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There’s a strange dissonance between Beth Gibbons’s shy physical presence and that voice—enormous and unignorable. At the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles last night, the Portishead singer held back from the glare of the roughly 2,000-person audience, standing mid-stage and often shrouded in darkness while her six band members were bathed in light. She didn’t bother with any chitchat, even a hello, letting the songs—most of them from her first entirely solo album, Lives Outgrown—speak for themselves.

Which is just as well, as dissonance suits Gibbons. Her vocals seem summoned as much by spirits as the vibration of muscle tissue in the larynx. From her ethereal pleas of desire and despair floating over the cinematic trip-hop of Portishead’s 1994 debut, Dummy, to her naked introspection on the more earthbound Out of Season, her 2003 collaborative album with Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb (a.k.

This week’s episode of Back Roads, airing Thursday, February 20 at 8:00 pm on ABC Australia and ABC iview, visits Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Presenter Paul West explores how the island is recovering from the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20. Here’s the Lowdown: Paul West travels to Kangaroo Island, a place often called “Australia’s […]

Kangaroo Island’s Amazing Recovery: Back Roads Shows Nature’s Comeback...

Greta Lee and Teo Yoo in ‘Past Lives’ (Photo Credit: Jon Pack / Courtesy of A24)

Past Lives took home top film honors at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards, held on February 25th in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica. The film also earned Celine Song the Best Director award, with American Fiction‘s Cord Jefferson and May December‘s Samy Burch earning screenplay honors.

On the television side, The Last of Us collected two awards: Nick Offerman for Best Supporting Performance in a New Scripted Series and Keivonn Montreal Woodard for Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series. Beef also netted two wins, with Ali Wong awarded Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series and the show earning the Best New Scripted Series award.

2024 Film Independent Spirit Award Nominations

Best Feature (Award given to the producer.)

All of Us Strangers

Producers: Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin,...

Portishead have released a remastered and expanded edition of their excellent live album, Roseland NYC Live, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. Stream it below.

Roseland NYC Live was originally released on November 2nd, 1998, and featured Portishead backed by a 28-piece orchestra. The reissue adds three tracks previously only available in the concert film: “Undenied,” “Numb,” and “Western Eyes.” It also includes the original performances of “Sour Times” and “Roads” at the now-defunct New York City venue Roseland.

“I can’t believe it’s 25 years since Roseland,” vocalist Beth Gibbons wrote on Instagram. “It was such a scary but exciting time for me. It was the first time we had played our new tracks since Dummy and knowing it was being recorded meant I didn’t sleep much in the nights before.”

Guitarist Adrian Utley added, “I have really good memories of this show which we played before our second album was released.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Frank Zappa’s landmark Over-Nite Sensation, and in November, Zappa Records/UMe will celebrate the LP with a deluxe reissue of the 1973 album complete with unreleased tracks, outtakes, two concerts from the era, and more from one of Rolling Stone’s 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Ahead of Over-Nite Sensation: 50th Anniversary Edition’s release on November 17, check out the previously unheard “Face Down,” a demo that would ultimately transform into the album’s television-skewering “I’m the Slime.”

The demo finds the...

The San Sebastian Film Festival awarded O Corno (The Rye Horn) with the Golden Shell for Best Film. San Sebastián native Jaione Camborda took the top prize of the night for the feature she directed.

Additionally, the jury gave the Silver Shell for Best Director to Tzu-Hui Peng and Ping-Wen Wang for Chun xing / A Journey in Spring (Taiwan), while the Best Screenplay Award went to María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat for Puan (Argentina-Italy-Germany-France-Brazil).

The Silver Shell for Best Leading Performance fell ex aequo upon Marcelo Subiotto and Tatsuya Fuji for their respective roles in Puan, by Alché and Naishtat, and Great Absence (Japan), by Kei Chika-ura, while the Silver Shell for Best Supporting Performance went to Hovik Keuchkerian for his character in Un amor (Spain) by Isabel Coixet.

Check out the full list of winners below.

San Sebastian 2023 Award Winners List Golden Shell For Best Film

O Corno (The Rye Horn...

Paramount+ is not just the home of the Taylor Sheridan universe, it has also quietly assembled one of the best film libraries of any of the streaming services. Look no further than the list of what’s new on Paramount+ in March, which includes prestige dramas like “12 Years a Slave” and “Last of the Mohicans,” iconic thrillers like “The Sixth Sense,” “The Rock” and “Crimson Tide,” delightful rom-coms like “Kate & Leopold” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary” and other classics like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Galaxy Quest.”

And that’s not to mention the new originals premiering in March: Kiefer Sutherland plays a corporate espionage operative framed for murder in “Rabbit Hole,” while “School Spirits” follows a high school teen who suddenly discovers she’s dead and still haunting her school.

Check out the full list of what’s new on Paramount+ in March 2023 below.

Also Read:...

David Lynch delivered an ominous forecast for Vladimir Putin in his daily YouTube “Weather Report” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While Lynch typically keeps the focus of his “Weather Report” on, well, the weather and stray quotidian thoughts, he does occasionally dips his toe into current events. But rarely does the director unleash a scorched-earth monolog like he did for his Feb. 25 dispatch.

After noting it would start as a clear, albeit chilly day in Los Angeles, Lynch said he had been thinking of Ukraine and the 1994 Portishead song,...

Hot on the heels of last month’s announcement that Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever would star in Open Roads from developer Fullbright and publisher Annapurna Interactive, game director Steve Gaynor spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to share his inspirations behind the character and story-driven video game that is currently in production amid the raging Covid-19 pandemic.

Describing the game as “a mother-daughter road trip adventure,” Gaynor adds that the two leads, Opal (played by Russell) and Tessa (played by Dever), set out to uncover a generational family mystery involving Tessa’s grandmother. “After she passes away, it’s something that a ...

Hot on the heels of last month’s announcement that Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever would star in Open Roads from developer Fullbright and publisher Annapurna Interactive, game director Steve Gaynor spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to share his inspirations behind the character and story-driven video game that is currently in production amid the raging Covid-19 pandemic.

Describing the game as “a mother-daughter road trip adventure,” Gaynor adds that the two leads, Opal (played by Russell) and Tessa (played by Dever), set out to uncover a generational family mystery involving Tessa’s grandmother. “After she passes away, it’s something that a ...

In the past few months during quarantine, we’ve seen filmmakers creating a number of different short-form projects and self-releasing them on their own channels. Now, the biggest project yet is arriving from Netflix as they’ve teamed with nearly 20 filmmakers who each made their own new short. They will now be released next week as part of the anthology film Homemade.

Featuring films by Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart (who will team together for their next film) as well as Ana Lily Amirpour, Antonio Campos, Rachel Morrison, Naomi Kawase, David Mackenzie, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paolo Sorrentino, and more, it’s an eclectic batch of work from all over the world.

“For once in our careers, this wasn’t about money, agencies, lawyers or the Hollywood structure,” producer Juan de Dios Larrain tells Variety. “This was a simple idea of [conveying] one message in five to seven minutes, and the idea was...

Five projects in development and 21 Norwegian films released in local cinemas are among the beneficiaries of the Nfi’s funding schemes. Recently, the Norwegian Film Institute (Nfi) has made a series of funding announcements, including allocating support to five projects as part of the New Roads scheme and the launch of grants for the distribution of films in local cinemas. Starting with New Roads, the Nfi’s talent initiative, five feature-length projects at the development stage – two fictions, two documentaries and one drama series – have received a total of over Nok 2,575,500 from the institute. The aim of New Roads is to inspire and encourage innovative thinking and artistic courage among proven talents, and along with the grants for development, a letter of intent concerning production grants is also given to the recipients. A total of 20 projects were submitted to the scheme, with 70% coming from women...

It’s been over three months since the last Life is Strange 2 episode. The long wait times between episodes is guaranteed to test the patience of many gamers. The reasoning for these long breaks is to make each episode the best it possibly can be when it’s released. Episode 2 was fine but it’s debatable if it really was worth waiting four months for. In the case of ‘Wastelands’, it’s definitely a stronger episode than its predecessor.

Episode 3 takes place two months after ‘Rules’. Sean and Daniel are in gorgeous California woodlands saving money by working on an illegal weed farm and living with Cassidy and Finn (the two drifters you meet in Episode 2) along with a bunch of runaways and outsiders. However, tensions are running high between the two siblings as Daniel becomes more resentful about life on the run, jealous of Sean’s tendency to spend...

"I never really expected my life to turn out like this." Freestyle Digital Media has debuted the trailer for an indie dramedy titled Roads, Trees and Honey Bees, the feature directorial debut of young filmmaker Stephanie McBain. The film is about a trio of people on the move. Steve quits his job, gets divorced from his wife, and finds himself on a cross country journey with Connor Martin, a young, aspiring musician and his sister Sarah Martin, a college graduate who is looking for her next step. Together they embark on a journey to discover the pursuit of happiness and find their purpose in life - by driving to California. Starring Nick Nicotera, Donald Clark Jr., Nikki Leigh, Chris Mulkey, Jon Root, and Angela de Silva. This looks particularly unimpressive and forgettable, which explains why it hasn't played at any festivals or elsewhere. Here's the official trailer (+ poster) for Stephanie McBain's Roads,...

Exclusive: Here’s first footage of Sebastian Schipper’s (Victoria) new movie Roads, starring Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk), Stéphane Bak (Alone), Ben Chaplin (The Thin Red Line), and Moritz Bleibtreu (The Fifth Estate).

The Tribeca Film Festival world premiere follows a young man from the Congo who attempts to cross Europe’s borders in search of his brother. In Morocco, he teams up with a sharp-witted British runaway who pinched his stepfather’s recreational vehicle in order to escape from a family holiday. On their journey, the disparate duo have to make decisions that will also influence the lives of others. CAA is handling U.S. sales and HanWay handles international.

German filmmaker Schipper’s 2015 feature Victoria was one of the buzz films of the Berlin Film Festival that year. The story about a bank heist gone wrong unfolds in one seemingly continuous shot.

Script for Roads came from Schipper and Oliver Ziegenbald.

What movies are you thinking about right this very second?

I've got four movies playing in my head at the moment, two still imaginary and two just screened. The still-imaginary ones are, first, the Bill Condon / Sir Ian McKellen / Dame Helen Mirren thriller The Good Liar which got strong buzz out of the industry promo event CinemaCon. The second is the film adaptation of Cats which sounds Titanic-like (the boat not the movie) in its possibly epic high profile sinkability. Apparently the cats are not fully mocapped creatures but still look like the actors with fur digitally added but they're cat-sized (but why would they mention the cat-sized bit unless they shared scenes with humans which Nooooo).

As for the real movies that already exist in competed form, Laika has another winner with Missing Link (they've yet to make a stinker!) which we currently have in the 'most likely...

I am a huge fan of Dontnod’s Life is Strange franchise. The original title was one of the best releases of 2015, and the Deck Nine-developed prequel Before The Storm was a favorite of mine in 2017. Despite the occasionally wonky dialogue, both were great at getting into the mindset of angsty, nosey teenagers, which is apparently right in my wheelhouse. So, even when the news broke that the sequel would be moving on from Max, Chloe and the rest of Arcadia Bay, I was still interested. Two episodes into Life is Strange 2, I can say my faith in the French developer was not misplaced.

As mentioned, Life is Strange 2 sets an entirely new course for the series. We ditch the sleepy suburbs of Arcadia Bay for the slightly more populated city of Seattle. There we meet high-schooler Sean Diaz, who is just trying to live the life of any regular teenager.

If I had to sum up my experiences with the previous Life is Strange installments. I would say that I liked it but I didn’t love it. I went into the second main entry with the same expectations and by the end of Roads, I ended up thinking that this was the experience the internet told me I would have with the first game: Hard-hitting, touching and something to fall in love with.

As said in my Captain Spirit review, you do not need to play the original Life is Strange in order to play this. You can jump right into Life is Strange 2 without any knowledge of previous games in the series.

In Life is Strange 2, you play as sixteen-year-old Sean Diaz. At the start of Roads, Sean’s life is pretty normal. He goes to parties, he stresses about how to talk to his crush and is rather directionless about his future.

Roads

It’s been four years since German director Sebastian Schipper’s single take thriller Victoria (2015), but he’ll back in 2019 with his first English language film, Roads, which he produced alongside J.C. Reymond and David Keitsch as a German-French co-production. The film is lensed by Dp Matteo Cocco. Maren Ade, Jonas Dornbach, Kalle Friz, Isabel Hund, Jean-Christophe Reymond, and Janine Jackowski are all co-producing. An international cast is comprised of German star Moritz Bleibtreu, Ben Chaplin, Fionn Whitehead, Stephane Bak, and Claudia Trujillo. Schipper, previously known as an actor, became an international director of note with his fourth feature, Victoria, which won a Silver Bear for cinematography in the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival.…...

Canada-born with roots in Uruguay, Croatia and Argentina, Katherine Jerkovic split her childhood between Belgium and Uruguay. At 18, she settled in Montreal and studied film at Concordia University. After a few shorts (“The Winter’s Keeper”) and some video-installations, she has finished her first feature, “Roads in February.”

The film is a co-production between Nicolas Comeau (“Catimini”) at Montreal-based 1976 Productions and Micaela Solé (“Norberto’s Deadline”) at Montevideo’s Cordon Films.

Since 2002 there has been a bilateral co-production agreement between Canada and Uruguay. In fact, Canada has similar agreements with eight Latin American countries. “I believe that the key has essentially been a mutual and respectful understanding among all the people involved in the feature; all Uruguayan and Canadians enthusiastically feel part of it,” Solé said, adding: “The feature explores, in a very personal way, looking at the ‘Other,’ and allows the viewer to reflect from their own perspective. This...

While the Federal Film Board may be the premier funder for the German film industry, it also boasts a strong track record with international co-productions.

The Ffa has backed such high-profile Hollywood productions as Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” and Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies” via the government’s German Federal Film Fund, which it manages. It has also directly supported smaller international films, including Sebastian Lelio’s Chilean-German co-production “A Fantastic Woman,” which won the Oscar for foreign-language film earlier this year after taking the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for screenplay in 2017.

In 2018, the Ffa is funding such international co-productions as Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s “It Must Be Heaven” and Israeli helmer Yuval Adler’s “The Operative” as well as “Honey in the Head,” Til Schweiger’s English-language remake of his 2014 German box office hit, with Nick Nolte and Matt Dillon set to star.

Last year,...

“What do you mean you don’t like jazz?” Ryan Gosling‘s Sebastien says in disbelief in “La La Land.” The statement might’ve come straight from the mouth of its director Damien Chazelle, who made three straight films — “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” “Whiplash” and “La La land” — with jazz as the centrepiece. However, don’t expect to hear “Caravan” — or anything like it — in Chazelle’s upcoming “First Man.”

Starring Ryan Gosling, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, and Jason Clarke, written by Oscar winner Josh Singer (“Spotlight”), and based on James R.

Continue reading ‘La La Land’ & ‘Whiplash’ Director Damien Chazelle’s ‘First Man’ Won’t Have A Jazz Score at The Playlist.