are,...

Eighty-nine songs and 146 scores are on the Oscar ballots for Best Original Song and Best Original Score, according to lists obtained by TheWrap.

The list of songs is five fewer than last year, when 94 songs qualified. The scores fell two short of last year’s total of 148.

In the song category, Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic musical “The End” and the singer-songwriter drama “Dandelion” submitted three songs each, the maximum number of submissions allowed under Oscar rules. Films that submitted two songs included “Emilia Perez,” “Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life,” “Albany Road,” “Am I Racist?,” “Captain Avispa,” “The Garfield Movie,” “I Saw the TV Glow,” “Moana 2,” “Left Behind,” “Mufasa: The Lion King,” “Twisters” and “Your Monster.”

All of the songs considered to have the best chance of making the shortlist are eligible, including “El Mal” and “Mi Camino” from “Emilia Perez,” “Winter Coat” from “Blitz,” “Harper and Will Go West” from “Will & Harper,...

WaterTower Music, Warner Bros.’ in-house music label, has unveiled the official theme song for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.

The track, titled “The Rider,” is performed by English breakout artist Paris Paloma. The song was written and produced by Phoebe Gittins and David Long.

The music video for The Rider and its album cover art can be viewed below:

Producer Philippa Boyens praised the new addition to the franchise’s music legacy, stating, “Paris Paloma’s incredible performance of The Rider follows in the great tradition of powerful, heartfelt songs within The Lord of the Rings cinema universe. Her voice perfectly imbues the emotion, courage, and indefinable magic that is Middle-earth.”

A lifelong fan of Tolkien’s works, Paloma also expressed her excitement about being part of the franchise.

“I became completely immersed in Middle-earth, both in the books and the movies, and I have...

December cant come any sooner for fans of J.R.R. Tolkiens acclaimed The Lord of the Rings as the month will see the debut of Warner Bros. animated adaptation The War of the Rohirrim. Recently, the production company announced that this highly anticipated production will feature an original song by the indie singer-songwriter Paris Paloma titled The Rider. This new single will be available on all music platforms on November 14, exactly a month before The War of the Rohirrim hits theaters.

Chloë Grace Moretz, Anthony Ramos, Manny Jacinto, Isabel May, Lukas Gage and Billie Lourd will star in the romantic comedy Love Language from financier Caviar, the company behind Sound Of Metal and War Pony.

After Everything director Joey Power is helming the story, which is scheduled to begin shooting this month in Chicago. CAA Media Finance represents US sales rights.

Ari Lubet is producing for 3 Arts Entertainment, Colin Jost and Jeff Grosvenor for No Notes Productions, and Bert Hamelinck and Allison Hironaka for Caviar.

Executive producers include Michael Sagol of Caviar and Tyson Bidner.

Based in Los Angeles, Brussels,...

Quick Links Chloe Zhao Isn't Just Any Kind of Filmmaker Songs My Brothers Taught Me is an Unforgettable Directorial Debut The Rider is a Breathtakingly Beautiful Cowboy Story

Over the last decade or so, Chlo Zhao has made quite an impression in the film-making scene with her acclaimed directorial efforts. Having won two Academy Awards (including Best Picture) for 2020's Nomadland, she's even been able to branch out into the comic book film genre. While Eternals was not exactly as well-received as most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's previous entries, Zhao still brought something different to the franchise with a unique vision that many still appreciated. Before the world knew Zhao for her Oscar-winning achievements and her work with big-name franchises, she began her career on the independent circuit. Her first two films just happen to be the ones that most people have been aware of the least.

Both of her first two films,...

Focus Features has picked up the worldwide rights to Nomadland and Eternals director Chloé Zhao’s next movie, Hamnet, which stars Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn.

Amblin Partners, Hera Pictures, Neal Street Productions and Zhao’s Book of Shadows are backing the feature based on Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel of the same name about William Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, as she mourns the loss of her son, Hamnet.

Focus scooped the global rights to the film, with Universal Pictures International handling the international release for the specialty distributor. Zhao, an Oscar winner for Nomadland, a stark drama about life on the fringes of America, wrote the screenplay for Hamnet with O’Farrell. The novel Hamnet has sold 2 million copies in the U.K. and the U.S. and has been translated into 40 languages.

Zhao, who also acts as a writer and editor on many of her movies,...

Some Luchino Visconti grandeur in Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s Coup! with Jay Horton (Billy Magnussen) and his wife Julie (Sarah Gadon) In Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s fleet-footed Coup! (which had its world premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival), shot by Conor Murphy, with costumes by Stacy Jansen (Marc Turtletaub’s Jules) and a score by Nathan Halpern (Chloé Zhao’s The Rider), starring Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen and Sarah Gadon with Skye P Marshall, Faran Tahir, Kristine Nielsen, Willa Dunn, Callum Vinson, and Fisher Stevens as Upton Sinclair, the Spanish Flu of 1918 turns a well-established world inside out.

We start out by discussing how the global events of 1918 correlate with the present, the mystery of a missing finger left on the cutting room floor, pacifism and vegetarianism. We move on to nods to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, George Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair,...

The Werner Herzog Foundation has revealed that Canadian filmmaker Harley Chamandy will receive the 2024 Werner Herzog Film Prize for his feature “Allen Sunshine.” The annual award, presented in collaboration with the Munich Film Museum, comes with a €5,000 prize.

“Allen Sunshine” follows a former music mogul who retreats to a secluded lake house after his famous wife’s suicide. The protagonist copes with his loss by composing electronic music and forming an unlikely bond with two local boys. His journey through grief is punctuated by encounters that remind him of his past and future.

The film debuted at the Munich Film Festival in June. Chamandy previously directed several shorts and made his feature debut with “Allen Sunshine.”

Herzog, in a statement, praised Chamandy’s work: “The Werner Herzog Foundation Prize in 2024 will go to Harley Chamandy for his film ‘Allen Sunshine.’ One of the foundation’s tasks is to promote young talent,...

This article contains mention of violence and assault.

The intense sadness in Western movies comes from themes like loss, dying of the West, and gunslinger loneliness. Tragic heroes embody the ideal of individualism but also show that singularity leads to heartbreak. Recent Western films subvert expectations, question morality, and offer nuanced portraits of the Old West.

Western movies grapple with many themes, but the intensity and violence that have come to define Western narratives have led to some of the saddest movies of the genre. This sadness could stem from the loss of an important character, the dying of the West, or the loneliness of the gunslinger lifestyle. Many of the tragic heroes who make up the central figures of the West isolate themselves and embody the ideal of individualism that is celebrated by these movies. However, hidden within this ideal is the message that this sense of singularity can...

Hell yeah! HBO and Max’s new releases for July include the two-episode debut of Harley Quinn spinoff series Kite Man: Hell Yeah! (July 18) that follows the titular villain and his girlfriend the Golden Glider as they take their relationship to the next logical step – opening a bar for supervillains together. Hilarious hijinks are bound to ensue as Gotham’s hottest new bar takes off.

Football fans will get to follow the New York Giants in this season of Hard Knocks: Offseason starting July 2. This non-scripted series will follow the team as they prepare for their highly anticipated 100th season.

Notable movie releases this month include Love Lies Bleeding (July 19), the Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart-starring feature about the love affair between a reclusive gym owner Lou (Stewart) and bodybuilder Jackie (O’Brian). Anyone wanting to rewatch the original Twister before its sequel premieres in theaters this month are in luck,...

Sony brought together a multiverse’s worth of its filmmakers past and present together Friday at Cannes for a dinner celebrating the 100th anniversary of Columbia Pictures.

The attendees at Mamo Michelangelo included Cannes jury president and Barbie director Greta Gerwig (who made Little Women for Columbia), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Oscar winners Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Bad Boys: Ride or Die directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Chloe Zhao, whose The Rider was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, Anyone But You director Will Gluck and Kraven the Hunter filmmaker J.C. Chandor.

Entrepreneur and film producer Charles Finch hosted the dinner with Tom Rothman, chairman & CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group.

During the dinner, Rothman gave a toast in which he wandered among the tables, pointing out specific talent and giving a nod to their contributions to the studio, name checking Ghostbusters: Afterlife director Jason Reitman...

Exclusive: Samantha Racanelli, former SVP of Film Development and Production at Fifth Season, has been hired as President of Production at TeaTime Pictures. In the new role, she will oversee development and production working closely with Dakota Johnson and Ro Donnelly, who co-founded the company in 2019.

This hire reflects a major expansion for the production company which recently promoted Maddie Schiff to Director of Development and Hyunji Ward to Creative Executive.

In addition, Boat Rocker, an independent, integrated global entertainment company, extended its current first-look deal with TeaTime to continue to develop and produce scripted and unscripted television and digital content.

“Dakota and Ro have an incredible appreciation for the content they want to create, driven by their unique taste for telling compelling and artful stories with broad commercial appeal,” said David Fortier and Ivan Schneeberg, Co-Executive Chairmen, Boat Rocker Media and Co-Chairmen, Boat Rocker Studios. “We’re thrilled to...

Among the Copia Final titles in Ventana Sur, the Dominican Republic’s “Tiger” (“Tiguere”) by lauded filmmaker José María Cabral (“Woodpeckers”) casts a harsh light on the machismo culture of the Caribbean nation and by extension, Latin America.

Shot in a lush mountain retreat, “Tiger” is set in a boot camp where families drop off their teenage sons with the hope that they learn to become “real men.” It is led by boot camp head Alberto, who decides that his son Pablo, an aspiring artist, is ready to join the camp. Naturally, Pablo rebels, which leads to some dire consequences.

Drawing from his own personal experience at a similar boot camp and inspiration from such classics as “Beau Travail,” “The Rider” and “Honey Boy,” Cabral co-penned his semi-autobiographical drama with Cuban writers Arturo Arango, Nuri Duarte, Xenia Rivery and Alan González.

“Towards the end of the ’90s, my parents sent...

“Past Lives” won Best Feature at the 33rd Annual Gotham Awards. It was the outcome we expected at the end of the night, but we were taken by surprises multiple times throughout the evening. Check out the complete list of winners here.

“Past Lives” only won that one category, but it was the big one, and it has potential implications for the awards season to come. Almost every single winner of Best Feature at the Gotham Awards has gone on to compete in at least one category at the Oscars, with only 2018’s “The Rider” being completely overlooked by the motion picture academy. Best Feature has also lined up with the Oscars’ Best Picture multiple times, with “The Hurt Locker,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight,” “Moonlight,” “Nomadland” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” all claiming both trophies.

SEE2023 Gotham Awards winners list: See who won at the 33rd annual event

Lily Gladstone won...

On Monday night, November 27, at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, the Gotham Awards presented the winners at their 33rd annual event. “All of Us Strangers” went in with a leading four bids, followed by “Past Lives,” “The Zone of Interest” and the TV limited series “Beef” with three apiece. But who prevailed? Scroll down for the full list, updated throughout the night.

The nominations were decided by panels of film and television critics, journalists, festival programmers and film curators. The winners were then selected by juries of writers, directors, actors, producers, editors and others directly involved in filmmaking. That makes these awards unique and often results in surprising winners like “The Rider” for Best Feature in 2018 over the higher-profile “The Favourite,” or Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) for Best Lead Performance in 2022 over eventual Oscar winners Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”). So a...

“Past Lives” is the overwhelming favorite to win Best Feature at the 2023 Gotham Awards, which will be presented tonight at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. That’s according to the predictions of more than 1,000 Gold Derby users who have placed their bets here in our predictions center. Those predictions were combined to generate our official racetrack odds in all 10 competitive categories. Scroll down to see those odds with our projected winners highlighted in gold.

SEEGotham Awards will present ‘Ferrari’ with Icon and Creator Tribute for Innovation

A romantic drama about childhood friends separated for years, “Past Lives” is the front-runner for Best Feature and Breakthrough Director for its first-time filmmaker Celine Song. Could it achieve a clean sweep by winning its third nomination for lead performer Greta Lee? It’s possible, but she’s in a tight race with front-runner Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction“) for that award.

Elsewhere,...

by Nick Taylor

By far the most surprising nomination from this year’s Gotham nominees was the lone nomination for Reality in the Best Feature category. Not the most obscure film cited, not in any way a quality assessment, not even an anomaly for the Gothams. Hell, The Rider won Best Feature in 2018 with no other nominations to its name (if we don’t count their 20-film Audience Award lineup). But who saw Reality coming, after a positive but wholly unremarkable critical response when it premiered in the US all the way back in May? Who had this on their bingo card, and could they share their guess on this week’s lottery numbers with me?

I’ll be spending November giving full reviews to some Gotham nominees that have yet to receive full coverage on The Film Experience. This was not the first title I watched, but the sheer...

Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” Ira Sachs’ “Passages,” Tina Satter’s “Reality,” Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up” and A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” have been nominated as best feature of 2023 for the 33rd annual Gotham Awards, which announced its nominations on Tuesday morning in New York City.

In a year in which the Gothams eliminated its longstanding budget cap and allowed films of any budget to enter the race, its nominating committees went small with a thoroughly indie lineup of nominees. Still, bigger films slipped into the Outstanding Supporting Performance category with nominations for Ryan Gosling in “Barbie” and Penelope Cruz in “Ferrari.”

In the Best International Feature category, the nominees are “All of Us Strangers,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Poor Things,” “Totem” and “The Zone of Interest.” The nominated documentaries are “20 Days in Mariupol,” “Against the Tide,” “Apolonia, Apolonia,” “Four Daughters” and “Our Body.”

“Past Lives...

Exclusive: Bad Boys for Life directing duo Adil and Bilall have signed for representation with Caviar.

Having produced the Belgian-Moroccan duo’s latest film Rebel, the Sound of Metal studio will represent the pair in the U.S. exclusively on commercials. They are represented in all areas by Entertainment 360, CAA and Karl Austen.

The duo, whose full names are Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, are known for directing gangster films including Black, Gangsta and the third instalment of the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence Bad Boys franchise, and they are working on the fourth. Rebel, meanwhile, was a break from tradition. It premiered at Cannes last year and follows a Muslim family torn apart over the future of its youngest member.

The directing pair also have a number of TV directing credits including Snowfall and Ms. Marvel.

“We’re always striving to work with the best of the best,...

Director Pedro Almodovar “didn’t pay a lot of attention” to Westerns early in his life because he didn’t think the Spaghetti Western movies he was exposed to at the time were very good. But around when he was 18 he discovered American Westerns and “fell completely in love with the genre.” Now he has made a romantic Western short film, “Strange Way of Life,” and discussed it at the New York Film Festival. Watch his complete Q&a below.

It was “in the last three years that I started writing this,” Almodovar explained about this script, about two men (Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal) who are reunited after decades apart, but divided again by loyalty to their families. “I didn’t know it would become a short, but sometimes I write just for fun, and then I have many set pieces in my computer, and sometimes those set pieces...

Rezo Gigineishvili’s “Patient #1” is the 2023 winner of the annual Werner Herzog Film Award.

Set at the end of the Soviet era, the film focuses on the decline in power of Konstantin Chernenko, a Russian leader with failing health who is surrounded by a large medical team. He is old and frail, but has a tight grip on power. He is waging a war in Afghanistan, has a nuclear button and can take the entire world to the grave with him. It is convenient for both the elites and the secret services to keep the leader alive and various groups are scoring political points.

The cast includes Aleksandr Filippenko, Olga Makeeva, Inna Churikova, Igor Chernevich and Sergey Gilev. The film is produced by Archil Gelovani, Sergey Yahontov for Georgian outfit Independent Film Project.

Gigineishvili previously directed “Hostages” (2017) which premiered at the Berlinale and participated in more than 30 international film festivals including Telluride,...

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.

Following the successful run of his Comedy Central series “Key & Peele,” Jordan Peele made a well-received pivot to the psychological horror genre, starting with his 2017 feature “Get Out” starring Daniel Kaluuya followed by 2019’s “Us” with and 2022’s “Nope.” His current catalog of thrillers center on themes of Blackness in America, pitting the sometimes horrifying reality of these experiences against the classic supernatural tropes of scary movies.

Now, the actor, writer and director is releasing a new book, “Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror,” a hard-cover curation of some of the best horror stories from 19 Black writers. Peele edited the anthology and wrote the foreword for the book, which is already a No. 1 new-release on Amazon.

Buy: Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror $25.20

Inside the cover,...

The Western genre dominated cinema during the Golden era of the 1940s to 1960s. During then, roughened cowboys, gun-slinging action, and the lawless world were all the rage for audiences. As cinema evolved, it now seems to be a classic and dated genre that simply translates to a generic costume idea. But surprisingly, Western films have come to the forefront of modern cinema once more in recent times, with notable films in the past decade like Chloé Zhao's The Rider, Jeymes Samuel's The Harder They Fall, and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog bringing the genre back better than ever. Adding to this expansive list of Western projects with a refreshing take is prolific Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar with his short film​​​​​ Strange Way of Life.

Filmmakers are given fewer opportunities to make creative passion projects outside of the standard audience expectations, resulting in directors like Chloé Zhao and Ryan Coogler turning to franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Only a select group of directors today can generate audience passion based on their name alone, with Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, and Edgar Wright emerging as some of the few. Cory Finley, the filmmaker behind Thoroughbreds and Bad Education, deserves to be considered among the great directors of his generation due to his ability to discover new talented performers and create films that provide dark commentary on emotional reckoning, wealth disparity, and public education.

The number of filmmakers working today that have the potential to last as long as the industry as Oliver Stone or Ridley Scott is dwindling, as directors are given less opportunities to make creative passion projects that fall outside the standard expectations of audiences.

Film is written by Nathwani and Screen Star of Tomorrow Helen Simmons.

UK-based filmmaker Sasha Nathwani has wrapped his debut feature Last Swim, a day-in-a-life drama featuring a host of rising stars, co-written by Screen 2018 producer Star of Tomorrow Helen Simmons,

The film stars newcomer Deba Hekmat alongside Under The Shadow actress Narges Rashidi, Screen 2022 Star of Tomorrow Solly McLeod, The Batman’s Jay Lycurgo and Denzel Baidoo. Shooting took place from mid-May to early June at locations across London.

Last Swim follows an ambitious Iranian teenager in London who has been diagnosed with a life-changing condition. On A-level results day,...

Exclusive: Longtime IFC Films and Cinetic Media PR colleagues Laura Sok and Kate McEdwards are launching new PR and strategy firm, Track Shot.

Track Shot will be based in New York City and work across independent, foreign and genre films as well as distribution strategy. The duo brings more than two decades in the publicity and communications field as well as a deep knowledge of the distribution landscape. Sok and McEdwards have built and led hundreds of film campaigns during their careers working in-house and alongside major distributors on the agency side. Previously, they led PR efforts for IFC Films, IFC Midnight, Sundance Selects, IFC Films Unlimited (streaming service) and most recently Shudder and Rlje.

Their final campaign for IFC Films was Matt Johnson’s chart-topping BlackBerry. This year they also launched Kyle Edward Ball’s breakthrough feature Skinamarink for Shudder/IFC Films.

Among their many successful campaigns at IFC...

The Alien franchise is one of the most beloved recurring sagas in science fiction film history, even if the series has always had a somewhat peculiar relationship with its directors. Alien and Aliens are two of the greatest movies of all-time, but the cinematic styles of Ridley Scott and James Cameron couldn’t be more different. Directors like Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Paul W.S. Anderson pushed the series into even weirder territory with Alien: Resurrection and Alien vs. Predator, respectively. However, the real curiosity within the franchise has always been the divisive Alien 3, which came from the legendary filmmaker David Fincher.

Fincher is now regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of the past several decades, and has helmed many modern classics that rank among the best of all-time. Films like Fight Club and Se7en have inspired countless imitators, and there’s a growing affection for his more recent projects Zodiac and Gone Girl.

An acrobatic archer, a sorceress, a shapeshifting barbarian, skeletons-with-swords, and a frightened child. These are just a few of the characters you’ll meet in the minute-long trailer for Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming blockbuster video game “Diablo IV.” And if this has a more cinematic look than most ads targeting the joystick set, that’s no surprise. The trailer is co-directed by Chloe Zhao alongside Kiku Ohe.

Few would have predicted, watching the 2015 independent film “Songs My Brother Taught Me,” just how mainstream Zhao would become in just a few years. After a similarly elegiac look at the American West with “The Rider,” Zhao teamed with Frances McDormand for “Nomadland.” The 2020 feature was an awards smash, winning Zhao two Oscars – Best Picture as a producer and Best Director. McDormand also took home two trophies during that ceremony, her third Best Actress award following “Fargo” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,...

Short films are an under-discussed bedrock of the film-festival scene. They are often as interesting (or more so!) than the features but regularly vanish from public availability once they’ve played the circuit. Anyway, one short film that debuted at Cannes 2023 is “Strange Way of Life,” in which Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke play gay cowboys. The English-language project was financed by the French fashion house Saint Laurent and was written and directed by Spain’s Oscar-winner Pedro Almodóvar.

At the film’s premiere, Almodóvar referred to his cast as “beauties” who, he joked, “are also very good actors.” He called his film “the first really queer Western,” and saluted recent work by Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) and Chloe Zhao (“The Rider”), and, of course, Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain”). The audience apparently ate it up when he said that “Power of the Dog” was too ambivalent about...

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar rode into the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his short film Strange Way Of Life, pushing boundaries for LGBT representation in the Western genre.

Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal star as a sheriff and a rancher with a romantic history, who reconnect after a 25-year gap. While it’s clear that their passion is still alive, circumstances appear to conspire against a reunion.

Check out the trailer here.

Almodóvar and Hawke took to the stage for a special conversation after the Out of Competition world premiere in Cannes on Wednesday.

The director said the premise for the film had come from a question asked in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain – ‘What would two men do, working on a ranch?” – but added that his short bore no other similarities with the 2005 feature.

“I wanted to make a classic western in which we talk about the desire between two cowboys.

"Behind the world's toughest sport." Amazon's Prime Video has debuted their official trailer for a bullriding sports documentary series titled The Ride, about the new "team" bullriding competition and the evolution of the sport. This will be streaming on Pv in May, telling the story of many riders and people involved in this intense and dangerous sport. The Ride follows an ensemble cast of bull riders and coaches throughout the Pbr Team Series, as they navigate the league's inaugural 2022 season, budding rivalries, exhilarating highs, and the challenging lows of Pbr’s newest team-based competition. The Pbr (aka Professional Bull Riders) organization launched a brand new format last year, and this doc is made up of all the footage they shot on that first year. I'm sure many didn't even realize bull riding was still an ongoing professional sport, but it absolutely is. This is also covered in Chloe Zhao's excellent film called The Rider.

When you listen to Chloé Zhao talk about the films that she loves, an obvious pattern emerges. The Oscar-winning director describes her favorite movies by focusing on their scope and the worlds they create. One of her favorite ways to praise a director is by focusing how they approach using their locations: how the tiny details that populate a setting are considered, and how the characters’ interactions with their surroundings establish and reflect their own internal universes.

The films that use their locations successfully, in Zhao’s eyes, can vary widely. Some are massive epics like “Lord of the Rings” or “Interstellar,” while others are intimate romantic dramas like “Happy Together” or “Wuthering Heights.” Zhao’s films are often compared to the works of Terrence Malick, and she’s unsurprisingly a big fan of the director’s absorbing and gorgeous works, especially his 2005 historical epic “The New World.” But Zhao...

That's no spelling mistake -- "Hamnet" is a film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same name, not a new movie version of William Shakespeare's famous stage play tragedy "Hamlet". The film is being developed by Chloé Zhao, herself coming off multiple Oscars wins for her adaptation of the non-fiction book "Nomadland." Her other credits include "Songs My Brother Taught Me" and "The Rider," both of which have quasi-documentary qualities similar to those of "Nomadland."

More recently, Zhao directed "Eternals" -- a cosmic gumbo of a superhero epic that, say what you might against it, is one of most visually-accomplished and emotionally-grounded Marvel Cinematic Universe films to date. The point being, Zhao always aspires to make art that is both emotionally and technically complex, and "Hamnet" is certainly a good match for her sensibilities.

While we're still awaiting some key information at the time of writing (including...

Exclusive: Deadline has learned that IFC Films’ longtime Head of PR Laura Sok will be departing the indie distribution company.

Sok has been Head of PR for the last five years in an overall seven-year career at IFC (she worked there from 2008-2010), and was first hired by Jonathan Sehring to run the department. She led public-relations efforts for IFC Films, IFC Midnight, Sundance Selects and streaming service IFC Films Unlimited. Last December, her oversight was expanded to include the labels Shudder and Rlje Films.

Sok led 20th anniversary efforts for IFC Films and was integral in constructing the 2020 drive-in release and promotion strategy during the pandemic. She also led publicity strategy and campaigns for all films during the most successful financial years in IFC Films history.

While Sok is one of many executives to recently leave IFC including distribution head Jasper Basch,...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month, including a Béla Tarr double bill, with new 4K restorations of Damnation and Sátántangó, Léa Mysius’ The Five Devils, Radu Jude’s short The Potemkinists, and Kira Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists.

They will also present a series on past Cannes Film Festival selections with films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Alice Rohrwacher, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Jeremy Saulnier, and more. Ana Vaz’s The Age of Stone and most recent work It is Night in America will arrive on the service, plus a Merchant Ivory series.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

May 1 – Blind Spot, directed by Claudia von Alemann | What Sets Us Free? German Feminist Cinema

May 2 – Heat and Dust, directed by James Ivory | Gilded Passions: Films by Merchant Ivory

May 3 – Damnation, directed by Béla Tarr | Béla Tarr: A Double Bill

May 4 – The Bostonians, directed by...

Chloé Zhao is adding another feature to the roster of films she has on her plate. The filmmaker has set her sights on Hamnet, which is in the works from Amblin Partners, Hera Pictures, Neal Street Productions and Book of Shadows.

The feature is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel of the same name. It centers on Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare who is mourning the loss of her son, Hamnet.

Zhao is a two-time Oscar winner for Nomadland, which landed her best director and best picture Oscars as a producer. The filmmaker followed that up with Marvel Studios’ Eternals, and she is also known for The Rider.

Zhao will pen the script for Hamnet with O’Farrell. Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris and Sam Mendes are producing, with Nic Gonda executive producing for Book of Shadows. Jeb Brody, Amblin’s president of production, and Mia Maniscalco, senior vp creative affairs,...

After Chloé Zhao’s venture into the Marvel universe, the Oscar winner is taking on the Bard. The “Nomadland” and “Eternals” director will adapt “Hamnet,” the 2020 novel from Irish author Maggie O’Farrell, IndieWire has confirmed.

A work of historical fiction, “Hamnet” tells the story of William Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway (referred in the story as Agnes), and her romance with the man who would become the world’s most famous playwright. The novel particularly focuses on the death of the couple’s son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in 1596 and has long been speculated to be an inspiration for Shakespeare’s most famous play, the very similarly named “Hamlet.” Upon its release, O’Farrell’s novel received critical acclaim; it won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Fiction Prize from the 2020 National Book Critics Circle, and was named by the New York Times Book Review as one...