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Since its launch in 1995, the Slamdance Film Festival has been full to bursting with micro-budgeted concoctions from emerging artists who receded as fast as they emerged. But the festival has launched numerous big-deal careers. Rian Johnson (Evil Demon Golf Ball from Hell!!!), Christopher Nolan (Following), and Joe and Anthony Russo (Pieces) are among the filmmakers who jumped more than one rung on the directing ladder thanks to Slamdance. What’s more common is that the festival is a notch on the career bedpost for fringe, first-time filmmakers who gave it an honest try and, if they're lucky, will get to try again someday. That’s what happens when a Slamdance entry can’t quite lay claim to a major talent being born.

Onto that list comes Sabrina Greco, whose languid and intermittently interesting debut feature, Lockjaw, premiered at the 2025 Slamdance festival, which has relocated to Los Angeles from its former home in Salt Lake City,...

American Film Convention (AFC) organisers have announced further details of the 40-strong panel programme at the inaugural event scheduled for October 15-17 in Downtown Los Angeles.

Distribution expert Peter Broderick of Paradigm Consulting will kick off the AFC Talks sessions at Magic Box on October 15 with the keynote, Supercharge Your Distribution!

That day’s sessions will include an examination of the exhibition space featuring Neil Williams from event cinema company Gathr and Christie Marchese from social cinema platform Kinema, alongside Peter Ambrosio of arthouse chain Lumiere and Evan Saxon of distribution, marketing and rights management specialist Abramorama.

Filmmaker Keith Ochwat...

Detroit-manufactured Bruce Campbell is a cult legend who sawed his way into every genre. Evil Dead Rise, the fifth installment of the franchise most associated with the actor, opens a new book on April 21, and it will be the first not to lead with his chin. He isn’t taunting the sacred geometry of the “Necronomicon Ex-Mortis,” Campbell was busy. He is always busy. He has authored novels, comic books, and screenplays, and has directed productions on big screens and small. Campbell is the star attraction of several franchise fandoms, beloved at the Comic-Con circuit and, believe it or else, crooned Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” for an Old Spice commercial, besides hosting the short-lived Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

“This guy never stops working,” his Ash vs. Evil Dead co-star, Dana DeLorenzo, marveled at January’s Sf Sketchfest’s Roast of Bruce Campbell, before adding “On...

Ewan McGregor has had a prolific career on screen since his feature-film debut in 1994. The actor rose to fame following his gritty portrayal of Mark Renton in the 1996 film "Trainspotting" and continued to rise in Hollywood after appearing in films like "Emma" and "Velvet Goldmine." Arguably, the actor became universally popular as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the 1997 film "Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace," which helped pave the way for roles in other blockbuster films like "Moulin Rouge!" and "Black Hawk Down" in the early 2000s.

Most recently, McGregor played Danny Torrance in "Doctor Sleep" and reprised his Obi-Wan Kenobi character in the "Obi-Wan Kenobi" miniseries, which concluded in June 2022.

Outside of his packed work schedule over the years, McGregor is also a father to his five children, four of whom he shares with ex-wife Eve Mavrakis. After the "Birds of Prey" actor split from Mavrakis in 2017, he started...

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has made way for a number of theories trying to explain what happens at the Overlook Hotel and what the story really means, and among them is a theory that explains the real reason why the Grady twins were killed. Many of Stephen King’s works have been adapted to other media, sometimes more than once, as is the case of The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, The Shining was released in 1980, and while it’s now regarded as one of the best horror movies ever made, it was initially received with mixed reactions due to its tone, the changes it made to King’s story, and its symbolism, ambiguities, “mistakes”, and the unanswered questions it left.

Kubrick’s The Shining took the premise and characters from King’s novel but made significant changes to it, so much so that it’s often seen as...

Exclusive: Sullivan Jones and Lisa Gilroy have been cast as leads opposite Jimmy O. Yang in Interior Chinatown, a new Hulu series from creator/executive producer Charles Yu, who wrote the 2020 bestseller of the same name, Taika Waititi and 20th Television.

Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu (Yang), a background character trapped in a police procedural trying to find his way into the larger story–and along the way discovers secrets about the strange world he inhabits and his family’s buried history.

Jones and Gilroy will play Miles Turner and Sarah Green, respectively, the two lead detectives on the procedural crime show Black & White.

An expert at making flashy arrests—whenever he’s not bantering with his longtime partner Sarah Green—Turner’s seemingly perfect exterior masks someone more complex. Ambitious and hyper-competent, Green is indisputably the best detective on the force, but somehow still finds herself...

It’s scary movie season! Well, for some diehard horror fans that’s Every season, but one thing that horror film buffs and the casual movie-going crowd can agree on is that The Shining is arguably the best horror movie of all time. We’ve seen it so many times it’s basically a comfort movie at this point. Based on the novel by prolific author Stephen King and adapted by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, the film stars the incredible Jack Nicholson delivering some of the most disturbing and intense acting ever put to celluloid! What more can we say about The Shining that hasn’t already been said?

Fast forward nearly 40 years later to 2019, Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep hit theaters but underperformed at the box office. The long-awaited sequel to The Shining based on the 2013 novel of the same name stars Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor, playing an adult Danny Torrance.

The year is 1995, and you’ve submitted your film to the Sundance Film Festival, and they’ve said no. What do you do? Are you disappointed? Yes. Do you feel lost or defeated? Maybe. Do you give up? No. That is the origin story of the Slamdance Film Festival, which happens every year in Park City, Utah, at the same time as the Sundance Film Festival. Unwilling to take “no” for an answer, Dan Mirvish, Jon Fitzgerald, Shane Kuhn, Peter Baxter, and Paul Rachman created the Slamdance Festival to give independent filmmakers a voice.

Continue reading ‘Mad Cats’ Trailer: Director Reiki Tsuno Says “No More Depressing Films” & Tries To Supercharge Japanese Cinema [Slamdance Exclusive] at The Playlist.

The success of Mike Flanagan's upcoming The Dark Tower TV show hinges on the casting of the iconic Gunslinger, and these are a few possible actors who could fill his dusty cowboy boots. During an interview, Flangan announced that he would create and release the Stephen King epic series through Amazon Studios. Both Flanagan and fellow founder of Intrepid Pictures, Trevor Macy, said they even have the first image of the show in mind: "That first shot which comes right off at the first incredible sentence of the first book, The Gunslinger, I've had that image just rattling around in my head since I was an undergrad."

That first image involves the Gunslinger traipsing across a desert plain in search of the enigmatic 'Man in Black,' and for Flanagan to successfully adapt King's Dark Tower series faithfully, he will need a good Gunslinger. King's epic eight novel series...

In an extract from his forthcoming book, Unkrich explains how, aged 12, he first saw the film which would inspire a lifelong passion

‘Are you Ok? Is it too scary? We can leave if you need to …” It was May 1980. I was nearly 13 years old, sitting in an Ohio movie theatre with my mother watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. She was right to be concerned; exactly two years earlier she had taken me to see Larry Cohen’s horror film It Lives Again – his sequel to It’s Alive – and the experience had caused more than a year of traumatic, recurring nightmares. As a result, I had since avoided any scary movies (or even their trailers). So it was risky for her to take me to see another horror film that early summer evening.

Little did she know that she was changing the course of my life. The Shining penetrated...

Happy Monday, dear readers! We’re back today (after a slight delay) with the latest installment of Daily Dead’s 2022 Holiday Gift Guide, which focuses on a ton of great movie soundtracks released on vinyl throughout 2022. I’ve broken down all the titles by where you can find them, whether it’s on Waxwork Records or Mondo’s sites, or via other sites like Amazon and other retailers.

One of my favorite gifts to get every holiday season is soundtrack LPs, and I suspect it’s pretty similar for a lot of other horror fans out there, so be sure to check out the entire list so that it can help you as you finish up your shopping this holiday season.

Cheers!

Waxwork Records:

Nope Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Michael Abels

Oscar® winner Jordan Peele disrupted and redefined modern horror with Get Out and then Us. Now, he reimagines...

Though it is a key theme throughout his works, Mike Flanagan recalls how writing one Doctor Sleep scene put him on the path towards a sober life. The sequel to The Shining marked Flanagan's second dive into the world of Stephen King, his first being the acclaimed adaptation of Gerald's Game led by Carla Gugino. Scoring similarly positive reviews from critics, audiences and King alike, Doctor Sleep currently remains Flanagan's last King-based work following the shelving of his spinoffs and Revival adaptation, but it did leave one major impact on his life.

In response to a fan's question about the film, Mike Flanagan took to Tumblr to offer a detailed recollection of his time on Doctor Sleep. The writer/director recalled how the King movie adaptation changed his life by finally putting him on the path to sobriety, recalling his efforts to include this theme from both of King's novels...

Despite knowing of his strong distaste for the prior adaptation, Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan pitched ties to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to Stephen King, and it nearly didn't work. The 2019 horror drama acted as an adaptation of King's novel of the same name, itself a sequel to his Shining novel, and centered on an adult Danny Torrance struggling with his sobriety and having to tap back into his abilities to help fellow shiner Abra as a cult of vampiric shiners known as the True Knot hunt her down. With Ewan McGregor leading the cast of Doctor Sleep as Danny, the film hit theaters in late 2019 to largely favorable reviews from critics and audiences alike, though was considered to be an under performer at the box office, bringing in over 72 million against its reported 55 million production budget.

In a recent post on his Tumblr, Mike Flanagan reflected on his experience making Doctor Sleep.

The recent announcement that Shelley Duvall is going to return to the big screen after a lengthy hiatus is welcome news to those who enjoyed her performance in The Shining. Though she had achieved a great deal of success in Hollywood, 20 years ago, she decided that it wasn’t for her any more.

Duvall isn’t alone in deciding that Hollywood stardom isn’t worth the hassle and headache of staying in the business. Having achieved a measure of success in a given movie, some go on to carve out careers in other fields. The users of Reddit have identified a number of such actors.

Peter Ostrum

Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory is often regarded as one of the best family movies ever made. It manages to stay true to the disturbing spirit of Roald Dahl’s novel, while also having a lighter touch. There’s also no question that its hero,...

Pixar's Toy Story movies are inundated with Easter eggs referring to The Shining. From the original Toy Story in 1995 to 2019's Toy Story 4, the animation studio's brilliant franchise is peppered with visual nods and winking allusions to Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece. Lee Unkrich is an influential figure behind their existence. As a film editor on Toy Story, co-director on Toy Story 2, director on Toy Story 3, and then executive producer on Toy Story 4, Unkrich has added a treasure trove of Overlook references that are easy to overlook.

Unkrich, who left Pixar in 2019, has previously spoken about his obsession with Kubrick's movie, especially The Shining's woman in room 237. In an interview with Empire in 2012, Unkrich explained, "I think it was because it was the first film I saw that so pervasively had a specific mood to it. I'd never seen a movie that had made me...

It's almost time for DesignerCon! The annual art and design convention is hitting the Anaheim Convention Center in California from November 18 through November 20 with over 300,000 square feet packed with over 700 vendors, art and custom collectible shows, live demonstrations, and tons more. Of course, that's the perfect place for our friends at Mondo to release a bunch of cool new exclusives that fans will want to get their hands on.

/Film is proud to debut every single one of the exclusives that Mondo will be bringing to DesignerCon 2022, including "The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting," a vinyl record and book bundle featuring exclusive essays, original recollections, contributions from cultural luminaries, and art and visual ephemera. There's also plenty for Godzilla fans, including an assortment of collectible figures featuring the King of Monsters and a few of his adversaries from over the years, as well as some fantastic artwork. "Masters of the Universe...

Horror has always been a matter of perspective. The maniac with a knife just isn’t as intimidating when he’s facing off against a Swat team, and the only thing keeping Predator from turning into an all-out slasher flick is the size of the protagonists’ biceps. It’s a lot easier to fear for a helpless victim, and that’s why it makes sense that so many scary stories focus on children and childhood fears.

After all, what’s more vulnerable than a child? And with so many child-centric scary movies out there, we’ve come up with this list celebrating six of the best “Final Kid” performances in horror.

Talented child actors are hard to come by, so I think it’s time to shine a light on the pint-sized survivors that helped to make some of our favorite horror flicks so memorable.

While this list is based on personal opinion,...

Fans go to horror movies expecting to see characters die, but some of these deaths can be decidedly unfair. While there are a number of horror movie victims who were innocent and undeserving of their grisly demise, their deaths fit into the audience's expectations.

However, fans on Reddit have highlighted some horror movie deaths that they felt were unnecessary or particularly unjust to the characters. Whether it is a shocking end to someone fans expected to survive or a cruel end to someone who seemed so likable, these were some of the most underserved deaths in horror movies.

Ben - Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead still holds up today as a zombie classic thanks to some ground-breaking aspects. One of those aspects is the character of Ben, a Black man who becomes the hero of the story which was quite unheard...

Stephen King turns 75 years old this week, just two weeks after the publication of his 64th novel, the already acclaimed Fairy Tale. Aside from a trickle of short stories he sold for a number of years starting in 1967, his career really began in earnest with the 1974 arrival of Carrie, his first published novel.

While the book sold modestly in hardcover, it was the sale of the paperback rights and the novel’s subsequent success in that format which enabled King to become a full-time writer and launch the historic career that is still going strong 48 years later and has made him one of the most successful and well-known writers of all time.

It was in paperback that I first encountered the work of Stephen King as well, although it wasn’t Carrie. Instead it was King’s second published novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, which I spotted on one of those spinning...

A new prequel film based on “The Shining” has been axed by Warner Bros. Discovery due to the poor box office performance of 2019’s “Doctor Sleep,” according to the film’s director Mike Flanagan.

“We were So Close. I’ll always regret this didn’t happen,” Director Mike Flanagan tweeted.

We were So Close. I’ll always regret this didn’t happen https://t.co/0hr3hUTMhg

— Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) September 18, 2022

When asked by a Twitter user why the movie wasn’t happening, Flanagan responded, “Because of Doctor Sleep’s box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.”

Also Read:

Paul Greengrass to Adapt and Direct Stephen King Novel ‘Fairy Tale’

Because of Doctor Sleep’s box office performance, Warner Bros opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.

— Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) September...

Warner Bros. has officially said goodnight to the “Doctor Sleep” sequel.

Director Mike Flanagan confirmed on Twitter that his proposed “The Shining” sequel follow-up is indefinitely shelved. The film was set to focus on the fan-favorite character Dick Hallorann, played by Scatman Crothers (and killed) in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”; he’s played by Carl Lumbly in “Shining” callbacks in 2019’s “Doctor Sleep.”

“We were so close,” Flanagan tweeted. “I’ll always regret this didn’t happen.”

In the comments section, Flanagan added that the film was canceled “because of ‘Doctor Sleep’s’ box office performance, Warner Bros. opted not to proceed with it. They control the rights, so that was that.”

“Doctor Sleep” starred Ewan McGregor as an older (and more haunted) Danny Torrance and opened to 14 million at the domestic box office, ultimately grossing 31 million domestic and 72 million worldwide against a 45 million budget. An ardent hater of Kubrick’s “The Shining,...

“Doctor Sleep” director Mike Flanagan confirmed on Twitter that a planned sequel to his 2019 “The Shining” sequel is officially dead. The filmmaker cited the dismal box office performance of “Doctor Sleep” as the main reason why Warner Bros. isn’t moving forward with a “The Shining” prequel film focused on the character of Dick Hallorann, “Hallorann was always more about Dick as a younger man learning about the shining. And the ‘Doctor Sleep’ novel tees up a prologue for it perfectly with the story of his grandmother and his grandfather. Which he tells a little bit of in this [movie]. But the idea was to open with him as Carl Lumbly, and then to find a way to go back into the past and kind of tell this other story that inevitably would, very much in the way ‘Doctor Sleep’ did, inevitably bring us back to a familiar hotel.”

A Flanagan-directed...

The connection to "The Shining" might've been both the best and worst thing "Doctor Sleep" had going for it. On paper, the 2019 film read like a surefire hit. It was a Stephen King adaptation arriving at a time when projects based on his work were more popular than ever, with an acclaimed filmmaker in Mike Flanagan at the helm. Throw in Ewan McGregor as a traumatized older version of the kid who cried "Redrum" and an evil Rebecca Ferguson in a cool hat, and you've got a surefire recipe for success.

Or so it seemed. In truth, Warner Bros. might have hurt "Doctor Sleep" by playing up the fact it's a sequel to one of the famous horror movies ever made. Its trailers focused so much on the film's third act trip to the Overlook Hotel, they didn't really get across just how well Flanagan's movie works as a standalone story,...

Few remakes feel necessary, but English-language versions of international horror films have an especially difficult time justifying their existence. We certainly didn’t need George Sluizer or Michael Haneke to remake their own “The Vanishing” and “Funny Games” for the benefit of subtitle-averse audiences, nor was anyone asking for a “Let the Right One In” remake when it was first released. “Need” and “want” are two different things, of course, and it’s hardly unheard of for one of these remakes to be quite good — just ask Naomi Watts, who followed her star-making turn in “Mulholland Drive” with “The Ring.” The two-time Oscar nominee now finds herself as the face of Matt Sobel’s remake of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s “Goodnight Mommy.” Well, maybe not the face exactly — as in the original, her head is obscured by surgical bandages for reasons that aren’t immediately made clear.

Few remakes feel truly necessary,...

Leon Vitali, one of Stanley Kubrick’s closest collaborators, died on Saturday night at the age of 74, Kubrick announced in a series of tweets Sunday.

“It is with the greatest of sadness that we have to tell you that the mainstay of a vast number of Kubrick’s films, Leon Vitali, passed away peacefully last night. Our thoughts are with his family and all that new and loved him. 26 July 1948 – 20 August 2022,” Kubrick wrote.

In a subsequent post, Kubrick continued, “Whether giving the performance of his life as Lord Bullingdon, portraying the ominous Red Cloak, providing BTS technical support on Fmj and attending the Cannes Film Festival 4K release of The Shining, Leon Vitali was the heartbeat of Kubrick’s films after the master himself.”

Also Read:

Virginia Patton, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Actress, Dies at 97

No further details of his passing or the cause of death have been released.

It...

Leon Vitali, an actor in Barry Lyndon who went on to become director Stanley Kubrick’s right-hand man, died Friday in Los Angeles at age 74. His family confirmed his death to Associated Press, but no cause was given.

“Leon was a special and lovely man driven by his curiosity, who spread love and warmth wherever he went,” his children said in a statement provided by his daughter, Masha Vitali. “He will be remembered with love and be hugely missed by the many people he touched.”

Vitali was profiled in the 2017 documentary Filmworker, which spotlighted his contributions to Kubrick’ work. Filmmaker Tony Zierra’s noted that Vitali did everything from casting and coaching actors to overseeing restorations.

His duties went so far as to once setting up a video monitor so that Kubrick could keep an eye on his dying cat.

Matthew Modine, who starred in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket,...

Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s longtime associate who starred in “Barry Lyndon” and “Eyes Wide Shut” in addition to assisting the filmmaker throughout his career, his died at the age of 74. The news was revealed by the official Twitter account of Kubrick’s estate.

The official statement reads: “It is with the greatest of sadness that we have to tell you that the mainstay of a vast number of Kubrick’s films, Leon Vitali, passed away peacefully last night. Our thoughts are with his family and all that knew and loved him. 26 July 1948 – 20 August 2022.”

Vitali began pursuing an acting career after attending the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He had small guest spots on a variety of television shows in the early 1970s before pivoting to feature films in 1973. He starred in the Italian film “Super Bitch,” which was directed by Sergio Leone’s longtime cinematographer Massimo Dallamano,...

Willa Fitzgerald is an American actress. She is known for her roles in the television shows Scream, Dare Me and Reacher.

Willa Fitzgerald Biography: Age, Early Life, Family, Education

Willa Fitzgerald was born on January 17, 1991 (Willa Fitzgerald: age 31) in Nashville, Tennessee.

Fitzgerald spoke exclusively to uInterview about how she started acting in the first place.

“I started doing Forensics. I grew up in Tennessee, Forensics is kind of like competition acting. It’s big in the South from what I know, and basically you go and perform a monologue and there’s many rounds and you either make it through the rounds or you don’t and somebody wins… it’s like sports, but it’s acting,” the actress laughed. “So I started doing that in fifth grade, and as happens when you’re a child, when you start winning prizes for something that you’re doing, you start liking to do it even more,...

Here’s the latest episode of the The Filmmakers Podcast, part of the ever-growing podcast roster here on Nerdly. If you haven’t heard the show yet, you can check out previous episodes on the official podcast site, whilst we’ll be featuring each and every new episode as it premieres.

For those unfamiliar with the series, The Filmmakers Podcast is a podcast about how to make films from micro budget indie films to bigger budget studio films and everything in-between. Our hosts Giles Alderson, Dan Richardson, Andrew Rodger and Cristian James talk how to get films made, how to actually make them and how to try not to f… it up in their very humble opinion. Guests will come on and chat about their film making experiences from directors, writers, producers, screenwriters, actors, cinematographers and distributors.

The Filmmaker’s Podcast #285: Between Crowdfunding and the Oscars: Masterclass in Indie...

18½

The fall of Richard Nixon in the early 1970s was one of the biggest scandals in modern political history, and some aspects of the story remain shrouded in mystery. How involved was the US President himself in the cover-up? Who ordered the break-in at the Watergate hotel? And what happened to the 18½ minutes of tape which notoriously went missing from White House records?

Dan Mirvish’s sharp witted comedy drama 18½ is a fictionalised take on what might have happened to that tape, starring Willa Fitzgerald as a White House transcriber who has managed to acquire it, and John Magaro as the journalist she shares it with. It’s not is US cinemas, and shortly before it opened, I spoke with John about it, asking him when he first remembered becoming aware of the scandal.

18½

“Ever since I was a kid, I knew about it,” he says. “I'm pretty political,...

On 8 August, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the US presidency in disgrace following exposure of the scandal which was gone down in history as Watergate. During the investigation of these events, hundreds of hours of tape recordings from the White House were transcribed, but a mystery became apparent: on the afternoon of 20 June, 1972, there was a gap. 18½ minutes was missing. With questions still unanswered about the cover-up and the break-in at the Watergate hotel (famously rendered on celluloid in All The President’s Men, this prompted a great deal of speculation, and despite claims made about it by various staffers, there has never been a satisfactory explanation.

Half a century later, Dan Mirvish’s sprightly comedy thriller returns to the subject with a fictional tale about a rogue White House transcriber who manages to get hold of the missing material and aims to share it with a journalist. Played...

The Watergate saga is fictitiously reimagined in this kooky caper that ditches thrills in favour of meandering oddball fun

‘Thank God we’re erasing this tape. It would have killed us.” That’s the voice of Richard Nixon in Dan Mirvish’s offbeat, meandering indie, whose what-if storyline imagines a fictional White House typist in 1974 finding the infamous 18-and-a-half-minutes missing from the Watergate tapes and leaking it to the press. The gap in the recording is real: Rose Mary Woods, the president’s secretary, claimed she accidentally erased the section with a clumsy slip of the foot on a pedal. But pretty much everything else is pure fiction.

Another movie would have played it as a thriller, but Mirvish gives us an eccentric laid-back comedy that ambles along – likable enough but in danger of becoming forgettable. Willa Fitzgerald is Connie, a clever, ambitious young typist who takes her eye-wateringly dull...

First published May 14th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.

Don’t spend hours scrolling the menus at Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other movie services. I point you to the best new films and hidden gems to stream.

Movies included here may be available on services other than those mentioned, and in other regions, too. JustWatch and Reelgood are great for finding which films are on what streamers; you can customize each site so that it shows you only those services you have access to.

When you rent or purchase a film through the Amazon and Apple links here, I get a small affiliate fee that helps support my work. Please use them if you can! (Affiliate fees do not increase your cost.)

both sides of the pond

Whether any of us have actually gotten used to the idea of paying 20/£16 (or more) to stream a hot new movie at home is debatable.

“It’s been the great mystery in political history of the past 50 years,” said Slamdance Film Festival founder, writer and director Dan Mirvish of the eighteen-and-a-half minutes famously missing from the Nixon Tapes. His campy political thriller out this weekend takes a stab at what might have happened.

Adventure Entertainment opens 18 1/2 today on four screens in NY, LA, and Fort Lauderdale, expanding next week to about 60 including a special screening Wednesday at the Landmark Theatres E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Watergate. The National Archives is screening CNN documentary series Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal the same night at a dueling event with John Dean, who was President Richard Nixon’s counsel from July, 1970 to April, 1973. The mother of U.S. political scandals exploded in June of 1972 when five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex.

Writer-director Dan Mirvish takes all kinds of chances with “18 ½,” a wayward, very pedestrian film set in the early 1970s against the background of the Nixon administration. “18 ½” attempts to be part cloak-and-dagger thriller, part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part mood piece, and its plotting is slapdash, to say the least.

Willa Fitzgerald (“Reacher”) plays Connie, a young and uptight secretary whose job it is to transcribe audio tapes for the US government. We first see Connie in a car as she listens to a radio report about the tapes that Nixon made and how there is an 18 ½ minute gap on one of them; there is a slow zoom out from her face as the male voice on the radio drones on and some music on the soundtrack starts to seep in, and all this layering seems to be preparing us for a paranoid mystery of some sort.

Connie meets...

“Bernard and Huey” helmer and co-founder of Slamdance Film Festival Dan Mirvish, now behind “18 ½,” knew that making a movie about Watergate would still be “resonant and relevant,” he says. Not just in the U.S., but all over the world.

Focusing on the infamous “18½-minute gap” from a taped conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman after the Watergate break-in, allegedly erased by Nixon’s secretary by mistake, a Bugeater Films and Kyyba Films production – starring Willa Fitzgerald and John Magaro – will open theatrically on May 24 in Los Angeles, New York and Omaha, later expanding to other cities.

“[On ‘Bernard and Huey’] our last day of shooting was on the day of the 2016 presidential election. I had a feeling that the word ‘impeachment’ or the echoes of Watergate and Nixon would come back to haunt us,” Mirvish tells Variety.

“When we showed the film at the São Paulo International Film Festival,...

Dan Mirvish’s film centres a transcriber caught up in the infamous scandal.

UK-based sales outfiit 101 Films International has acquired worldwide rights to Dan Mirvish’s Watergate drama 18½.

The completed film is inspired by the Watergate scandal, in which the administration of US president Richard Nixon attempted to cover up its involvement in the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C.

The film centres on a transcriber who is thrust to the forefront of events when she obtains the only copy of the 18 ½-minute gap in the president’s tapes.

Dan Mirvish’s film centres a transcriber caught up in the infamous scandal.

UK-based sales outfiit 101 Films International has acquired worldwide rights to Dan Mirvish’s Watergate drama 18 ½.

The completed film is inspired by the Watergate scandal, in which the administration of US president Richard Nixon attempted to cover up its involvement in the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C.

The film centres on a transcriber who is thrust to the forefront of events when she obtains the only copy of the 18 ½-minute gap in the president’s tapes.

Bruce Campbell is that rare breed of actor who has the looks of a classic matinee idol but the soul of a character actor. In a career that has spanned over four decades, he has conquered every genre you can think of; there is nothing he can’t do. At age 63, when most people are planning their retirement, Campbell is reinventing himself. Not one to sit idle, he has been extremely busy throughout the pandemic working on various productions. Over the summer of 2020, he did voicework on Dan Mirvish’s darkly comedic Watergate era thriller, 18 1/2 .The actor portrayed President Richard M. Nixon for the indie film director. Following that experience, he landed a role in Casey Tebo’s upcoming holiday horror flick, Black Friday,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Dan Mirvish’s latest indie venture, 18 ½ is a rare find in the current landscape of filmmaking, an original story that draws you in from the opening frame. Set amidst the Watergate Scandal during Richard Nixon’s presidency, it is Not a political statement production. Thematically, it has more in common with Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men but that is where the similarity ends. However, it is important to know a little history behind Daniel Moya’s smart script. In 1972, President Nixon was up for re-election. During the summer, the Democratic National Committee headquarters (which was located in the Watergate Office Building) was burglarized. It came to light that the persons involved with the incident were members of Nixon’s re-election campaign. Of course, when...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

The Woodstock Film Festival has announced the slate for its 22nd edition, with 11 world premieres among the 43 features on the bill.

The festival will take place September 29 to October 3 in three Hudson Valley communities about two hours north of New York City. In-person screenings and events will be featured throughout the fest’s five days, but online options will also enable attendees to connect amid the ongoing challenges of Covid-19.

Panels, concerts and comedy sets along with film screenings are planned in Woodstock, Kingston and Saugerties. Neon chief Tom Quinn is slated to receive the festival’s Honorary Trailblazer Award, an honor announced in 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic.

The festival will kick off with Fanny: The Right to Rock, a documentary about a pathbreaking Filipina-American garage band, with a performance by some of the band’s members following the screening. Music is an annual touchstone for Woodstock’s lineup,...

Andrea Martin (Great News), Robert Ri’chard (Empire), Juani Feliz (Blue Bloods), Kate Rockwell (Mean Girls: The Musical) and Sullivan Jones (The Surrogate) are set for recurring roles on Amazon’s Harlem, the comedy series from Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip), Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions and Universal TV. They’ll join previously announced Whoopi Goldberg and Jasmine Guy, who also recur.

Created, written and executive produced by Oliver, Harlem, formerly the Untitled Tracy Oliver Project, is a single-camera comedy following the lives of four black women, friends from their college days at NYU, as they navigate sex, relationships and chasing their dreams.

Martin will play Robin, Camille’s passionate feminist mentor at Columbia University. Ri’chard portrays Shawn, Quinn’s sexy, stripper one-night stand who sticks around much longer than she planned. Feliz is Isabela, a local politician on track to beating AOCs record as the youngest member of Congress...

Bruce Campbell will be the voice of President Richard M. Nixon in an indie thriller and dark comedy set in the Watergate era called “18 1/2” as directed by Slamdance Film Festival co-founder Dan Mirvish, Bugeater Films announced Friday.

The film’s live-action cast was also unveiled and stars Willa Fitzgerald, John Magaro, Vondie Curtis Hall, Catherine Curtin and Sullivan Jones. And alongside Campbell in the voice cast are Ted Raimi as Gen. Al Haig and Jon Cryer as H. R. Haldeman.

“18 1/2” is a historical fiction film about the 18 1/2 minutes of audio erased from President Nixon’s Oval Office voice recording system that led to the unraveling of the Watergate scandal. It made the audio’s erasure one of the worst incidents of evidence destruction by a presidential administration and something that’s been ripe for conspiracy theories. Campbell has previously played another President, playing Ronald Reagan on “Fargo,” and his voice...

Last year, a piece in the Washington Post raised the question, “Is Jules Feiffer Our Greatest Living Cartoonist?” To which Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” creator Art Spiegelman replied, “He’s certainly near the very pinnacle, wherever that is.” All of which sounds rather complimentary if it weren’t a somewhat inadequate description of the 89-year-old social satirist extraordinaire’s myriad cultural accomplishments.

As well as creating decades of celebrated work as cartoonist for the Village Voice and Playboy, Feiffer also penned novels and works for stage and film, including screenplays for noted auteurs such as Robert Altman, Mike Nichols and Alain Resnais. More recently, Feiffer penned the screenplay for director Dan Mirvish’s acclaimed 2017 film, “Bernard and Huey.”

Plays derived from his work or written by Feiffer have garnered multiple Tony nominations, including one over a half-century ago for a young actor who’s getting the SAG Life Achievement Award this month: Alan Alda.

The 25th anniversary edition of the Slamdance Film Festival kicks off Jan. 25-31 in Park City, Utah, with a line-up of world premieres, guest speakers and filmmaking seminars all geared toward fresh storytellers who are looking for their cinematic breakthroughs.

This year, further underscoring a desire for world cinema, there are 11 narrative and nine documentary features that will be showcased in competition, from Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, Poland, South Africa and the U.K., alongside the U.S. All competition films are feature-length directorial debuts with budgets of less than $1 million, and lack American distribution.

Founded by current president Peter Baxter, as well as Jon Fitzgerald, Shane Kuhn, Dan Mirvish and Paul Rachman, Slamdance has screened more than 2,000 films over the years, with notable alumni including Christopher Nolan (whose 1999 drama “Following” debuted at the fest), Oren Peli (“Paranormal Activity”), Bong Joon-ho (“Okja”), Lynn Shelton (“Outside In”), Ari Aster...

No one expected Slamdance to see its 25th anniversary — least of all founders Dan Mirvish, Jon Fitzgerald, Shane Kuhn, Peter Baxter, and Paul Rachman. All were filmmakers rejected by the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, and their concerns initially ran to the short term: how to screen their films in and around Park City, the center of the indie-filmmaking universe.

They began by showing their work at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and migrated to spaces around Park City, where they handed out flyers and cajoled makeshift venues. They took turns running the projectors.

The next year, they came back to Park City — this time, setting up headquarters at the Treasure Mountain Inn, on top of Main Street. Screenings were still chaotic, but the ethos was in place: a festival programmed by filmmakers, for first-time filmmakers who had shoestring budgets and unique visions but no distribution… and, the benefit...

Belize City, Belize – Mexican films and shorts dominated the winners of the 13th Belize Intl. Film Festival on Sunday in a brisk closing ceremony punctuated by pulsing reggae music performances by the likes of Ras Indio & Boss Lady, Ernestine Carballo and Jah Art.

The event was broadcast live on local television station, Channel 5.

“Guerrero,” Ludovic Bonleux’s harrowing documentary about the disappearance of 43 students and the protests that paralyzed the Mexican state, won best film in the festival’s Collective Memories section.

“You wouldn’t know it, but it’s a feel-good musical,” quipped juror Dan Mirvish, co-founder of Slamdance, who presented the award.

Mexican short films also beat out other contenders from the region with Toronto-based multihyphenate-juror Nicole Brooks – who showed off her prodigious dancing skills to kick off the event – giving out the best short prizes.

Mexican short “The Good Man” (“El Hombre Bueno”) by Jose Luis Solis,...

“I can’t decide which one of you is more narcissistic” is a line from Dan Mirvish’s adaptation of Jules Feiffer’s comic strip “Bernard and Huey,” and it’s one of two pieces bits of dialogue — amidst a roaring avalanche of verbiage, mind you — that neatly encapsulates the experience of watching this movie.

The other line is “Do you really believe this s–t, or are you just talking?”

“Bernard and Huey” is the story of Bernard, a 49-year-old editor of historical non-fiction, with an active sex life and not much else. He’s been living in his apartment for a whole five years, and he hasn’t even bothered to get a table yet. One night there’s a knock on Bernard’s door, and he’s surprised to discover his estranged college friend Huey on the other side, waving around fistfuls of cash and looking for a place to stay.

There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]...

There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]...