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Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Beast.Beast, the new film from director Baltasar Kormákur, answers the all-important question: who would win in a fight between Idris Elba and a bloodthirsty lion? Sure, lions are intimidating, but are they as frightening as “Stringer” Bell? Well, Beast answers that question definitively, at long last. With Beast coming out this weekend, let’s explore what happens at the end of Elba’s survival film, and most importantly, who wins in this fight of man vs. beast?...

Stars: Erin Brown, Hannah Fierman, Marilyn Light, Seth Michaels, Kane Hodder, Bill Moseley, Melissa Haas, Charis Jeffers, Daniel Rashid, Logan Creed, Tommy Grillo, Linnea Quigley | Directed by Davi Crimmins, Eric Davis, Hannah Fierman, Greg Garrison, Melissa Haas, Torey Haas, Jay Holloway, Jenna Kanell, Anissa Matlock, Tony Reames

Dead by Midnight (Y2Kill) is the unexpected follow-up to Dead by Midnight (11pm Central). And I say unexpected because despite being a fun collection of stories, it pretty much stayed under everyone’s radar. But enough people did see it that a second film got greenlighted, and with a big enough budget to include a couple of genre heavyweights.

The film opens with The Mistress of Midnight sitting around hell, googling for reviews of the first film and unleashing her wrath on those who didn’t give it a thumbs up.

From here we leap to The Temptress introducing the first segment...

No One Gets Out Alive: "Ambar (Cristina Rodlo) is an immigrant in search of the American dream, but when she's forced to take a room in a boarding house, she finds herself in a nightmare she can't escape."

Director: Santiago Menghini

Writers: Jon Croker, Fernanda Coppel

Based on the Novel No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill

Cast: Cristina Rodlo, Marc Menchaca

Producers: Jonathan Cavendish, Will Tennant

Executive Producers: Andy Serkis, David Bruckner, Philip Robertson, Adam Nevill, Jon Croker

Releases globally on Netflix on September 29, 2021

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Mean Spirited: "Michelle Veintimilla, Neville Archambault, and Will Madden join the cast for Mean Spirited, the solo directorial debut from Jeff Ryan. The film, which is co-written by Ryan and Joe Adams, is a found-footage horror-comedy set to begin shooting this fall.

Madden will star as Andy, an up-and-coming Vlogger whose attempts to reconnect with his estranged friend, Bryce (played by Ryan) fall...

Schitt’s Creek Star Joins Hot Docs Food Film

Exclusive: Schitt’s Creek star Dustin Milligan has boarded doc Food For The Rest of Us as executive producer. The film, which had its world premiere at Doxa, will also play at Hot Docs next month. Milligan is best known for his performances in Rutherford Falls, Schitt’s Creek and RuPaul’s Secret Celebrity Drag Race. The film follows young people across the U.S. striving for a better world through food, including an Indigenous-owned, youth run organic farm in Hawaii, a Black urban grower in Kansas City, a female Kosher Butcher in Colorado working with the Queer Community, and an Inuit community in the Northwest Territories employing traditional harvesting methods to grow fresh produce in a community greenhouse. Pic is directed by Caroline Cox, produced by Tiffany Ayalik and Caroline Cox and is executive-produced by Stuart Henderson and Milligan. The actor said: “Being born...

“Beast Beast” is not your typical teen drama. There are no fights about who’s going with who to Prom. No drama about boyfriends and girlfriends. But writer-director Danny Madden’s debut feature is able to capture the awkwardness and the split-second choices that teens are faced with on a daily basis in an honest, often brutal way. And clearly, this honesty is a large part of what attracted Alec Baldwin to the project.

Continue reading Alec Baldwin & Danny Madden Talk The Honesty Of ‘Beast Beast’ And Social Media’s Impact On Teens [Interview] at The Playlist.

Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough set off on a whirlwind weekend romance in Monday, a romantic drama that IFC Films released in theaters and on-demand Friday.

It’s the fourth feature from director Argyris Papadimitropoulos, who also wrote and produced the film.

Here is the plot: When Mickey (Stan) is dragged away from his DJ set by a drunken friend and introduced to Chloe (Gough) one hot summer night in Athens, the attraction between the pair is immediately palpable. So palpable that before they know it they’re waking up naked on the beach Saturday morning. And so it goes that a one-night stand on Friday turns into a whirlwind weekend romance that leads to serious conversations when they face the harsh sunlight on Monday morning.

The pic was an official selection at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2020 Toronto Film Festival. Check out the trailer below.

Oscar-winner Morgan Freeman...

Chekhov’s Gun has never felt more ominous than as part of an arsenal on the wall of a lonely teenager’s bedroom in a slice-of-life movie about modern American high schoolers. In fact, it sometimes feels as if “Beast Beast” writer/director/composer Danny Madden has underestimated the dark cloud such a thing can cast over every inch of his story, even if the inevitability is so obviously the point (and even if the gun doesn’t go off when and where you assume it will).

On one hand, ; as a phenomenon that follows god-awful gun laws and online radicalization with the same meteorological certainty that thunder follows lightning. We see it coming before any of Madden’s characters do, and his film would be held together by our own nauseated helplessness even if it weren’t so percussive, well-acted, and perversely fun to watch. For better or worse,...

Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? This week, […]

The post This Week In Trailers: Silo, Beast Beast, Sugar Daddy, The Unthinkable, Why Did You Kill Me? appeared first on /Film.

"So I guess we're not having any fun today?" Vanishing Angle has released official trailer for indie coming-of-age film Beast Beast, which originally premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival last year to some solid reviews. This looks like a super indie, shoot-from-the-hip, creative low key story about "what it means to come of age in an era marked by technology and social media, where violent clashes awaken dormant passions and teenagers are faced with growing up all too quickly." The cast of newcomers includes Shirley Chen, Will Madden, and Jose Angeles. Reviews say that the film "captures Gen Z in a compelling, raw form. Insightful and terrifying... ambitious and intriguing." Terrifying indeed. This definitely does look a bit wild and crazy, maybe a bit too wild and crazy, but perhaps I just don't understand all the kids these days... Here's the official trailer (+ two posters) for Danny Madden's Beast Beast,...

Exclusive: Pedro Correa (The Middle), Booboo Stewart (X-Men: Days of Future Past), Raymond Cruz (Breaking Bad), Simon Rex (Scary Movie franchise) and Steven Bauer (Scarface) will star in My Dead Dad, a coming-of-age indie drama from executive producers Declan Baldwin and Karl Hartman of Big Indie Pictures, the production company behind acclaimed films like Manchester by the Sea and Beautiful Boy.

Correa also co-wrote the alongside the film’s director Fabio Frey. It’s about a young burnout who discovers his estranged father is dead and has left him an apartment complex. With hopes of cutting ties, he’s forced to grow up and learn about the father he never knew through the eclectic tenants.

Wanderwell Entertainment’s Tara Ansley produced the pic with Correa for Never Norm Films.

Big Indie Pictures currently has Chemical Hearts, Troop Zero, I’m Your Woman and Hunters all available on Amazon Prime.

Vanishing Angle, the production company behind SXSW winner “Thunder Road,” has re-teamed with writer-director Jim Cummings for thriller “The Beta Test.”

The studio will produce the movie — about a married Hollywood agent who deals with the fallout after receiving a mysterious letter from an anonymous sexual encounter. The cast includes Cummings, Pj McCabe, Olivia Applegate and Virginia Newcomb. Filming wrapped in December and production is expected to be completed by the end of the summer.

“It’s our new movie about the Agency fight with the WGA,” Cummings said in a statement. “It’s a horror film.”

Vanishing Angle, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, will also be the subject of a case study from the Sundance Institute. It will take a look at the self-distribution of “Thunder Road,” the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival grand jury prize winner, and provide a road map for independent filmmakers and studios hoping...

Alec Baldwin is set to star in Joel Souza’s “Rust,” which he will also produce under his El Dorado Pictures banner, the Highland Film Group announced on Friday.

Baldwin will produce alongside Anjul Nigam and and executive producer Matthew Helderman. Souza will write and direct the action/western, based on a story by him and Baldwin. Anna Granucci is producing, while Elizabeth L. Barbatelli is executive producing.

Baldwin, Souza and Nigam are reteaming for “Rust” after previously collaborating on Souza’s “Crown Vic.” The Highland Film Group will launch international sales at the upcoming Marché du Film Online. CAA Media Finance is handling domestic rights. Bondlt Media Capital is financing.

Also Read: 'SNL': Alec Baldwin's Trump Delivers Commencement Speech to 'Class of Covid-19' (Video)

“Rust” follows infamous Western outlaw Hardland Rust (Baldwin) who has had a bounty on his head for as long as he can remember. When...

Emmy Award and Golden Globe awards winner Alec Baldwin has signed on to produce and star in action/western feature Rust. The pic is based on a story by Baldwin and Crown Vic helmer Joel Souza, who will write the screenplay and direct.

The plot follows infamous western outlaw Harland Rust (Baldwin), who has had a bounty on his head for as long as he can remember. When his estranged 13-year-old grandson Lucas is convicted of an accidental murder and sentenced to hang, Rust travels to Kansas to break him out of prison. Together, the two fugitives must outrun the legendary U.S. Marshal Wood Helm and bounty-hunter Fenton “Preacher” Lang who are hot on their tail. Deeply buried secrets rise from the ashes and an unexpected familial bond begins to form as the mismatched duo tries to survive the merciless American Frontier.

Oscar nominee Baldwin will produce under his...

“Beast Beast” director Danny Madden and his cast dropped by TheWrap studio at Sundance and he discussed how the characters in his film represent different parts of his brain. Watch the interview above.

“Like most of my ideas it all comes from just this hodge podge of things and feelings and conversations and people in my life and experiences I’ve had and it all meshes together and so I wrote a trip tick,” Madden tells TheWrap.

“It’s three different characters and their stories all interweave and each of them kind of plays a different part of my brain,” Madden added. “We have like a theater kid, and a kind of skateboarder, and a filmmaker in a sense, and so for me it was kind of just like diving up the brain and letting the story go where it needs to go.”

Also Read: 'Miss Americana' Director...

There are a lot of reasons why independent filmmakers gravitate towards ensemble pieces for their first few features, not the least of which is the company they keep. The now copies the mid-2000s, the mid-2000s copied the mid-’90s, and the mid-’90s copied the swiftness of ‘60s France. But while the particular subgenre of wayward teens is associated almost entirely with American culture, why is it that so many of these movies have so little to do with America itself? Is there nothing in between the camera and the subjects? An ethnography if one thing, but there should be some disconnect that invites the viewer to partake.

Beast Beast, the second film from Danny Madden, fails in that regard. There’s no real point of view, no real specificity beyond its sense of atmosphere. It’s Georgia, but we just know that because of the license plates.

Writer-director Danny Madden’s “Beast Beast” clatters to life with organic percussion: a stick rat-a-tatting against an iron fence, a skateboard scraping on concrete, a rifle pinging bullets against a defenseless tin plate. Together, these sounds combine into jazz, despite the discordance of the three teens making such a ruckus. Krista (Shirley Chen), the stick thwacker, is a squeaky-perfect theater geek strolling through the suburbs. Nito (Jose Angeles), the skater, sleeps on a mattress on the floor when his father deigns to let him in the apartment. And recently graduated gun-nut Adam is frustrated that his target-shooting videos are only getting 46 views – exponentially less than he needs to convince his parents that he’s got a real job.

What connects them is a need to be seen, accepted and applauded. Throw a spitball at any fellow Panther classmate, and they’ll feel the same. Krista, Nito and Adam are universal in their ordinariness,...

The coming-of-age sub-genre is “thousands and thousands of hours of TV shows and films,” explained Alec Baldwin Friday night during a talk for his latest Sundance feature production Beast Beast.

So how do you make it fresh?

Baldwin who serves as Ep on the Danny Madden directed and written teenage pic with his producing partner Casey Bader are in the business of shepherding and launching young filmmakers.

“We see a lot of things. I watch a number of films and I’d say it’s three categories: 20% is either good or great, 20% is horrible, and 60% of it is Ok,” said Baldwin at a Nrdc panel for the film yesterday with Madden, his brother Will Madden who stars in Beast Beast as a gun-loving fanatic, and actors Shirley Chen and Jose Angeles. Baldwin and Bader came across Madden’s short, Krista, which Beast Beast is based upon, and they were blown away,...

There’s so much that scares me as a parent of a teenager, much of it coming from the knowledge that this generation of teens is unlike any other. Really, it’s uncharted ground in parenting. In his feature film debut, “Beast Beast,” writer-director Danny Madden captures Gen Z in a compelling, raw form; watching as a parent is both insightful and terrifying.

Though I have some reservations about a choice made towards the end of the film, everything else — from the cast to the documentary-style filmmaking to the varying perspectives of different characters from diverse backgrounds — is ambitious and intriguing.

The film opens with a group of kids in a drama class doing a warm-up exercise. “Beast Beast, ready to act,” they chant as they clap and jump, growing louder and louder by the second. Quickly we’re introduced to Krista (Shirley Chen), an aspiring young actress; Nito (Jose...

Company continues to ramp up after recently announcing $100m production finance fund.

Los Angeles-based Xyz Films continues to ramp up after recently announcing a $100m production finance fund and has promoted three executives to vice-president.

Pip Ngo is promoted from director to vice-president of sales and acquisitions; Maxime Cottray moves up from director to vice-president of financing and production; and Scott Freije becomes vice-president of international sales and distribution.

Xyz Films co-heads Nate Bolotin, Nick Spicer, and Aram Tertzakian are also promoting Francesca Musumeci and Alex Williams to global sales coordinator and content coordinator, respectively.

“These executives have proven their...