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Vertigo Releasing is delighted to share the new trailer and artwork for thriller American Star, which is out now in UK Cinemas & on Digital Platforms. Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego, the film, as its name suggests, boasts an all-star cast of Golden Globe Award-Winning actor Ian McShane, Fanny Ardent, Nora Arnezeder and Thomas Kretschmann. American Star is written by Nacho Faerna who wrote the screen play for The Ugliest Woman in the World (Méliès d’Argent 2000 at Fantasporto Festival, “Best Film” at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival 2000). The film is produced by Michael Elliott, known for Catch Me Daddy (2014) and BAFTA-nominated Jawbone (2017). An assassin on final assignment arrives in Fuerteventura to kill a man he has never met. But the target is delayed. Instead of following protocol he stays, drawn to the island, the people, and a ghostly shipwreck. When the target returns, the world has shifted. Before everything was simple,...

Romantic drama will challenge societal norms.

Paris-based mk2 films has boarded sales on Carine Tardieu’s upcoming romantic drama The Young Lovers, starring Fanny Ardant opposite Melvil Poupaud as a 70-year-old woman who embarks on an affair with a married doctor 25 years her junior.

“It’s a modern and nuanced drama where love defies society’s standards,” said mk2 films sales chief Fionnuala Jamison.

Ardant plays an elegant, retired architect whose path crosses with a happily married doctor in his 40s, who first made an impression on her in a brief meeting 15 years previously.

Both are quite troubled to meet again and begin an affair.

Romantic drama will challenge societal norms.

Paris-based mk2 films has boarded sales on Carine Tardieu’s upcoming romantic drama The Young Lovers, starring Fanny Ardant opposite Melvil Poupard as a 70-year-old woman who embarks on an affair with a married doctor 25 years her junior.

“It’s a modern and nuanced drama where love defies society’s standards,” said mk2 films sales chief Fionnuala Jamison.

Ardant plays an elegant, retired architect whose path crosses with a happily married doctor in his 40s, who first made an impression on her in a brief meeting 15 years previously.

Both are quite troubled to meet again and begin an affair.

Collections of films by iconic directors such as François Truffaut and Charlie Chaplin are heading to Netflix as part of a wide-ranging deal struck with distributor MK2 Films.

The titles will be available only in France for now.

Twelve of Truffaut’s seminal films, including “Jules and Jim” and “The 400 Blows” (pictured), will launch on the streaming giant on April 24. The deal is particularly auspicious given France’s ongoing coronavirus lockdown, which is due to remain in place until May 11.

The pact between Netflix and the indie arthouse distributor covers a catalogue of 50 films directed by Truffaut, Chaplin, Demy, Alain Resnais, David Lynch, Emir Kusturica, Michael Haneke, Xavier Dolan, Steve McQueen and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The agreement, however, is not exclusive, and select titles are still available on other platforms, such as Amazon Prime Video. However, the pact — which will see all 50 films rolled out throughout the year — does mark...

Netflix has announced a new partnership with M2K Films that will bring heavyweight auteurs such as Charlie Chaplin, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and more to the streaming platform. The deal is set to bring 50 movies from the MK2 Films catalogue to Netflix throughout 2020, beginning April 24 with the launch of 12 Truffaut classics: “Bed and Board,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Confidentially Yours,” “Jules and Jim,” “Love on the Run,” “Shoot the Piano Player,” “Stolen Kisses,” “The 400 Blows,” “The Last Metro,” “The Soft Skin,” “The Woman Next Door,” and “Two English Girls.”

Cinephile early adopters may remember that around 2007 and 2008, when Netflix first introduced streaming for some movies — via a blue “Instant Viewing” button that would appear next to certain titles in addition to the option to add the DVD to your queue — the service actually did include a sizable number of classic titles, including “Fahrenheit 451.” But as...

So you thought compact discs were a dead format? Not to soundtrack collectors. Film music labels continue to thrive, turning from current scores to, increasingly, limited-edition expansions and even new recordings of classic scores from the past.

Many film studios have (as they did in the 1950s and ’60s) formed their own in-house music labels and frequently release digital-only albums of their movie and TV soundtracks. So the traditional soundtrack labels are focusing more on older, classic material, often expanding the old 30-to-40 minute albums to CD length of 75 minutes or more. They’re also tracking down and licensing previously unreleased soundtracks of interest to collectors.

It’s a business model that seems to be working for more than a dozen labels in the U.S. and Europe that are devoted to releasing music from movies and TV. Here then, alphabetically, are our choices for the best classic film music...

In the century since its founding in 1919, United Artists has made and distributed hundreds of films and pioneered business models — such as UA Classics — that continue to resonate in the entertainment industry.

From the founders to the period between the early ’50s through the late ’60s when Arthur Krim and Bob Benjamin ran the company, to the ’70s when David Picker called the shots, there was a simple focus and philosophy.

“Movies that were successful were guided by very successful producers that worked with the top directors,” says Michael Barker, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics and

a former executive at UA Classics and Orion Classics. “It’s really the philosophy and mission

of United Artists.”

That philosophy led to films such as “High Noon,” “West Side Story,” “Some Like It Hot,”

“Carrie,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Rocky,” “Raging Bull” and “The Birdcage,” and the indie film biz

of today can...

Christian Petzold: The State We Are In is showing at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center from November 30 – December 13, 2018.JerichowIt begins with a train. Sometimes it’s a bus. A few films center their action in a car. This is not to say we will watch a road trip or the story of a journey. The newest film opens with a train escape, but revolves around booking passage on an international ship. Characters pass through space to evade, to rejoin and to hide. Movement through landscape is essential, but rarely do characters succeed in reaching anywhere new. Frames are precise; form is economical. The value of money and labor, often dehumanizing, are vital to acquire. Lead characters, often women, are oddly both familiar and alien. They live among us, yet seem unreachable and unreadable. His films are both self-reflexive and of the world; they indicate a particularly German trauma and crisis.

Exclusive: Merlin star Colin Morgan co-stars in British coming-of-age feature.

Shooting has begun in France on Waiting For You, a British drama starring Fanny Ardant (8 Women) and Colin Morgan (Merlin).

The film, funded by private equity, will shoot for five weeks on location in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France until June 20. Production will then move to the Ilford in the UK for a week.

Production designer Charles Garrad (The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill…) will make his feature directorial debut on the project, which he describes as “a lyrical mystery”.

The story centres on Paul (Morgan), who investigates his late father’s increasingly disturbing past and becomes suspicious of the mysterious, melancholic and probably dangerous Madeleine (Ardant).

Chris Curling (Hannibal Rising) produces for Zephyr Films and it will be shot by cinematographer David Raedeker (My Brother the Devil).

French actress Ardant won the Cesar Award for best actress in 1997 for Pedale Douche and was nominated...

Other guests of the festival will include Hollywood actress Laura Dern and French actress Fanny Ardant as well as directors Alice Rohrwacher, Bong Joon-ho and David Mackenzie among others.

Mel Gibson is to receive the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema at the 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff), which runs July 4-12.

The actor and filmmaker will attend the festival in the Czech Republic to receive the honour and present a screening of his most recent work as a director, the 2006 action-adventure Apocalypto.

The Crystal Globe is the festival’s highest award and has been presented in previous years to John Travolta and Helen Mirren.

Gibson is best known for his roles in Mad Max and the Lethal Weapon series as well as for his award-winning turns as director of Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. He will next be seen in action sequel The Expendables 3.

Festival [link=tt...

Like many of her middle-aged French peers (Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, and co.), Fanny Ardant remains an in-demand talent across the pond. Whereas in America, actresses over 50 are often delegated to playing the doting mom or frumpy grandma (if they're offered anything at all), in France, the roles seem to get better with time for celebrated actresses. At 65, Ardant (best known to American audiences for her role in 1981’s "The Woman Next Door," directed by her late partner François Truffaut) is afforded one of the best roles of her career in Marion Vernoux's "Bright Days Ahead," which opens today in select theaters (you can also catch it On Demand). In the drama, Ardant plays Caroline, a married, recently retired dentist with two daughters and grandchildren, who takes up computer classes at a senior center. There she meets a 40-ish computer consultant (Laurent Lafitte), and it's...

Avant-garde French cinematographer at the heart of the new wave

For 45 years, the French cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who has died of heart disease aged 72, put his talents at the disposal of the most challenging, intellectually inquiring, uncompromisingly brilliant film directors who emerged with the French new wave. Lubtchansky worked with Jean-Luc Godard (six times), although they fell out, made up and fell out again; the husband and wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (11 times); and Jacques Rivette (14 times).

Although these directors differed in their approaches and sensibilities, they were united in their irreverent, generally unsentimental treatment of character, their existential attitude to society and to human behaviour, and their experiments with filmic space and time. They questioned cinema itself by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making and quoting from the other arts. They presented an alternative to Hollywood by consciously breaking its conventions while at the...

French cinematographer William Lubtchansky has lost his battle with heart disease, aged 72.

Lubtchansky, who has worked with leading European directors including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Lanzmann, died in Paris on 4 May.

With Rivette he created 14 feature-length films, including last year's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup, Lubtchansky's final movie.

His other film credits include Elsa la rose in 1966, 1972 documentary Pourquoi Israel?, Lanzmann's 1985 Holocaust film Shoah, and Truffaut's 1981 drama The Woman Next Door.

Lubtchansky is survived by his wife, Nicole, and his daughter, Irina.