Month: September 2021

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook Inc. could become the latest celebrity-backed media company to secure a splashy deal. The company, which produces the popular “Red Table Talk” on Facebook Watch and is backing the upcoming “King Richard,” is in negotiations to sell itself to the unnamed media venture run by former Walt Disney

Melanie Laurent, one of France’s most acclaimed actors-turned-filmmakers, has been having a banner 2021, headlining Alexandre Aja’s hit Netflix movie “Oxygene,” sitting on Spike Lee’s Cannes jury, and world premiering her sixth directorial effort “The Mad Women’s Ball” at Toronto. The ambitious period movie marks Amazon’s first French movie original. Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds,””Beginners”) shot the

Belgium’s Fien Troch, who won best director in Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section in 2016 with “Home,” returned to the Lido last week to pitch her fifth feature, “Holly,” in the Venice Gap-Financing Market. The project, which is budgeted at €2.5 million, is produced by Antonino Lombardo’s Belgian outfit Prime Time. The Dardenne Brothers’ company,

Playwright Stephen Karam hasn’t just made a movie out of his Tony-winning play “The Humans”; he’s made an A24 movie, with all the idiosyncrasies and directorial self-indulgences that implies. Over the course of just eight years, A24 has established itself as a distributor for which out-there creative gambits aren’t merely permitted, but outright encouraged. The

Late in “The Starling,” at a stage when Melissa McCarthy’s grieving mother has never felt more distant from her withdrawn husband, she receives a pep talk from Kevin Kline’s wise confidante about the titular bird. When starlings mate, he explains, they build and protect their nest together: “They’re just not meant to exist in the

Eight months after winning the documentary Oscar for “Free Solo,” directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin began working on their next documentary project: National Geographic’s “The Rescue.” The directing duo used never-before-seen footage and exclusive interviews to tell the story of the dramatic 2018 rescue of 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach from

Barry Levinson is back at the Toronto International Film Festival with “The Survivor,” the incredible story of Harry Haft, who managed to survive Auschwitz by boxing his fellow prisoners. After moving to America, Haft boxed professionally, having a memorable bout with Rocky Marciano, but continued to be haunted by his experiences in the concentration camps.

Canadian actor Sarah Gadon told Variety Saturday she was “really happy” with the decisions of Venice’s main jury this year, on which she served alongside Bong Joon-ho, Saverio Costanzo, Virginie Efira, Cynthia Erivo, Alexander Nanau and last year’s Golden Lion winner Chloé Zhao. The jury gave the Golden Lion to French director Audrey Diwan’s powerful

Waxing, waning COVID restrictions continue to force filmmakers to develop workarounds if they want to work at all. While one can admire their enterprise, it would be fibbing to pretend most such efforts to date have been very interesting as art or entertainment, beyond the novelty of whatever conceptual gimmick allowed them to keep cast

Scrappy filmmaking can sometimes deliver superb storytelling, as is proven by Erik Matti’s initially wobbly but increasingly gripping, increasingly thoughtful, increasingly increasing three-and-a-half-hour “On the Job: The Missing 8,” the prolific Filipino director’s Venice-competing sequel to the 2013 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title “On the Job.” While the film unfolds more like the TV show it’s

Have you ever noticed how, in Western culture, when referring to someone’s death, writers feel obliged to insert the word “tragic” somewhere in the sentence? Is there any other kind, a reader might rightly ask. Sometimes they mean “unexpected,” a kind of shorthand intended to show that the life in question was cut short before

The 2021 crop of the Toronto Film Festival’s Tribute Awards honorees gathered on Saturday to discuss their cinematic achievements and indulge in some responsible human contact. This year’s recipients — including Jessica Chastain, Benedict Cumberbatch, Denis Villeneuve, Alanis Obomsawin, Ari Wegner, Danis Goulet and Dionne Warwick — sat for a press conference moderated by Variety at

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read if you have not yet watched James Wan’s “Malignant.” James Wan’s newest horror film, “Malignant,” is taking the genre — and its critics — by storm. The Warner Bros. film, which premiered on Sept. 10 in theaters and on HBO Max, shocked audiences in its third act by revealing that

A usurper melodrama by any other name is still a usurper melodrama, and Fabrice du Welz’s latest doesn’t really try to cloak its genre conventions: “Inexorable” might just as well be titled “Single White Female Nanny” or “Fatal Domestic.” Still, if this isn’t the most surprising or original among the Belgian helmer’s character-driven thrillers to

Three mercenaries on the run with a plane full of gold and a dark secret in their past are the starting point for Jean Luc Herbulot’s Senegalese genre-bender “Saloum,” which has its world premiere in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival. The film centers on the Bangui Hyenas, a mythic trio of

Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” won a pair of prizes at the 47th Deauville American Film Festival where “Blue Bayou,” “Down With the King,” “Pleasure” and “John and the Hole” also picked up awards during the closing ceremony. Michael Shannon, who was previously at Deauville with “99 Homes” and “Take Shelter,” received the honorary Talent Award

Negotiations between West Coast IATSE locals and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on a new master film and TV contract have stretched past the Sept. 10 deadline as union members become more vocal about the possibility of a strike. Little progress has been made since negotiations between the union and the AMPTP

Among authors who didn’t live to witness their own success, Louis Hemon is a particularly unfortunate case — his novel “Maria Chapdelaine” was published in 1913, the same year as his train-struck death. Thus he didn’t see it become an early Quebec-lit classic taught to generations of schoolchildren, published in translation worldwide or adapted into

Eli Roth, who is known to have a passion for Italian B-movies, is at the Venice Film Festival to help promote biographical doc “Inferno Rosso: Joe D’Amato on the Road to Excess,” directed by Manlio Gomarasca and Massimiliano Zanin, in which Roth features as a talking head. The doc, which premiered on the Lido as

The Venice Film Festival is drawing to a close as tonight’s star-studded awards ceremony begins, with Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon-ho’s jury set to reveal their selections from this year’s official Competition. Penélope Cruz and Jane Campion are among the potential prizewinners already spotted on the red carpet prior to the ceremony. Follow here for the