Month: January 2023

Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center have unveiled the lineup for the 28th edition of Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, an annual celebration of contemporary French filmmaking. The event will take place March 2–12.  It kicks off with a screening of Alice Winocour’s “Revoir Paris,” which stars Virginie Efira as a translator named Mia, who survived a

Italy-based sales agent Lights On has acquired world rights for “Mammalia” by Romanian director Sebastian Mihăilescu, ahead of its world premiere in the Berlinale Forum strand. It has debuted the film’s trailer (below). In “Mammalia,” 39-year-old Camil (István Téglás) embarks on a dreamlike trip where the banal and the surreal merge. Struggling to come to

Abramorama, a New York-based film distribution and marketing company, is launching a global video-on-demand rental service. It’s collaborating with Artinii.Pro, a cloud-tech driven media enterprise, to extend film offerings through the digital platform Abramorama at Home. To kick off the partnership, six music and social issue documentaries including “Long Live Rock,” “Herb Alpert Is…” and “Cosplay

Jordanian director Bassel Ghandour’s thriller “The Alleys,” which depicts lowlife intrigue in Amman’s murky underworld, is drawing fire from conservative members of Jordan’s parliament for its use of expletives and allegedly blasphemous themes. Ghandour’s multi-strand genre film — shot in a claustrophobic neighborhood in East Amman called Jabal Al Natheef, where violence runs rampant — is

Cinema box office in Hong Kong rebounded over the recent Chinese New Year holiday period. They failed to recover to pre-pandemic levels, but local titles performed strongly. Data from Hong Kong Box Office Limited showed gross revenues between Saturday and Tuesday (Jan 21-24, 2023) amounted to HK$50.89 million ($6.52 million). That is a 19% improvement

We’re all aware of the hokey old “the doctor is a woman!” riddle, but what if that doctor were Dr. Frankenstein? Distaff riffs on Mary Shelley’s OG horror novel do exist — schlocky 1971 Italian exploitation flick “Lady Frankenstein,” for one. But given that it’s a story of life-creation, it’s slightly surprising that it’s taken

The success of long-format cult-exposé documentaries like HBO’s “The Vow” and Netflix’s “Wild Wild Country” has given the cult-curious an appetite for the kind of chain-link explosion rhythms that only serials can supply. We’re primed, one might even say programmed, to expect the smallest new kink on even the oddest tangent to get ample screentime,

The title “The Accidental Getaway Driver” says it all: A down-on-his-luck driver picks up felons in his vehicle and unwittingly gets mixed up in their criminal acts. This “Collateral”-esque proposition propels renowned music video director Sing J. Lee’s minor-key and frustratingly one-note crime-drama, inspired by the true story of a Southern California driver of Vietnamese

Having its world premiere at the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam, Georden West’s directorial debut “Playland” is an interdisciplinary film about the titular establishment, Boston’s oldest gay bar. “I was volunteering at an MIT event, like an archive hackathon, and I learned about People Before Highways, which was a grassroots movement against urban renewal and the

On Monday night, NBA star Stephen Curry found himself facing a different kind of full-court press — in the form of a mass of reporters lined up on the red carpet at Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere of the new documentary “Underrated,” which chronicles his life and career. In a lucky bit of

Pathé has signed a three-year co-production and co-financing deal with Logical Pictures to strengthen its ambitious film production strategy. The family-owned company operates France’s leading multiplex chain and runs one of the country’s most successful film studios. 2023 looks to be Pathé’s biggest year in a while with three major French releases: Guillaume Canet’s “Asterix

One travels to the Sundance Film Festival in the dead of winter for numerous reasons, chief of them being the promise of a front-row seat to confident debuts like Cory Finley’s delectably dark “Thoroughbreds.” Indeed, the playwright-turned-filmmaker demonstrated himself an original voice with his first cinematic outing in 2017, proving his promise with the equally