News

Alex Ross Perry is chasing “Pavements” — that is, the fictionalized version of the band that his very real faux music documentary is about.

The “Her Smell” director helms the movie within a movie about Pavement, the ’90s American alternative group. The official synopsis reads: “‘Pavements’ is a movie about Pavement the band — among other things. The latest film from acclaimed director Alex Ross Perry is a documentary that may or may not be entirely true, may or may not be totally sincere, and may or may not be more about the idea of the band — or any band — than a history of the short-lived, passionately loved, commercially marginal ’90s American alternative group Pavement. This unconventional film about a highly unconventional band incorporates a stage musical, rock biopic, gallery exhibition, archival footage, and contemporary observational footage to create a film as irreducible, uncharacterizable, and entertaining as the band and its music.

Elisabeth Moss has really upped her game since her career started decades ago in 1990, though her breakthrough role as Peggy Olson in Mad Men, which made her a household name in Hollywood’s entertainment industry, continues to be regarded as her best one to date. For years, she perfectly embodied her to the point where her name started being used simultaneously with Peggy’s.

Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson. | Credits: Mad Men / AMC.

In fact, to say that Moss is as equally resilient and strong in her mindset and opinions, if not more, wouldn’t be an understatement. This is because, just like her strong-willed character, the 42-year-old actress boldly refused to follow in Jon Hamm’s footsteps with one decision that other major actors seemed to be taking: Going not only in front of the lens but behind them too.

Elisabeth Moss refused to direct on Mad Men, unlike her co-stars Moss as Peggy.

Six years since his last solo directing feature, Her Smell, Alex Ross Perry returned to the world of rock in a very different way with Pavements. A tribute to Stephen Malkmus’ group, the film jumps between band documentary, biopic (and the making of the biopic), Broadway-musical creation, museum exhibition, and more to try containing the genius of this influential group. After its fall festival premiere, Utopia will give it a release this year, beginning on May 2, and they’ve now released the first trailer after we got a fun teaser at the film within the film. Along with Pavement members, the film also features Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus, alongside Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Nat Wolff, and more.

Here’s the synopsis: “Pavements is a movie about Pavement the band—among other things. The latest film from acclaimed director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell...

Six years since his last solo directing feature, Her Smell, Alex Ross Perry returned to the world of rock in a very different way with Pavements. A tribute to Stephen Malkmus’ group, the film jumps between band documentary, biopic (and the making of the biopic), Broadway-musical creation, museum exhibition, and more to try containing the genius of this influential group. After its fall festival premiere, Utopia will give it a release this year and they’ve now released the first trailer for the fake biopic Range Life within the film. The “film” stars Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus, alongside Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Nat Wolff, and more.

David Katz said in his review, “Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music...

US director Alex Ross Perry, whose credits include 2014’s Listen Up Philip and 2018’s Her Smell, arrives at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) this week with two new features.

Videoheaven world premieres in the festival’s focus on VHS culture, ‘Hold Video In Your Hands.’ Loosely inspired by the 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture At The America Video Store by Daniel Herbert, it’s a film essay constructed around clips from films and TV shows featuring neighbourhood video stores: everything from Friends to I Am Legend.

Videoheaven was produced by Perry himself alongside Andrew Adair and Jake Perlin through non-profit organisation Cinema Conservancy,...

The International Film Festival Rotterdam revealed the lineups of its Tiger, Big Screen and Tiger Short competition sections Tuesday, and the first tranche of speakers for the Talks program, who include Cate Blanchett and Guy Maddin.

Following their recent collaboration on “Rumours,” Blanchett and Maddin will come together for “an expansive dialogue about creative collaboration, the role of film festivals, and the enduring power of the short film form,” IFFR said.

IFFR will also welcome Robby Müller Award recipient Lol Crawley, in conversation with writer and film critic Peter Bradshaw to discuss his cinematography, including his work on “The Brutalist” and other highlights from his career.

Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, known for Locarno’s “Listen Up Philip,” Toronto’s “Her Smell” and Sundance’s “Golden Exits,” will talk about his documentary “Videoheaven,” part of the Focus program “Hold Video in Your Hands,” celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture. Perry...

Writer-director Alex Ross Perry is not a filmmaker who does things the easy way. From his black comedies like The Color Wheel and Listen Up Philip, to the intentionally abrasive Her Smell, and even his work writing Christopher Robin, a film that brings Winnie-the-Pooh characters into the real world, Perry is not someone who could ever be accused of being formulaic. But thats never been more true than in his absurdly convoluted and ingeniously crafted music documentary (sort of), Pavements. The indie slacker rock band Pavement is also a band that didnt take the conventional route to success, making Perry and Pavement a match made in lo-fi heaven, with director and band matching each others weirdness to great effect.

The world of music documentaries is a complex one.

There are plenty of films covering the biggest artists in the world from Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, Hulu’s Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band and Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ’64.

But under the surface, music like alternative music scenes themselves, there’s a phalanx of weird and interesting films about lesser known artists, where the story is often as strange and endearing as the artists. These often become the films that have longevity, from The Decline of Western Civilization to Dig!

This is where the Sound Unseen Film Festival comes in. Held in the Twin Cities across a variety of cinemas in and around Minneapolis, the festival showcases a slew of leftfield films from interesting directors and filmmakers such as Omar & Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted,...

Joe Keery has found the role of a lifetime in Stephen Malkmus, the enigmatic and ambivalent frontman of seminal rock band Pavement. Like so many performers inspired by the particular charisma of a music icon, Keery has thrown himself into the role with zeal and commitment, studying countless hours of...

Alex Ross Perry’s 2019 backstage rock drama Her Smell is bookmarked by cutaways to faux-documentary video footage, capturing its fictional 1990s alternative group in moments of camera-friendly bliss. Placed next to the emotional apocalypse that comprises most of the rest of the film’s runtime, the supposedly “real” Behind the Music-style footage can’t help but feel like an obfuscation of the band’s true story.

Perry avoids such pitfalls with Pavements, a docu-fiction about indie rock titans Pavement. The band’s legendary status, quickly achieved in the early ’90s indie underground, has always felt somewhat at odds with the sense of shaggy self-effacement that their critics often mistook for a conscious lack of effort. Wisely anticipating that the traditional rock-doc format would be a poor fit for such a group, Perry has crafted a far less easily classifiable tribute.

Pavements pulls together at least four different strands for its...

Exclusive: English actress, activist, entrepreneur, musician and style icon Cara Delevingne has signed with Anonymous Content in all areas, we can tell you.

Delevingne continues to be repped by Shemarya Artists, The Lede Company and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern.

Most recently, Delevingne completed her run as Sally Bowles in Rebecca Frecknall’s rendition of Cabaret in the West End. She can also be seen in the recently completed 12th season of FX’s American Horror Story anthology, American Horror Story: Delicate, which this year won a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Contemporary Costumes for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. She also has a guest-starring role on the 12th season of the animated sci-fi series Futurama.

Delevingne made her acting debut in 2012 in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina opposite Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Her TV credits include starring in and executive producing the Amazon Prime series Carnival Row; developing,...

Arthouse streamer Mubi has secured the rights to Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements following its world premiere in the Orizzonti section at the Venice International Film Festival.

Mubi nabbed the portrait of the influential ’90s indie band in all rights deals for the U.K, Ireland, Germany, Austria, France, and Canada. It also scooped up exclusive SVOD rights in the U.S., where Utopia is releasing the film theatrically.

Perry, known for features like Her Smell and Listen Up Philip, is also a prolific music video director and helmed Pavement’s video for Harness Your Hopes in 2022. For Pavements, he uses different formats and genres — from documentary to musical comedy to museum exhibition — to present the work of the alt-rock band whose reputation has only grown since their ’90s heyday.

Calling the two-hour-plus result both “exhaustive and enthusiastic,” THR reviewer Jordan Mintzer noted “You don’t have to be a major fan of Pavement,...

Mubi has acquired “Pavements,” Alex Ross Perry’s unconventional documentary-musical-biopic about cult ’90s slacker band Pavement, for multiple territories following its recent world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The arthouse distributor, streamer and production company has picked up all rights to the film — soon to bow in both the New York Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival — for the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Austria, France and Canada. Meanwhile, Mubi also acquired exclusive SVOD rights for the U.S.

The deal was signed with Utopia, which is handling world sales and, the day after the film’s Venice launch, announced it would also distribute theatrically in the U.S. Mubi says it will announce its release plans in the coming months.

Directed and written by Perry (“Her Smell”), “Pavements” stars Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Tim Heidecker, Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones and...

In Alex Ross Perry’s exuberant tribute to Pavement, Tim Heidecker gives a succinct descriptor of what made the band a staple of college radio stations in the ‘90s: “For kids who thought everything was stupid and everything sucked, they were your band.” In an era when rock stars gave up hours doing big hair in the makeup chair to instead wear the flannel they walked in off the street with, the band, fronted by Stephen Malkmus, cultivated a fan base that cared quite a bit when they looked like they didn’t care much at all, standing out in the grunge period for their ironic detachment and a general lack of pretense that belied the sophistication of their songcraft.

While passion didn’t necessarily appear to be part of Pavement’s persona, Perry feels obliged to overcompensate, declaring them to be “the world’s most important and influential band...

You don’t have to be a major fan of Pavement, or director Alex Ross Perry, to enjoy his exhaustive and enthusiastic two-hour-plus love letter to the beloved ’90s alt-rock band. But it certainly helps.

This multifaceted meta-movie is at once documentary, musical comedy, faux biopic and real museum exhibition. In its attempts to capture the quintessence of a much appreciated but never all that famous indie group, it throws in everything but the kitchen sink — including vintage muddied t-shirts from Lollapalooza 1995.

And yet, with its onslaught of footage both old and new, staged and captured live, split-screened, chopped and screwed, Pavements oftentimes seems to be preaching to the choir more than trying to win over or welcome new admirers. It’s something of a sincere if self-indulgent inside joke about a band that always had a strong undercurrent of irony, whether about itself or the music business. At some point,...

When Alex Ross Perry set out to make a film about Pavement, he wanted it to be as absurd as some of the ’90s slacker band’s lyrics. For the indie director, known for “Listen Up Philip” and “Her Smell,” that meant pushing the very boundaries of what a film could be.

“Pavements,” premiering on Wednesday in the Horizons section of Venice Film Festival, is a documentary-musical-biopic hybrid that imagines a world where Pavement has achieved Rolling Stones-level success. The film follows the group on its 2022 reunion tour, tracks the progress of Perry’s “Slanted! Enchanted!” musical that also premiered that year, takes the audience inside a pop-up museum dedicated to the band and pitches a tongue-in-cheek biopic starring “Stranger Things” breakout Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus and Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs. If it seems like that’s a lot for one film,...

The lineup for the 81st Venice International Film Festival is here. Artistic director Alberto Barbera and Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco revealed the complete list of titles across sections early on Tuesday, July 23. Watch the live stream here or on YouTube.

Competition highlights included, as expected, Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” with Angelina Jolie, Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” with Daniel Craig, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.” Other gems in the lineup include “April,” from Georgian “Beginning” director Dea Kulumbegashvili; Brady Corbet’s “Fountainhead”-inspired epic “The Brutalist,” which runs a whopping 215 minutes and will present in 70mm; Aussie auteur Justin Kurzel’s thriller “The Order”; “Chevalier” director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Harvest” with Caleb Landry Jones; and Halina Reijn’s psychosexual thriller for A24, “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.

Out of competition across series and features, there’s new work from Harmony Korine,...

Life as a rock and roll star is not for the faint of heart, and if you've watched enough movies about fictional and historical artists, you're aware of the treacherous rise and fall that comes with the lifestyle. For as glorious as the peaks are, the valleys are equally tormenting. We know the beats of the average rock star's life too well, as music biopics are perhaps the most derided subgenre for their reliance on tired tropes and a burden to cram one's entire career on the screen. However, even in music biopics with the most hackneyed tropes, a stellar leading performance can salvage the genre's restrictions. While Her Smell, the 2018 Alex Ross Perry film about a troubled punk rocker told through various segments in her life, is a finely crafted exploration of a life of fame, it would be lacking potency if not for a mesmerizing performance by Elisabeth Moss,...

Rock ‘n roll and performative Satanism may be a match made in heaven, but conservative attitudes used to mean that musicians had to tread carefully when subverting religious standards in their performances. Thankfully, decades of pushed boundaries have led to mainstream audiences finally becoming a bit more lenient when it comes to musical blasphemy. That’s why no one bats an eye when thousands of fans fill up an arena to see a band that openly mocks religious institutions while casually incorporating demonic chants into their romantic lyrics.

And with so many followers willing to dress up as ghouls and evil nuns as they sing along to ballads about doomed lovers and eldritch rituals, it was only a matter of time before Swedish rock band Ghost would get the chance to celebrate their particular brand of high-spirited satanism with a feature-length concert film.

Masterminded by Tobias Forge himself, working alongside...

Exclusive: Independent Artist Group on Tuesday announced its signing of actress Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars).

Benson is best known for starring on the hit Freeform series Pretty Little Liars, based on the novels by Sara Shepard, which aired for seven seasons from 2010 to 2017.

Created by I. Marlene King, the mystery drama follows the lives of four high school girls whose friendship falls apart after their clique leader, Alison, goes missing. A year later, they start receiving anonymous messages from a mysterious figure known as “A,” who threatens to expose their deepest secrets, including ones they thought only Alison knew. In the role of “It girl” Hannah Marin, Benson starred opposite Troian Bellisario, Holly Marie Combs, Lucy Hale and more.

Most recently, the actress starred alongside Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jenna Colman in Prime Video’s thriller miniseries Wilderness. Her feature film credits include Mob Land with John Travolta, Kevin Dillon...

Exclusive: Dylan Gelula (Dream Scenario) has joined Paramount Pictures’ untitled sequel to Smile, the 2022 horror thriller from Parker Finn, which went on to outsized success in theaters after initially being set to debut on Paramount+.

The actress joins an ensemble that also includes Naomi Scott, Lukas Gage, Kyle Gallner and Rosemarie DeWitt, as previously announced.

Details as to the plot and cast members’ roles are under wraps. But Finn has returned to direct from his own script, with Temple Hill producing. The sequel is slated for release on October 18, 2024, when it will go up against an unnamed title from Universal Pictures.

Grossing over $217M at the worldwide box office, Smile was one of the great, unexpected box office successes of 2022. One of a number of original studio horror films of late to expand into a franchise, pic tells the story of Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a psychiatrist who becomes...

Here at /Film, we have talked quite a bit about how much we love genre-specific streaming services like Shudder or Alter, but does such a platform exist for fans of science fiction? Sure, there's always the Syfy channel on cable, but with so many people cutting cords and pivoting exclusively to streaming, you may be wondering where to find new and unique sci-fi stories. Well, may we interest you in Dust? A sister site of Alter, Dust comes from the folks at Gunpowder and Sky, the independent studio behind hits like "Summer of 84," "Tragedy Girls," "Her Smell," "Hearts Beat Loud," "Call Me Miss Cleo," and "Kobe Bryant's Dear Basketball."

A hub for the very best in sci-fi short films, Dust also has a live linear channel constantly playing from their selection of shorts, so if you don't feel like wading through the selections, you can let the service choose for you.

It’s been five years since Alex Ross Perry’s most recent narrative feature, “Her Smell.” Despite the film earning pretty solid reviews, as have most of his narrative features, the filmmaker doesn’t seem at all interested in narrative filmmaking at this moment. In fact, he has two new films on the horizon, but both are documentaries. And in his mind, this is exactly what a quality filmmaker should be doing—diversifying.

Continue reading Alex Ross Perry Details His Next Two Docs & Explains His Reluctance To Make Narrative Features Right Now at The Playlist.

He might be technically retired from what we consider regular fiction filmmaking, but since his TIFF premiered Her Smell back in 2018 Alex Ross Perry‘s output has been fruitful, plentiful and now we this hybrid we can say imaginative and not trapped by conformity. Announced late last year, the project as Perry called it will be a mix of items tossed into a blender. Putting together the members of Pavement, Zoe Lister-Jones, Michael Esper and Kathryn Gallagher, the behind the line crew folk include cinematography Robert Kolodny and editor Robert Greene. Perry first visited Park City for Listen Up Philip in 2014.…...

“Her Smell” director Alex Ross Perry is developing two nonfiction projects, including the as-yet-untitled doc about video stores.

“I can’t speak for everybody but yeah, I miss them,” he tells Variety at Poland’s American Film Festival, where he also picked the Indie Star Award and treated the audience to work-in-progress footage.

“I’m trying to tell this story while it’s still within our grasp. You only have so much time when something is both a present tense memory for one half of your audience and a completely new experience for another. In another decade, everything I’m talking about will be ancient history.”

Perry, who has been working on the project for 10 years, is also putting finishing touches on “Pavements,” about an indie rock band.

“I think both this video store movie and the Pavement movie are examinations of the unexamined era,” he says.

“It was something...

Exclusive: The Longest Yard is getting another set of downs.

Deadline hears that another remake of the film, which originally starred Burt Reynolds in 1974 and was remade starring Adam Sandler in 2005, is in the works at Paramount Pictures. Rodney Barnes, who was an exec producer and writer on HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, is writing.

It comes from Gunpowder & Sky, whose CEO Van Toffler was an exec producer on the 2005 version when he worked at then-MTV owner Viacom. Toffler is producing with former MTV Films boss David Gale, who reunited with Toffler at Gunpowder & Sky and who also exec produced the Sandler version.

The Longest Yard is a prison sports comedy film.

‘The Longest Yard,’ 1974

The 1974 original was based on a story by Al Ruddy, directed by Robert Aldrich and written by Tracy Keenan Wynn. It starred Reynolds as Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a...

More than 90 feature films showcasing the best in U.S. moviemaking will take center stage next month at Poland’s American Film Festival (Aff), whose 14th edition takes place Nov. 7 – 12 in Wrocław, Poland.

Founded in 2010 as the sister event of the long-running New Horizons Film Festival, the Aff bills itself as the first film event in Central Europe solely devoted to the works of contemporary and classic American cinema.

In putting together the program for the 14th edition, festival director Ula Śniegowska says she and the programming team spent the past year “scouting the festivals and trying to get our hands on the pulse of what’s happening in American auteur and independent film.” The festival, which includes titles that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Cannes and other leading fests, is similar in spirit to France’s long-running Deauville American Film Festival, which mounted its 49th edition this year.

Eddie Redmayne will star in the Cabaret revival coming to Broadway this spring.

He reprises his role as the Emcee from the production in London, opposite newcomer Gayle Rankin (Glow), who will be playing Sally Bowles. The production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, starts previews at the August Wilson Theatre on April 1, 2024, with an official press opening night on April 21.

Like in London, the creative team plans to transform the August Wilson Theatre for the production, featuring an in-the-round auditorium and “sinfully dreamlike spaces,” where attendees can view entertainment and buy drinks and food before the show. Each attendee will have a timed entry to the theater and the pre show. Tom Scutt is the club, scenic, and costume designer and Julia Cheng is the choreographer.

In addition to performing the role in London, for which he won an Olivier Award for best actor in a musical (alongside the production’s...

Bi-continental production outfit Lspg (Luca Severi Production Group) has boarded “Eco Village,” a gonzo musical comedy led by Sidney Flanigan, the star of Sundance and Berlinale prize winner “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.” Nearing completion, the project is eyeing a festival launch early next year.

Marking the feature debut of playwright Phoebe Nir – who adapted her own Off-Broadway play – the off-kilter film follows a young drifter (played by actor-musician Flanigan) who makes her way first onto an anarchic and uninhibited artists colony, and then into the thrall of the utopia’s manipulative leader, played by Lindsay Burdge (of “Thirst Street” and “Her Smell”).

The filmmaker describes her 16mm project as an “[honest depiction of] the agonies and ecstasies of female desire, inspired by the memory of my tumble down the rabbit hole of first love (or was it lust?) in an idealistic hippie commune where jealousy and rage churned quietly beneath the surface.”

Theresa Rebeck and Linda Gray produced,...

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the final image of Sean Price Williams’s solo feature directorial debut, The Sweet East, is that of Talia Ryder’s Lillian nonchalantly strolling toward and past the camera, a smirk on her face. That’s effectively the whole vibe of the film, an odyssey that traipses through the world of white supremacist academics, PizzaGate conspiracy theorists, self-satisfied filmmakers, mixed-media artists of questionable talent, and religious zealots. And as these various figure heads of a post-whatever world aspire to approximate, at once, political and social fragmentation, reactionaryism, delusion, provocation, and apathy, there Lilian is, eyes like butterfly knives being toyed with by a bored teenager.

As a cinematographer, Price Williams made a name for himself working with filmmakers like Alex Ross Perry and Josh and Benny Safdie, lending their films an earthy sense of immediacy. On 16mm, his images burn...

Cara Delevingne exploded onto the modeling scene in the early 2010s as one of the most sought-after names in fashion. As her modeling career took off, she also took up acting and has since appeared in a number of different films and TV shows over the years - including "Paper Towns," "Suicide Squad," "Her Smell," "Only Murders in the Building," and "Carnival Row."

Despite her celebrity status and fame, Delevingne is not very open about her personal life, including those she's romanced through the years. In the past, Delevingne has vaguely alluded to how she chooses her partners. "However one defines themselves, whether it's 'they' or 'he' or 'she,' I fall in love with the person - and that's that," she told Variety in 2020 of her pansexual identity. "I'm attracted to the person."

Since emerging into the spotlight, the model-turned-actor has been the subject of many dating rumors (and...

Prime Video’s new thriller series Wilderness is already making a splash by having a truly great bop as its theme tune in Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, but there’s much more to enjoy here than that. The raunchy show follows a young writer called Liv, whose dream life with her handsome and wealthy husband falls apart when they move stateside and she catches him cheating on her. Their “make or break” dream holiday is set to crumble into a nightmare, albeit a scenic one, when Liv sets out to get her revenge.

The cast of Wilderness may be small, but it’s stacked with notable actors, some of whom might seem very familiar to you. If you can’t remember where you’ve seen them before, or just want to know more about them, we’re here to help!

Jenna Coleman as Liv

Blackpool-born...

With Cannes done and dusted and the heavy-hitting autumn quartet of Venice, Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF still a few months off, what’s a film festival fan to do during the dog days of summer? With New York City’s own Tribeca Festival now firmly ensconced in the summer months after moving off its traditional spring dates in 2021, movie lovers both in the city and beyond can enjoy the annual event’s prodigious programming, thanks to a combination of in-person and virtual programming.

The 2023 edition will kick off June 7 with the North American premiere of “Kiss the Future,” a documentary following the story of a community of underground musicians and creatives throughout the nearly four-year-long siege of Sarajevo, as well as the 1997 U2 concert celebrating the liberation of the Bosnian capital.

A special 30th-anniversary screening of “A Bronx Tale” will close the fest on June 17. After the movie, the film...

Sean Prince Williams made his name with cinephiles as the Dp on several recent movies like the Safdie Brothers‘ “Good Time,” Alex Ross Perry‘s “Her Smell,” “Tesla,” and Abel Ferrara‘s “Zeroes And Ones.” Now it’s his turn to sit in the director’s chair. The Match Factory brings Williams’ directorial debut, “The Sweet East,” to the Cannes Film Festival this year, where it has its world premiere as part of the Directors’ Fortnight.

Continue reading ‘The Sweet East’ First Look: Sean Prince Williams Makes His Directorial Debut During The Directors’ Fortnight At Cannes 2023 at The Playlist.

The Match Factory has acquired international sales rights on U.S. cinematographer and filmmaker Sean Price Williams’s feature directorial debut The Sweet East ahead of its world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight in May.

Written by the film critic and programmer Nick Pinkerton, the movie is described as a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the United States undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C.

Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a fractured fairy tale travelogue into America, where she is granted access to a variety of the strange factions that proliferate the present-day unreality of contemporary life.

Williams’s credits as a cinematographer include Owen Kline’s Funny Pages (2022), Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones (2021), Michael Almereyda’s Tesla (2020), Alex Ross Perry...

Film is directorial debut of prolific cinematographer Sean Price Williams.

The Match Factory has boarded Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East which world premieres next month in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

Written by the film critic and programmer Nick Pinkerton, it is the first feature film directed by cinematographer Price Williams, whose credits Owen Kline’s Funny Pages (2022), Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones (2021), Michael Almereyda’s Tesla (2020), Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell (2018) and the Safdie brothers Good Time (2017).

The Sweet East is billed as picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the US undertaken by Lillian,...

The Match Factory has boarded Sean Price Williams’s “The Sweet East,” which has its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival in May.

It is the first feature film directed by Price Williams, the cinematographer of Owen Kline’s “Funny Pages” (2022), Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and Ones” (2021), Michael Almereyda’s “Tesla” (2020), Alex Ross Perry’s “Her Smell” (2018) and the Safdies’ “Good Time” (2017).

The screenplay is by film critic and programmer Nick Pinkerton.

“The Sweet East” is a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina, who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C.

“Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a fractured fairy-tale travelogue into America, where she is granted access to a variety of the strange factions...

Film festivals tend to have at least one trend. Cannes 2021 was the year of ... well, cunnilingus, while TIFF 2018 was the year of movies about troubled musicians. In 2023, South by Southwest was the year of the brand movie or product biopic (the prodpic?). Finally, Hollywood has realized that people are tired of the same old biopics that distill someone's entire life into a truncated narrative full of cliches and tropes, reducing moments of genuine innovation into contrived deus ex machinas.

Besides, who cares about people anyway? Not Hollywood, apparently, because they have finally recognized that audience's huge interest in recognizable IP and nostalgia means they don't care about people or characters, they care about products. And so, this year's SXSW saw movie writers and producers realize that they could just cut the middlemen and deliver what the people want right to them — movies about products!

That's right. This was the year...

Nashville garage rockers Bully are back with a new song, “Days Move Slow,” which will appear on their next album, Lucky for You, out June 2 via Sub Pop.

“Days Move Slow” is a punchy but poignant tune, an energetic and honest exploration of grief that Bully’s Alicia Bognanno wrote after the death of her dog, Mezzi.

“As someone who has spent the majority of my life feeling agonizingly misunderstood, there is no greater gift than experiencing true unconditional love and acceptance,” Bognanno said in a statement. “I waited my...

Cara Delevingne sparked widespread concern after paparazzi images captured at a private airport in L.A. last September showed the model and actress looking disheveled and acting erratically upon returning from Burning Man. Now, in a revealing cover interview with Vogue, the 30-year-old said she’s grateful for those images because it sent her on a path to rehab and sobriety.

“I hadn’t slept. I was not Ok,” she told Vogue writer Chioma Nnadi. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, Ok, I don’t look well. You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”

For the interview, conducted in late January, Delevingne confessed that she was four months sober after a stint in rehab late last year. “I’ve had interventions of a sort, but I wasn’t ready.

There have been several famous guest stars throughout How I Met Your Mother's nine-season run, and Ashley Benson guest starred in one season 8 episode. Benson broke out when she portrayed the intelligent and funny Hanna Marin on Pretty Little Liars, and she joined several other TV actors who have also appeared in Himym guest roles, including Rachel Bloom, Bryan Cranston, and James Van Der Beek. Benson's TV career has been more successful than her film one, although she has had a few compelling movie roles, such as Brit in the 2012 dark comedy Spring Breakers.

Before Benson's Himym episode aired in 2013, she had small appearances on several popular series, including The O.C., Zoey 101, and 7th Heaven. She also played Abigail Deveraux on Days of Our Lives, although she would turn to darker films such as 2018's Her Smell and 2022's Private Property several years later. Like the best guest stars on Himym,...

Exclusive: Alyssa Milano (Brazen), Virginia Madsen (Sideways), Gina Torres (9-1-1: Lone Star) and Milana Vayntrub (This Is Us) have signed on for roles in the feature-length anthology Give Me an A, which links together 15 short films, in response to the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The film currently in post-production will have been completed within two months from the date of Roe’s overturning — which eliminated the longstanding constitutional right to abortion — in an effort to ensure this is a response and not a delayed reaction. The creators, cast and crew have made a significant effort to expedite the process in order to start a conversation with audiences about the importance of bodily autonomy and address the dysfunction of a democracy that is not protecting the needs of a majority of the population. Support from vendors like Keslow, Panavision and The Ebell of Los Angeles has allowed...

Bulldog Film Distribution has exclusively released a new clip from the upcoming surreal feature ‘Strawberry Mansion.’

In a future where the government records dreams and taxes them, a dream auditor gets caught up in the dreams of an ageing eccentric…

Written and Directed by Kentucker Audley & Albert Binney, the film stars Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Penny Fuller, Reed Birney, Constance Shulman and Linas Phillips.

Also in news – Kumail Nanjiani features in first look images for ‘Welcome to Chippendales’

The film hits select cinemas and on demand 16 September. Here’s the exclusive clip.

And here’s the film’s official trailer.

The post Exclusive: Dreamy new clip from surreal feature ‘Strawberry Mansion’ appeared first on HeyUGuys.

Rain Management Group has brought on Yasmin Felice Morris as a Talent Manager, effective immediately.

Morris began her career in her hometown of Chicago working for veteran casting director Claire Simon, supporting shows including Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., and Empire, as well as features, commercials, and theatre. She later segued into talent covering rising stars coming out of the long-established Chicago theatre community such as Kiki Layne, Chris Redd, Tosin Morohunfola and Joe Keery. Morris then moved on to production, assisting Executive Producer/Director Michael Waxman on Chicago Med for the show’s first three seasons.

She moved to Los Angeles in 2018, first working as a development exec at Van Toffler and Floris Bauer’s independent studio, Gunpowder & Sky, responsible for such titles as The Little Hours, Hearts Beat Loud,...

At this point, if anyone in Hollywood is selling a story that happens to center on a haunted, damaged, and obsessively driven woman, they sure as hell better be giving Elisabeth Moss a call. The supremely talented star of "Mad Men," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Her Smell," "The Invisible Man," and "Shirley" has all but cornered the market in playing these specific types of leads, going above and beyond to embody such rich characters with a fierce and unwavering sense of commitment. It's not really overselling things to state that the results, thus far, have...

The post Shining Girls Trailer: Elisabeth Moss Attempts To Catch A Killer In A Reality-Shifting Mystery Series appeared first on /Film.

No, this is not a video from the archives. Released as a B-side on their 1999 EP Spit On a Stranger, Pavement’s song Harness Your Hopes has had a rebirth as of late, becoming a viral sensation across TikTok and Spotify, racking up nearly 70 million plays on the latter platform. The EP is now getting a re-issue on April 8 courtesy of Matador Records and an entertaining new music video has dropped.

Coming from director Alex Ross Perry, whose last feature was 2018’s Her Smell, the video stars Sophia Thatcher (Yellowjackets) traveling through various vintage footage of the band and beyond placed behind her. As we await news on Arp’s next project, this certainly tides us over. Check it out below.

The post Watch Alex Ross Perry's Music Video for Pavement's Harness Your Hopes first appeared on The Film Stage.

Maybe it’s the pandemic screwing with the perceived passing of time, but it does feel like it was only recently that filmmaker Alex Ross Perry released the musical drama “Her Smell.” But actually, that was nearly four years ago, way back in the pre-covid era of 2018. Since then, the filmmaker hasn’t released any new films or TV shows, but he has stayed busy directing music videos, like the newest one for the ’90s indie-rock band Pavement.

Continue reading Alex Ross Perry Teams With Pavement & Actress Sophie Thatcher For ‘Harness Your Hopes’ Music Video at The Playlist.

The eighth annual Nitehawk Shorts Festival is upon us!

IndieWire can exclusively announce highlights from the upcoming Nitehawk Shorts Fest, running March 2–6 at both the Nitehawk’s Prospect Park and Williamsburg locations.

The Nitehawk Shorts Festival celebrates independent filmmaking by featuring over 60 short films, with filmmakers in attendance for Q&As. Continuing its mission to represent diverse backgrounds, voices, and perspectives with a selection of exceptional short-form films, female-directed films make up a majority of this year’s festival program.

The festival will include six programs: Opening Nite, Music Driven, Midnite, Matinee, NoBudge, and Closing Nite. Opening and Closing Nite shows will take place at the Prospect Park location, with post-screening parties hosted in the Trees Lounge bar. Music Driven, Midnite, Matinee, and NoBudge will be at the Williamsburg location.

“We have been eager to get the Nitehawk Shorts Festival back up and running, since it has become such an...

2021 is nearly in the books and Hulu is celebrating by heading back to the past…like, the way past. With its list of new releases for December 2021, Hulu is going positive Medieval with two swords and shield original series arriving this month.

Animated comedy Crossing Swords premieres its second season on Dec. 10. This stop-motion style tale follows Patrick (Nicholas Hoult) as he works his way up the feudal latter of The Kingdom. This will be complemented by Dragons: The Nine Realms on Dec. 23. This series is set in the How to Train Your Dragon universe and takes place over 1,000 years after the events of the films. In it, a group of modern day kids uncover the secret truth about dragons.

Hulu also has some more current options for TV this month. Original comedy Pen15 premieres the second half of its second season on Dec. 3. Watch it to relive the trauma...

Ashley Benson, Shiloh Fernandez, Logan Miller, Frank Whaley and Jay Pharoah are starring in “Private Property,” a remake of the 1960 noir film of the same title.

The movie recently wrapped production in Los Angeles and was written, produced, and directed by Chadd Harbold. The original film, written and directed by “Outer Limits” creator Leslie Stevens, was out of circulation for 30 years and considered lost, until it was restored and re-released by Cinelicious Pics in 2016 to critical acclaim.

In the remake, Benson stars as Kathryn, a struggling actress and unfulfilled housewife who becomes involved with her new gardener Ben, played by Fernandez. As he gives her the attention and sensitivity she craves, they start to fall for each other. But, in true noir fashion, Ben is not all that he seems.

Benson is best known for her work in “Spring Breakers,” “Her Smell” and the teen mystery-drama series “Pretty Little Liars.