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The documentary A Star Without a Star: The Untold Juanita Moore Story presents itself as a campaign film, an argument for a piece of terrestrial brass and terrazzo on a famous sidewalk. Its subject is Juanita Moore, an actress of formidable power whose 1959 Academy Award nomination for Imitation of Life should have secured her place in the firmament. Instead, her legacy is a case study in what we might call institutional forgetting.

The film uses the quest for a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as its narrative engine. But that public crusade is merely the glossy invitation to a far more complex and somber exhibition. This is not a film about a star; it is a film about the architecture of the sky that prevented certain lights from being seen. It asks us to look past the pavement and consider the machinery that polishes some names while letting others tarnish.

Netflix has set a Nov. 14 theatrical release for their Cannes pick-up Left-Handed Girl from filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou. The movie, which is co-written by multi-Oscar winner Sean Baker and Tsou and produced by the Anora filmmaker, will stream on Nov. 28.

We told you first that the streamer took most of the world on Tsou’s movie which played in Cannes Critics’ Week.

Pic won won the Gan Foundation Award and the Prix du Rail d’Or following its premiere on the Croissette.

The Mandarin and Taiwanese language movie follows a single mother and her two daughters who relocate to Taipei to open a night market stall, each of them navigating the challenges of adapting to their new environment while striving to maintain family unity. Janel Tsai stars as the mother, along with Nina Ye and Shih-Yuan Ma as the children.

Deadline Chief Film Critic Pete Hammond praised coming the pic at the fest,...

Jimmy Hunt, the freckle-faced youngster who appeared in Pitfall, Sorry, Wrong Number, Cheaper by the Dozen, Invaders From Mars and 31 other features before he retired from acting at age 14, has died. He was 85.

Hunt suffered a heart attack six weeks ago and died Friday in a hospital in Simi Valley, his daughter-in-law Alisa Hunt told The Hollywood Reporter.

Hunt played William Gilbreth, one of the 12 offspring of an efficiency expert (Clifton Webb) and a psychologist (Myrna Loy), in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), then returned to play another son in the family, Fred, in the sequel, Belles on the Toes (1952).

As an orphan, his character fueled the plot in The Mating of Millie (1948), a charming romantic comedy starring Evelyn Keyes and Glenn Ford, who taught him how to shoot marbles on the set. And in The Lone Hand (1953), Hunt portrayed the son of a widowed farmer (Joel McCrea) and served as...

TCM’s Two for One is back with a double feature curated by none other than Brian Tyree Henry. The acclaimed actor joins host Ben Mankiewicz this Saturday, June 14th at 8 Pm Et to present a pair of films that explore race and identity through vastly different lenses. Henry’s selections, Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation […]

Two for One: Brian Tyree Henry – Imitation of Life & The Learning Tree...

Actor-turned-director Deepak Tijori’s Do Lafzon Ki Kahani is a heartfelt adaptation of the Korean film, Alone, about a disgraced guilt-stricken boxer and a happy but visibly impaired girl whom he falls in love with.

The theme has been done earlier in films as far-ranging as Douglas Sirk’s A Magnificent Obsession and Gulzar’s Kinara. Deepak Tijori is unable to whip up a powerful concoction on the pain and suffering of two opposites locked in a love relationship.

Sooraj has a past. Since he’s played by Randeep Hooda this past angst is pinned down to the narrative with persuasive energy. Hooda’s coiled clenched performance nourishes the arid areas of Tijori’s narrative. Hooda’s scenes in the boxing ring have more punch than the film’s romantic backbone.The actor is far more well-prepared than the script.

Kajal Aggarwal drags a dollop of sunshine into a film...

Exclusive: Netflix has acquired most of the global rights to Shih-Ching Tsou’s Cannes’ Critics Week movie Left-Handed Girl.

The movie, produced by and co-written by 4x Anora Oscar winner Sean Baker won the Gan Foundation Award as well as the Prix du Rail d’Or following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Mandarin and Taiwanese language movie follows a single mother and her two daughters who relocate to Taipei to open a night market stall, each of them navigating the challenges of adapting to their new environment while striving to maintain family unity. Janel Tsai stars as the mother, along with Nina Ye and Shih-Yuan Ma as the children.

We heard back on the Croisette that Netflix was very excited about acquiring this movie.

“The original story comes from something my grandfather told me when I was young,” Tsou told Deadline’s Melanie Goodfellow in our Cannes Studio.

Warning: This article will discuss a film about sexual abuse and incest.

Filmmaker Ari Aster exploded into the world of cinema with the release of "Hereditary" in 2018. That film was structured around a demonic cult and the magical glyphs they used to conduct ritual sacrifices, but moreso, it was about intergenerational guilt, barely suppressed rage, and the dissolution of the family unit. Toni Collette gives a career-best performance as a woman who kind of hated her own mother, and who has no small amount of depressed resentment toward her own family.

Aster followed that with "Midsommar," another film about cult sacrifices, this time complimented by the murder/suicide of the protagonist's family. Like "Hereditary," "Midsommar" was deeply beloved by the horror community, and is often held up as an example of the A24 house style. Florence Pugh also gives an astonishing performance as a grieving young woman whose awful boyfriend hates her.

Dennis Quaid played the male lead in the 2002 Todd Haynes film Far from Heaven. While the film mainly centered on Julian Moore’s Cathy, her husband Frank, played by Quaid, also had a significant contribution to the film’s controversial themes. The film explores Cathy and Frank’s life in 1950s suburban Connecticut, when their marriage seems to fall apart.

Quaid’s character’s homosexuality is one of the central themes in a film that also deals with racism, miscegenation, and escapism. While the nature and how these issues are addressed gained critical acclaim, fans might have overlooked one issue with the portrayal of Quaid’s character.

Dennis Quaid’s character in Far from Heaven is not in the clear just because of his homosexuality Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore as Frank and Cathy Whitaker in Far from Heaven | Credits: Focus Features

For their neighbors, Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore‘s lead characters,...

Douglas Sirk is one of the most prominent filmmakers of the 1940s and 50s, long before major Hollywood studios took charge of the industry. Even before diversity was a thing, Sirk brought a unique immigrant value to his otherwise melodramatic movies after he left his homeland, Germany, to start a new career in America.

Sirk’s first major Hollywood production was the World War II movie Hitler’s Madman, based on the real-life assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich and the ensuing massacre of Lidice. While Sirk had a different vision for the movie, MGM forced reshoots that turned it into propaganda, and here is what went down with Hitler’s Madman and Sirk’s career.

MGM turned Douglas Sirk’s Hitler’s Madman into a glittery propaganda

Douglas Sirk was born as Hans Detlef Sierck in Germany and rose to prominence during the 1930s with drama films he directed in his homeland.

Director Katell Quillévéré explores the ravages of romance in an intelligently performed period piece about a shamed mother and a closeted husband

The title of Katell Quillévéré’s first movie, Un Poison Violent from 2010, was taken from Serge Gainsbourg’s song Un poison violent, c’est ça l’amour, and the awful toxicity of love is a theme that has run through her work ever since. It is an underground stream that has become very much an overground stream in this new, heartfelt movie. It’s robust and a little unsubtle, without the nuances and indirections that govern her best work, but handsomely produced and resoundingly performed, avowedly autobiographical and inspired by her grandmother. Quillévéré has said that her influences are Maurice Pialat for the tough realism and Douglas Sirk for the melodrama and the sense of buried shame. I wonder if there isn’t some David Lean in there...

What do you do after a record-setting haul of four individual Oscars including Best Picture for Anora? For Sean Baker, it is returning to his filmmaking roots and the Cannes Film Festival, where he also took the 2024 Palme d’Or for Anora. In this case he isn’t directing, instead leaving that to longtime collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou, who worked as a producer with him on earlier films including Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket. The pair also co-directed a film called Take Out 21 years ago, and it has taken that long for Shih-Ching to take the reins of a second film, co-writing the script for Left-Handed Girl with Baker, who also serves as a producer and sole film editor. It premiered today in Cannes as part of Critics’ Week.

Set in a bustling Taiwanese night market that also seems like a Melrose Place-style food court, the film...

What do you do after setting a record haul of four individual Oscars including Best Picture for Anora? For Sean Baker it is returning to his filmmaking roots and the Cannes Film Festival where he also took the Palme d’Or last May for Anora. In this case he isn’t directing, and instead leaving that to long time collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou, who worked as a producer with him on earlier films like Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. The pair also co-directed a film called Take Out 21 years ago, and it has taken that long for Shih-Ching to take on the reins of a second film, co-writing the script for Left-Handed Girl with Baker who also serves as a producer and sole film editor. It premiered today in Cannes as part of Critics Week.

Set in a bustling Taiwanese night market that also seems like a Melrose Place -style food court,...

The TCM Classic Film Festival, running this year from April 24-27 for its 16th annual edition, comes at a pivotal time for the network and the state of classic cinema as a whole.

As a new generation of cinephiles flock to vintage film screenings across Los Angeles and beyond, the TCM Classic Film Festival is meeting the moment with Tiktoks and creators helping spread the word.

Beginning in January, TCM hosted a video series titled “New Voices of Film,” where three content creators and impassioned cinema lovers presented a film of their choosing to program on the network. The selections ranged from the Douglas Sirk melodrama “All That Heaven Allows,” Billy Wilder’s “A Foreign Affair” to the pre-code classic “Merrily We Go to Hell.” But in order to reach younger audiences, TCM has also focused its efforts across social media, with short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram drawing bridges between contemporary and older films.

Baltimore native John Waters is filmdom’s pencil-mustached titan of trash who has spent a lifetime of dumpster-diving into a vat of bad taste, sleaze, kinky gross-outs, over-the-top camp, maudlin melodramatics, sick jokes, taboo sexuality, vulgarity and bizarre personalities. At least he has a fabulous sense of humor. The director is a New York University film school dropout who instead became a scholar of transgressive, envelope-shredding cinema, influenced by the directorial likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Federico Fellini, William Castle, Douglas Sirk and Ingmar Bergman. Early on, Waters assembled a stock company of players from suburban Baltimore who he would the Dreamlanders, including Mink Stole and Edith Massey.

But Waters would find his true muse and favorite leading lady in his childhood friend, Glenn Milstead, a drag queen whose alter-ego was known as Divine. When Milstead died at age 42 from an enlarged heart in 1988, Waters' output went more mainstream, with...

Note: I have kept Velvert Undergound at 2, its my personal favorite out of all his work

Todd Haynes is a filmmaker who has always refused to play by the rules. One of the most distinctive and provocative directors working today, from the moment he burst onto the indie scene in the late ’80s, he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in telling stories the way Hollywood expected.

He’s obsessed with identity, performance, and the ways people construct (or are forced to construct) facades to survive. And so, his work swings between two key fascinations. The quiet lives of people who break taboos – whether they mean to or not – and the larger-than-life personas of rockstars, both real and imagined.

Born in Los Angeles in 1961, Haynes studied film at Bard College, where he directed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a shockingly effective (and sometimes banned) biopic of the famous singer’s tragic life,...

The Pearl episode of Revisited was Written and Narrated by Vannah Taylor, Edited by Juan Jimenez, Produced by Tyler Nichols and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

If there’s one thing Ti West continues to nail, it’s a retro aesthetic. Throughout his filmography, West channels the essence of ‘70s and ‘80s horror films, not only in the visual style he achieves through his attention to detail when it comes to production design, his frequent use of natural lighting and minimalist sound design but through his abilities as a storyteller. Films such as The Roost (2005), The House of the Devil (2009), and In a Valley of Violence (2016) can all be characterized by their sincere homages to the genres they are playing within while still exploring fresh, contemporary themes and bringing new twists to the table. His most recent endeavor, the X Trilogy, is no different. Not only did...

Our recent review of “Opus” may very well leave some of you looking to a list ranking the “best A24 movies” as a sweet bout of hypocrisy; the fandom surrounding the distributor has been well-documented and thoroughly lambasted, so what purpose is served exactly by compiling a list of the best films that just so happen to have been acquired by a specific group of New York millennials tapped into meme culture? In examining the films that have garnered the studio such status, though, it’s not impossible to envision certain patterns in these independent features that might have attracted those millennials to acquire these films in the first place—in essence, while there is no such thing as a style defined in an “A24 film,” there is certainly a particular breed of audacious art films that the studio prefers to platform with all their savvy marketing magic, to the mutual benefit of all involved.

August’s Locarno Film Festival will go British with its latest retrospective: Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960.

The retrospective forms a major strand of the film festival’s programming and for many festival goers is a standout and popular attraction. Boasting fresh restorations and rare screenings of difficult to get prints, past seasons have been devoted to filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk or studios such as last year’s retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, which celebrated the centenary of Columbia Pictures.

Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960 is organized by the Locarno Film Festival in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of Studiocanal. The film curator responsible for the last program, Ehsan Khoshbakht, returns this year with Great Expectations. He spoke exclusively with Variety about the lineup and the rules dictating his selection.

What are the criteria for selection?

I chose...

Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

by James Cameron-wilson

The career and reputation of Douglas Sirk has undergone many mutations. Famous for directing lush melodramas in the 1950s, he was dismissed and belittled by many contemporary critics, until seeing a revival of sorts in the 1970s sparked by European writers and filmmakers, in particular Jean-Luc Godard and then subsequently by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Later on, many notable directors doffed their hat to Sirk and paid homage to his 1950s’ soap operas, including Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters, Lars von Trier and in particular Todd Haynes, with his sumptuous imitation Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore. When the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro accepted his Oscar for The Shape of Water, he even name-checked Douglas Sirk as an inspiration.

Sirk, the son of Danish parents, made his breakthrough as a stage director in 1920s’ Germany and then, when filmmakers...

No streaming service does a director retrospective like the Criterion Channel, and March offers two masters at opposite ends of exposure. On one side is Michael Mann, whose work from Thief through Collateral (minus The Keep) is given a spotlight; on the other is Alain Guiraudie, who (in advance of Misericordia opening on March 21) has five films arriving. (2001’s duet of That Old Dream That Moves and Sunshine for the Scoundrels have perhaps never streamed in the U.S. before.) Meanwhile, three noirs from Douglas Sirk are programmed alongside a Lee Chang-dong retrospective that features three new restorations.

Showcases will be staged for Dogme 95, Best Supporting Actor winners, and French Poetic Relaism. Welles’ The Trial gets a Criterion Edition alongside Demon Pond; Horace Ové’s newly restored Pressure makes a streaming premiere alongside spruced-up copies of Amadeus, Love Is the Devil, Port of Shadows, and Burning an Illusion, as...

In 1986, one of cinema's most fiercely original auteurs released a film that scandalized the public. At the heart of his dark dissection of the American soul was a stunning performance by an Italian actress who would become an international icon. Isabella Rossellini bore the brunt of the backlash against David Lynch's Blue Velvet, but her Oscar nomination for Conclave is a long-overdue acknowledgment of her extraordinary abilities.

Isabella Rossellini is a true Renaissance woman. The scholarly farmer, filmmaker, and model is most famous for her genre-spanning acting career — which was nearly nipped in the bud by the movie for which she is best known today. Blue Velvet shocked contemporary audiences who were unprepared for its frank portrayal of sexual trauma, but today it is regarded as one of the great American independent masterworks, largely due to Isabella Rossellini's unapologetic creation of an unforgettable character.

Blue Velvet Was Reviled Upon Release,...

I consider myself something like a student, autodidact or otherwise, of cinema and––even still, must confess––had not ever grasped the concept of Argentine noir. Credit to Criterion Channel, who’ll expand my horizons with February’s program (concisely titled “Argentine Noir”) that includes one known title––Pierre Chenal’s Native Son, an Argentine film from a French director adapting an American novel about the African-American experience in Chicago––and five I look forward to discovering. Retrospective-wise, their wide-reaching Claudette Colbert program could double as a lesson in Old Hollywood, between Capra, Stahl, DeMille, Lubitsch, Sirk, and Sturges. February, of course, brings Black History Month and Valentine’s Day: the former engenders a series featuring films such as Nothing but a Man, Portrait of Jason, and Losing Ground; the latter brings “New York Love Stories,” from Carol to Crossing Delancey to, curiously, Annie Hall, which likely would not have...

As we continue to explore the best in 2024, today we’re taking a look at the articles that you, our dear readers, enjoyed the most throughout the past twelve months. Spanning reviews, interviews, features, podcasts, news, and trailers, check out the highlights below and return for more year-end coverage.

Most-Read Reviews

1. The Goldfinger

2. From Darkness to Light

3. The Devil’s Bath

4. Only the River Flows

5. Longlegs

6. The Nature of Love

7. The 2024 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films, Reviewed

8. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2

9. Trap

10. Dune: Part Two

Most-Read Interviews

1. Richard Linklater on Sex, Murder, Hit Man, and the Infantilization of Culture

2. Will Menaker on the Year in Cinema: Oppenheimer, Scorsese, Friedkin & Beyond

3. Lee Daniels on The Deliverance, Shifting Culture, Douglas Sirk, and That Glenn Close Performance

4. “All Great DPs Become Alcoholics”: Rob Tregenza on Shooting Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies

5. In a Violent Nature Director Chris Nash on Creating a New Kind of Slasher,...

Holiday horror is a special subgenre all its own, full of famous films from the scandal-stirring Silent Night, Deadly Night, to Art the Clown's festive turn in Terrifier 3. The image of an evil Santa Claus has become iconic over the years, but his first — and best — starring role is in the incomparable Christmas Evil. This personal favorite of John Waters is constantly surprising, right up to its genuinely shocking twist ending.

While many holiday horror movies settle for a homicidal villain in a red and white suit, Christmas Evil has an antihero who is so obsessed with Saint Nick that he fully transforms into the jolly old elf, bringing cheer to the nice and slaughtering the naughty. The movie's startling mix of slasher movie depravity and yuletide fantasy thrilled the director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, and this John Waters-approved oddity should become a new Christmas tradition for cult film fans.

Few directors have captivated audiences and inspired more discussion than David Lynch. From Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive to Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet, Lynch's body of work is as thought-provoking as it is diverse. Perhaps no other film has raised more questions and intrigue than the director's full-length debut, Eraserhead. Released in 1977 and still considered by many to be one of the most fascinating films ever made, a common saying about Eraserhead is that six different people will give six different interpretations. All these years later, scholars and critics are still dissecting the imagery and the abrasive tone that Eraserhead possesses.

In 1977, the same year that audiences flocked to see Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Lynch turned the world upside down in a film that captured both the desperation of a cold industrial wasteland and the director's own fear of fatherhood. With Eraserhead,...

Some of the highest-profile Spanish films of 2024 – from Málaga Festival winner and now Spain’s Oscar entry “Saturn Return” to San Sebastián laureates “I Am Nevenka” and “Glimmers” – feature in Mass, a Spanish film showcase which will unspool in Buenos Aires over Nov. 28-30 and Montevideo during Dec. 2-4, running parallel with the Uruguayan capital’s Ventana Sur market.

The film season represents the latest collaboration between Spain’s San Sebastián and Málaga Festival, here in partnership of Spain’s Icaa film agency and Argentina’s Orca Films, as Spain’s seeks to capitalize on its predominant presence on global streamers among E.U. film powers to consolidate production and co-financing relations in Uruguay, a building film-tv hub, and with regions of Argentina.

During their stay in Argentina, the San Sebastian and Malaga Festivals will meet representatives of the Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos and Santiago del Estero provinces to work...

Pull out your copy of the latest septic tank health and safety regulations, because Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s masterfully unsettling and thought-provoking triumph “Evil Does Not Exist” will soon be streaming at home.

The Criterion Channel will exclusively premiere “Evil Does Not Exist” in a live streaming event this Sunday September 22 at 8:00 p.m. Et/5:00 p.m. Et. Then the film will live on the Criterion Channel as its exclusive streaming home starting October 1.

This is the latest of several live streaming events the Criterion Channel has hosted, with previous ones including Janus Films’ pickup “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus,” directed by Neo Sora, and Sideshow and Janus’s “The Beast,” directed by Bertrand Bonello. The live streams are a novel way of making a film’s streaming premiere an event unto itself and is one of several innovations the Criterion Channel has rolled out over the past year, such as...

The 2022 film Pearl, directed by Ti West, has attracted many viewers on Netflix in recent weeks. According to Rotten Tomatoes, a website that reviews films, 92% of critics liked Pearl. This high rating means most reviewers enjoyed the movie.

Pearl is a prequel to West’s earlier film X. It tells the story of the character Pearl from before the events in X. The movie takes place in 1918 during the flu pandemic and World War I. It shows Pearl’s mental health declining over time. Unlike some scary movies that rely mostly on gore and jump scares, Pearl focuses more on character development and psychology.

Actress Mia Goth received praise for her role as Pearl. Some said her performance was award-worthy. Goth co-wrote the screenplay with West while quarantining in New Zealand during filming for X. She portrayed Pearl as a sympathetic yet terrifying woman trapped by her situation who commits horrible acts.

Brazilian actors Alice Braga (“Queen of the South”) and Bianca Comparato (“3%”) have joined forces to launch South, a new production label based out of Los Angeles, New York and São Paulo. The company was established with financial support from Flagcx, the largest independent creative services holding company in Latin America.

South will debut its first feature project, Gabriela Amaral Almeida’s body-horror story “She, Crocodile,” at this year’s 12th edition of the San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, which will take place from Sept. 25 -27.

Described by the producers as a “horror fable,” “She, Crocodile” is the story of a young woman, the sole heiress to a luxury real estate brokerage in Rio de Janeiro, who slowly transforms into one of the titular reptiles. As a project, it received backing from the MacDowell Institute Residency program where Amaral wrote a full-50 page treatment.

According to Amaral, a rising genre...

Most of the projects we find listed in the annual selections for the San Sebastian Co-Production Forum are at the very least two, mostly three to four plus years away from a production start date but there is nonetheless plenty to get excited about with the 2024 group of fourteen projects. Comprised of a mix of mostly established filmmakers, we have a favorite with her genre offerings in Brazilian filmmaker Gabriela Amaral Almeida — her new film is influenced by David Cronenberg and Douglas Sirk and is called She, Crocodile. Neighboring Argentina is well rerpested this year — having just premiered his last feature in the Directors’ Fortnight last May, Hernan Rosselli’s latest is titled Hard-Boiled School tells the tale of real-life legendary thief Pedro Palomar.…...

Ti Wests slasher film Pearl, the highly acclaimed second installment of A24's X trilogy, is set to debut on Netflix screens nationwide on August 1, 2024.

Netflix announced the film's arrival on its official account, using Pearl's iconic line in a post that stated, "She's A Star. Pearl is comin' to Netflix on August 1."

Related X, Pearl, and MaXXXines Connection, Explained

A24's X trilogy is one of the horror genre's biggest success stories and MaXXine, Pearl, and X all relate in a unique way.

She's A Star. Pearl is comin' to Netflix August 1. pic.twitter.com/EroBn7BRe8 Netflix (@netflix) July 23, 2024

After collaborating on X, Ti West started working on a prequel script inspired by Mia Goth's character. Filming began right after the first movie in New Zealand, using sets from X and crews experienced from Avatar: The Way of Water, with strict Covid-19 safety measures in place.

Pearl...

Pearl, the highly acclaimed prequel to Ti West’s X, is a hauntingly beautiful exploration of ambition, madness, and the darker side of the American Dream. Released mere months after its predecessor, Pearl dives deep into the backstory of its titular character, offering audiences a glimpse into the origins of the sinister figure they met in X.

Set in 1918, the film transports us to a world ravaged by the Spanish flu pandemic and the aftermath of World War I. The film’s protagonist, Pearl (Mia Goth), is a young woman living on a remote farm with her strict German mother (Tandi Wright) and her paralysed father (Matthew Sunderland). Her husband, Howard, is away fighting in the war. Pearl dreams of escaping her monotonous life to become a movie star, an aspiration fueled by the films she obsessively watches and the fantasies she concocts while performing for the farm animals.

West...

Romance is complicated. The meshing together of two or more people isn’t designed to be a smooth process and art has reflected that for generations, most recently in the new rom-com “A Family Affair.” In honor of the film dropping, IndieWire has compiled a list of the best age-gap romance films to enjoy after watching Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron’s jaunt within the genre. From writer Carrie Solomon and “P.S. I Love You” director Richard Lagravenese, “A Family Affair” follows a self-absorbed movie star (Efron) who ends up in a whirlwind Hollywood romance with the relatively older mom (Kidman) of his 24 year-old assistant (Joey King). Efron returns to full heartthrob mode following a dark, dramatic turn in “The Iron Claw” and reunites with his “Paperboy” co-star to charming results.

In addition to his directorial work, Lagravenese is also known for his romantic screenwriting work with “The Bridges of Madison County...

Director Bardia Zeinali knew exactly what the music video for Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” needed. For a song in which a woman pleads with her chaotic partner to behave, the music video demanded sexy crime vibes. There’s a reason Zeinali put Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct” on the mood board.

The resulting video for Carpenter’s second single off her upcoming “Short ‘n’ Sweet” album, in which Carpenter meets Barry Keoghan’s smirking ne’er-do-well, is instantly iconic, with director of photography Sean Price Williams’ lush visuals bringing to mind Douglas Sirk doing neo-noir. But beyond turning Oscar nominee Keoghan into the internet’s latest boyfriend (something even “Saltburn” didn’t achieve) and creating the summer’s go-to meme, Zeinali gave the video something even more vital: a total understanding and appreciation of the sly humor in Carpenter’s songwriting.

“She has a bit of that wink always,...

Ti West and A24 pulled off a killer surprise Thursday night, unveiling an early screening of their upcoming slasher movie Maxxxine to a group of unsuspecting horror fans.

The evening was billed as a double feature of West’s X horror series, which includes X and Pearl, the movies that thrust Mia Goth into the role Hollywood’s nouveau killer queen. The sold-out evening brought out film nerds and horror geeks of all shapes and hairstyles — some dressed up as Pearl, some wearing Pearl T-shirts, while others sported T-shirts with logos and characters ranging from X-Men to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood‘s Rick Dalton.

During a Q&a in between the two screenings, moderator and Maxxxine actress Lily Collins and West suddenly switched gears. Collins asked how many in the audience had seen Pearl — and almost all raised their hands. She then posited the question: if everyone had seen that movie,...

John Waters’s Cry-Baby is the ideal companion piece to the filmmaker’s 1988 hit Hairspray. That film takes place in the early ’60s, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, and deals in a lighthearted fashion with thorny issues of racial segregation, while Cry-Baby uses its mid-’50s setting to poke fun at class conflict in staid Eisenhower-era Baltimore. And both films are perfectly realized period pieces awash with the music of their respective eras: Hairspray focusing on soul and R&b, Cry-Baby packed with catchy rockabilly and doowop numbers.

Cry-Baby focuses on Wade Walker (Johnny Depp), the leader of a redoubtable gang of “drapes,” a Baltimorean spin on the greasers of the time. Events begin to echo Romeo and Juliet once Cry-Baby, who’s known for driving girls crazy for the way he’s able to shed a single tear, makes a play for Allison (Amy Locane), the...

Before Simon (Théodore Pellerin) struts out on stage every night in his drag regalia, he prepares backstage by lip-syncing to Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.” His persona, Glory Gore, isn’t fully formed at this point — she’s only been half-painted into existence — but when Chaka belts out the lyrics to her signature anthem, something physically shifts within Simon as he begins to inhabit the words and the woman inside him alike. Although the other drag queens roll their eyes and tease Simon for always playing the same song each night, it’s not long before everyone joins him for a communal singalong that speaks to the uniquely queer connection these queens have bonded through.

Yet “Solo” isn’t so much about belonging as it is the desperate need to belong, and it’s this pain that Simon is forced to work through when his life twists into...

Spanish cinema is expanding, opening up attractive film avenues to reach the worldwide market, driven by upscale commercial projects, blending of genres and a new generation of emerging female directors.

The country’s filmmakers landed three Oscar nominations: Juan A. Bayona with “Society of the Snow” (inter- national feature and makeup and hair styling); and Pablo Berger with “Robot Dreams” (animated feature). Also, four of Netflix’s top five most-popular non-English films ever are from Spain.

“The boom in talent is making for a unique and very diverse cinema,” says Guillermo Farré, Movistar Plus+ head of original films and Spanish cinema.

“The great foreign perception of Spanish cinema is driven by the productions’ quality and their international diffusion,” says Elástica Films’ María Zamora, producer of Carla Simón’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner “Alcarrás.”

“Spanish cinema is evolving with the appearance of new voices especially female and new ways of narrating,...

There’s a special tug at the heartstrings that follows the death of an actor who’s been closely associated with a death scene, as is the case with Bernard Hill, who died May 5 at the age of 79.

The death of Juanita Moore in 2013 at the age of 98 came 54 years after maybe the ultimate movie deathbed scene — not to mention funeral, with a horse-drawn hearse and Mahalia Jackson eulogizing her in song — in Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life.” And when Carl Weathers died earlier this year, it came nearly four decades after his best-known character, Apollo Creed, had died in “Rocky IV,” prompting the entire “Creed” franchise to spring up in his wake, with him conspicuously, obviously, absent.

Much praise and remembrance has been given since Hill’s passing to his role as Captain E.J. Smith in James Cameron’s “Titanic.” But Bernard Hill’s death scene as Theoden...

For several years now, Quentin Tarantino has been adamant that he plans to make a single 10th and final movie — which will no longer be The Movie Critic. Some of his fans were relieved when this news broke yesterday. The Movie Critic originally sounded like a nostalgic character study (“more epilogue-y,” as Tarantino once put it), while his fans particularly love the director’s more pulply, genre-driven fair. The result would have almost certainly been great. But would it have been great enough to be Tarantino’s last film?

More details about this decision are likely still to come. Still, one wonders: Would Tarantino have abandoned the movie if there wasn’t so much riding on it? His many statements about quitting film directing have suggested he’s extremely focused on protecting his legacy, which seems like a downright masochistic way of putting an enormous amount pressure on yourself. A...

Barbra Rush, the prolific actress best known for roles in 1953’s It Came From Outer Space and long runs on Peyton Place and All My Children, has died. Her daughter confirmed Rush’s passing to Fox News on Sunday. She was 97.

Rush had a near 60-year career. In the ’50s and ’60s, she worked on the big screen with Paul Newman (three times), Kirk Douglas, Rock Hudson, Dean Martin, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Richard Burton. In addition to pulpier fare like Prince of Pirates and Taza, Son of Cochise, Rush did a trio of films with Douglas Sirk — The First Legion, Magnificent Obsession and Captain Lightfoot — and Bigger Than Life with Nicholas Ray.

By the late 1960s, Rush had segued mostly to TV, appearing in mainstays of the period such as Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, The Fugitive, Marcus Welby, M.D., McCloud, Maude, Ironside and Mannix.

Rush appeared in...

Barbara Rush, the classy yet largely unheralded leading lady who sparkled in the 1950s melodramas Magnificent Obsession, Bigger Than Life and The Young Philadelphians, has died. She was 97.

Rush, a regular on the fifth and final season of ABC’s Peyton Place and a favorite of sci-fi fans thanks to her work in When Worlds Collide (1951) and It Came From Outer Space (1953), died Sunday in Westlake Village, her daughter, Fox News senior correspondent Claudia Cowan, announced.

“My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening. I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition,” Cowan said. “It’s fitting she chose to leave on Easter as it was one of her favorite holidays and now, of course, Easter will have a deeper significance for me and my family.”

A starlet at Paramount, Universal and Fox whose career blossomed at...

Douglas Sirk was a German-born director active in the 1930s and '50s. Although he dabbled in Westerns, war movies, and comedies, he is most famous for his melodramas, including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. These movies were commercially successful but dismissed by reviewers on release. However, Sirk's critical standing improved significantly over the intervening decades, to the point that he is now frequently ranked among the greatest filmmakers of the 1950s.

The official jury for the New York International Children’s Film Festival (Nyicff) has been unveiled, with “Passages” director Ira Sachs, “Broad City” co-creator Ilana Glazer, “Into the Spider-Verse” producer Peter Ramsey, and actress Uma Thurman among the A-listers presiding over the 2024 festival.

IndieWire exclusively reveals the full jury lineup, as well as the jurors’ personal favorite films from growing up. The 2024 installment of Nyicff boasts Cannes-premiered animated film “Chicken for Linda!” and buzzy Neon release “Robot Dreams” among its program, as well as anime film “The Concierge” and sequel “Dounia – The Great White North.” The Oscar-qualifying festival will take place March 2 through 17. See the full lineup here.

The full jury committee includes Ilana Glazer, Uma Thurman, Sony Pictures Animation head of story Guillermo Martinez, Matthew Modine, “Doc McStuffins” creator Chris Nee, “Migration” director Benjamin Renner, filmmaker Ira Sachs, Phillipa Soo, head of artistic recruiting at Titmouse Animation Ellen Su,...

Filmax has acquired international rights to Spanish thriller “Nina,” the new feature written and directed by Andrea Jaurrieta (“Ana by Day”) that bows at this week’s Málaga Film Festival as one of its higher profile titles in main competition.

Loosely based on the play of the same name by José Ramón Fernández, which borrows elements of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” “Nina” tells the story of a woman, an actress, who returns to her home town on Spain’s rugged northern coast seeking to take revenge on a celebrated writer. As she encounters past acquaintances, including a once close childhood friend, and faces dark memories, she begins to question whether vengeance is the only way forward.

“Nina” stars Goya-winning actress Patricia López Arnaiz (“Ane is Missing”) as the titular character and San Sebastián Silver Shell winner Darío Grandinetti, famed for his performance in Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her,...

Is there a single director working today with a better track record than Martin Scorsese? Ever since breaking through with his gritty, scrappy crime drama “Mean Streets,” the Italian-American’s name has been synonymous with quality, and he’s kept that train going for several years. Some films were more acclaimed than others, but from the ’70s all the way to the 2020s, Scorsese has remained a consistent top-tier filmmaker, pumping out at least one or two stone-cold classics per decade.

What’s even more impressive is how adaptable and varied the man has proven himself to be. A refrain popular among internet contrarians is that Scorsese is just a dude who makes gangster movies, but one look at the films he’s made over the years shows that only scratches the surface of his capabilities and tastes. While his mafia films like “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman” are obvious greats,...

Not many directors would choose an apocalyptic sci-fi romance spanning several filmmaking disciplines for their feature debut, but Sam and Andy Zuchero wouldn’t have it any other way when it comes to “Love Me.” The film, which will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week, stars Oscar-nominated duo Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun as a buoy and a satellite falling in love a billion years after humans have gone extinct.

Speaking exclusively to Variety, the married filmmaking team say they first thought of the idea for “Love Me” back in 2019, and shortly after the global pandemic had them ruminating on themes of isolation and human connection.

“We thought that the idea of a buoy and a satellite, the two furthest things from each other, having a conversation was really funny,” Sam says when asked about the seeds of the project. “Then we read Ray Kurzweil...

Courtesy of Kino Lorber

by Chad Kennerk

Set in the 1920s, Has Anybody Seen My Gal? gets its name from the once-popular jazz song recorded by the California Ramblers in 1925. Loosely based upon the Eleanor Porter novel Oh Money! Money! (she was also the author behind Pollyanna), the 1952 jukebox musical comedy was given the full Technicolor treatment – a visual bee’s knees in Kino Lorber’s sterling release.

The Universal Pictures title makes good use of Twenties tunes such as ‘Tiger Rag,’ ‘When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,’ ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More,’ ‘Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?’ - and of course, ‘Has Anybody Seen My Gal?’. It was directed by studio regular Douglas Sirk, who would go on to make his name with lush, slyly ironic melodramas such as Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind (all with Rock Hudson), There's Always Tomorrow,...

February––particularly its third week––is all about romance. Accordingly the Criterion Channel got creative with their monthly programming and, in a few weeks, will debut Interdimensional Romance, a series of films wherein “passion conquers time and space, age and memory, and even death and the afterlife.” For every title you might’ve guessed there’s a wilder companion: Alan Rudolph’s Made In Heaven, Soderbergh’s remake, and Resnais’ Love Unto Death. Mostly I’m excited to revisit Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, a likely essential viewing before Megalopolis.

February also marks Black History Month, and Criterion’s series will include work by Shirley Clarke (also subject of a standalone series), Garrett Bradley, Cheryl Dunye, and Julie Dash, while movies by Sirk, Minnelli, King Vidor, and Lang play in “Gothic Noir.” Greta Gerwig gets an “Adventures in Moviegoing” and can be seen in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast,...

Todd Haynes' "May December" is a tricky, difficult drama that tells a fictionalized version of the Mary Kay LeTourneau story. Some may recall that LeTourneau, a sixth-grade teacher, was arrested in 1997 for having targeted and statutorily assaulted 12-year-old Vili Fualaau. LeTourneau had two children with Lualaau, and when she was released from prison, the two married. They remained married for 14 years. In "May December," the LeTourneau-inspired character was renamed Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianna Moore), and her much younger husband, 34 at the time of the movie, was renamed Joe Yoo (Charles Melton).

Haynes' film follows a famous actor named Elizabeth Barry (Natalie Portman), who has taken a job playing Gracie in an upcoming drama. Elizabeth spends several weeks observing Gracie, imitating her mannerisms, and interviewing the people in her life. Why, Elizabeth wonders, did Gracie commit her terrible crime? How does Joe feel about it so many years later, still married to his victimizer?...