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A careworn husband is accused of murdering his wife in a story inspired by a real life case that dispenses with the genre’s familiar brutality

Here is a fictionalised true crime drama, but one that is more stately and sedate than the garish procedural brutality of regular true crime. There is one gruesome crime-scene photo, but otherwise this could really have been based on something by Ruth Rendell. It is co-written and directed by its star Daniel Auteuil and the original French title is Le Fil (The Thread), after an incriminating thread of material found on the corpse – or perhaps it means the thread of logic behind a legal argument, the loose thread which, if pulled sufficiently, might cause the whole thing to collapse.

The action is based on a case recounted by Jean-Yves Moyart, a criminal defence lawyer, who blogged under the name “Maître Mô” and who died...

Ozon’s drama mixes implied horror with sentimentality as it examines dangerous secrets and the disastrous ramifications of an (accidental?) poisoning

That amazingly prolific film-maker François Ozon returns with an intriguing, if tonally uncertain, mystery drama about a suspected murder. In it, the implied Chabrol-esque horror is made to coexist with an odd mood of gentleness and even sentimentality as we witness the loneliness of an ageing woman with secrets and regrets in the autumn of her life.

This is Michelle, played by 81-year-old actor-director Hélène Vincent; at one point, Ozon allows us to notice she is reading a book by Ruth Rendell, whose thrillers were famously adapted by Claude Chabrol and indeed by Ozon himself (The New Girlfriend). This film is not a Rendell adaptation, but I wonder if Ozon and his co-screenwriter Philippe Piazzo were inspired by the Rendell short story Means of Evil, which also involved mushroom...

Christopher Nolan is back working with the studio that finally earned him a Best Director Oscar. He teams up with Universal to bring out his new movie on July 17, 2026. Reports suggest that the film will go into production early next year. Nolan is also reportedly collaborating with Matt Damon for the third time, who may lead an ensemble cast in this film.

Christopher Nolan with Matt Damon and Matthew McConaughey on the sets of Interstellar | Credits: Paramount Pictures

The title, plot, and even the genre of the film are kept under tight wraps and fans can only speculate what Nolan’s new venture is going to be. Nolan and Universal will look to repeat their Oppenheimer success, both at the box office and during the awards season, for this film.

What is Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie About? Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy on the sets of Oppenheimer | Credits: Universal Pictures...

Useful as it may be for facts and stats, an actor’s Wikipedia page isn’t ever the go-to place for a complete, nuanced description of their thespian essence, and so it proves for Isabelle Huppert. “Known for her portrayals of cold, austere women devoid of morality, she is considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation,” states the introduction, in a strikingly selective encapsulation of over half a century on screen. Huppert can certainly do froideur and severity with flair — she’s imposing beyond the bounds of her diminutive frame in such rigorous, chill-carrying films as Claude Chabrol’s “La Cérémonie,” Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” and of course Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” though whether these complex, conflicted women are “devoid of morality” isn’t a call for any one web editor to make.

But it does Huppert an injustice to paint her, however admiringly, as some...

She’s worked with most of the great names of European cinema, from Godard to Haneke, and on one of Hollywood’s greatest disasters. Now she’s ready for your closeup quizzing

France has quite a few grandes dames of cinema, with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Adjani all very much in the game. But none can hold much of a candle to Isabelle Huppert, who is firing on all cylinders as she enters her 70s, in her sixth decade of headline acting performances. Tightly wound and fiery, while simultaneously self-contained and tough as nails, Huppert’s acting persona has been instrumental to a string of masterpieces – and even if the film around her isn’t that great, she’s always magnificent to watch.

With so many amazing credits, stretching back to the 1970s, it’s hard to pick out a few, but we’ll have a go: early...

The phrase 'eat the rich' might be partly a joke, but it did originate in France, during the Reign Of Terror - it was pointed out by the leader a commune that, if the poor had nothing left to eat, they would eat those who left them in their poverty. As the phrase, and the recognition of what capitalism and the class system have done to our world, it's perhaps fitting to have a new edition of Claude Chabrol's The Ceremony (La Cérémonie) for our enjoyment and edification. The 1997 film, based on the novel by UK author Ruth Rendell, which itself draws from a true story, tells of Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire), a young woman who finds employment as a housekepper for the well-off...

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

This article contains references/descriptions of graphic violence and domestic abuse

Batman Begins changed Christopher Nolan's career, leading to him becoming the 21st century's most reliable action director with clever and epic blockbusters. Nolan almost made The Keys to the Street instead of Batman, but dropped out due to its thematic similarity to his previous movies. Directing The Keys to the Street would have established Nolan as a truly provocative director with a dark and hard-r movie, potentially changing the course of his career.

Batman Begins completely changed the course of Christopher Nolan's career, but the movie he almost made instead would have kept him from being the blockbuster action director he's known as today. The 2005 Batman movie was Nolan's first major Hollywood movie, and while the film didn't break box office records, making just $373 million worldwide (via Box Office Mojo), it was overwhelmingly positively received and led to the billion-dollar-grossing The Dark Knight.

In 1998, a young and still-unknown Christopher Nolan released Following, his black-and-white debut feature. The noir-tinged crime caper starred Jeremy Theobald as a struggling writer who becomes an apprentice to a small-time thief. Despite being made for a mere $6,000, Following introduced the world to a director brimming with ideas and style to spare. In the time since, Nolan has become one of the most celebrated directors working in the medium, whose big-budget epics often challenge as much as they entertain.

Memento was one of the first movies told almost entirely backwards; The Dark Knight Trilogy redefined what superhero movies could be; Inception was a stunningly-original sci-fi heist thriller; and Interstellar is a space epic that rivals only 2001: A Space Odyssey in scope and ambition. Every Christopher Nolan movie is an event, and each new film is more ambitious than the last. His next movie, Oppenheimer, for which Nolan and Kodak...

Ok, so the actor Anthony Perkins is best known for his legendary role as Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho and its sequels… but that part is not the sum total of this superb actor’s career. That’s not to say he didn’t trade on his status as cinema’s seminal psycho, and starred in plenty of chiller thrillers, instantly lending them Batesian cachet… for example Edge of Sanity, a delirious conflation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s classic horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Jack the Ripper’s real-life reign of terror over Victorian London, where Perkins plays the unhinged lead role with aplomb. To celebrate the release of Edge of Sanity on Blu-ray from Arrow Video, here’s a round-up of some of Perkins’ finest non-Bates roles…

Pretty Poison (1968)

In this wonderful cult classic black comedy thriller, Perkins plays Dennis Pitt,...

Surprisingly tense lesbian love story is powered by stunning performances by Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier

How refreshing to watch a film in which the sexuality and desire of women in their 70s is portrayed not as a novelty but simply part and parcel of their lives; and since this French movie is a lesbian drama, there’s two of them – even better. In one sense, Two of Us is as much a conventional romance as anything else, but it’s directed with a shiver of suspense by first-time feature maker Filippo Meneghetti. Almost like a Ruth Rendell novel, you half expect one of these ordinary characters to sink a knife into someone’s back at any moment. They don’t, but the expectation adds a little stab of something to most scenes, unnerving and unexpectedly tense.

Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) live across the hall from each...

Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe in Hidden Figures The New Girlfriend, BBC iPlayer, until November 14

French director François Ozon has always taken a playful approach to genre and you can sense he's having considerable fun with this loose adaptation of Ruth Rendell's short story. He uses warm, offbeat humour to avoid farce as he explores continuum of sexuality in this tale of a Claire (Anna Demoustier), who gets more than she bargained for after telling her seriously ill friend Laura (Isild Le Besco) that she'll take care of her husband David (Romain Duris) and baby. It turns out that David has a particularly unusual - and for Claire, initially challenging - way of coping with grief, setting the stage for an exploration of masculinity and femininity that will run through the film. Ozon isn't afraid to challenge his audience but he always makes sure he entertains along the way.

The director on waiting 35 years to film the perfect gay love story, and how French cinema is coping with Covid

French writer-director François Ozon, 52, is famous for his prodigious output. He directed his first full-length feature, Sitcom, in 1998, and his 19th, Summer of 85, a love story about two teenage boys in a Normandy seaside town, is out in the UK this month. In between, his diverse output includes the musical 8 Women, the retro comedy Potiche, the Ruth Rendell adaptation The New Girlfriend and last year’s By the Grace of God.

What were you doing in the summer of ’85?

What was I doing? I think I went to Spain with a friend – I can’t remember exactly, I’d have to ask my parents. The film was going to be called Summer of 84. I changed the title because of Robert Smith of the Cure. I absolutely wanted to use their song In Between Days,...

8 May 1998: The Spanish director talks about plunging into the depths of Franco’s reign in his new film, Live Flesh

Pedro Almodóvar is not in the fluffiest of moods. The normally effervescent Spanish wunderkind, the director who gave expression to the feeling of liberation that swept through Spain following the death of Franco, is, it seems, rather bored.

Almodóvar is in London to talk about his new and most accomplished film to date, Live Flesh. A loose adaptation of a Ruth Rendell story, Almodóvar’s 12th film has been received with rapture by critics throughout Europe. In a further accolade, it is set for a wide release in America following MGM’s decision to push its new Goldwyn art-house line with the film.

Sex, envy and pyromania make for a riveting mystery in Lee Chang-dong’s masterfully crafted Murakami adaptation

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is a superbly shot and sensuously scored movie, a mystery thriller about obsessive love taken from a short story by Haruki Murakami but with something of Patricia Highsmith or maybe the kind of Ruth Rendell novel that Claude Chabrol might have filmed. It’s a psychological drama set in the modern consumerist Korea of the callous Gangnam-style rich and poor young people who often go invisibly to ground, pursued by credit-card debt.

Burning is based around an enigma – a vanishing – whose solubility or otherwise becomes progressively less important to the protagonist than his hurt feelings, his wounded love, his damaged soul and his toxic male envy. Yoo Ah-in gives a tremendous performance as Jongsoo, a country boy from Paju, near Panmunjom on the 38th parallel, a rural area where...

Gem Wheeler Dec 21, 2016

We celebrate the work of M.R. James, whose eerie ghost stories were made into a festive tradition by the BBC...

A shadow lurking just beyond the edge of the vision. Dusty manuscripts bearing fragments of ancient testimony, conflicting and confounding. The sickening touch of a decayed hand, grasping at us from the darkness. The imagery of the ghost story may differ between cultures, but the sense of creeping dread left by the most effective tales remains universal.

See related Jonathan Creek review: The Clue Of The Savant's Thumb Alan Davies interview: Jonathan Creek, Qi, "Creek Geeks" & more... Rik Mayall interview: Jonathan Creek, Bottom, Hooligan's Island, & more... Sheridan Smith interview: Jonathan Creek & more... David Renwick interview: Jonathan Creek, One Foot In The Grave, & more...

One name stands out in the grim roster of English purveyors of the form: Montague Rhodes James, an eminent medievalist with a sideline in...

After premiering at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival in the Galas Program, via Cohen Media, the double 40th César Award nominated The New Girlfriend received a limited theatrical release a year later for a meager box-office take just under one hundred and fifty thousand. Based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, Francois Ozon’s playful subversion of gender dynamics hinges on camp, recalling a legion of vintage queer classics from decades ago (as well as Ozon’s own darker, challenging early filmography when the auteur was referred to as a terrible enfant). As politically correct agendas continue to be applied to queer characters, engulfing deliberations of appropriate representation, items such as Ozon’s film have become a rarity in the English language market. But there’s a perverse mixture of dark comedy and psychological unrest portrayed here, and Ozon gleefully captures a neglected energy of queer cinema once again relegated to the periphery of good taste.

★★★☆☆ Having continued his fascination with the secrets and lies that act as an ostensibly dormant undercurrent to everyday life with recent films such as In the House (2012) and Jeune & Jolie (2013) - the latter of which this shares a sexuality-based topic - François Ozon returns with The New Girlfriend (2015), an audacious but somewhat insubstantial drama featuring a French actor as you've never seen him before. Based on the short story collection by Ruth Rendell, The New Girlfriend and Other Stories - though given its own 'Ozonian' twist - the film sees Anaïs Demoustier playing Claire, a women who, after the death of her best friend, vows to watch over her child and husband David (Romain Duris).

François Ozon pays Ruth Rendell a slinky tribute, Pitch Perfect 2 hits all the right notes, while Keanu Reeves sharpens up in a menacing thriller

It is, perhaps, a curious indication of national genre snobbery that Ruth Rendell, surely one of our most silkily brilliant crime writers of any generation, died earlier this year with her oeuvre still largely untouched by British film-makers. Some respectable television adaptation, sure. A B-movie or two in the 80s, fine. But on the continent major film-makers – Claude Chabrol, Claude Miller, Pedro Almodovar – have known how to treat her nasty, needling narratives with the requisite style. To that group we can now add François Ozon, whose slinky, utterly delectable take on The New Girlfriend (Metrodome, 15) is both a liberal, Gallic-as-Gaultier interpretation, and as fitting a Rendell tribute as could have been released in the year of her passing.

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The New Girlfriend (Une nouvelle amie) Cohen Media Group Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes. Grade: B+ Director: François Ozon Screenwriter: François Ozon from the short story “The New Girlfriend” by Ruth Rendell Cast: Romain Duris, Anäis Demoustier, Raphaël Personnaz, Isild Le Besco, Aurore Clément Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 9/1/15 Opens: September 18, 2015 Every baby needs a mother, but what to do when the mother is out of the picture—maybe imprisoned, drugged, or dead? Dad could take over the job, of course, but some dads go to extremes. In the case of “The New Girlfriend,” director François Ozon, already well known for such previous [ Read More ]

The post The New Girlfriend Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

From RedBand.Ca, Sneak Peek restricted 'red band' footage from the dramatic feature "The New Girlfriend", directed by François Ozon, based on the short story of the same name by author Ruth Rendell, opening September 18, 2015:

Cast includes Romain Duris, Anaïs Demoustier, Raphaël Personnaz, Isild Le Besco, Aurore Clément, Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat, Bruno Perard, Claudine Chatel, Anita Gillier, Alex Fondja and Zita Hanrot.

"...a delectable riff on transformation, desire and sexuality that blends the heightened reality of melodrama with mischievous humor....powered by beautifully controlled performances from Anaïs Demoustier and Romain Duris..."

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "The New Girlfriend"...

The prolific François Ozon's latest feature is so Gallic in tone that it comes as a surprise to learn it is actually adapted from a Ruth Rendell story. The New Girlfriend begins superbly. It is not just the visual inventiveness that impresses but the sheer narrative economy. In a matter of only minutes, we've had a funeral of a beautiful woman followed by flashbacks which give us the entire history of her life. Her grief-stricken husband (Romain Duris) and her best friend Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) react in a very surprising way to her death.

Chicago – Friday, May 1st, kicks off one of 2015 Chicago’s most special events, the Chicago Critics Film Festival (Ccff) – a film festival as programmed by the members of the Chicago Film Critics Association. The place to be is at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, and the titles included are an exciting batch of movies making their premiere here.

Many of the films had their world premiere at festivals like Sundance, Toronto and South X Southwest, and HollywoodChicago.com contributors Nick Allen and Patrick McDonald have been sampling the best of the festival, and offer this preview of the kick-off weekend. Each capsule is designated with Na (Nick Allen) or Pm (Patrick McDonald) – to indicate the author – or encapsulates the official synopsis from the festival.

Be sure to check back with HollywoodChicago.com on Monday, when we finish our preview of the festival by looking ahead to the weekday schedule,...

Title: Une Nouvelle Amie (The New Girl Friend) Director: François Ozon Starring:Romain Duris, Anaïs Demoustier, Raphaël Personnaz, Isild Le Besco Francois Ozon’s humorous psychological drama ‘Une Nouvelle Amie’ (intended as the new female friend) explores the complexity of sexuality, transcending stereotypes. ‘The New Girl Friend’ adapts a Ruth Rendell short story where Ozon plays freely with gender cliches, to suggest that the male-female dichotomy is only an abstract concept. Anaïs Demoustier stars as Claire, a young woman whose closest friend since childhood, Laura (Isilde Le Besco), passes away leaving behind a husband, David (Romain Duris) and their newborn baby Lucie. One day she drops by David’s house unexpectedly, and finds [ Read More ]

The post Une Nouvelle Amie (The New Girl Friend) Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

The final film by Alain Resnais, based on an Alan Ayckbourn play, is sometimes stagey but filled with sadness and charm

Alain Resnais, who died last March at the age of 91, left us this gentle, muted swansong: an adaptation of the stage-play Life of Riley, by Alan Ayckbourn – an English author to whom Resnais was as attached as Claude Chabrol was to Ruth Rendell. A trio of couples are united in shock and anxiety as they hear that their old friend, George Riley, is terminally ill, with just a few months left. All of the women have some emotional or sexual history with Riley (who, like Godot, remains absent from the stage) and when they sentimentally invite him to take part in an amateur drama production they’re involved with, these long-submerged tensions rise to the surface.

The movie takes place in an odd, eccentric, artificial world: studio-bound stage sets...

★★★☆☆ Another year, another film from prolific French director and festival regular François Ozon. After the (intentional) inscrutability of the lead in Jeune et Jolie (2013), his latest film The New Girlfriend (2014) is thankfully a far deeper exploration of its two equally complex central characters. Based on a Ruth Rendell story - though inflected with considerably more humour by all accounts - it explores a burgeoning relationship between a widower and his departed wife's best friend on a sliding scale of gender and sexuality. Ozon's inconsistency of tone is once again present, but on this occasion he just about carries it off, crafting a thoughtful comic drama led by a pair of fine and nuanced performances.

Duris left holding the baby in The New Girlfriend by François Ozon

That most hunky and hirsute of French actors, Romain Duris (40), gets in touch with his feminine side (and then some) in François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend (Une Nouvelle Amie). Adapted from a short story by British writer Ruth Rendell, it's turned in to a heady concoction of transformation, desire, sexuality and identity. Duris plays a bereaved husband, David, who on occasion turns in to cross-dressing Virginie. Shocked at first by David’s open admission of a long-standing cross-dressing habit, his late wife’s close childhood friend Claire (Anais Demoustier) is intrigued to be in on his secret. Duris had already demonstrated his feminine wiles in Christophe Honoré’s Seventeen Times Cecile Cassard, in a campy rendition of the eponymous cabaret dancer’s song from Jacques Demy’s Lola. But at Ozon’s behest the actor takes it to another level.

Annual event set to showcase 90 French productions, 48 of them market premieres.

Unifrance’s annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris will kick-off as planned on Thursday (Jan 15), a week after a series of terrorist attacks, in which 17 people were killed, rocked the capital.

France remains on high alert after the shooting of 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, by two radicalised brothers offended by its cartoon depictions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed; the shooting of a police woman and the slaughter of four people at a kosher supermarket in the east of the city.

The French government announced on Monday that it was deploying 10,000 troops to protect vulnerable sites across the country — including Jewish schools and neighbourhoods – amid news that security forces believed at least six members of the terrorist cell that plotted the attacks may still be at large.

Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff have responded to the attack with a new edition of the...

Annual event set to showcase 90 French productions, 48 of them market premieres.

Unifrance’s annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris will kick-off as planned on Thursday (Jan 15), a week after a series of terrorist attacks, in which 17 people were killed, rocked the capital.

France remains on high alert after the shooting of 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, by two radicalised brothers offended by its cartoon depictions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed; the shooting of a police woman and the slaughter of four people at a kosher supermarket in the east of the city.

The French government announced on Monday that it was deploying 10,000 troops to protect vulnerable sites across the country — including Jewish schools and neighbourhoods – amid news that security forces believed at least six members of the terrorist cell that plotted the attacks may still be at large.

Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff have responded to the attack with a new edition of the...

Cohen Media Group has acquired Us rights to Mandarin Cinema’s current San Sebastian Film Festival entry directed by François Ozon.

The New Girlfriend is based on Ruth Rendell’s mystery about a woman who becomes depressed after her best friend’s death – until a discovery about her friend’s husband reaffirms her will to live. The film premiered in Toronto.

Cohen Media Group negotiated the deal with Films Distribution.

After making its world premiere in Toronto, François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend has inked U.S. distribution with Cohen Media Group. The Hitchcockian romance is adapted from the story by British suspense writer Ruth Rendell about Claire (Anaïs Demoustier), who discovers a surprising secret about her late best friend’s husband (Romain Duris) that tests the boundaries of sexual and gender identity. French company Mandarin Cinema produced the pic from the prolific Ozon (In The House, Swimming Pool, Under The Sand). Cmg Evp John Kochman and Films Distribution co-founder Nicolas Brigaud Robert negotiated the deal. The New Girlfriend won the Sebastian 2014 Award last week at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where it screened in competition.

Blue in the Face: Amalric’s Simenon Adaptation an Exquisite Enigma

Though actor/director Mathieu Amalric’s last directorial effort, On Tour (2010), landed him a Best Director win at the Cannes Film Festival, it never received Us distribution. Thankfully, his latest effort, an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel The Blue Room, won’t be subjected to the same neglect, as it’s an elegantly staged exercise of what could have easily been a straightforward nourish tale of adultery and murder. Pared down to a regal running time of barely eighty minutes, Amalric’s film is cinema of sensation, a puzzle of subtlety detailed accents and various, deliberate textures. Swift and intoxicating, by the time its final implications have been announced, what’s left is a sense of paralytic comprehension, a goading motivation for a second viewing. It’s depiction of an adulterous affair is icy, complicated, isolating, but...

The Skin I Live In: Ozon’s Exquisite New Exploration of Gender Subversion

For his most playful and delightfully creepy film in years, Francois Ozon adapts crime writer Ruth Rendell’s short story for his latest, The New Girlfriend. Rendell has long supplied a bevy of European filmmakers with some of their most memorable titles, including Claude Miller’s Alias Betty (2001), Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh (1997), and perhaps, most notably, Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremonie (1994) and The Bridesmaid (2004). An excellent purveyor of strange and complicated relationships that often involve sublimated identities and tendencies that often lead to deadly scenarios, Rendell serves as an excellent template for Ozon with material that recalls the sexually transgressive explorations of his early career.

Claire (Anais Demoustier) and Laura (Isild Le Besco) have been inseparable friends since childhood. They’ve followed nearly the same life trajectory as well, both marrying handsome young men and what not.

Norwegian distributor scores hat-trick of titles.

Fidalgo has secured three titles at the Toronto International Film Festival for Norwegian distribution.

The films include Marie’s Story’s from Jean-Pierre Ameris, sold by Indie Film Sales. The film stars Isabelle Carré as a determined nun in late 19th century France who taught a deaf and blind child to communicate.

Fidalgo has also picked up Duccio Chiarini’s debut, Short Skin, from Films Boutique. Starring Matteo Creatini and Francesca Agostini, the bittersweet comedy follows a 17-year-old protagonist who suffers too tight a foreskin to have sex.

In addition, the distributor has picked up Francois Ozon’s The New Girlfriend. Based on a short story collection by crime writer Ruth Rendell, the drama stars Anaïs Demoustier, Romain Duris and Raphaël Personnaz.

The film follows a woman who falls into a deep depression after the death of her best friend but is given a new lease of life when she discovers...

Exclusive: Mia Hansen Love, Francois Ozon dramas and Cannon Films doc among Toronto haul.

UK distributor Metrodome has secured UK and Ireland rights to a trio of films that played at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (Sept 4-14): Mia Hansen Love’s well-received drama Eden, Francois Ozon’s The New Girlfriend and documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

All three will play at the London Film Festival (Oct 8-19).

Metrodome acquired Eden from sales agent Kinology in a deal negotiated by Metrodome head of acquisitions Giles Edwards and Kinology’s CEO Grégoire Melin.

Directed by French auteur Mia Hansen Love and starring Felix De Givry, Pauline Etienne and Greta Gerwig, Eden charts the rise and fall of one of the DJs who pioneered the French electro music scene in the 1990s.

The film features cameo’s from the likes of Daft Punk, Joe Smooth, the late Frankie Knuckles...

The seductive mystery fiction of British writer Ruth Rendell has proven highly adaptable source material for a number of non-Anglo European filmmakers, among them Claude Chabrol in La Ceremonie and The Bridesmaid, Claude Miller in Alias Betty and Pedro Almodovar in Live Flesh. Francois Ozon joins the list with The New Girlfriend, spun from a 1985 short story by Rendell into a delectable riff on transformation, desire and sexuality that blends the heightened reality of melodrama with mischievous humor and an understated strain of Hitchcockian suspense. Ozon has carved a career out of scratching beneath the cool surface of the

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Seven films will compete for the top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The films in the running for the Golden Shell at the 62nd San Sebastian Film Festival (Sep 19-27) have been unveiled.

The seven titles are:

Casanova Variations, Michael Sturminger (Fr-Aus-Ger)

Silent Heart, Bille August (Den)

Phoenix, Christian Petzold (Ger)

The New Girlfriend, François Ozon (Fra)

Haemoo, Shim Sung-Bo (S Kor)

Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve (Fra)

The Drop, Michaël R. Roskam (Us)

New titles to join them in the Official Selection will be announced next week.

Casanova Variations stars John Malkovich stars as the legendary seducer. Based on Histoire de ma vie by Giacomo Casanova and with arias from W.A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, his story is told both through fiction and on-stage performances to reveal stories of his adventures and fear of death.

The Drop marks the Us debut of Belgian filmmaker Roskam, who arrived on the scene with muscular drama Bullhead. The film...

Winter of Our Discontent: Amini’s Problem with Narrative Pabulum

Few crime writers can boast such a weighty lineage of cinematic adaptation as that of Patricia Highsmith, probably falling somewhere between Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell, if one were to measure. Wim Wenders, Rene Clement, Anthony Minghella and Liliana Cavani have all reincarnated her most celebrated character, Tom Ripley, to the big screen, while Hitchcock, Michel Deville, Claude Chabrol (and later this year, Todd Haynes) have adapted some of her signature titles. And so, it is with great regard that screenwriter Hossein Amini arrives with his directorial debut, The Two Faces of January, a promise of scrappy ne’er-do-wells conning each other for money or guilty pleasures of the carnal sort, performed by a trio of renowned actors that rival Minghella’s starry line-up of The Talented Mr. Ripley. And yet, there’s something unnervingly stale about the whole endeavor,...

Exclusive: Latest film from Francois Ozon [pictured] stars Romain Duris and Raphael Personnaz.

Paris-based film company Films Distribution has racked up sales on François Ozon’s upcoming film The New Girlfriend starring Romain Duris and Raphael Personnaz.

It has sold to Switzerland (Filmcoopi), Spain (Golem), Portugal (Leopardo Filmes), Sweden (Folkets Bio), Cis (A-one Films), Israel (Lev Cinema), Brazil (Imovision), Hong Kong (Sundream) and Japan (Kino Films).

Based on a short story by Ruth Rendell, the film stars Anais Demoustier as a young woman who falls into a deep depression after her best friend dies. She finds the strength to re-embrace life after her she discovers an unexpected secret about her friend’s husband.

The picture, which is in post-production, is produced by Eric and Nicolas Altmayer of Paris-based Mandarin Cinema.

Films Distribution is promo-reeling The New Girlfriend in the Marché. Other hot titles on its slate include Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood which opened Directors’ Fortnight and Pascale Ferran’s Un Certain...

The New Girlfriend (Une Nouvelle Amie)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writer: Francois Ozon

Producers: Mandarin Films’ Eric and Nicolas Altmayer

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

Cast: Romain Duris, Anais Demoustier, Raphael Personnaz

Man, Francois Ozon is on a roll. His last film, Young & Beautiful just premiered at Cannes 2013 in the Main Competition and he’s already in post-production on his next, I Am Woman, which seems to have been recently re-titled The New Girlfriend. Never at a loss for top notch talent, Ozon headlines his latest with two of France’s most sought after leading men, Romain Duris (who Us audiences should recognize from Heartbreaker, Populaire, and several well known Klapisch titles) and Raphael Personnaz (Vronsky in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina) while hot commodity Anais Demoustier plays the female lead.

Gist: Penned by Ozon (pictured above) and based on a novel by British auteur Ruth Rendell,” Girlfriend” turns on Claire,...

Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.

William Boyd

By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was...

Midnight Delivery

British TV director Otto Bathurst ("Criminal Justice," "Peaky Blinders") has locked a deal to direct the Guillermo del Toro-produced feature thriller "Midnight Delivery" for Universal Pictures.

Kevin Costner plays a father who attempts to save his estranged daughter from a Colombian gang by trafficking cocaine to London on a midnight flight. Neil Cross ("Luther") penned the script. [Source: Heat Vision]

The Nightmare

Rodney Ascher ("Room 237") will direct the horror documentary "The Nightmare" for Preferred Film & TV. Glen Zipper, Ross Dinerstein and Kevin Iwashina will produce.

The project deals with victims of sleep paralysis who experience demonic visions, something Ascher himself has personal experience with. [Source: Screen]

The Girlfriend Exclusive

Francois Ozon is set to direct the feature adaptation of Ruth Rendell's novel "The New Girlfriend" for Films Distribution. Romain Duris, Anais Demoustier and Raphael Personnaz star.

The story follows a young woman who falls into depression after her best girlfriend’s death.

When Christopher Nolan writes a script, he usually ends up directing the movie. But Variety is now reporting that Gemma Arterton and Tim Roth have signed on to star in "the Keys to the Street," which is based on the Ruth Rendell novel and was adapted by Nolan and Michael Stokes. Czech helmer Julius Sevcik is on board to direct. The plan is to begin shooting next year in London. Plot: The story centers on a woman named Mary Jargo (Arterton). As a means to get away from her psychotic ex-boyfriend (Roth), she takes a job house-sitting in Regent Park - one of the most snobbish areas of the city - and while doing so begins to help and feed the homeless people who live nearby, as nobody else in the neighborhood will. After befriending a group of homeless people, Mary discovers that some of them are being murdered and...

Up until now, the only screenplays that Christopher Nolan has written have also been directed by him, but that pattern is about to change in a major way. Variety is reporting out of the Toronto International Film Festival that Gemma Arterton and Tim Roth are now set to star in The Keys to the Street, an adaptation of the Ruth Rendell novel of the same name that has been adapted by Nolan and co-writer Michael Stokes. According to Amazon, the story centers on a woman named Mary Jargo (Arterton). As a means to get away from her psychotic ex-boyfriend (Roth), she takes a job housesitting in Regent Park - one of the most snobbish areas of the city - and while doing so begins to help and feed the homeless people who live nearby, as nobody else in the neighborhood will. After befriending a group of homeless people, Mary discovers...

With all the excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s first post-Batman feature, Interstellar, it seems to have been forgotten by many that the director and screenwriter adapted Ruth Rendell’s novel The Keys To The Street for the big screen. That project now has its two leads in Gemma Arterton and Tim Roth, and will kick off production in January.

Czech director Julius Sevcik (Normal) is set to helm the film which takes place in London. Sevcik is a young director, with his last directorial credit coming in 2009, but he’s known for creating dark and intriguing thrillers. Normal, or as it’s fully titled: Normal: the Düsseldorf Ripper, earned Sevcik best director honors at the Shanghai film festival in 2009.

The book follows Mary, a woman who starts house-sitting in order to escape her violent ex-boyfriend Alastair (Roth). A series of murders of the homeless occurs in the neighborhood, while she...

The Keys to the Street, Nolan's shelved adaptation of Ruth Rendell's 1996 crime novel, to shoot with new director at helm

• Matthew McConaughey to star in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar

• Video: Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight Rises cast: 'Gotham has become a cynical place'

A never-completed Christopher Nolan film project is set to be revived with Gemma Arterton and Tim Roth in the lead roles. The pair are to star in crime-thriller The Keys to the Street, based on Ruth Rendell's 1996 novel about a young woman who moves into an exclusive central London home to escape her violent boyfriend but discovers that a series of murders are taking place in the surrounding area.

The Keys to the Street has been revived for Czech film-maker Julius Sevcik to direct, almost a decade after Nolan decided not to make it his follow-up to 2002's Insomnia. The British director, who wrote the screenplay with Michael Stokes,...

Your daily movie bulletin bringing you the lowdown on 9 September

Greetings from Canada, where it's just turned midnight and the clock has struck on the first weekend of the Toronto film festival.

Coming up today from Toronto

News on The F Word, Daniel Radcliffe's third breakout film festival hit of the year (after Kill Your Darlings and Horns), as well as on Belle and The Armstrong Lie. Plus for those who need it, an instructional video will bring you right up to speed on the weekend at Tiff.

Chris Michael reports from the sneak preview of Spike Jonze's new film, Her, and the Q&A afterwards.We'll have review of Jason Bateman's directorial debut, Bad Words, of Matthew (Mad Men) Weiner's first film, You Are Here, of Amma Assante's Belle, John Turturro in Fading Gigolo, Alex Gibney's The Armstrong Lie, Colin Firth in Devil's Knot, Keanu Reeves's directorial debut,...

• Emma Watson (Harry Potter, The Bling Ring) is set to star in an adaptation of Emma Forrest’s memoir, Your Voice in My Head, about her descent into mental illness as she struggles to pursue relationships and a writing career, and how one doctor saved her life. Francesca Gregorini, who directed Rooney Mara in the prep school coming-of-age drama Tanner Hall, will direct Watson in the project.Forrest is writing the script. In the press release announcing the news, producer and International Film Trust co-founder Michael Benaroya said, “We are incredibly excited to be working with Emma Forrest as she...

Gemma Arterton has talked freely about the myriad of in development projects she is attached to, and many of them have never come to fruition, but it looks like one finally will. Variety is reporting “The Keys to the Street,” one of Christopher Nolan’s first screenplays, adapted from the novel by Ruth Rendell, is finally [...]

The post Max Irons and Gemma Arterton Set for Christopher Nolan-Scripted “Keys to the Street” appeared first on Up and Comers.

London -- The Christopher Nolan and Michael Stokes penned crime thriller The Keys to the Street starring Gemma Arterton and Tim Roth is to be touted to international buyers by Myriad Pictures. The psychological thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Ruth Rendell, details the story of a woman who, after escaping from her violent husband, has a love affair with a man who is not who he seems to be. The title also stars Max Irons (TV’s The White Queen), and will be directed by Czech director Julius Sevcik (Normal). Story: Filming Begins on Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar Slated to begin production in the U.

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British murder mystery Broadchurch, heading to the U.S. later this year on BBC America, is a worthy successor to Forbrydelsen. My take on ITV’s tantalizing thriller, which wraps up tonight in the U.K. Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Broadchurch: This British Murder Mystery Will Be Your Next Television Obsession," in which I review ITV's sensational murder mystery Broadchurch, which stars David Tennant and Olivia Colman and which will head Stateside later this year on BBC America. Not to be missed! The British have an insatiable appetite for crime fiction, whether it appears in print or on television screens. Putting aside the twee tea cozy mysteries of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, however, these thrillers are not only taut but also bleak depictions of the psychological fallout from murder: tracing, as novelist Ruth Rendell has done so well in her work,...