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There’s a lot to grab your attention here, but strong performances struggle to save Ariane Labed’s adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters

Award-winning French star Ariane Labed directs her first feature film, a self-aware and self-conscious work she has adapted from the novel Sisters by Booker-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson. Johnson’s own debts to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are acknowledged in the film with a quote from The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”, and a visual quote from The Shining. It’s made in a style clearly influenced by the Greek new wave in which Labed made her name in films such as Attenberg and Alps.

There’s an awful lot to grab the attention here: a story of an intense sisterly bond in a private shared world, a lot of set-pieces,...

Tonight, we’ve got the latest on everything – the bonus puzzle, all answers and contestants – that you need to know about tonight’s episode of Wheel of Fortune!

The post is updated as soon as it airs, so stay on TV Regular for all the latest on Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! and all the latest TV news and previews.

Wheel of Fortune Contestants & Winner – Friday, 24 January 2025 WinnerOther Contestants Kate StuntzJaryce Echols, Andy Kraus Wheel of Fortune Prize Puzzle & All Solutions – Friday, 24 January 2025 $1,000 Toss Up: The Italian Alps (On the Map)

$2,000 Toss Up: Spicy Curry (Food & Drink)

Round 1: Riding A Toboggan To Work (Fun & Games)

Round 2: Cloudy With A Chance Of Snowplows (Weather Report)

Round 3 (Prize): Magical Northern Lights (Things)

Triple Toss Up 1: Take The Dog For A Walk (Phrase)

Triple Toss Up 2: Feed The Birds (Phrase)

Triple Toss Up 3: Let The Cat Out Of...

Nobody makes movies quite like Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, and his 2024 dark comedy anthology film "Kinds of Kindness" is something like "The Twilight Zone" for perverts and sickos (in the most complimentary way). Emma Stone leads a cast of talented actors who each appear in a triptych of tales, playing different roles in each story, and the somewhat nihilistic fable is the most "Lanthimos" movie Lanthimos has ever made.

Some fans were disappointed in "Kinds of Kindness" after the Academy Award-winning psychosexual delights of Stone and Lanthimos's previous collaboration, "Poor Things," which featured a script by "The Great" creator Tony McNamara, but "Kinds of Kindness" is a fascinating piece of work nonetheless. Lanthimos co-wrote "Kinds of Kindness" with his frequent collaborator Efthymis Filippou, who also wrote the director's films "Alps," "Dogtooth," "The Lobster," and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," and it's a return to many of his unusual trademarks.

The Kino Film Collection streaming service is celebrating the annual Sundance Film Festival season with a special January program featuring festival-alum films.

IndieWire can announce that 49 movies that have previously played at Sundance will be part of the Kino Film Collection, including “Prey for Rock and Roll” and “The Disappearance of My Mother” — both new-to-the-platform films begin streaming January 23. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” will also make its streaming debut later this season.

Highlights from the Kino Film Collection Sundance edition include Todd Haynes’ iconic 1991 film “Poison,” Taika Waititi’s breakout “Boy,” Eliza Hittman’s “It Felt Like Love,” and Chloe Zhao’s “Songs My Brother Taught Me.” Alex Gibney’s documentary “Finding Fela” and Nina Menkes’ acclaimed “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” are additionally among the selected titles.

The Kino Film Collection similarly launched a Toronto International Film Festival edition in 2024, with Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Alps” and Pietro Marcello’s “Martin Eden.”

Kino...

On Thursday September 26 2024, National Geographic broadcasts Europe From Above!

Alps Season 5 Episode 5 Episode Summary

The upcoming episode of “Europe From Above,” titled “Alps,” promises to take viewers on a breathtaking journey over one of the most stunning mountain ranges in the world. Airing on National Geographic, this episode showcases the beauty and innovation found in the Alps region.

In this episode, the aerial views highlight an impressive solar panel engineering project. The show will explore how this technology is being integrated into the picturesque landscape, showcasing the balance between nature and modern advancements. This segment will likely provide insight into how the Alps are adapting to sustainable energy solutions.

Another exciting feature of the episode is a hot air balloon festival. The colorful balloons floating above the majestic mountains create a striking visual contrast. This festival not only offers a feast for the eyes but also captures the spirit of...

On Thursday, September 26, 2024, at 10:00 Am, National Geographic will present an exciting episode of “Europe From Above” titled “Alps.” This episode invites viewers to take to the skies for a stunning aerial view of the magnificent Alps region. With breathtaking landscapes and captivating sights, the episode promises to showcase the beauty and innovation that define this iconic area.

The episode highlights an impressive solar panel engineering feat, demonstrating how technology harmonizes with nature to harness renewable energy in this picturesque setting. Viewers will also enjoy the colorful spectacle of a hot air balloon festival, where vibrant balloons dot the sky, creating a mesmerizing scene against the backdrop of the majestic mountains. The flight alongside the Northern Bald Ibis adds an extra layer of intrigue, offering a glimpse into the lives of this unique bird species and their habitat.

“Europe From Above: Alps” is set to be a visual feast, combining...

Can’t make it to Toronto International Film Festival next week? Have no fear, Kino Film Collection is here to make you feel less left out. Though the streamer won’t be offering the latest selections from this year’s festival, to celebrate the annual showcase, it has created a program of 87 films that have previously screened there and will be available throughout the month. Below you can find some of the selections with language provided by Kino.

“3 Faces”

Winner of the Best Screenplay Award and nominated for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, “3 Faces” is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking. Starring Behnaz Jafari as herself, Panahi’s film builds in narrative, thematic, and visual intricacy to put forth a grand expression of community and solidarity under the eye of oppression.

“Alps”

Before “The Favourite”, Academy...

Even without the “Welcome to Marathon” flyer that greets Katerina (Angeliki Papoulia) and Yannis (Vangelis Mourikis) upon their arrival in “Arcadia,” it’s clear that they’ve entered one of Greece’s stranger corners: a resort town where they will look into the untimely death of a loved one. An unnerving and curious meditation on grief, Yorgos Zois’ second feature will satiate those looking for deeper cuts from the Greek Weird Wave than Yorgos Lanthimos and Christos Nikou, but will hold limited appeal for those who generally look to find comfort at the movies; Zois offers more of the opposite.

Still, there’s something compelling at the core of “Arcadia,” which takes literally the idea of Marathon becoming a ghost town in its off-season. In a place where tourists come and go, but the residents who cater to their whims can feel stuck in purgatory, Katerina and Yannis aren’t...

★★★★1/2

‘A visually stunning & emotionally devastating take on a classic scary story.’

Screen Rant

★★★★

‘One of the best horror films of the year so far.’

Dread Central

‘A tasty blend of blood, wit and social commentary.’

Screen International

Lost in a hostile forest, the Marquis d’Urfé, a noble emissary of the King of France, finds refuge in the home of a strange family… An adaptation of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s 1884 vampiric novella of Gothic Romanticism “La Famille du Vourdalak”, published 40 years before Dracula, The Vourdalak is a haunting gothic tale directed by Adrien Beau and starring Ariane Labed, Kacey Mottet-Klein, and Grégoire Colin. The Vourdalak premiered at Venice Film Festival where it was nominated for Best Film at International Critics Week.

The Vourdalak arrives on Digital Platforms on 16th September 2024 from Blue Finch Film Releasing

The post Haunting Gothic Tale The Vourdalak – On Digital Platforms 16th September 2024 appeared first on Horror Asylum.

Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek filmmaker known for his unique and often surreal style. Poor Things is Lanthimos' most broadly appealing movie. Many of Lanthimos' earlier works are challenging films to watch, but each provides a distinct experience.

Yorgos Lanthimos has created several exciting movies over the course of his career, but his experimental style and distanced storytelling have resulted in varying degrees of critical and commercial success. The director is notorious for his unique narratives and unconventional camera movements, which give his projects a very specific tone and atmosphere. While this can sometimes be alienating and lead to some misunderstandings in regard to the story, he always offers plenty of strange clues and a deep subtext that brings his movies to life and gives the viewer something profound to think about.

Lanthimos career began in the late 90s with a series of Greek-language shorts that first allowed the director...

Shot while in post-production on Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness shares with its predecessor a preoccupation with the struggle to achieve autonomy in a bounded world. While the film does mark a return to the austere aesthetics of earlier Lanthimos films like Dogtooth and The Lobster, the more operative change that supersedes and to a degree governs that aesthetic recourse is the swapping out of Tony McNamara, the writer of Poor Things and co-writer of The Favourite, for Efthimis Filippou, who collaborated with Lanthimos on the scripts for The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster, Alps, and Dogtooth.

Readers familiar with Lanthimos’s work will easily recognize the stark tonal divide between these groups of films. The sadism with which Lanthimos treated his early characters, the cynicism with which he characterized their capacity to change, and the nihilism redolent in his view of the world which...

Joe Alwyn has been the center of much media attention in the last few years. That may be news if you’ve been living in a hermetically sealed bunker. But outside that particular and unsolicited spotlight, the dandyish 33-year-old British actor has carved his name out in films from idiosyncratic auteurs. There was Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II” as a grieving and queer-flirting film editor; Claire Denis’ sensuous 2022 Cannes Grand Prix winner “Stars at Noon” as a Brit adrift in Nicaragua having lots of sex with Margaret Qualley’s character; and most recently “Kinds of Kindness,” whose director Yorgos Lanthimos he previously starred for as a lusty baron in “The Favourite.”

Alwyn is back this year at Cannes in three roles in “Kinds of Kindness,” co-written with Lanthimos by his friend and “Alps” and “The Lobster” collaborator Efthimis Flippou. Which means we are very much in the mode of old-school Lanthimos,...

Fans of Greek surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos know that there's a lot to love about his dark, bizarre films, but it can be very difficult to recommend them to people. Social rules are often thrown out the window and what we think of as standard human behavior is often turned on its head, which make his films uncomfortable even before digging into some of the tougher subject matter. For those who are willing to view the world through Lanthimos' slightly tilted (and fish-eyed) lens, however, these films are beautiful explorations of the human condition. But which is the best? If someone were going to dip their toe into his work, or only had the time and energy to watch one film, which film should they pick? 

Fear not, intrepid film fan, because I'm here with the definitive /Film ranking of all of Lanthimos' feature films -- from his earliest Greek-language efforts to his latest,...

Two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone further expands her cinematic universe alongside auteur Yorgos Lanthimos with their latest collaboration “Kinds of Kindness.”

Yet while “Poor Things” was an Academy Award-winning feature, the Cannes premiere for “Kinds of Kindness” seemed to puzzle critics and fans alike. The feature, which was originally titled “And”, is Lanthimos’ eighth film and co-stars Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Hunter Schafer, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie.

Lanthimos previously described the contemporary anthology film as being “three different stories, with four or five actors who play one part in each story, so they all play three different parts,” which, according to the director, was “almost like making three films” in one.

Lanthimos reunited with frequent screenwriter collaborator Efthimis Filippou to pen the script for “Kinds of Kindness.” The duo previously co-wrote Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” and “Alps.”

The IndieWire...

Irish production company Element Pictures is firing on all cylinders, as company partners Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe bring three very different pictures to Cannes.

The Yorgos Lanthimos producers are still smiling after a nail-biter Oscar night that yielded four wins for “Poor Things,” including Best Actress for Emma Stone. She also stars in all three episodes in Lanthimos’ follow-up, the $15-million black comedy “Kinds of Kindness” along with returning co-stars Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley and Lanthimos newbie Jesse Plemons, who leads the first two episodes. He gets to show what he can do throughout; Stone delivers an emotional performance in the ultimate story.

Each of the stories features the same actors, but with different emphasis. Lanthimos had his eye on Plemons for a while, said Lowe on Zoom, and finally found a film for him: “When the right thing comes along, Yorgos pounces. He’s specific about casting.

Getting a feature into Cannes’ official selection is among the pinnacles of filmmaking achievements for most production companies. Ireland’s Element Pictures clearly isn’t most production companies — this year, it has three.

According to co-founder Ed Guiney, who set up Element with Andrew Lowe in 2001, while his company’s triple-headed festival visit may be “wonderful”, it’s simply down to good fortune and timing. “You know, some years you have nothing for Cannes,” he says, speaking from Element’s breezy, white-walled Dublin headquarters, located above an outdoor clothing shop and a jeweler on the Irish capital’s busy O’Connell Street, where it also runs its distribution arm Volta Pictures and the programming for the popular arthouse Light House Cinema, which it has operated since 2012.

But for anyone who has been keeping an eye on Element over the last decade, this edition of Cannes is merely another unprecedented milestone...

Sydney Film Festival (June 5-16) has unveiled the 12 titles that will play in competition at its 71st edition, including six features that are set to premiere at Cannes this month.

Fresh from playing in Competition at Cannes will be Kinds of Kindness, starring Emma Stone and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who won the Sydney Film Prize in 2012 with Alps. Further Palme d’Or contenders selected for Sydney include Grand Tour from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes, whose Arabian Nights won the Sydney Film Prize in 2015; Christophe Honoré’s French-Italian comedy Marcello Mio; and Payal Kapadia’s Indian romantic drama All We Imagine As Light.

Emma Stone in Kinds Of Kindness Screenshot: Searchlight Pictures/YouTube Sweet dreams are made of this: Yorgos Lanthimos has brought his merry band of weirdos, including Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn, back together for a new picture. Kinds Of Kindness, which premieres in...

Emma Stone in Kinds Of KindnessScreenshot: Searchlight Pictures/YouTube

Sweet dreams are made of this: Yorgos Lanthimos has brought his merry band of weirdos, including Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn, back together for a new picture. Kinds Of Kindness, which premieres in theaters...

It’s fun to think that when Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos were on the Oscar campaign trail during the early months of the year, they already had a new project under their belts. “Kinds of Kindness” marks the third straight feature collaboration between actress and director (and Searchlight Pictures) after “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” both of which won their leading performers, Olivia Colman and Stone, Best Actress Oscars.

The first teaser for this new joint was released this morning and it’s one of those 46-second clips that tells you absolutely nothing but flashes a ton of cool imagery in your face. Set to a remixed version of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” by the Eurythmics, we see Stone zooming around in a purple muscle car (and dancing in an empty parking lot), a close-up of a dog in black and white, Jesse Plemons getting whapped across...

Searchlight Pictures has revealed the official teaser trailer for Kinds of Kindness, the upcoming movie from Poor Things and The Favourite filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos.

Opening in theaters on June 21, 2024, the film was written by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou.

Kinds of Kindness is a triptych fable following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife, who was missing at sea, has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

The film stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer.

The producers include Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element, Kasia Malipan, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Originally titled “And,” the movie started production in October of 2022 in New Orleans and...

Yorgos Lanthimos is examining the kinds of cruelty in his latest film “Kinds of Kindness.”

The feature, which was originally titled “And”, marks Lanthimos’ eighth film and reunites the auteur with two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone following her recent “Poor Things” Best Actress win. Stone previously garnered her first Oscar after starring in Lanthimos’ “The Favourite.”

While the plot details for the Searchlight Pictures release remain elusive, we do know that “Kinds of Kindness” is an anthology film with three separate storylines that collide. Stone stars alongside her “Poor Things” co-stars Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, plus Jesse Plemons, Hunter Schafer, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie.

“It’s great to be working again with Emma,” Lanthimos told The Guardian about the project. “It makes it so much easier to have someone there who trusts you so much, and who you trust so much.” The duo are next set...

It is no secret that Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ career has been evolving quite nicely since his hit film The Lobster. The Greek director has gained numerous major awards and nominations, and with his recent hit film, Poor Things, winning several Academy Awards, we are pleased to confirm that his upcoming movie, Kinds of Kindness, will be released later this year – on June 21, 2024.

Unlike his two previous films, The Favourite and Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness will be based on an original script written by Lanthimos himself and Efthimis Filippou. It is going to be an anthology film, which the director himself described as “a contemporary film, set in the US – three different stories, with four or five actors who play one part in each story”. The actors in question include Lanthimos’ favorite collaborator, Emma Stone, as well as Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie,...

Searchlight is wasting no time getting the next Yorgos Lanthimos film out there.

Less than a week after “Poor Things” won four Academy Awards include Best Actress for Emma Stone, distributor Searchlight Pictures has announced the release date for his next film, “Kinds of Kindness“: It will open in theaters June 21, 2024. A limited release will kick off the launch for Lanthimos’ eighth feature film, with a wider nationwide opening to follow.

The June 21 release almost certainly means that “Kinds of Kindness” will be ready for Cannes 2024 — and will potentially be his first feature to premiere on the Croisette since 2017’s “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” His past Oscar winners “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” both went the way of Venice. The 2024 Cannes Film Festival runs May 14 through May 25.

“Kinds of Kindness” is an anthology film with three separate storylines that collide, though plot details remain scarce so far.

When it comes to director Piero Messina’s Another End, it’s almost necessary to begin with its ending. But only to say that its denouement isn’t unlike that of M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, for how it confers meaning retroactively to the plot and will, most likely, leave you dumbfounded. Revealing more would mean spoiling this science-fiction film, which is as guilty of overtly sentimental dialogue as it is meticulous about revealing the rules of its world little by little. The screenplay’s last-minute plot twist is so astonishing that it all but makes one forget the hackneyed elements that structure the film.

What the atmosphere of Another End tells us from the start is that the world has become a perpetual penumbra. Its inhabitants look disaffected, if not depressed. That’s certainly the case with Sal (Gael García Bernal), who enters his elderly neighbor’s apartment...

None of Us Strangers: Zois Probes Unrest of Our Shadows

“It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them,” states a character in Tom Stoppard’s celebrated 1993 play Arcadia, a word which connotes an Edenic or utopian realm. There’s a much more ironically melancholic context in the similarly titled sophomore film from Greek director Yorgos Zois. A peripheral alumni of the Greek Weird Wave (he had a small role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2011 film Alps), Zois is reunited with Angeliki Papoulia in this rather sorrowful study on the stages of grief and the circuitous evolution of love.…...

Following part one of our 2024 preview, we’re counting down our 50 most-anticipated films of the year.

50. The Actor (Duke Johnson)

Duke Johnson, one half of the directing duo behind Anomalisa, makes his solo directorial (and live-action) debut with The Actor. For being based on the posthumously published novel from Donald E. Westlake, a synopsis points towards an amnesia thriller with André Holland as a New York City actor beaten and stranded in 1950s Ohio. Gemma Chan and Toby Jones co-star. As a state native I’m intrigued how they shot Budapest for small-town Ohio––the two don’t exactly scream perfect matches, but I won’t doubt the movie magic before I see it. Anomalisa was a wholly original stop-motion feature; we’re intrigued how Johnson continues that creativity in the live-action realm. – Caleb H.

49. Presence (Steven Soderbergh)

Steven Soderbergh has flirted with horror before––2018’s Unsane in particular nearly...

Yorgos Lanthimos’ next film is kind of three movies in one, according to the auteur.

Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness” (originally titled “And”) was filmed in New Orleans while “Poor Things” was in VFX post-production in October 2022, and in case it wasn’t enough having two films back-to-back, the “Favourite” filmmaker revealed to The Guardian that “Kind of Kindness” is a trio of storylines.

“It’s a contemporary film, set in the U.S. — three different stories, with four or five actors who play one part in each story, so they all play three different parts. It was almost like making three films, really,” Lanthimos said. “It’s all shot and we have started editing.”

“Kinds of Kindness” reunites Lanthimos with “Poor Things” stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley, plus “The Favourite” actor Joe Alwyn. Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, and Hunter Schafer mark their respective first films with Lanthimos as part of the cast.

Variety will honor “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos with the Creative Impact in Directing Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The award, which is for the director’s body of work including “The Favourite”, “The Lobster” and “The Killing of A Sacred Deer,” will be presented as part of Variety’s annual 10 Directors to Watch and Creative Impact Awards brunch presented by Directv on Jan. 5 at the Parker Palm Springs. “Poor Things” star and frequent collaborator with Yorgos, Emma Stone, will be on hand to present him the award at the brunch.

“Poor Things” debuted at this year’s Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion. The Searchlight Pictures film has continued to wow audiences after premiering at the Telluride Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. It won the Bronze Frog for cinematographer Robbie Ryan and the Audience Award at CamerImage, as well as...

A "bizarre dance sequence" could be a square in a game of Yorgos Lanthimos-themed Bingo. When I watched "Poor Things" (screenplay by Tony McNamara) at the New York Film Festival, the film's contender for Greatest Guffaws occurred when the free-spirited Bella Beatrix (Emma Stone), a Frankensteinesque reanimated woman, bounces onto the ballroom floor with abandon. Her rakish paramour Duncan Wedderburn (a hilarious Mark Ruffalo) joins in and marvels at her untamable spirit, though she would end up burning out his patience later. Living in a steampunk Victorian setting of futurism and antiquity, Bella's dance is her proverbial middle finger to restrictive "polite society."

Weird dancing — or odd choreography — is a vital ingredient to Lanthimos' directorial idiosyncrasies, given that dance is an extension of power, control, or conformity. His early 2005 "Kinetta" engages in a litany of sloppy homicide reenactments, and several of his films followed up with his signature "weird dances.

Maria Hatzakou and Alexandra Matheou’s “Stringa,” a female-led folk-horror set in remote rural Greece, won the top prize at Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Crossroads Co-Production Forum, which wrapped with an award ceremony Wednesday.

The Greek project took home the Two Thirty-Five Co-Production Award, giving full post-production image and sound support to a film that’s in development. This will be a debut feature for Matheou and Hatzakou, who also produces the film under her label Merricat. She was the one to receive the prize from the jury, which called the project “very solid and persuasive” in the ways in which it “addresses freedom of choice in a patriarchal society.”

The directors, who also co-wrote the script, describe it as “a film about the female experience,” a subversive horror that “touches on post-generational trauma and the sly ways by which the patriarchy still manages to impose itself on our lives and choices.

Explore where to stream the best films of 2023.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Amerikatsi (Michael A. Goorjian)

If “Rear Window meets Life Is Beautiful” sounds like an all-timer of a cursed elevator pitch, then there’s nothing Michael A. Goorjian’s well-intentioned crowd-pleaser Amerikatsi will be able to do to win you over. A stubbornly unfashionable blend of broad comedy and highly sentimental prisoner-of-war drama, it’s paint-by-numbers middlebrow cinema of the kind the Weinstein Company would release regularly, albeit on a much more contained budget. While there is some brief novelty factor that movies of this distinctively Weinsteinian vintage are still getting made outside Hollywood, even as the broader cinematic landscape has moved past emulating that studio’s tried-and-tested formula in the hopes of awards success,...

“Sex is back,” Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride Film Festival, told a packed house of festivalgoers as they took in the newest effort from Yorgos Lanthimos at the 50th anniversary edition. A pre-screening convo and tribute was moderated by director Karyn Kusama, as the two discussed Lanthimos’ filmography, including his early works “Kinetta” and “Alps.”

In the audience were Oscar winners like director Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) and actor Casey Affleck (“Manchester by the Sea”), and they, along with the rest of the crowd, devoured the audacious, Frankenstein-esque tale.

After bowing at the Venice Film Festival, Lanthimos brought his eccentric cinematic style to the Colorado mountains with the sci-fi dramedy, the first movie among this year’s sensational Telluride lineup that feels like a potential best picture winner.

Based on the novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, it tells the story of a young woman named Bella Baxter...

“Poor Things” indeed — for viewers who now have to wait a few more months, at least.

Searchlight Pictures has just moved Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein retelling off its planned September 8 release date to a December 8, 2023 holiday-adjacent opening. The Disney-owned distributor and production company made the announcement Tuesday morning mere hours after the Venice Film Festival director confirmed the movie for a world premiere competition spot.

The shift comes as studios start to debate what movies they can push forward sans talent amid SAG-AFTRA strike orders that prevent union members from promoting their work in any form — that includes interviews, social media, and flashbulb-lit festival red carpets that draw attention to fall season Oscar hopefuls.

Still, “Poor Things” will sail ahead as originally predicted on the Lido without Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, and more from the ensemble to wave at paparazzi from water taxis and participate in press conferences, screening intros,...

The thing Aden likes about acting, he tells someone who cares enough to ask, is “how organized it is.” You know where you stand, quite literally, because someone tells you; you’re given things to say, and told how to say them. Order and certainty aren’t typically seen as benefits of the thespian calling, and even Aden doesn’t sound entirely convinced of his own words. But then Aden — played, in a performance of brilliant, diamantine versatility, by Nabhaan Rizwan — is never entirely convinced of himself, period, when he hasn’t a script to follow or a character to inhabit. A simultaneously playful and savagely pointed satire from first-time feature director Naqqash Khalid, “In Camera” traces how its young British-Asian protagonist’s sense of identity is progressively diminished by the cynicism and tokenism of the industry he’s trying to crack — though as it turns out, when you lose yourself entirely,...

Fox Searchlight recently announced that the “female Frankenstein” story Poor Things, which stars Emma Stone (Cruella), will be receiving a theatrical release on September 8th. Now they have unveiled a teaser trailer for the film, and you can check it out in the embed above!

Stone earned an Oscar nomination for her role in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Favourite, and Poor Things brings them back together. Lanthimos has directed the film from a screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Alasdair Gray (pick up a copy Here). Stone is joined in the cast by Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man: No Way Home), Mark Ruffalo (The Avengers), Ramy Youssef (Ramy), Jerrod Carmichael (The Carmichael Show), and Christopher Abbott (Possessor).

When we first heard about Poor Things, all we knew about the story was that it was called a “female Frankenstein” story because after drowning herself to escape her abusive husband,...

Remember when we shared the news that Emma Stone (Cruella) had signed on to star in the “female Frankenstein” story Poor Things? It’s understandable if you don’t, since more than two years have passed since that announcement was made – but now Fox Searchlight has Poor Things set for a September 8th theatrical release, and they’ve gotten the marketing machine started by unveiling a trio of images from the film. These images, which feature Stone and co-star Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man: No Way Home), can be seen at the bottom of this article.

Stone earned an Oscar nomination for her role in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Favourite, and Poor Things brings them back together. Lanthimos has directed the film from a screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Alasdair Gray (pick up a copy Here).

The film is described as being the incredible tale and...

The Cannes Film Festival has appointed Swedish director and two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund as jury president for its upcoming 76th edition, running from May 16 to 27.

Östlund’s jury duty will fall exactly 50 years after late compatriot, actress Ingrid Bergman also served in the role in 1973.

“I am happy, proud, and humbled to be trusted with the honor of jury president for this year’s Competition at the Festival de Cannes. Nowhere in the film world is the anticipation as strong as when the curtain rises on the films in Competition at the festival,” said Östlund.

“It is a privilege to be part of it, together with the Cannes audience of connoisseurs. I am sincere when I say that cinema culture is in its most important period ever. The cinema has a unique aspect – there, we watch together, and it demands more on what is shown and increases the intensity of the experience.

Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).In Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift (2017), two women holiday in Sylt, the northernmost island in Germany. Theresa and Josefina return to the port city of Hamburg temporarily and then, across a cut, Theresa appears alone in Antigua. Soon afterward, she sails across the Atlantic, via the Azores, back to Hamburg—but before she sails, Theresa stops at a beach in Antigua, where she gathers shells and dried coral.Within the first ten minutes of Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to Drift, a woman hands another woman a piece of dried coral—“from Antigua,” she says in French. She is not Theresa and the film does not return to Antigua. Ida, played by Angeliki Papoulia, nonetheless shares with Theresa the experience of a trip there, where she came across a shoreline “like the cemetery of a coral reef.”Human Flowers of Flesh shares a...

By the time Tom Cruise arrived at the Cannes Film Festival for “Top Gun: Maverick,” a movie originally supposed to play at the festival two years ago, he had the seventh “Mission: Impossible” in the bag. Opening night entry “Final Cut” may be the first film from “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius since the pandemic hit, but it won’t be the last, as he’s already in post-production on the animated Holocaust drama “The Most Precious of Cargoes.” Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov finally arrived in Cannes following years of house arrest in the country to premiere “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” but he’s already halfway through a new production about a Russian exile starring Ben Whishaw.

Seemingly everywhere at this year’s festival are reminders of a global film industry clawing its way back after two horrible pandemic years. Projects started ramping up in recent months, with Cannes arriving right as...

British auteur Peter Strickland is back with his fifth feature, “Flux Gourmet,” and it is as striking and uncompromising as his previous body of work, which includes “In Fabric” (2018), “The Duke of Burgundy” (2014), “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012) and “Katalin Varga” (2009). “Flux Gourmet” world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival’s Encounters strand on Feb. 11.

The film follows a sonic collective trio with rocky interpersonal dynamics, who take up residency at an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance and have to answer to the institute’s head, who has her own opinions about their work. Their chronicler, meanwhile, is dealing with stomach problems.

“Flux Gourmet” began life as Strickland was completing “In Fabric” when a producer offered him the opportunity of making anything he wanted, provided the budget was under £1 million ($1.3 million). “When I showed them the script, they ran a mile,” Strickland told Variety. “They said, ‘Do whatever you want,...

Paralympics

U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 has revealed a disabled presenting team for the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games, who will present on the ground in China. Award-winning presenter Ade Adepitan will front the daily highlights show, with former rugby player Ed Jackson and Paralympic champion triathlete Lauren Steadman presenting the “Breakfast Show.” Recently retired Paralympic swimmer Ellie Robinson will be joined by British racing car driver Billy Monger as on-screen reporters and former sit-kier Sean Rose as pundit. Tokyo 2020 presenter Arthur Williams will lead overnight sports coverage.

Over 80 hours of the games will be on Channel 4 live from Beijing and will also stream on the broadcaster’s streaming on YouTube platform.

Channel 4’s director of programs Ian Katz said: “Channel 4 is incredibly proud to announce a stellar presenting team and — in a first for any broadcaster around the world — an entire presenting team who are disabled. This is testament to...

Orange Studio has taken the opportunity of this year’s Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris to lift the curtain on season two of “L’Opéra,” a premium series that offers a backstage look at the inner workings and private passions of the dancers who illuminate Paris’ prestigious Opera Garnier. Ahead of Wednesday’s market presentation, execs from Orange Studio confirmed to Variety that two-time César winner Anne Alvaro will join the cast as the sophomore season’s chief antagonist.

The lauded performer will join a cast headed by veteran Ariane Labed as a hard-living 35-year-old fighting to remain in the spotlight and newcomer Suzy Bemba (of the upcoming Yorgos Lanthimos project “Poor Things”) as a 19-year-old from an underprivileged background looking for a chance to prove herself. Season one’s third lead Raphael Personnaz (“Anna Karenina”) will also return, this time taking a more supporting role as the troupe’s outgoing director.

The four Palestinian docs-in-progress showcased as part of the Marché’s Cannes Docs forum bear testimony to the diversity and creativity of a nouvelle vague of Palestinian filmmakers.

Covering a broad range of topics – ranging from the plight of refugees crossing the Alps from Italy to France, a family of Bedouins forced to leave their dwelling, a mother’s painful decision to leave her country at war or the story of Jenin’s last projectionist – the films selected “are representative of Palestine today”, according to May Odeh, the producer of “The Last Projectionist.”

“It’s like having films from four different countries. Palestinians are everywhere. It’s not about land, it’s about questions that are inside us: We question the refugees in the Alps, modernity and gentrification… we question the future of cinema. This is what I like about Palestinian cinema: it takes a fresh look at a whole...

Yorgos Lanthimos's Nimic is exclusively showing on Mubi in the Luminaries series.Above: Vasilis Marmatakis’s poster for Nimic.Has there ever been a graphic designer more closely allied with a filmmaker than Vasilis Marmatakis is with Yorgos Lanthimos? Saul Bass and Otto Preminger are the team that most easily come to mind, but even then, though Preminger was a great supporter of and advocate for Bass’s work, I don’t feel that Bass’s designs quite express Preminger’s ethos in the same way that Marmatakis’s designs encapsulate the wonderful strangeness of Lanthimos’s work. Starting with Dogtooth in 2009, Marmatakis has created the windows to his friend’s worlds with a series of iconic posters that are among the very best of the past 20 years.Above: Vasilis Marmatakis’s posters for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films (clockwise from top left) Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), Alps (2011), The Favourite (2018) and...

Altitude’s ‘Rocks’ opens in the UK and Ireland.

France, opening Wednesday, September 16

Two French Cannes 2020 titles were the biggest openers in France this week. Caroline Vignal’s comedy-drama My Lover, My Donkey & I opened on around 460 copies for Diaphana Distribution. This second feature for Vignal stars the popular actress as a school teacher who sets off on a donkey trekking holiday in hot pursuit of her secret lover.

Emmanuel Mouret’s contemporary love-triangle drama Love Affair(s) also launched on around 460 copies for Pyramide Distribution. Camelia Jordana co-stars opposite Niels Schneider and Vincent Macaigne as a pregnant young woman...

Pandemics come in a handful of different varieties — some we accurately diagnose, and some we don’t even notice. A highly contagious outbreak of coronavirus (to pick a random example) leaves behind a trail of bodies that makes it rather easy for right-thinking people to recognize the disease for what it is. Other global health crises, however, can be harder to spot. The ones that poison our mental health. The ones that disguise themselves as progress. The ones that seduce us into forgetting who we are.

Set in an analog and uncertain version of the recent past (or perhaps in a parallel universe where the iPhone was never invented), Christos Nikou’s “Apples” begins in the midst of a slow-rolling plague that spreads mysteriously and leaves its victims with severe amnesia. Details are scant, but the crisis has been around long enough that people in Greece have learned to live...

Being Phoebe Bridgers is a pretty sweet gig. “I fucking love my life,” says the 25-year-old Californian. “My mom occasionally gets, ‘Are you related to Phoebe Bridgers?’ She fucking eats it up. And then she’ll be like, ‘I promised this couple that you would play their prom,’ and I’m like, ‘Mom! No!'”

Bridgers has become one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of recent years by writing bleak, introspective songs grounded in twentysomething realness — she’s the folk rocker most likely to make you cry a little as you brew your morning coffee.

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ career has long displayed a morbid fascination for the contours of the body, mind, and spirit, in all their ugliness. Well before “Dogtooth” shook the international film scene and “The Favourite” won Olivia Colman an Oscar, the Greek filmmaker made his debut with “Kinetta.” While this head-scratching puzzle box may at times feel like a sketchpad draft for his films to come, it nevertheless exerts a hypnotic power that makes it easy to see why Lanthimos quickly became a director to watch.

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Most of Lanthimos’ movies include self-flagellation of some sort, whether the literal acts of torture inflicted by the women of “The Favourite” on themselves,...

Towards the end of Phoebe Bridgers’ new track, “Garden Song,” she captures her songwriting prowess in just two lines: “Everything’s growing in our garden/You don’t have to know that it’s haunted.” Since her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, Bridgers has garnered fans by skillfully blending beauty with darkness, and on “Garden Song,” her first new solo material since Alps, she nails it.

The track rides along a wave of shimmery synths by Ethan Gruska, Bridgers’ co-producer. Using the delicate, crushing vocals that are her trademark, she...