Movies

Evan Rachel Wood says in the new documentary “Phoenix Rising” that she was “essentially raped on-camera” while filming the 2007 music video for Marilyn Manson’s “Heart-Shaped Glasses.” The video features Wood wearing “Lolita”-inspired heart-shaped glasses and having sex with Manson while flake blood rains down on them. Wood was 19 years old when she filmed

Ondi Timoner has already won two Sundance grand jury prizes for her documentaries. But she is especially nervous about screening “Last Flight Home” at this year’s virtual festival. “It’s a scary moment for me because this film is so personal,” says Timoner of the documentary about her father and his final days. “It’s my family

Guillermo del Toro fans had to wait four years in between his best picture winner “The Shape of Water” and his newest release “Nightmare Alley.” The wait for his next project won’t be as long. Netflix has announced the director’s stop-motion, musical adaptation of “Pinocchio” is set for release in December 2022. Del Toro co-directs

“Nightmare Alley,” “Cruella,” “No Time to Die” and “In The Heights” are among the top films recognized for excellence in production design in the 26th annual Art Directors Guild nominations. On Monday, the ADG announced nominations for this year’s awards show, which will return to a live ceremony on March 5 at the Intercontinental Hotel

On the Eastern border of Ukraine in the Donbas region is the city of Lysychansk, only 90 kilometers from Lugansk, where along the bank of the Donets lies the Lysychansk Center for the Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children. This halfway house serves as a momentary intervention for neglected and at-risk children while the state

After months of heated debates and clashes, the French film industry has set new windowing rules for movies that are released in local theaters. The rules will apply to exhibitors, pay and free TV channels and subscription-based services. They’re expected to be signed by France’s Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot later on Monday (Jan. 24) Netflix

The producers of Sundance world dramatic competition entry “Utama,” Bolivia’s Alma Films and Uruguay’s LaMayorCine, have re-teamed for “Los Abrazos” (“The Embrace”), the sixth fiction feature of Marcos Loayza. The father of “Utama” director Alejandro Loayza Grisi and a lauded filmmaker in Bolivia, Loayza’s credits include his career-launching 1995 drama “A Question of Faith” (“Cuestion

MocapLab – one of Europe’s biggest motion capture (mocap) facilities – is implementing a major expansion plan to meet increased demand from film and TV projects, commercials, videogames and immersive media. Founded by Rémi Brun in 2007, MocapLab offers state-of-the-art motion capture services, from its facilities based on the outskirts of Paris. It has a

Race, class and cultural divides are probed with intriguing understatement in “God’s Country.” Julian Higgins’ first feature can be taken as a drama with thriller elements or a low-key thriller with atypical dramatic nuance, working either way as a quietly effective balance between genre, social issue and character study elements. Based on a James Lee

Krystin Ver Linden’s “Alice” is a righteous fable about a Black woman (Keke Palmer) who escapes from an isolated Georgia plantation that’s enslaved her, her husband (Gaius Charles) and her family for generations, and discovers a wonderland just outside the property line: 1973 America, where she learns she’s been emancipated for a century. “I never

Netflix’s epic Kanye West documentary, “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” will unfold in three feature-length parts, as the subtitle promises. (The first part premiered Sunday in the Sundance Film Festival, and gets a one-night theatrical release Feb. 10; the whole thing will unspool on successive Wednesdays on Netflix, starting Feb. 16.) But however the filmmakers carve

The clumsy, drunken lunge and uninvited cheek-kiss that precipitates the action in wildly uneven French-Canadian comedy “Babysitter” is oddly appropriate for a film that can also feel like the victim of misguided, intrusive, if hardly malevolent exuberance. Far less coherent than her more focused and confident debut “A Brother’s Love,” Monia Chokri’s second feature is

He’s a cha cha real smooth talker. He’s 22, tall and handsome with a beard, but not a scruffy hipster beard — more like a post-millennial, post-ironic traditional beard, which sets off features that are finely chiseled in a Middle American corporate way. (When he grins, he looks like Donny Osmond.) He’s just out of

How to take on the hypocrisy of megachurch culture on a micro budget? That’s the quandary at the center of the Ebo twins’ “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” An easy-target satire of a disgraced Southern Baptist pastor and the First Lady who stood by his side amidst scandal, packed as a Christopher Guest-style mock

French VFX powerhouse MacGuff – with headquarters in Paris and offices in L.A. – is using proprietary artificial intelligence tools, in particular Face Engine and Body Engine, in a broad range of VFX projects. Current projects in the pipeline include Season 2 of “Lupin” for Netflix, “Hôtel du temps” for France Télévisions, and Christian Carion’s

Unstoppable force meets immovable object in “To the End.” Rachel Lears’ documentary inspires in its portrait of youthful activists organizing to push impactful climate-change policies into American political reality — and exasperates in the resistance with which that urgent quest is greeted on both sides of the entrenched-power aisle. Covering several years of fast-moving events,

In the same way that children at slumber parties share ghost stories after dark, a group of young boys regale each other with tales of horror in their shared dorm, as a kaleidoscope lamp casts strange, shifting patterns over their faces for extra atmosphere. These aren’t supernatural chestnuts or spooky urban legends, however, but grim

Over recent years France has established itself as a key hub for VFX work, driven by the talent and creativity of local players and extensive public support schemes. In 2020, the VFX sector was given a further boost by the change to France’s Tax Rebate for International Production (TRIP) scheme, which now offers a 40%

National Geographic Documentary Films has acquired “The Territory,” a timely look at indigenous-led land defense in the Amazon rainforest, following its premiere at the virtual Sundance Film Festival. The company plans to release “The Territory” theatrically later this year before the film heads to its streaming platforms. Alex Pritz directed “The Territory” in his feature

On a balmy Labor Day weekend, four best friends find a dead body in the woods, the discovery marking an end of innocence as adolescence beckons. If you think you’ve seen this one before, “Summering” makes no apology for the resemblance. Right down to a stolen pistol shoved in a backpack, James Ponsoldt’s unhurried, sun-kissed

National Geographic Documentary Films has won out in a fierce bidding war for the rights to “Fire of Love,” a documentary and love story about two French scientists who died tracking the volcanoes that were their greatest passion. It’s the first big pact of this year’s virtual Sundance, a festival that has been rather slow-going

Avoiding the heady and idyllic world of adolescent coming-of-age tales ever-familiar to viewers, Spanish writer-director Carlota Pereda presents a brazen look into the psyches of youth; their faults, rage, and insecurity. In this award-winning short-turned-feature, Pereda, known for nudging the boundaries of genre, delivers a roundhouse kick, annihilating them. “Piggy” (“Cerdita”) is set in a serene

There are very few actors with Rebecca Hall’s facility for making difficult, even contradictory characters seem plausible. So it’s quite something to say that even her knack for the dignified and intelligent portrayal of mental and behavioral instability meets its Waterloo with Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection,” a psychological thriller that starts off promisingly before swerving into

Motherhood is scary stuff. From “Rosemary’s Baby” through to “The Babadook” and “Hereditary,” a certain breed of horror film has taught us as much. Equally disturbing, in Hanna Bergholm’s inventive, alarmingly sunny genre outing “Hatching,” is adolescence: lurking under a protective mother’s wings, waiting to crack and come of age in a Finnish suburb’s suffocating,

The villagers refer to her as Old Maid Maria, invoking the witch’s name as a way to make children behave. But the Wolf-Eateress — or Volkojatka, as the superstitious peasants call this shape-shifting witch — is more than just a scary story in “You Won’t Be Alone.” The adults also believe in Old Maid Maria,

For a decade, Lena Dunham has kept more than busy, executive producing TV series like “Camping” and “Generation” and putting out her memoir. Yet she’s been notably selective about her main slate of projects, and “Sharp Stick,” which premiered tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, is her third major act. The first was “Tiny Furniture,”

Dual forces of climate change and cultural genocide overlap to devastating effect in “The Territory,” threatening not just a native community but a wider ecosystem — and cheered on by the actively hostile powers that be. Riveting and despairing in equal measure, freshman director Alex Pritz’s documentary immerses us over the course of three years

Turns out, it is easier to create a human clone than it is to destroy one. Or so goes writer-director Riley Stearns’ morbidly satirical, grimly absurd parallel version of the world as we know it. In “Dual,” for those who have themselves copied, then change their minds for whatever reason, just one course of action

In the opening sequence of Sophie Hyde’s riveting “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a suave young man (Daryl McCormack) steps out of an ice cream parlor, catches a mint candy in his mouth, and swings around a street pole like a hipster Gene Kelly. The Irishman is confidently cool — and not quite himself.

Aisha didn’t move to New York City to raise some other mother’s kids. She moved there with the intention of bringing her young son over from Senegal. In order to pay his way, however, Aisha must do as so many undocumented women have in the Big Apple: She must play mom to a stranger’s child,