News

Gwen Van Dam, a veteran character actress of seven decades whose 140 credits spanned television, film and the Los Angeles stage, died Dec. 19 at her home in West LA. She was 96.

Per previous reporting attributed to her son Dirk Smillie, the cause of death was a recurrence of cancer.

Throughout her long-tenured career, Van Dam appeared in 1978’s Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis, 1994’s Star Trek Generations with Patrick Stewart, the romantic war drama Coming Home featuring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight and the Sidney Poitier-helmed Gene Wilder pic Stir Crazy.

Among her television credits are illustrious series like Days of Our Lives, Gilmore Girls, Knots Landing, ER, Moonlighting, The Brady Bunch, Maude, Owen Marshall, New Girl, Modern Family and Criminal Minds.

On the music video side of things, she appeared in visual works for U2, Smashing Pumpkins, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Panic! At the Disco and heavy metal band Mastodon.

Margaret Menegoz, the head of French production company Les Films du Losange, who produced the movies of Michael Hanke, Wim Wenders and Éric Rohmer, among others, has died. She was 83.

The company issued a statement confirming that Menegoz died in Montpellier on August 7. They cited her “love of films and work, and her loyalty to her filmmakers that have become the hallmarks of Les Films du Losange,” describing Menegoz as “open-minded towards Europe and the international scene, which she particularly cherished.”

Menegoz led Les Films du Losange for close to 50 years, taking over at the company in 1973. She produced more than 60 films, including Haneke’s Amour, The White Ribbon and Cache, Wenders’ 1977 feature The American Friend, Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984), Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa (1990), Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992), among many others.

Amour received 5 Oscar nominations in 2013, including a nomination for Menegoz for best feature.

New York Film Festival (NYFF) has announced a varied Main Slate featuring anticipated Venice world premiere The Brutalist from Brady Corbet as well as a raft of Cannes and Berlin winners including Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora.

The line-up of 33 films announced on Tuesday morning includes Payal Kapadia’s Cannes grand prize winner All We Imagine As Light, Miguel Gomes’s best director winner Grand Tour, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, recipient of the special prize.

Mati Diop’s Berlin Golden Bear winner Dahomey takes its place in the selection, as...

Thirty-three films will make up the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival, including the latest from David Cronenberg, Sean Baker, Payal Kapadia, Mike Leigh, Mati Diop, Hong Sang-soo and Julia Loktev. The festival will take place Sept. 27 — Oct. 14, 2024.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a statement. “The most notable thing about the films in the Main Slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks— is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

The movies in this year’s Main Slate come from 24 different countries.

New York Film Festival has revealed the Main Slate titles for its 62nd edition, which runs September 27 through October 14. The selection includes feature films from 24 countries, with 18 directors making their NYFF Main Slate debut, and two world, five North American, and 16 U.S. premieres. As previously announced, the festival will open with RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” and close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” and will feature Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” as its Centerpiece.

The Main Slate includes celebrated films from festivals worldwide including Cannes prize winners: Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” (Grand Prize), Sean Baker’s “Anora” (Palme d’Or), Roberto Minervini’s “The Damned”, Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour” (Best Director), Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Special Prize). At this year’s Berlinale, Mati Diop’s “Dahomey” received the Golden...

A drama about an Iranian human rights activist and a documentary about the hacking of queer indie pop duo Tegan and Sara are among the films that have been added to the lineup of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which unveiled its Centrepiece section on Tuesday to kick off a second week of programming announcements.

The 43 films come from filmmakers representing 41 countries, with 18 of the titles receiving their world premieres at TIFF. Those premieres include “Seven Days,” a film about an imprisoned Iranian activist directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi and written by Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker who was himself sentenced to flogging and prison by Iranian authorities; “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” a romantic comedy from French writer-director Laura Piani; “The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos,” a debut from the Nigerian filmmaking group known as the Agbajowo Collective; and Erin Lee Carr’s “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara,...

Steven Soderbergh’s spooky ghost story Presence — starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan and newcomer Callina Liang — will receive its international premiere as part of the Centerpiece sidebar at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival.

Soderbergh first screened Presence at Sundance earlier this year, some 35 years after the debut of his breakout film, Sex, Lies and Videotape, in Park City. In all, TIFF’s Centerpiece section, previously known as Contemporary World Cinema, unveiled 43 films from 41 countries on Tuesday.

There’s world premieres for Marcelle Lunam’s rom com Addition, starring Teresa Palmer and Joe Dempsie; Erin Lee Carr’s documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, a Hulu title about the Canadian pop duo falling victim to identity theft; French director Laura Piani’s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, with a Frederick Wiseman cameo; Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Measures for a Funeral, written by actor Derah Campbell; and Algerian director Merzak Allouache’s Front Row,...

Magnify has acquired global and U.S. sales rights to Neo Sora’s near-futuristic film “Happyend” ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The movie will play in the Horizons section and is being handled by Magnify outside of Japan and Singapore.

Set in a near-future Tokyo, “Happyend” revolves around two rabble-rousing best friends who are about to graduate high school while threats of a catastrophic earthquake looms. One night, they pull a prank on their principal, which leads to a surveillance system being installed in their school. Stuck between the oppressive security system and a darkening national political situation, the two respond in contrasting ways.

The movie marks Neo Sora’s fictionh feature debut. His previous credits include “Ryuichi Sakamoto/Opus” which premiered at Venice and was picked by Janus for North America, and short films, such as “The Chicken” which premiered in Locarno, among others.

Just a day after New York Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival made major announcements, Venice Film Festival is here with their full lineup ahead of the festival taking place August 28 through September 7.

Highlights include Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, Takeshi Kitano’s Broken Rage, Errol Morris’ Separated, Lav Diaz’s Phantosmia, Thomas Vinterberg’s Families Like Ours, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and more.

Check out the lineup below with a hat tip to Cineuropa.

Competition

The Room Next Door – Pedro Almodóvar

Campo di battaglia – Gianni Amelio

Leurs enfants après eux – Ludovic & Zoran Boukherma

The Brutalist – Brady Corbet

Jouer avec le feu – Delphine & Muriel Coulin

Vermiglio – Maura Delpero

Iddu (Sicilian Letters) – Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza

Queer – Luca Guadagnino

Love – Dag Johan Haugerud...

Venice Film Festival has revealed the programme for its 81st edition, featuring a 21-strong Competition that includes new films from Todd Phillips, Pedro Almodovar, Luca Guadagino, Pablo Larrain, Brady Corbet and Justin Kurzel.

Scroll down for full line-up

The selection was unveiled by festival president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and artistic director Alberto Barbera. It marked Buttafuoco’s first time at the annual press conference, after replacing Roberto Cicutto in October 2023.

Further filmmakers in Competition include Wang Bing, Luis Ortega, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Dag Johan Haugerud, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Walter Salles.

The line-up also includes Jon Watt’s Wolfs, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney,...

It’s been over a year since the passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but new music from the legendary composer is on the way. Today, his estate and Milan Records have announced a posthumous album titled Opus (due on August 9th), and released the lead single, a meditative new rendition of “Tong Poo.”

Taken from a “final, private piano concert” Sakamoto performed in 2022 at his Nhk 509 Studio in Tokyo, Opus features reimaginings of songs from throughout his career, including film scores, Yellow Magic Orchestra hits, and more. Due to his ailing health, the performance was completed across multiple sessions, which were all filmed by Sakamoto’s son Neo Sora; the resulting concert film/documentary will premiere on June 30th on The Criterion Channel with the title Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus.

In a statement written before his death, Sakamoto explained that Opus was “conceived as a way to record my performances — while I...

Beloved French actor Isabelle Huppert will receive the Lumière Award in the city of Lyon in October.

Created by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux, the Lumière Film Festival celebrates classic and contemporary cinema each fall. The Lumière Award honors a leading figure in the world of cinema and their entire body of work.

Huppert succeeds German director Wim Wenders who was awarded the prize in 2023. Former recipients include Tim Burton, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, Pedro Almodóvar, Miloš Forman, the Dardenne brothers and Wong Kar-wai, among others.

“It’s a great honor for me to receive the Lumière Award. It’s a magnificent prize, and so is its festival. It’s an award that bears the name of the inventors of cinema! Receiving it fills me with joy and pride,” said Huppert.

A prolific actor who shoots an average...

Isabelle Huppert will head up the 2024 Venice Film Festival jury this year. Serving as jury president, Huppert will hand out the Golden Lion and other awards when the festival on the Lido concludes. The dates for this year’s edition are August 28 to September 7.

Huppert has never before served as jury president at Venice, but she did at Cannes in 2009, awarding the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” after deliberations with James Gray, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Asia Argento, Robin Wright, and Lee Chang-dong. Before that she’d served on the jury headed by Dirk Bogarde at Cannes in 1984, which gave the top prize to “Paris, Texas.”

The 71-year-old actress has been a powerhouse force in global cinema for the past 50 years, making her mark in French cinema before quickly appearing in Hollywood productions such as Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.” Over the past decade Huppert’s...

Carrie Robbins, whose more than 30 years as a Broadway costume designer saw her involvement in 1972’s Grease, for which she contributed the production’s signature poodle skirts, and the nuns’ habits of 1983’s Agnes of God, died following a brief illness with Covid on Friday, April 12, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her death was announced by her friend Daniel Neiden.

Robbin’s Broadway career began somewhat inauspiciously with Leda and the Little Swan, a play that closed on Broadway before its scheduled opening at the Cort Theatre in 1968. Written by Amber Gascoigne and dealing with sex between generations of one family, Leda was called by William Goldman in his classic theater book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway “the hardest show of the season to sit through.”

Robbins rebounded quickly on Broadway with a revival of You Can’t Take It With You the following year, and,...

It’s a good time to be a Sofia Coppola fan. Alongside last fall’s release of one of her finest films, Priscilla, we got an expansive book detailing her career. Now we have two new updates related to other peaks of the director’s career.

First up, a New Yorker profile has revealed that a documentary on the making of her 2006 feature Marie Antoinette is in the works. Sofia Coppola’s mother Eleanor Coppola shot behind-the-scenes footage from the production, as she did for her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s films, most notably resulting in the documentary feature Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. For Marie Antoinette, she captured around 80 hours, and both mother and daughter are now in the editing process. Here’s hoping it arrives by the film’s 20th anniversary.

For something that will arrive a bit sooner, a deluxe double vinyl LP of the Lost in Translation...

Good news for fans of a certain “palmtop tiger”: Toradora! , a 2008 – 2009 TV anime based on the popular romantic comedy light novel series written by Yuyuko Takemiya and illustrated by Yasu, is releasing a limited edition vinyl album pressing of the “Toradora! Best Album √ Happyend” soundtrack. The “Toradora! Best Album √ Happyend” album was originally published in 2012, and it features 15 tracks with songs from the Toradora! TV anime as well as music from games, radio broadcasts and character song albums. Reservations for the vinyl LP are open online until February 15, 2024, with the final product scheduled to be released in Japan on April 22, 2024. “Toradora! Best Album √ Happyend” visual Related: Celebrating the Passionate World of Mari Okada If you need more Toradora! in your life, Seven Seas Entertainment publishes English language versions of both the original light novels and their manga adaptation (featuring artwork by Zekkyo), while the Toradora! TV anime currently streams on Crunchyroll,...

Kleber Mendonça Filho followed his epic Bacurau with a lower-key reflection on his personal cinematic life. A hit at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Pictures of Ghosts distills a lifetime of the Brazilian’s cinephilia through archival documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories to bring back to life downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century, many of which are mostly gone. Ahead of Grasshopper Film’s January 26 release, there’s a new trailer.

As David Katz said in his review, “If the death of cinema is imminent, at least Kleber Mendonça Filho can play it out with some vintage Tropicália. It’s becoming a nice leitmotif of the Brazilian director’s career, whose ultraviolent Bacurau curtain-raised with Gal Costa’s ‘Não Identificado,’ and latest effort Pictures of Ghosts, which premiered as a Special Screening at Cannes, eases in with Tom Zé’s deceptively jaunty ‘Happy End.

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has been relatively quiet of late and hasn’t made a film since 2017’s “Happy End,” but his exacting reputation has been coming under fire in recent weeks. First, Juliette Binoche called him a “control freak” while recalling working with the filmmaker on “Caché.” “I thought, ‘He doesn’t give a shit about what I’m doing.’ So I said that to him; I said, did you see?

Continue reading Franz Rogowski Says Michael Haneke Can Be “Cruel & Unforgiving” & Talks Terrence Malick’s ‘The Way Of The Wind’ at The Playlist.

[Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Passages.”]

Franz Rogowski’s intense and offbeat appeal gets its purest expression in the despairing polycule at the center of Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” In the Euro-chic romantic drama that recalls Mike Nichols’ “Closer” through the unsentimental lens of a Maurice Pialat film, the German dancer-turned-actor plays solipsistic, emotionally arrested filmmaker Tomas Freibur. On the eve of wrapping his latest film, he strays from his taciturn husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and into the arms of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who, when Tomas later tells her he’s in love with her, replies, “You must say that a lot.”

Rogowski is a physically striking performer, here in great shape in this film after withering as a gay prisoner post-World War II for his European Film Award-nominated turn in 2021’s “Great Freedom.” His filmography has acquainted him closely with the world’s great filmmakers, from Michael Haneke to Terrence Malick (“A Hidden Life”) and Christian Petzold...

German actor Franz Rogowski is on the rise after winning Best Actor from the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle for his performance as a toxic bisexual in Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” The “Happy End” breakout actor’s turn also featured in IndieWire’s Critics Poll of the best films and performances of 2023.

That means you shouldn’t ignore his performance in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature “Disco Boy,” winner of the 2023 Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. In this vividly dreamlike postwar drama, Rogowski plays a Belarusian immigrant haunted by his actions as a mercenary in the French Foreign Legion. Comparisons to Claire Denis’ similarly themed “Beau Travail,” as Ben Croll pointed out in his Berlinale review for IndieWire, are inevitable and apt. After all, there’s a movie that made another unusual European actor — French actor Denis Lavant — an everlasting arthouse favorite.

In “Disco Boy,” following a difficult journey across Europe,...

The Irish festival runs from February 22 to March 2.

Dublin International Film Festival has unveiled its first programme highlights, with French star Isabelle Huppert to receive Diff’s career achievement accolade, the Volta Award, and That They May Face The Rising Sun set to close the festival.

Huppert’s career has spanned six decades, from early roles such as Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker, for which she received the Bafta most promising newcomer award, to recent cinema roles including Mia Hansen-Love’s Things To Come, Michael Haneke’s Happy End, Neil Jordan’s Greta, Anthony Fabian Mrs Harris Goes To...

The project stars American actress/model Devon Ross.

The production of director Dominik Sedlar’s Second World War feature Vindicta is underway in Croatia.

The film stars Devon Ross (HBO’s Irma Vep), Jack Bandeira, Sam Hazeldine (Peaky Blinders), Pip Torrens, Suzanne Bertish and Anna Madeley.

Austrian producer Veit Heiduschka, who has produced several of Michael Haneke’s films including Happy End, Amour, The White Ribbon and Hidden, is producing alongside Croatia Film’s creative director Zeljko Zima, Stephen Ollendorff, Alan Green, Wendy Benge and Sedlar.

It is Croatian-born US filmmaker Sedlar’s third successive feature with a Second World...

Matteo Garrone’s talent for weaving stories out of the fabric of real events––especially those involving desperate or violent people––gets another airing in Io Capitano, an engrossing, visceral portrait of one young man’s brutal journey from Senegal to the coast of Italy. The director won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008 for Gomorrah, his defining, excoriating portrait of the Camorra crime syndicate, and he performed the trick again ten years later in Dogman, inspired by a gruesome gangland murder in Rome. He’s also had success in comedies (Reality) and fantasy (Tale of Tales), but his new film is an epic embracing the defining issue of Italian politics right now––the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean heading for Europe––making a potentially abstract, no-less-urgent topic tactile and approachable.

The migrant crisis is having a moment this year in European cinema, with Agnieszka Holland’s recent Green Border,...

When Franz Rogowski tries to pinpoint the moment he went from being a struggling unknown to an in-demand art house star — the 37-year-old German actor is still basking in critical acclaim for his performances in Ira Sachs’ Passages alongside Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as well

as Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Berlin festival sleeper Disco Boy and will be walking the Lido red carpet with Giorgio Diritti’s Venice competition title Lubo — he goes back to Berlin 2018.

“That was the year I had a double pack: Two films in competition, with [Christian Petzold’s] Transit and [Thomas Stuber’s] In the Aisles,” says Rogowski, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter via a shaky Zoom connection from France, where he’s spending a few days after wrapping his latest, Bird from American Honey director Andrea Arnold.

“I was also one of the European Shooting Stars that year. So it was a bit of a turning point.

Director Ira Sachs and lead Franz Rogowski discussed their film “Passages” at an exclusive screening in London on Friday.

The screening was the first of a series of exclusive Q&a events curated by Variety in partnership with brand and culture consultancy Bsbp targeted at BAFTA and AMPAS voters as well as key players in the showbiz community in the U.K., taking place at London’s The Cinema at Selfridges. Variety and Bsbp teamed with film distributor, global streaming service and production company Mubi for the first screening in the series, “Passages,” written and directed by Sachs.

The screening was accompanied by a Q&a conducted by Variety critic Guy Lodge with Sachs and Rogowski. The sexually frank relationship drama, about a polysexual Parisian love triangle, also stars Ben Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos, and premiered to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival, also playing at the Berlinale. It...

Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, revolutionized storytelling by narrating its entire plot in reverse order, earning critical acclaim and Oscars. However, several movies before Memento, such as Happy End, Betrayal, and 2 Friends, had already perfected the art of reverse storytelling, showcasing the changing notions of love, friendship, and growing up. Peppermint Candy, released just a year before Memento, used reverse chronology to tell an epic tale of a man's life and serve as a metaphorical documentation of a changing South Korea.

Christopher Nolan’s breakout hit Memento felt groundbreaking in its time for narrating its entire storyline in reverse order, taking first-time viewers by surprise. Based on the short story Memento Mori by his brother Jonathan Nolan, the 2000 psychological thriller followed the disturbed life of Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator with short-term memory loss. Clinging on to the fragments of his memory through Polaroid photographs and tattoos,...

Following his epic Bacurau, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho returned to Cannes Film Festival this year with Pictures of Ghosts, a bittersweet, fascinating look at his personal cinematic life. Utilizing archive documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories to bring back to life downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century, many of which are mostly gone, the film will stop by TIFF and NYFF followed by a release from Grasshopper Film and now the first trailer has arrived.

David Katz said in his review, “If the death of cinema is imminent, at least Kleber Mendonça Filho can play it out with some vintage Tropicália. It’s becoming a nice leitmotif of the Brazilian director’s career, whose ultraviolent Bacurau curtain-raised with Gal Costa’s “Não Identificado,” and latest effort Pictures of Ghosts, which premiered as a Special Screening at Cannes, eases in with Tom Zé’s deceptively jaunty “Happy End.

“I wanted to make a movie of pleasure,” offers Ira Sachs. “For me, that means skin is revealed. Skin is part of what cinema can offer in a way that creates a kind of… horny environment for the audience and the actors.”

Sachs, the veteran indie filmmaker behind intimate dramas like Forty Shades of Blue and Love Is Strange, is discussing his stellar latest, Passages, about a libertine director in Paris, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), who decides to have an affair with a woman, Agathe (Adéle Exarchopoulos), despite being in a...

When it comes to “Passages,” Ira Sachs’ witty, wise and very sexy Parisian drama, it all started with Franz Rogowski, who plays the film’s self-absorbed film director, Tomas. “I had seen Michael Haneke’s “Happy End” starring Franz,” remembers Sachs, the auteur of richly textured, grown-up gems such as “Love is Strange,” “Little Men” and “Keep the Lights On,” recently joining me for an interview about his latest, opening in theaters this week.

Continue reading ‘Passages’: Ira Sachs On His New Film’s Nc-17 Rating, The Movie’s Intimate Sex Scenes & Finding Pleasure In Men Behaving Badly [Interview] at The Playlist.

After of two decades of filmmaking, from “Married Life” to “Love Is Strange,” Ira Sachs has made his tenth feature with the alluring “Passages.” The unrestrained, brazenly sexy love triangle starring an all-start cast of Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos hit big at both Sundance and Berlin.

Last January, Sachs enjoyed holding court at a Sundance steakhouse as distributors made offers. Although the MPA Ratings Board slapped an Nc-17 on “Passages,” winning suitor Mubi will release the French-produced film unrated on August 4 before making Sachs’ film available online to its 12 million subscribers.

The filmmaker Zoomed with me from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anne Thompson: Twelve million. That’s a significant number!

Ira Sachs: They understand that there’s a large audience who is interested in personal filmmaking that has been neglected by Hollywood. There’s no interest in...

Cannes acclaimed filmmaker Marie Amachoukeli and leading French studio Miyu Productions will pair on “Happy End,” a macabre comedy Amachoukeli will co-direct with Vladimir Mavounia Kouka. Set for production in 2024, the project has already received backing from Bac Films and MK2, with the latter handling international sales.

Variety has scored a first look at the project, which recently presented at the Cartoon Movie pitch and co-production forum in Bordeaux.

Imagining a world without death and employing a visual style reminiscent of Max Fleischer, the 2D, adult-targeted film follows Bertha King, a suicidal career soldier who has the bad to luck to finally end things right as the grim reaper hangs up his scythe. Left yearning to die while death has gone on strike, the depressed hero must navigate a morose new existence all of sudden freed from the bonds of mortality.

“The idea of the film is to encourage laughter and re-enchantment,...

Within the Korean film industry, Jeon Do-yeon is both a big star and a deeply respected actor’s actor. In over 25 years on-screen, she has appeared in scores of K-dramas and over 20 films, including numerous titles now considered modern Korean classics. Now, she’s poised for greater global exposure as the star of Netflix’s forthcoming action drama Kill Boksoon, a film that blends everything international audiences have come to love about Korean cinema: wit, genre invention, powerful performances, slick production values and a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Soon after her breakthrough on the small screen in the 1990s, Jeon quickly earned a reputation as a uniquely chameleonic film actress, inhabiting a diverse range of characters — from a doctor (A Promise, 1998) to a school girl (The Harmonium in My Memory, 1999), an adulterous wife (Happy End, 1999), a dreamy bank teller (I Wish I Had a Wife, 2001), a time traveler (My Mother,...

Andie MacDowell is keeping a brave face while she faces her toughest battle yet in a new trailer for My Happy Ending. Based on Anat Gov’s play, Happy End, the comedy-drama will follow a famous actress (MacDowell) who’s dealing with a life-changing and crushing diagnosis of stage four cancer. Trying to keep things on the hush-hush, the actress enters into a treatment program without telling her friends, family, or even her talent manager. The beginning bits of the trailer reveals MacDowell’s character trying to keep up with appearances, even lying to other hospital patients and telling them that she’s going undercover to study for a role.

Netflix has unveiled a trailer for Berlin-bound action drama “Kill Boksoon,” with Jeon Do-yeon, previous winner of the best actress prize at Cannes, in the starring role.

The film sees Jeon as Gil, a single woman juggling the demanding and conflicting roles of professional killer and mother to a teenage daughter.

Despite her unblemished track record as an assassin, Gil hesitates about renewing her contract at the killing company where she is employed and decides to spend time finding out what is gnawing at her daughter. But complications are never far away, such as discovering her next target is at a parent-teacher meeting.

She also finds herself in competition with another hired gun (portrayed by “Peninsula” star Koo Kyo-hwan) and under pressure from her employers, portrayed Sul Kyung-gu and E Som (“Samjin English Company Class”).

The movie will have its world premiere in the Berlinale Special section, which acts as...

Exclusive: Roadside Attractions has snapped up North American rights to the comedy My Happy Ending, toplined by four-time Golden Globe nominee Andie MacDowell (Maid).

The film directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon will be released exclusively in theaters nationwide on February 24 — contending on its opening weekend with Uni’s Cocaine Bear, Shout! Studios’ sci-fi dramedy Linoleum, Warner Bros.’ animated title Mummies and Lionsgate’s Jesus Revolution, among other titles.

My Happy Ending follows a famous actor (MacDowell) who goes incognito to seek treatment for a medical issue. While at the hospital, she meets three unique and remarkable women — an aging rocker, a young mother, and a forever-single, retired schoolteacher. Together, they help her face adversity with humor and camaraderie while coaching her for the most challenging role she has ever played…herself.

Rona Tamir adapted the screenplay for the Israeli/UK co-production, based on the acclaimed Israeli play Sof Tov...

A version of this review first ran during the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

When you saw Joaquin Phoenix dancing down those outdoor steps toward the end of “Joker,” you probably didn’t think about Princess Elsa belting out “Let It Go” in the 2013 animated film “Frozen.” But Mark Cousins did –- and that’s the difference between him and you and me and the rest of the people who see Cousins make that juxtaposition in his documentary “The Story of Film: A New Generation.”

Cousins ties Joker and Elsa together because of the defiance at the heart of his dance and her song, and he does so at the start of “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” The documentary was an extraordinarily apt film to screen on the opening afternoon of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, which came 14 months after the pandemic had forced the festival to cancel its 2020 edition. The...

Altered Innocence has picked up U.S. rights to Fabrice du Welz’s dark contemporary fairytale “Adoration,” which premiered at Locarno Film Festival. A release is planned for summer.

“Adoration” combines a violent thriller with a romantic sexual awakening story, capturing the teenage intensity of “amour fou.” It features rising stars Thomas Gioria (“Custody”) and Fantine Harduin (Michael Haneke’s “Happy End”). The film is the finale to the director’s Ardennes trilogy, following “Calvaire” and “Alleluia.”

As well as Locarno, the film played at leading genre festivals such as Fantastic Fest and Sitges, where it won the Special Prize of the Jury, and Rotterdam.

The film follows shy 12-year-old Paul who lives near a psychiatric institute. After an encounter with a patient there, the troubled yet beautiful Gloria, he becomes infatuated and vows to protect her. Insisting the doctors are holding her hostage for an inheritance, the two escape...

Oscar and double Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke has become the latest prominent European artist to lament what he calls a “witch hunt” in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Speaking with Kurier, the Austrian filmmaker said there is no question that “any form of rape or coercion is punishable… But this hysterical pre-judgment which is spreading now, I find absolutely disgusting. And I don’t want to know how many of these accusations related to incidents 20 or 30 years ago are primarily statements that have little to do with sexual assault.”

The renown director of Amour, The White Ribbon, The Piano Teacher and last year’s Happy End allowed he would probably be referred to as “Haneke, the male chauvinist pig” after making the comments in the interview. He qualified his statements saying the current debate is disturbing because of “the blind rage that’s not based on facts...