News

Billy Corben and Jen Gatien’s “Men of War,” one of the first documentaries that Neon produced and funded, will be available to watch via PVOD starting Sept. 9.

The doc, which premiered at the 2024 Toronto Film International Festival, chronicles Operation Gideon, a 2020 sea invasion of Venezuela by a coalition of local dissidents and American mercenaries to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro. Former Green Beret Jordan Goudreau planned the failed mission that happened just weeks after the Trump administration placed a $15 million bounty on President Maduro.

Goudreau, a former Special Forces soldier who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, planned to land in Venezuela via speedboat with approximately 60 other men in an attempt to capture Maduro, an authoritarian president. At the time, Goudreau said that he and his team were acting to protect Venezuela’s democracy after Maduro’s 2018 re-election, which was boycotted by the opposition and condemned as undemocratic by the U.

Documentaries about journalists Seymour Hersh, Lynsey Addario, and the late Fatma Hassona are heading to the 50th edition of the Toronto Intl. Film Festival.

TIFF‘s Docs program gets underway Sept. 4 and will feature 23 feature docs from 18 countries. The program will open with the world premiere of two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Ben Proudfoot’s “The Eyes of Ghana,” about 93-year-old Chris Hesse, a cinematographer who served as the personal filmmaker for Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Barack and Michelle Obama-led shingle Higher Ground executive produced the doc.

“The film is a love letter to filmmaking and the efforts of Chris Hesse to not only document a chapter of history, but also his work to preserve that footage,” said Thom Powers, lead TIFF documentary programmer.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus’s “Cover Up,” about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, will make its Canadian premiere at TIFF after a...

Early Tuesday morning, the Venice Film Festival announced the lineup for its 82nd edition featuring a range of films set to make waves internationally the rest of the year. While many of the competition titles were predicted by IndieWire and others ahead of the official announcement on the morning of July 22, the overall list of films and filmmakers in attendance still offered plenty of surprises.

Below, we dive into what stood out about the lineup, whether it was which films and studios are not participating this time around, to the ways in which this group of Venice entries differs from the ones from last year.

No Warner Bros. Pictures

While there are other studios that are not taking some expected features to Venice, like Focus Features with “Hamnet” or Sony with “Klara and the Sun,” the studio most noticeably absent from any part of the Venice schedule is Warner Bros.

The Venice Film Festival is back on the Lido for its 82nd edition, kicking off August 27-September 6. The packed lineup of auteur premieres heading to Italy include new films from Olivier Assayas, Guillermo del Toro, Mona Fastvold, Kathryn Bigelow, Noah Baumbach, Yorgos Lanthimos, Benny Safdie, Jim Jarmusch, Park Chan-wook, László Nemes, François Ozon, Pietro Marcello, and many more in competition.

Out of competition, we’ll see new films from Luca Guadagnino (“After the Hunt”), Werner Herzog (“Ghost Elephants”), Sofia Coppola (Marc Jacobs documentary “Marc by Sofia”), Charlie Kaufman (the short “How to Shoot a Ghost”), Julian Schnabel (“In the Hand of Dante”), Gus Van Sant (“Dead Man’s Wire”), Laura Poitras (“Cover-Up”), Lucrecia Martel (“Nuestra Tierra”), and Tsai Ming-liang (“Back Home”)

Artistic director Alberto Barbera’s programmers had already unveiled a wave of announcements before Tuesday’s lineup: Alexander Payne heads up the jury, Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia” opens the festival Italian-style,...

It’s safe to say a lot of people had a lot of problems with the switch from HBO Max to Max, but there was at least one upside to the streaming shakeup. Now, it’s easier than ever to find the excellent queer stories floating around Warner Bros. Discovery’s platform.

During its lifespan, HBO Max never had an LGBTQ tag to filter its offerings and help subscribers find stories about the queer community more easily: a surprising move for a streamer named after the channel that brought us boundary-breaking works like “Six Feet Under” and the miniseries adaptation of “Angels in America.” That’s been remedied on Max, which features an “LGBTQ+ Voices” collection. You do have to scroll quite far down the homepage to find it in the collections carousel, but when you do, it makes searching for the queer films and shows on the streamer considerably easier.

Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux entered the room with a martial bearing, his square jaw tilted upwards in the manner of a man who need not doubt his significance.

He came to the Salon des Ambassadeurs within the Palais to make a few remarks before the awarding of the annual l’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award for the festival’s top documentary, as selected by a jury. Before an audience of perhaps a hundred or more nonfiction film lovers, he stated what must be considered unquestionable:

“Documentaries are a minority within the Cannes Film Festival. There have been documentaries in the past, but very few,” Frémaux acknowledged, before adding, “But it’s true that over the past few years, there have been many more.”

Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux speaks at the l’Oeil d’or ceremony Matthew Carey

He went on to say, “[With] your minority status, you can always feel a little oppressed.

Jane Rosenthal is taking the pulse of the nonfiction feature space — and it doesn’t look good. The mega-producer and Tribeca co-founder told Variety during a recent interview that she is “worried” about how documentaries are faring, especially amid the current political climate and rise in streaming.

When asked how the “business” of documentary films are going — citing how the Tribeca Festival is known for spotlighting pioneering docs — Rosenthal lamented that perhaps the golden age of political documentaries has passed.

“I’m worried about that space,” Rosenthal said. “Fewer places are buying hard-hitting documentaries. If it’s about true crime, you’ll get a deal someplace. The bigger platforms — Netflix and Amazon — want more celebrity stories and sports stories. But for political stories, it’s harder to find a home.”

It’s a concern that many documentaries and distributors alike have also voiced: “We are caught in this terrible place...

Do not drive over to the factory to meet an old chum if you haven't seen "Sweet Vitriol," the eighth episode of season 2 of "Severance." This is your final spoiler warning!

This article also contains discussions of addiction and child abuse.

After living without Patricia Arquette's steely Harmony Cobel for a few episodes of "Severance," we finally catch up with the former head of Lumon's severed floor while she's driving around in her Volkswagen White Rabbit to parts unknown. At the beginning of her standalone episode "Sweet Vitriol," we see Harmony arrive in the run-down town of Salt's Neck, and when she meets up with an old friend, who we eventually learn is named Hampton (played by James Le Gros). Hampton runs a small dining spot called The Drippy Pot, and while he serves coffee to an elderly patron, he also slips him a bottle; shortly before that, we...

Screening in Sundance’s Premieres section, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a reimagining of the 1985 film set amid Argentina’s Dirty War, with one prisoner relating his favorite Hollywood musical to the other. The film is directed by Bill Condon, whose credits include Dreamgirls, Gods and Monsters, and both parts of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn. Brian Kates served as the film’s editor, having worked with Condon many years ago. Below, Kates explains the importance of maintaining connections and how the filmmakers devised a method to edit the movie as quickly as the movie’s structure necessitated. […]

The post “Our Job Was To Create Two Movies”: Editor Brian Kates on Kiss of the Spider Woman first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Screening in Sundance’s Premieres section, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a reimagining of the 1985 film set amid Argentina’s Dirty War, with one prisoner relating his favorite Hollywood musical to the other. The film is directed by Bill Condon, whose credits include Dreamgirls, Gods and Monsters, and both parts of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn. Brian Kates served as the film’s editor, having worked with Condon many years ago. Below, Kates explains the importance of maintaining connections and how the filmmakers devised a method to edit the movie as quickly as the movie’s structure necessitated. […]

The post “Our Job Was To Create Two Movies”: Editor Brian Kates on Kiss of the Spider Woman first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival is now coming to theaters next month. Robert Kolodny’s feature debut The Featherweight, which stars James Madio, Ruby Wolf, Keir Gilchrist, Stephen Lang, Ron Livingston, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Shari Albert, and undefeated professional featherweight boxer Bruce Carrington, is based on the true story of the winningest American boxer in the history of the sport. Ahead of a September 20 release, the first trailer and poser have arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “Set in the mid-1960s in Hartford, Connecticut, The Featherweight presents a gripping chapter in the true-life story of Italian-American boxer Willie Pep the winningest fighter of all time—who, down and out in his mid-40s and with his personal life in shambles, decides to make a return to the ring, at which point a documentary camera crew enters his life. Painstakingly researched and constructed, the film is a...

Former U.S. Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, who was arrested on July 31 in connection to his failed 2020 coup to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, is the subject of Neon’s latest documentary “Men of War.”

Directed by Billy Corben (“God Forbid”) and Jen Gatien (“Limelight”) “Men of War” follows Goudreau, who, according to the film’s logline “finds himself in over his head and on the run after mounting the failed Venezuela coup and being chased by the American government who he spent his life fighting for.”

Goudreau, a former Special Forces soldier who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, planned to land in Venezuela via speedboat with approximately 60 other men in an attempt to capture Maduro, an authoritarian president. At the time, Goudreau said that he and his team were acting to protect Venezuela’s democracy after Maduro’s 2018 re-election, which was boycotted by the opposition and condemned as undemocratic by the U.

Five documentary filmmaking teams haven been selected to participate in the Catapult Film Fund and True/False Film Fest’s ninth annual Rough Cut Retreat.

The immersive mentorship is designed for documentary feature filmmakers who lack strong feedback networks. This year’s retreat will take place at the Whispertree retreat in Boonville, Calif., over four days beginning on July 21.

The 2024 Rcr selected doc projects and the attending film teams are: “The Inventory” (director ilana coleman and producer Ivonne Villalón), “The Last Nomads” (directors Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić), “Natchez” (director Suzannah Herbert and editor Pablo Proenza), “The Nile Splits” (director Zuff Shoya and sound designer Khaleel Lee), and “Seeds” (director Brittany Shyne and editor Malika Zouhali-Worrall).

“This year, the selected projects represent some of the boldest new voices in nonfiction cinema,” says True/False artistic director Chloé Trayner. “Each of the films has a distinct approach to storytelling, taking risks...

The first Los Angeles edition of the Peabody Awards on June 9 declared its intention to stand out from the awards-season pack by daring to address the complex real-world events in ways that other shows would never dare.

Where else would it befit host Kumail Nanjiani to make partition jokes in the guise of a bit about how Pakistan lost to the United States at the Icc Cricket World Cup? “Getting some perspective, it would be like Pakistan beating the USA at basketball,” the comedian said an appreciative applause.

Outside of Jonathan Glazer’s controversial Oscars speech, awards shows have steered clear of world issues for some time. However, to hear documentarian Laura Poitras end her Peabody Award acceptance speech for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” with the declaration of “Free Palestine” had a resonance that no polite lapel pin could touch.

Early in the Sunday night program — shortly after...

“Anora,” Sean Baker’s comic look at an exotic dancer and sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, will hit theaters next fall. The film will open in limited release on Oct. 18 from Neon.

It’s a lucky time of year for the indie studio. Neon previously launched “Parasite” on Oct. 11, debuted “Triangle of Sadness” on Oct. 7 and opened “Anatomy of a Fall” on Oct 13. Like “Anora,” all three of those films premiered at Cannes and won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top honor. “Anora” was the first U.S. film to earn the prize since 2011’s “Tree of Life” from director Terrence Malick.

In a rave review for Variety, Peter Debruge enthused that the film was the “uncut gem of this year’s Cannes competition,” adding that it is “a rowdy Safdie-style movie about two cultures (Russian and American), two languages (Russian and English...

The UK’s Documentary Film Council (Dfc) has elected its first national board of representatives, which includes execs such as Storyville lead commissioner Emma Hindley, Doc Society co-director Sandra Whipham and filmmakers Jessi Gutch and Andy Mundy-Castle.

The Dfc was set up last summer just prior to Sheffield DocFest to lobby for the sector and to highlight challenges facing UK documentary.

The Dfc is a co-operative that is owned and run by its membership which comprises 706 people across three tiers. Of these, 264 are voting members.

The election was announced in March and closed on May 31, with 31 candidates putting themselves forward...

The Peabody Awards has revealed its 2024 winners, with Bluey, The Bear, The Last of Us and Fellow Travelers among the high-profile projects set to receive awards.

Other noteworthy winners among the 34 award recipients include Judy Blume Forever, 20 Days in Mariupol, All the Beauty and The Bloodshed, Bobi Wine: The People’s President, Dead Ringers, Jury Duty, Reality and Somebody Somewhere.

Last Week Tonight was also honored with its third Peabody award, while Reservation Dogs won its second Peabody.

Peabody is also honoring Star Trek with its Institutional Award and Witness with its first Global Impact Award, the organization announced Thursday.

The 84th annual Peabody Awards winners will be celebrated at a June 9 awards show in Los Angeles hosted by Kumail Nanjiani.

A full list of the 2024 Peabody Award winners, along with jurors’ comments about each selection and presented in alphabetical order by category, follows.

Arts

Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones...

The winners of the 84th Peabody Awards are out, and the list includes Emmy favorites The Bear, The Last of Us and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver along with other TV shows including the now-wrapped Reservation Dogs, kids toon sensation Bluey, breakout prank-umentary Jury Duty and the Oscar-winning Ukraine War documentary 20 Days in Mariupol.

Winners will be feted June 9 at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles — its first in-person ceremony since 2019, hosted by Kumail Nanjiani. See the full list below; the 2024 nominees are here.

The beloved, enduring sci-fi franchise Star Trek is set for the 2024 Institutional Award, which recognizes institutions, organizations, series or programs for their body of work and their lasting impact on the media landscape and the public imagination.

Related: Peabody Adds More A-List TV Execs To Board Of Directors Posts; UTA’s David Kramer New West Coast Chair

Witness, the international rights group that assists...

“The Bear,” “Bluey,” “Reservation Dogs,” “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” “The Last of Us” and “Jury Duty” are among the series set to receive this year’s Peabody Award, the org was set to announce on Thursday morning. The Peabody Awards’ board of 32 jurors have selected 34 winners, all of which received unanimous vote from TV, podcast/radio and web/digital nominees in entertainment, news, documentary, arts, children’s/youth, public service, and interactive programming.

HBO/Max led the wins with seven total, followed by PBS with five, and then three for Amazon MGM Studios and two each for FX and The Washington Post. This repped the second Peabody for “Reservation Dogs” and the third for “Last Week Tonight.”

“Whether courageously documenting wars across the globe or cleverly bringing much needed smiles to our faces, the winners of the 84th Peabody Awards each crafted compelling and imaginative stories,” said Peabody...

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...

This is not the documentary renaissance we hoped for. Despite its 2023 Oscar win for “Navalny,” CNN pulled back on non-fiction production. Non-fiction programming at Showtime Networks, which produced Oscar-nominated “Attica” in 2022, is no more.

“The New York Times Presents” series, which produced titles like “The Killing of Breonna Taylor” and “Framing Britney Spears,” is being phased out in favor of integrating non-fiction video into the media brand. Hot Docs is on the ropes; Participant, which produced documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” and “American Factory,” closed last month.

And then there’s Netflix, which is still very much in the documentary game under Adam Del Deo, Netflix VP of original documentary films and limited series — and can afford to be with nearly 270 million global subscribers. However, it’s a specific sort of gameplay: For tight, high-quality nonfiction work that’s heartwarming, or thrilling, or stars a celebrity,...

The Peabody Awards are revealing their 2024 nominees in two batches this year and today was an opportunity to shine the spotlight on the non-narrative works. Among the Documentary, News, Public Service, and Radio/Podcast nominees were a slew of Oscar-nominated films including “The Eternal Memory,” “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” and “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Oh, and this year’s Academy Award winner, “20 Days in Mariupol.”

Read More: 10 pressing questions for the 2024 Emmy Award Season

This year’s narrative nominees will be revealed on Thursday.

Continue reading ’20 Days In Mariupol’ & ‘The Eternal Memory’ Among Early 2024 Peabody Awards Nominees at The Playlist.

The Peabody Awards Board of Jurors today announced the 41 nominees for the Documentary, News, Public Service and Radio/Podcast categories selected to represent the most compelling and empowering stories released in broadcasting and streaming media during 2023. The nominees were chosen by a unanimous vote of 32 jurors from more than 1,100 entries from television, podcasts/radio and the web in entertainment, news, documentary, arts, children’s/youth, public service and multimedia programming.

Among the Documentary nominees is the 2024 Oscar winner 20 Days in Mariupol, which followed director Mstyslav Chernov as he led a team of AP journalists caught in the Ukrainian city in 2022 after the Russian invasion. Five other Oscar-nominated documentaries also received Peabody noms, including the 2023 nominees All That Breathes and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and 2024 nominees Bobi Wine: The People’s President, The Eternal Memory and To Kill a Tiger. The Emmy-winning bio-doc Still: A Michael J. Fox Story also received a nomination.

PBS landed 11 nominations, by far the most of any outlet, as Peabody Awards Board of Jurors announced this year’s 41 nominees across its documentary, news, public service and radio/podcast categories. The pubcaster’s Peabody noms include “20 Days in Mariupol,” which recently won the Oscar for best documentary feature film.

“20 Days in Mariupol” is a production of “Frontline” and the Associated Press. Among PBS series, “Frontline” landed five noms, the most of any program, while “Independent Lens” received three.

Also scoring multiple nominations was the combination of HBO and Max, which received four — including one for the doc “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which HBO Documentary Films produced with Neon and Participant. That’s notable in light of last week’s news that Participant Media is shutting its operations.

This year’s Peabody Award nominees are selected from stories and projects that were released in broadcast or...

The shocking news that Participant, a leading producer of specialized/independent features with a socially relevant interest as well many top documentaries, is shutting down immediately hit the industry hard Tuesday. With a profile of co-produced films over the last 20 years that rivals any other company’s slate, this was devastating news.

Founder and owner Jeff Skoll’s decision to shut down his company will impact the production of a certain kind of specialized film, particularly in the documentary field. Never a distributor, and most often collaborating with other production companies, Participant was still a significant force for most of its two decades.

But what’s the real impact of this move? Jonathan Dana, a veteran distribution executive and producer, commented, “It didn’t fail. It just ran its course.” That typifies much of the insider reaction, which relates to the specific purpose and goals of the company.

‘Spotlight’ © Open...

We are going crazy for the upcoming horror flick Cuckoo, which is already shaping up to be one of the most intriguing horror films to watch out for in 2024. Produced and set to be distributed by the independent film company Neon, horror fans around the world are surely hoping that it will be just as successful as their previous movies. The company has previously worked with multiple foreign and domestic filmmakers, many of whom are high-profile names in the industry today, including Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), Sara Dosa (Fire of Love), Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), and Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed). Cuckoo is being directed by Tilman Singer, an up-and-coming director in the genre of horror whose previous work includes the award-winning 2018 film Luz.

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

I usually give myself until the Oscar ceremony to do any best-of-the-year lists. Mostly because I like to be as thorough as I can be. This year, however, lent me a few extra hurdles to jump over, which meant it took me a little bit longer than normal. Buying my first home, a litany of illnesses, the loss of a close friend, and general exhaustion with the movies of 2023. But, hey, here we are at the end of March and, honestly, movies don’t just vanish once the year is out so why not finally go about publishing my best documentaries of the year list?

This year in documentary lacked the sort of movie like All the Beauty and the Bloodshed or Collective that loomed over the entire end-of-year discussion and therefore there was no clear number one title of the year. For me, at least.

A snapshot of the most exciting voices working in American and international cinema today––and with a strong focus on newcomers––the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival returns this week, taking place March 13-17.

As always, the annual festival brings together a varied, eclectic lineup of cinema from all corners of the world––including a number of films still seeking distribution, making this series perhaps one of your only chances to see these works on the big screen. Check out our top picks below, along with the exclusive premiere of the festival trailer.

Arthur&Diana (Sara Summa)

A lo-fi siblings road trip movie shot with a mix of MiniDV, Betacam, and 16mm, Sara Summa’s Arthur&Diana marks an interesting, mostly successful gamble of personal storytelling, in which Summa stars alongside her-real brother, Robin Summa. Jared Mobarak said in his TIFF review, “As such, we glean...

For director Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed represents a departure of sorts. After centering films around people ranging from a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden in The Oath to Edward Snowden in Citizenfour and Julian Assange in Risk, her latest documentary focuses on an artist: legendary photographer Nan Goldin. But there’s still a strong political dimension to the film, since Goldin was a major force in bringing down the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, one of the global pharmaceutical companies largely responsible for the opioid epidemic in the United States.

It’s a deeply personal mission for Goldin, as someone who found herself addicted to OxyContin for a period of time until she nearly died from an overdose. Goldin’s activism, though, is, the documentary suggests, born out of not just her brush with the opioid crisis, but from a lifetime of dealing with mental illness,...

Supernatural horror Deliver US is out now on digital platforms including Google, Apple TV, Sky and Amazon in the UK & Ireland.

Maria Vera Ratti (Inspector Ricciardi) stars as a nun who claims to have conceived twins through immaculate conception – that the Vatican fear will fulfil an ancient prophecy that one is the Messiah, and the other the Antichrist. Deliver US also stars co-director Lee Roy Kunz, as well as Thomas Kretschmann (Infinity Pool), and Peaky Blinders star Alexander Siddig.

Co-directed by Cru Ennis, Deliver US us a slick, striking and seriously scary slice of religious horror that will appeal to horror fans who enjoyed The Pope’s Exorcist, The Omen and The Nun movies.

Synopsis: When a nun in a remote convent claims immaculate conception, the Vatican sends a team of priests to investigate, concerned about an ancient prophecy that a woman will give birth to twin boys: one the Messiah,...

A-listers Alice Eve and Antonio Banderas (The Mask of Zorro) star in Cult Killer which is out now on Digital Platforms in the UK and Ireland. Also out on DVD on the 12th February 2024.

Eve (Star Trek Into Darkness) is a fearless private eye (with Banderas as her mentor) who uncovers brutal secrets in a sleepy Irish town that puts her life in danger. The film also stars Shelley Henig (Unfriended), Olwen Fouéré (The Northman) and Nick Dunning (The Tudors).

Stylishly directed by John Keeyes (Codename Banshee), Cult Killer recalls the nerve-shredding thrills of Silence of the Lambs and 7even, and is unmissable for fans of intelligent, dark crime thrillers.

Synopsis: When a renowned private investigator is murdered, his protege takes on the case. As her investigation unfolds, she is forced into a dangerous alliance with his killer to uncover the town’s grisly secrets and bring justice to its victims.

Following Alexei Navalny’s death at 47 on February 16, the filmmaking team behind the winner of the best documentary feature Oscar at 2023’s Academy Awards has released a statement. The film, simply titled “Navalny” and directed by Daniel Roher, beat top competition, including “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” and “All That Breathes,” to win the prize.

“We are all overcome with emotions today,” the statement, attributed to the entire filmmaking team collectively, begins. “Pain, sadness, and most of all anger. Alexei was a light who, along with his family, made the greatest of sacrifices to fight against Putin and his vile regime. Alexei built his organization and his movement to survive even if he did not.

“The fight against corruption, against authoritarianism, and against the war in Ukraine continues. The fight for democracy must go on. The most important thing we learned from Alexei lived in his spirit, the way...

Andrew McCarthy is getting back together with his fellow Brat Pack alums Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Jon Cryer, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and more for the feature documentary Brats, a revealing look at the cultural phenomenon they became in the 1980s and how that has impacted their lives ever since.

Brats, from ABC News Studios, Neon, and Network Entertainment, is set to premiere on Hulu later this year. McCarthy, author of the 2021 memoir Brat: An ‘80s Story, writes and directs the documentary, which is now in post-production. He co-starred with fellow Brat Packers in some of the biggest hits of the mid- ‘80s including St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Less Than Zero (1987).

From left: ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’s Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Mare Winningham, Judd Nelson,

Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy

“McCarthy crisscrosses the country to meet up with some of the stars of those beloved films,...

Big Beach, the producer of “Little Miss Sunshine,” A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and “The Farewell,” has fully relocated from New York to Los Angeles while building out its ranks.

Keetin Mayakara has been tapped by Big Beach as a producer. As a post producer, she has worked on the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo,” and most recently, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” another Academy Award nominee. Before joining Big Beach, Mayakara co-produced the “The Year of the Everlasting Storm,” which premiered at Cannes Film Festival, and produced Season 2 of HBO’s “Random Acts of Flyness.”

Austin Cottle joins the company as its head of finance after starting his career at 20th Century Fox with stints in-house at Netflix and Amazon, as well as on the show side where he oversaw “How to Become a Tyrant” for Netflix and “The Heart of Sergio Ramos” for Prime Video.

Zoe Levine...

Bookmark this page for the latest updates in the territory.

Screen is listing the 2023 release dates for films in the UK and Ireland in the calendar below.

For distributors who wish to add/amend a date on the calendar, please get in touch with Screen here. Screen is also running a calendar for festival and market dates throughout 2023 here.

December

December 31

Berliner Philharmoniker Live: New Year’s Eve Concert 2023 (Trafalgar - event cinema)

Previous releases January

January 6

Piggy (Vertigo), The Enforcer (Vertigo), Alcarràs (Mubi), A Man Called Otto (Sony), Rashomon (BFI), Till (Universal)

January 7

Andre Rieu In Dublin 2023 (Piece of...

The year is almost over, and as everyone prepares for Christmas, Criterion is continuing to gear up for 2024 with a stacked collection of titles for cinephiles of all kinds. After ringing in the new year with Trainspotting and Mudbound among others in January, followed by a February lineup headlined by Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Criterion Collection will bolster its ranks in March with new additions, including Alice Diop's acclaimed 2022 legal drama Saint Omer as well as Laura Poitras's Academy Award-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed which leads off the month.

Laura Poitras’s powerful documentary follows artist Nan Goldin on a successful crusade to publicise the US opioids crisis

More of the best films of 2023More of the best culture of 2023

The Sackler family wanted their name to be synonymous with art, high-brow prestige and patrician good taste. But despite or because of their vainglorious donations to art galleries and museums all over the world, it became synonymous with something else: pain. And perhaps also with the ugly business of converting agony into money, while leaving behind more poverty and more agony among their abject American customer-base than there was before. Part of the Sackler family were behind the Purdue Pharma corporation marketing the ruinously addictive OxyContin opioid pill, which physicians across the US were persuaded to prescribe for essentially non-serious issues such as sports injuries. And yet only those who have never known what chronic pain is like will...

The best documentaries about artists exploit the visual powers of the storytelling medium to give us a tactile appreciation of what their work looks and feels, while also mining the depths of their souls and their relationships to history. Last year’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’ film about the life and work of activist/artist Nan Goldin, and 2011’s “Pina,” Wim Wenders’ portrait of choreographer Pina Bausch, come to mind, both straying far from the parameters of a talking-heads-driven nonfiction film to put us straight inside the work itself. These movies, too, stand as powerful cinematic and artistic exercises on their own terms.

Wenders now returns to the realm of 3D documentary he inhabited so gorgeously with “Pina” to explore the works of 78-year-old painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Explicitly non-biographical, “Anselm” is instead a philosophical rendering of an artist in working mode, where he actively...

Just in time to ruin Christmas, gruesome horror comedy The Mean One, is out now on DVD and Digital Platforms from Altitude Film Distribution.

David Howard Thornton, the award-winning actor who plays Art the Clown in the hugely popular Terrifier movies, stars as The Mean One, a gruesome grouch in a Santa suit who is intent on causing Christmas carnage. Directed by Steven Lamorte (Bury Me Twice), The Mean One also stars Krystle Martin as Cindy, who takes on the Christmas killer with a baseball bat wrapped in tree lights.

Like recent horror hit Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, The Mean One is another buzzy slasher mixing mirth, murder and all-out action in equal measure, as the townsfolk decide to take on the green meanie with all the weapons they can lay their hands on. Already a viral sensation (over 5 million people have watched the trailer online) The Mean One...

Anne-Cécile Rolland has been appointed to the role and start in February.

Anne-Cécile Rolland has been named head of acquisitions for France’s Pyramide Distribution and Pyramide International, taking over for Christine Ravet who will step down from her position at the end of the year.

Ravet is retiring after a more than 40-year career in auteur cinema. Before joining Pyramide, she was director of acquisitions at mk2 Films and a member of the selection committee for Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.

She was notably behind Pyramide’s acquisitions of Laura Poitras’ Venice-winning All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, Amjad Al Rasheed...

“We have seen titles doing the best they’ve ever done before in this ‘unhealthy’ marketplace.”

In a keynote address at Sunday’s (November 12) IDFA distribution panel Neon’s president of distribution Elissa Federoff gave a surprisingly upbeat assessment of prospects for the US and global independent documentary sector.

While acknowledging the market is “down” and that there are fewer titles being released that in the pre-Covid period, Federoff claimed that “in many ways, the box office is healthier than ever”.

Box office has decreased by around 20% since 2019 which the executive suggested was largely because there are 20% fewer titles being released.

Alex Pettyfer stars in the terrifying action thriller Black Noise, which is out out now on Digital Platforms including Google, Apple TV, Sky and Amazon Prime Video in the UK & Ireland.

“We go in, we get the client, and get out”. If only it was that simple for Alex Pettyfer (Alex Rider in Stormbreaker) and Jackson Rathbone (Twilight), on a rescue mission from hell in Black Noise, a chilling action horror set in a lush paradise, also starring Eve Mauro (Wicked Lake) and Ashton Leigh (Big Shark).

Sent to the remote island of Esperanza to rescue a tech heiress, a security team finds their communications cut off, and starts having nightmarish hallucinations… but the worst is yet to come. Coming on like 80s classic Predator Black Noise is an action adventure that turns into all-out horror.

Synopsis:

Members of an elite security team deployed to rescue a VIP on an exclusive island.

Amber Heard (Aquaman) stars as a doctor battling against 19th-century superstitions and paranoia in In The Fire, also starring Luca Calvani (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), Eduardo Noriega (The Devil’s Backbone), and Sophie Amber (soon to be seen in The Last Girl with Antonio Banderas).

Directed by Cocor Allyn (No Man’s Land), In The Fire is an intense and thrilling experience featuring a searing career-best lead performance from Heard as a woman attempting to convince a community that medicine can overcome what they perceive as ‘evil’.

Synopsis:

A doctor travels to a remote plantation to care for a disturbed boy who has inexplicable abilities. She ignites a war of science versus religion with the local priest who believes the boy is possessed by the Devil.

In The Fire is available now on Digital Platforms including Google, Apple TV, Sky and Amazon.

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Documentary festival opens with Olga Chernykh’s personal portrait of the Ukraine-Russia conflict ’A Picture To Remember’

Opening with Olga Chernykh’s personal portrait of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, A Picture To Remember, IDFA will showcase many features from the world’s political hotspots.

IDFA also begins its 36th edition (8-19 November) from a brand new year-round home in the Vondelpark Pavilion. The venue will open its doors officially next March but is already a festival location and has begun pilot programming including a collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum and a screening of Laura Poitras’s Golden Lion winner All The Beauty And The Bloodshed.

Pain Hustlers tackles the greed of American capitalism and the lasting effects of the opioid crisis, shedding light on the loss of ethics and Big Pharma's corruption. The film is a cautionary tale of corporate greed and fraud, exposing how the American medical system was used for profit during the opioid crisis. Movies similar to Pain Hustlers include The Wolf of Wall Street, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Bad Education, Pain & Gain, Little Woods, Spring Breakers, Boogie Nights, Killing Them Softly, The Big Short, and Lord of War.

Netflix's Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, has made its way to the streaming service, and it is the latest dramatization about the greed of American capitalism and the lasting effects of the opioid crisis. Directed by David Yates, Pain Hustlers sees Yates return to the more personal and dramatic type of film that kickstarted his career...

We probably won’t see this week’s streaming debuts on the Oscars’ nomination roster come January, but they offer a variety of genres that will satisfy whatever mood you find yourself in this weekend.

The contender to watch this week: “Pain Hustlers“

The opioid epidemic has fueled a wave of movie and TV shows in the last few years, from “Dopesick” and “Ben Is Back” to the gorgeous Oscar-nominated documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Hollywood’s latest Big Pharma indictment is a star-studded dramedy directed by “Harry Potter” alum David Yates. Based on a book by journalist Evan Hughes, “Pain Hustlers” features Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O’Hara, and Andy Garcia in a crime saga revolving around a pharmaceutical start-up whose founder served two years in prison. Reviews have been tepid, but “Hustlers” is now streaming on Netflix following a limited theatrical release.

Other contenders:

“My Sailor, My Love...

In the past two years, two limited-run series have been released about the attempt to force some kind of justice onto the Sackler family, the billionaires who own Purdue Pharma. Both Dopesick, released in 2021 on Hulu, and 2023's Painkiller on Netflix, tells the story of Richard Sackler's aggressive and dishonest marketing of OxyContin, which led, by some estimates, to hundreds of thousands of deaths from opiate addiction. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary on the same subject, is more thrilling and emotionally impactful than either of the fictionalized versions. The documentary from Laura Poitras focuses on Nan Goldin, the legendary photographer whose organization P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) led a series of protests against the Sacklers. The Sackler family was a prolific donor to the art world, and so there were wings and galleries named after them in many of the world's most prestigious museums.

The first sculpture seen in Wim Wenders’s documentary Anselm is a wedding dress, its long train strewn over a massive bed of fallen leaves, perched in a lush forest on a cliff’s edge. All the while, the film cuts between intimate close-ups and long shots that take in the totality of the piece. More sculptures emerge across an expansive outdoor atelier in Croissy, on the outskirts of Paris, each subsequent wedding dress overflowing with harsh textures due to the various hard materials used within them. As if mimicking the experience of an in-person encounter with Anselm Kiefer’s confrontational work, the 3D camera glides past them all.

First glimpsed in the film cycling in his vast warehouse in Barjac, France, the seventysomething Kiefer appears as if he’s sprung from one of his enormous paintings. As Wenders’s mesmerizing portrait of the Austrian-German multimedia artist progresses, the experience...

The Fall of the House of Usher draws inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe as well as the real-life Sackler family, who are central to the ongoing opioid crisis. The Netflix series cleverly combines horror and comedy to tackle current events, avoiding being too on-the-nose in its exploration of the Usher family's dark story. Viewers interested in the real inspirations behind the Usher family should watch the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which examines artist Nan Goldin's accountability efforts against the Sackler family.

One of the best movie follow-ups to watch after Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher is an Oscar-nominated documentary that's streaming on Max. By and large, Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher is best known for being inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story of the same name, as well as the author's larger body of work. However, "The Raven...

Matthew Heineman’s “American Symphony” leads all films with six nominations for the 8th annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards, the Critics Choice Association announced on Monday.

The film, a Netflix doc that follows musician Jon Batiste and his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, as Batiste prepares a composition for Carnegie Hall and Jaouad battles the return of her cancer, was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Score and Best Music Documentary categories. Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” D. Smith’s “Kokomo City” and Davis Guggenhein’s “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” received five nominations each.

Apart from “American Symphony,” “20 Days in Mariupol,” “Kokomo City” and “Still,” films nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category were “Beyond Utopia,” “The Deepest Breath,” “The Eternal Memory,” “Judy Blume Forever,” “The Mission” and “Stamped From the Beginning.”

All of those films received nominations in multiple categories,...