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U.S. filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, now based in Denmark, worries his “home country is perhaps becoming a dictatorship.”

“It remains to be seen. The question we all face, each and every one of us, is this: ‘Is it too late for us?’ I encourage you to look up and see that above you, there’s still a sky,” he said at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival on Sunday.

“When we read about the genocide in Gaza – which horrifies me particularly because it’s committed in my name as a Jew – when we read about thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea every year, trying to escape conditions of misery that we knowingly impose on them so that our clothes, our electronics, our food and our energy remains cheap… We feel heartbroken for a second and then we look for suitably heartbroken emoji,” he noted.

“Through that sentimental gesture of placing that emoji,...

The revered cinematographer was making an apocalyptic musical with Tilda Swinton deep in a salt mine when he realised he had to flee. Can he now save his son?

It was March 2022 and Joshua Oppenheimer was waiting at Copenhagen airport for the young man who would be staying with him for a few weeks. Oppenheimer, who directed two devastating Oscar-nominated documentaries about the 1965 Indonesian genocide, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, had been working closely with Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krichman. He was now preparing to make The End, an audacious musical about the last family on earth hiding in their bunker following a climate-related apocalypse in which they were complicit. And Mikhail’s 22-year-old son, Vlad, was travelling to Copenhagen to participate in a workshop addressing the challenges implicit in The End, which was to be shot partly in German and Italian salt mines.

Oppenheimer had never met Vlad before,...

Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End” revolves around an apocalyptic scenario in which a wealthy family lives in an underground bunker two decades after the apparent end of the world. It is not the only 2024 film that explores a catastrophic global crisis. Guy Maddin and Johnson brothers’ “Rumours” also highlighted the hypocrisy of those with wealth and power misusing it while being complacent about their minor noble deeds. Oppenheimer’s film uses the absence of an exterior world to highlight certain aspects of this family’s interior lives. Instead of calling its characters by their names, the writer refers to them by their roles in the context of their isolated setting. So, in this story, they are just friends, doctors, mothers, or girls – depending on what they represent in their isolated world.

Spoilers Ahead

The End (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

“The End” follows a wealthy family living in an underground luxurious...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

When reflecting on any year in movies, the theatrical experience rings most memorable. From driving across the border to Ohio with friends to watch No Country for Old Men in 2007, to a 35mm screening of Stalker at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2011, with so rapt an audience I was terrified to swallow for fear it would disrupt their experience—each year holds it own special memories and 2024 was no different. There was a lively afternoon matinee of Between the Temples in which I was the youngest present by about 25 years, and a sold-out Wednesday screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum with Elizabeth Berkley in person. But judging from reactions on X.com, I’m not alone in my favorite 2024 theatrical screening being witnessing Interstellar in 70mm IMAX.

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.

2073 (Asif Kapadia)

Asif Kapadia––the biographical documentary wiz behind contemporary classics like Senna and Amy––opens his semi-fictional film 2073 in a flurry of doc footage. Wildfires, floods, and other such natural disasters set the tone while disturbing clips of cops bashing skulls and riot police brutalizing innocent people cement it for the next 85 minutes. Then comes the fiction: it’s been 37 years since “The Event,” and we’re in the future: the year 2073. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Black Box Diaries (Shiori Ito)

In the middle of Black Box Diaries, journalist Shiori Ito’s debut documentary, Ito grins at the camera as she strolls through downtown Tokyo on the day of her book launch. It’s October 18, 2017. The...

Joshua Oppenheimer’s much-anticipated film The End, which debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, has become one of the most discussed cinematic experiences of the year. A visionary Golden Age-style musical featuring an all-star cast led by Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George Mackay, and Moses Ingram, The End is a deeply poignant cautionary tale of humanity’s struggle for survival and redemption. If you’re wondering where to stream ‘The End’, we’ve got you covered. What is The End about? Set in a post-apocalyptic world 25 years after environmental collapse rendered Earth uninhabitable, The End centers on a family—Mother, Father, and their son—living in isolation within a luxurious bunker. Their fragile existence is disrupted when a mysterious girl arrives, shaking the foundations of their carefully preserved routines. Through its intricate musical storytelling, the film examines themes of remorse, resilience, and the possibility of transformation, offering an emotional exploration of the human spirit.

What’s the deal with the film Academy’s documentary branch? This season’s shortlist for the best documentary feature Oscar, released Dec. 17, was missing one of the year’s most acclaimed crowd-pleasers, Warner Bros.’ Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story — which is at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, won the top Critics Choice documentary award and is nominated for the Producers Guild’s top doc award — and also impressive documentaries about Martha Stewart (Martha), Celine Dion (I Am: Celine Dion), James Carville (Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) and John Williams (Music by John Williams), among others.

This isn’t to say that the 15 docs that were shortlisted are lacking — to the contrary, most are excellent. But it does reconfirm the doc branch’s weird aversion, over roughly the past decade, to populist titles.

During that period, the branch declined to shortlist Good Night Oppy, a charmer about a Wall-e-like Mars...

Joshua Oppenheimer's new film, The End, is a post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay as a family living in a bunker bankrolled by a former oilman played by Shannon. The genre-bending high-concept film feels like it's looking directly into the souls of the modern earthly inhabitants, watching and burning a hole through us. While the film is set after it's too late for humanity, Oppenheimer doesn't think we're quite there yet, which is why The End exists in the first place. The director told us in a recent interview:

The film is a cautionary tale, and like all cautionary tales, it's created and told as an act of hope, in the belief that there are still people who can heed its warning, that there's still time to heed the warning.

"It may be too late for the family in the film, but it is not too late for the audience,...

Household names at home but working under the moniker of Filip och Fredrik, Swedish TV hosts and journalists Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson are now in the international spotlight with their documentary The Last Journey, Sweden’s Oscar entry.

The movie follows a road trip they organize for Hammar’s elderly father, retired French teacher Lars, taking him back to his favorite holiday destination in the South of France in a bid to reignite his spark for life.

The work – touching on such universal themes as aging and the shifting relationships between parents and children over time – has drawn more than 400,000 spectators in Sweden, making it the highest-grossing documentary ever in the country.

Related: Best International Feature Film Oscar Winners Through The Years: Photo Gallery

“It started out as a private project,” Hammar explained during Deadline’s Contenders International panel. “I’d been talking to my mom because she called...

Joshua Oppenheimer wasn’t planning on making his narrative feature debut about the end of the world — and he certainly didn’t think it would be a musical. And yet, eight years after the idea popped into his head, at last his bold opus has come to the big screen, ready to jolt audiences out of their complacency.

The End (in theaters now) is like no other movie this year. Yes, there are several that feature singing and dancing, but none of those take place in a lavish underground bunker...

For filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, the beginning of “The End” came somewhat unexpectedly as an extension of his work in documentary. This might sound strange considering this narrative feature is a musical set in the bunker of a family partly responsible for an apocalyptic event 25 years prior, but throughout the project’s inception, production, and edit, Oppenheimer was constantly drawing upon his skills as a documentarian to further his examination of humanity’s ability to — drawing upon a fitting allegory — “fiddle while Rome burns.”

To hear Oppenheimer tell it, if there were a way to have told the story depicted in “The End” as a documentary, he probably would have. In a recent interview with IndieWire, he said he intended to follow 2012’s “The Act of Killing” and its 2014 followup, “The Look of Silence,” with a third documentary about the oligarchs who exploited the pain and suffering of those featured in these films to enrich themselves.

After fearlessly interrogating man’s capacity for evil in Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer returns with The End, a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. Despite that unexpected logline, the core themes Oppenheimer grapples with in his work––i.e. the nature of absolution and the self-deception that makes us uniquely human––are still very much present in his fiction-feature debut.

The End’s bunker is occupied by wealthy energy magnate (Michael Shannon), his wife (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay). An allegory, they are credited as Father, Mother, and Son. A few lucky others get to join them in waiting out the apocalypse––also nameless, their titles, their vocations: Butler (Tim McInnerny) and Doctor (Lennie James). Bronagh Gallagher has a meatier role as Mother’s best “Friend,” who also functions as the chef. Moses Ingram as...

A work of profound optimism, an ambitious mishegas staring into the abyss, an experimental theater piece trapped on film, the most bizarre musical of the year in an annum filled with strong contenders for that title — this is only the beginning of possible descriptions for The End, Joshua Oppenheimer’s wild swing for the fences. A Sondheim-esque tale that’s tuneful and atonal in equal measures, this tale of a collective living in extravagance as the world gasps its last ecological breath is the kind of movie you want adventurous cineastes to make,...

The End director Joshua Oppenheimer reflects on the dangerous qualities of hope and how his new approach to the musical carries on the themes at the core of his documentaries like The Act of Killing. After directing some of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the 21st century like The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, The End proves to be a compelling exploration of what people go through while trying to deny the things they've done. Set within a bunker after the end of the world, The End centers around survivors dealing with a newfound guest.

This forces the group as a whole to evaluate the choices they made to survive the collapse of the world and the hard decisions they made to ensure their future at the cost of others. The End is a harrowing and powerful film, that uses musical tropes as a means of delving into the guilts,...

Despite the relatively light release year, a welcome spread of films this holiday season brings us good tidings and cheer. From indies to majors, from talking lions to dog-women, there’s variety under the tree this year, offering a mix of blockbuster studio baubles, idiosyncratic character-driven Hanukkah presents, and new stocking-stuffers from stalwart filmmakers.

Joshua Oppenheimer is tired.

The two-time Academy Award nominee isn’t simply spent at the tail end of an exhausting week for the American body politic. Nor has he tossed and turned his way through countless sleepless nights, doomscrolling through the nightmare scenarios of what a second Trump administration could mean for Americans’ civil rights, the rule of international law, women’s bodies, the fate of the planet — take your pick.

Speaking with Variety at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where the “Act of Killing” director’s first fiction feature, “The End,” is the closing film, Oppenheimer has just arrived from Japan, where he spent two weeks with his husband, a Japanese novelist, visiting the in-laws while his partner researches his next book.

The filmmaker barely managed to sleep on the plane, though he is poised, thoughtful and gracious to a fault as he powers through his festival press junket. He is also determined and defiant,...

Creating an original musical in the year 2024 is an achievement in its own right, even if it’s only part of the reason why Joshua Oppenheimer’s new narrative feature “The End” is so audacious. Audiences seem to flock to new musicals like “Wonka” and “Mean Girls” because they offer an only slight alteration on a previously existing work of intellectual property that they are already familiar with, and even this year’s divisive “Emilia Pérez” has ostensibly sold itself on being a “musical for people that hate musicals.” If there’s anything that “The End” does that is most worthy of admiration, it’s that Oppenheimer does not insert a hint of derisiveness or irony within his razzle dazzle, Golden Age style musical. If it weren’t for the very specific correlations made to recent events in world history, “The End” could have feasibly have been released in the...

Joshua Oppenheimer, who has been nominated for an Academy Award, is making his first narrative feature picture, “The End,” a post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. The movie is about how people connect in a world where the environment is breaking down.

The movie is set 25 years after Earth stops being livable. It takes place in an underground bunker where a biological family and their friends are shocked when a stranger shows up. Oppenheimer started the project after doing a lot of study on how the rich stay alive. He went to see former Soviet command bunkers and decommissioned nuclear missile silos that were being turned into high-end underground spaces.

Oppenheimer told people at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, “It’s a miracle this got made.” Live musical performances shot in a salt mine were just one of the many ambitious parts of making the movie. It was only...

Greece’s Thessaloniki Film Festival ends this evening with a screening of The End, the latest feature project from the enigmatic filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

Best known for his intellectually rich and Oscar-nominated non-fiction works The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Oppenheimer’s latest is his first fiction project, and for it he has recruited one of the most impressive ensembles of the year. Starring are Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), BAFTA-nominee George Mackay (1917), and Emmy-nominee Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit).

Styled as a Golden Age Hollywood musical, The End is set in a post-apocalyptic world twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable. A biological family and their companions – part-found-family, part-hired-help – live in harmony in a subterranean bunker. But the arrival of a stranger smashes the synthetic veil of their strictly organized world. The ensuing struggle to maintain their...

Lo protagonizan Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Moses Ingram y Michael Shannon. © Avalon

Neon ha publicado el primer tráiler de The End, un musical post-apocalíptico (por muy extraño que suene) del director de The Act of Killing y The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer.

The End sigue a una de las últimas familias de la Tierra, compuesta por un exmagnate energético (Michael Shannon), una exbailarina (Tilda Swinton) y su hijo (George MacKay), quienes viven en un lujoso búnker en unas minas de sal junto a un doctor (Lennie James), un mayordomo (Tim McInnerny) y una amiga (Bronagh Gallagher), hasta que la llegada de una chica superviviente (Moses Ingram) empieza a sacudir la aparente perfección de sus vidas y a sacar a la luz todas las verdades y sentimientos reprimidos que han ido forjando en su idílico mundo.

La película está protagonizada por Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Michael Shannon, Bronagh...

Tilda Swinton and George Mackay star in apocalyptic musical The End, and the first trailer has landed. Right here.

Actor George Mackay is set return to the world of big screen musicals with The End, which is, er, joyously set during the apocalypse.

The cast also includes Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny and Lennie James.

The songs were written by Marius De Vries and Josh Schmidt. De Vries won a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello award for his score to Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, while The End marks the feature debut of Schmidt. Joshua Oppenheimer, best known for the award-winning documentaries The Act Of Killing (2012) and The Look Of Silence (2014) directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg.

George MacKay is no stranger to movie musicals. In 2013 he starred in Dexter Fletcher’s film adaptation of Stephen Greenhorn’s ebullient Proclaimers musical Sunshine On Leith...

Neon has debuted a trailer for the apocalyptic musical feature ‘The End.’ featuring Tilda Swinton and George McKay.

From director Joshua Oppenheimer comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.

The family consists of a couple and their young adult son who has never seen the outside world. There’s also a maid, a doctor, a butler and a young woman who managed to survive and find her way in. Initially feeling righteousness over their survival, the couple are soon haunted by regret for those they lost and guilt over their own contribution to the apocalypse.

The movie stars Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917) and Moses Ingram.

Also in trailers – “She’s been feeding us government secrets…” Trailer drops for Netflix series ‘Black Doves’

The post “Who could we trust?” Tilda Swinton stars in trailer for ‘The End’ appeared first on HeyUGuys.

The end of the world is getting more sing-songy than usual in Neon's new audacious musical, The End, which boasts a stellar ensemble cast led by Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. The latest feature film from The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, The End takes place in a world where most of humanity has been wiped out in an apocalyptic disaster, with the only survivors being an affluent family living in a state-of-the-art bunker. At least, they think they're the last of humanity, but as the first trailer for The End shows, they might just be wrong.

It would be a surreal experience to be alive after the world has ended. A world you may or may not have played a huge role in ending. But who can say? Only the people left alive in the trailer for The End, the new movie musical from Neon, which features Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon singing their way through Joshua Oppenheimer's narrative feature debut.

A new trailer for the well-reviewed festival film was revealed on Monday, November 4, and it is setting up a bold and quirky premise ahead of its December 6, 2024 theatrical debut.

What is The End About and Who Stars in It?

The film, which also stars George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James, and Michael Shannon alongside Swinton, centers on an extremely wealthy family who have been living underground for some years after the end of the world. An end that they may...

What if you were trapped in a bunker with Tilda Swinton, and she kept breaking out into song?

That’s (an extremely reductive version of) the premise for “The End,” director Joshua Oppenheimer’s oddball post-apocalyptic musical, for which Neon released a trailer on Monday. The trailer teases a romantic musical set in a billionaire family’s bunker after the end of the world they helped cause, with elegant sets and an unusual tone.

The film is Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Oppenheimer’s (“The Act of Killing”) first narrative feature, which he wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg and produced with Signe Byrge Sorensen and Swinton. The film stars Academy Award winner Swinton (“Michael Clayton”), George Mackay (“1917”), Moses Ingram (“The Queen’s Gambit”), Bronagh Gallagher (“The Commitments”), Tim McInnerny (“One Day”), Lennie James (“The Walking Dead”), and Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon (“Nocturnal Animals”). The music is by Joshua Schmidt (“Midwestern Gothic...

It’s difficult to imagine that following apocalyptic events, the remaining humans will arbitrarily feel like busting out singing. But that’s what writer-director Joshua Oppenheimer envisions in The End. Described as a cautionary tale, The End opens in theaters on December 6, 2024.

The cast includes Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917), and Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit). Bronagh Gallagher (Brassic), Tim McInnerny (Gladiator II), and Lennie James (Fear the Walking Dead) also star.

“From Academy Award-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world. Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger,...

Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Michael Shannon, and Moses Ingram sing for their lives in “The End.”

Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic family drama “The End” stars Swinton as a mother who protects her family by living in a bunker for decades after the world has ended. George Mackay, her plays her son, has never seen the outside world. Shannon co-stars as his father, while Moses Ingram plays a stranger who arrives, interrupting their carefully crafted underground world.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine. Son, a naïve twenty-something who has never seen the outside world, is fascinated by the newcomer, and suddenly, the delicate bonds...

"I think I like her!" "But you've never met anybody before..." Neon has unveiled the full trailer for a unique musical creation called The End, the first narrative feature film directed by the acclaimed doc filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. This cynical take on the end of the world is a Golden Age-style musical about the last human family. Described as a poignant and deeply human musical about a wealthy family living in an ornate bunker in a salt mine. An urgent and unforgettable cautionary tale, The End stars Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, with Moses Ingram. Featuring original songs from Joshua Schmidt (music) and Joshua Oppenheimer (lyrics). The cast also includes Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James. I've heard mixed on this - some people love it, some people hate it, as if the movie was trolling the audience the entire time. A musical about a family of rich idiots?...

Almost three years have gone by since Joshua Oppenheimer, the director behind the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, announced that he was teaming up with Neon to make his narrative feature debut with The End, “a golden-age musical about the last human family.” That film went into production last year, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), George MacKay (1917), Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Bronagh Gallagher (Pulp Fiction), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Lennie James (The Walking Dead), and Danielle Ryan (The Silencing). Now it’s making the festival rounds, building up to a December theatrical release. The film is scheduled to start playing in New York and Los Angeles on December 6th, with the limited release expanding on December 13th. As those dates are swiftly approaching, a trailer for The End has...

Neon has revealed the trailer and poster for the apocalyptic musical film The End, which was co-written and directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. The movie will open in Los Angeles and New York on Dec. 6 and in select cities on Dec. 13.

From Academy Award-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.

Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine.

Son, a naïve twenty-something who has never seen the outside world, is fascinated by the newcomer, and suddenly, the delicate bonds of blind optimism that have held this wealthy clan together begin to fray.

As tensions rise, their...

From Academy Award®-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer comes Neon’s The End, being described as “a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.” Watch the official trailer below.

End of the world musical The End will release in theaters on December 6, 2024.

An urgent and unforgettable cautionary tale, The End stars Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Academy Award® nominee Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917) and Moses Ingram.

The screenplay is by Joshua Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair), with songs by Joshua Schmidt (music) and Joshua Oppenheimer (lyrics).

Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James also star.

The post ‘The End’ Official Trailer – Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Star in Apocalyptic Musical appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam has announced the 55 documentary projects selected for this year’s IDFA Forum, chosen from among 820 entries.

Among the prominent names heading to the forum, which runs November 17-20, is Emmy winner Eva Mulvad (The Cave), who will pitch her upcoming project House of the Holy Father, co-directed with Andreas Koefoed. “In an intriguing cinematic exercise that straddles fiction and documentary,” a release notes, “the film seeks to bare intricate workings of domination and manipulation, as ex-members of the notorious Christian sect Faderhuset direct scenes with well-known Danish actors, including Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik.”

Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann, who has won prizes at film festivals around the world, will participate in the Rough Cut Presentations section with Issa’s House, a film set in the West Bank. Another film shot in...

Joshua Oppenheimer and George Mackay during the press conference After establishing himself as a successful documentarian with The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer tackles a musical about the end of the world with his fiction debut, The End. Set in a near-future, a family has retreated to a bunker underground. There a Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton) and their Son (George Mackay) live with a butler (Tim McInnery), a doctor (Lennie James) and Mother’s friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who also essentially takes care of the housework. Their world is one of recreated comfort, packed with famous artworks, where the older members of the household carefully curate their own version of history, which they pass on to the son, who was born into the environment. Their equilibrium is rocked when a Girl (Moses Ingram) unexpectedly enters their world as the family and their new guest...

Where to begin with The End? It’s such an odd concoction of ideas and styles, it’s hard to know. The concept of bringing unlikely things together has, of course, worked for Joshua Oppenheimer in the past. Asking genocidal mass killers to re-enact their crimes for a documentary is not something most people would have hit upon but the director made it viscerally pay-off with The Act Of Killing.

This time around, however, while his audacity remains, his delivery falls short. Set in a dystopian future, the action takes place in a scraped out bunker, filled with dunes of salt. Walk through a door, though, and you’re suddenly in what appears to be a tasteful upper middle-class home, lined with art masterpieces from the likes of Renoir with not a speck of dirt to be seen. This is where, what we assume to be one of the world’s last families,...

by Abirbhab Maitra

In 2012, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, European auteur Michael Haneke discussed the challenges of dramatizing events with significant historical context in film. He argued that dramatization can lead to manipulation, stripping historical objectivity and imposing a subjective truth on the narrative. In his view, directors should take extra care to maintain a sense of responsibility towards both the historical events and the audience’s perception, encouraging them to confront history as their own, free from any kind of manipulation. Haneke illustrated his point by referencing Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog”, which prompts spectators to reflect on their position in relation to the depicted events without succumbing to the comforts of melodrama.

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Joshua Oppenheimer‘s 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing”, explores these ideas of confronting history through an objective lens. Based on the events...

by Cláudio Alves

Ambitious mess will always be more exciting and artistically valuable than cautious mediocrity. The timid filmmaker has their place, but they'll never rise above those whose ideas reach for the sky, the heavens, the likely impossible. Or, in Joshua Oppenheimer's case, those who burrow down below, digging to the center of the Earth, mayhap to hell. For his feature debut, The End, the director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence goes underground, setting the scene in a not-so-distant future when the Earth has been left ravaged by climate change and other related catastrophes, virtually inhabitable, so hostile to life that those who survive must fight one another for the scant resources around…...

Exclusive: Perfect Days, the comeback feature from legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders, has become boutique operator Curzon Cinemas’s longest-running film after passing 30 continuous weeks this past Friday.

Perfect Days has played at Curzon Bloomsbury in London for 206 continuous days. The film passes Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, which played for 26 continuous weeks, to become the operator’s longest-running title under modern tracking. Perfect Days is currently the 7th highest-grossing film at Curzon Bloomsbury of all time.

Wenders’s quietly radical, Tokyo-set drama, stars Japanese actor Koji Yakusho as a man with a love of trees and literature who mysteriously opts for a simple life by working as a toilet cleaner. The film debuted in Competition at Cannes in 2023 where Yakusho won Best Actor.

All rights on the film for the UK, Latam, India, and Turkey were acquired by Mubi from The Match Factory at Cannes 2023. The pic recorded...

Filmfest Hamburg has unveiled the full programme for its 32nd edition, which is set to open with Louise Courvoisier’s Cannes prize-winner Holy Cow and close with Pedro Almodovar’s Golden Lion-winner The Room Next Door.

French filmmaker Courvoisier will be accompanied by lead actors Clément Faveau and Malwéne Barthelemy at the opening gala on September 26 for the German premiere of her debut feature, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes where it won the Youth Prize. The coming-of-age film will be released by Pandora Film in German cinemas on January 2.

The Filmfest’s new director Malika Rabahallah and...

Plot: Many years after an apocalyptic event they may have contributed to, a wealthy family survives in a luxurious underground fortress.

Review: One of the best things about attending a festival like TIFF is that you often walk into movies without preconceived notions. Films playing at the festival are so new that they barely have any stills available, much less any trailers, so you walk into them pretty much blind. The downside is that, once in a while, you end up seeing a movie that sounds intriguing, but pretty much right off the bat, once you see a few minutes of it, you’re hit by a sinking feeling that, “oh no, this might not be for me.”

Indeed, The End wasn’t for me. While I’m a sucker for movies about the apocalypse, and the premise (and dream cast) are intriguing, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative debut is a slog to get through.

The Latin American premiere of Christopher Andrews’ TIFF selection Bring Them Down starring Barry Keoghan and a screening of Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 modern classic La Haine feature in the 20th Monterrey International Film Festival line-up.

Running September 25-October 2, the festival in northern Mexico led by general manager Diana Cobos brings Cannes, Sundance and Berlin selections in its World Highlights strand, including the Latin American premieres of Piero Messina’s Another End starring Gael Garcia Bernal, and Sugercane by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat.

The festival includes the Monterrey Classics section with screenings of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos,...

Chatting with the head of a prominent documentary-production company recently, I asked if hybrid filmmaking had reached its natural limit. Could it conceivably be pushed further? He posited these limitations might be behind a recent trend of documentarians pivoting to fiction: Kirsten Johnson is making a Susan Sontag biopic with Kristen Stewart; Frederick Wiseman made his first narrative feature A Couple after half a century spent in non-fiction; Roberto Minervini’s The Damned and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh both premiered at Cannes this past Spring; most recently, RaMell Ross adapted the Pulitzer-winning novel Nickel Boys. Documentarians are realizing that if fiction and non-fiction are both highly constructed, then why not work this construction openly, with the added perks of larger budgets and access to stars?

Joshua Oppenheimer joins that cohort with The End, a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. From the jump, The End embodies a more classical filmmaking mode.

A film crew took advantage of the Venice Film Festival spotlight Wednesday and wore clothing on its prestigious red carpet embroidered with the distances from the Lido to various locations where Russians are holding Ukrainian prisoners.

Their documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth, directed by Olha Zhurba, celebrated its world premiere in the Out of Competition strand.

Each piece of clothing, made in collaboration with Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist and designer Alisa Liubomska, featured embroidery carrying eight names of different detention sites and their respective distances in kilometres from the Lido. “Each of these names symbolizes the lives of thousands of Ukrainian men and women,” the team said.

“We wanted to remind people of the horrific conditions in which detainees are held, the illegitimate trials and fabricated charges, the torture, and the deaths,” said Zhurba. “About everything that Russia, as a terrorist state, is doing with impunity to individuals who should...

Exclusive: Mubi, the global distributor, streaming service and production company, has acquired all rights in UK, Germany and Austria to Joshua Oppenheimer’s (The Act of Killing) new feature The End, which had its world premiere at Telluride this weekend.

The ambitious film is imagined as a Golden Age-style musical and cautionary tale about the last human family.

Starring are Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), BAFTA-nominee George Mackay (1917), and Emmy-nominee Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit).

Screenplay is by Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair), with songs by Joshua Schmidt (music) and Oppenheimer (lyrics). Marius de Vries is the executive music producer.

The official synopsis reads: “Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily...

Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer shines a light on humanity’s darker side. His acclaimed works The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence uncovered atrocities in Indonesia with unflinching honesty. For his narrative debut, The End, Oppenheimer tackles similarly profound themes through a unique lens.

Set decades after climate change renders Earth uninhabitable, the film centers on an affluent family holed up in an underground bunker. For twenty-five years, they’ve hid from the devastated world above. Down here, Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, and their son (George MacKay) live in lavish, museum-like conditions. But to maintain their insular bubble, they must deny responsibility for the crisis.

Oppenheimer uses gilded cages and original songs to examine how privilege can breed willful blindness. Digging into guilt, denial, and desperate rationalizations, he peers into humanity’s capacity for self-delusion. The family’s cushy isolation gets disrupted by an outsider’s arrival, shaking foundations and dislodging long-buried feelings.

It’s a classic story prompt: The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s delirious and delicately monumental “The End,” the man is an über-affluent family. The “door” (so to speak) connects the scorched ruins of our planet to the cavernous underground bunker where these characters have buried themselves for the last 25 years. The knock reverberates with a force powerful enough to dislodge all the feelings they’ve worked so hard to bury along with them — the humanity they’ve had to deny somewhere deep within themselves in order to make peace with the humanity they chose to leave behind on the surface.

Despite the broad familiarity of its premise, however, this story doesn’t unfold like any post-apocalyptic fable before it. For one thing, it’s a full-throated musical that starts with Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton leading the rest of the...

The odd, accidental synchronicity of the movie business brought us double volcano movies, double asteroid/comet movies, double Pinocchio movies and double Truman Capote movies in rapid succession, along with four body-swapping movies over two years back in the 1980s. But “The End,” which premiered on Saturday night at the Telluride Film Festival, may be part of the weirdest trend in cinematic coincidence of them all: film-festival movies that are musicals, even though there’s absolutely nothing in the subject matter to make you think they should be.

First there was Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” which caused a sensation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival by taking a story of a Central American drug lord who undergoes gender reassignment surgery and filling it with songs. The Venice Film Festival struck next with “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which finds Todd Phillips turning his sequel to the Oscar-winning 2019 drama “Joker” into a musical,...

What will the existence of the elite class, whose conspicuous consumption is a status symbol and has a negative impact on the environment, look like once everything has been completely destroyed? Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End imagines what that future could look like, joining the ranks of other recent films that have put outrageous privilege in their often sanctimonious cross hairs. But the willful blindness of the ruling class is something that Oppenheimer has intimately grappled with in his documentary work, namely The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and he attempts to carve out a unique approach to eating the rich on screen by dressing up his venom in the fanciful garbs of a Golden Age musical.

Set 20 years after an environmental collapse has wiped out society, The End takes place in a lavish underground bunker within the depths of a salt mine. This is the home...

With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer approached the documentary form in a radical, seemingly unthinkable way, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served on the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera. Why should his narrative debut be any more conventional?

For “The End,” Oppenheimer conceives a peculiar post-apocalyptic musical, confined to an underground bunker where an elite set of people have hoarded fine art and expensive wines for a cataclysm that, perversely enough, they may well have instigated. Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about a “very wealthy, very dangerous family” (in his words), but ultimately chose to steer the project in a very different direction.

With its turgid 148-minute running time and defiant lack of compelling conflict, “The End” doesn’t pander to mainstream sensibilities. Rather, Oppenheimer appeals to the art-house crowd with a serious-minded rumination on...

Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay star in “The End,” a new post-apocalyptic musical about the last human family on Earth. I mean, we’re sold already, but further tantalizing is the fact that “The End” is the narrative debut and long-overdue latest film from filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. If Oppenheimer’s name rings a bell, it should. He’s the director behind the heralded Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” (2012) and “The Look of Silence” (2014), the former film listed in our feature about the Best Documentaries Of The 2010s.

Continue reading ‘The End’ First Look: Photos & Poster Of Joshua Oppenheimer’s Golden Age Musical With Tilda Swinton & Michael Shannon at The Playlist.

Almost three years have gone by since Joshua Oppenheimer, the director behind the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, announced that he was teaming up with Neon to make his narrative feature debut with The End, “a golden-age musical about the last human family.” That film went into production last year, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), George MacKay (1917), Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Bronagh Gallagher (Pulp Fiction), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Lennie James (The Walking Dead), and Danielle Ryan (The Silencing). Now it’s making the festival rounds, with the Telluride Film Festival unveiling the image that can be seen above, and a teaser poster arriving online just ahead of the film’s screenings at both Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival. The poster can be seen at the bottom of this article.