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As a cinema enthusiast, it really pains me to criticize an indie film that I know for a fact was made with a lot of blood and sweat over so many years. But occupational hazard compels me to address the unnecessary haphazardness of director Jane Spencer’s sci-fi flick, South of Hope Street. Clearly made on a shoestring budget, the movie does come up with very interesting visuals as well as an idea—rebelling against fascist oppression—that is more relevant than ever. The movie gets the mood right as well, by being both whimsical and frantic. What it lacks, however, is a certain conviction in the basics—writing and editing. Those are the foundation of practically any movie, and the screenplay of South of Hope Street really lets itself down. What further scuppers the ship is the choppy editing. Had those been alright, the amateurish acting from most of the cast—except Tanna Frederick,...

South of Hope Street (2025), directed by Jane Spencer, is a dystopian sci-fi film that plunges audiences into a world where conformity is survival and questioning the truth is a dangerous rebellion. Set against a crumbling society teetering on the brink, the film weaves a haunting narrative steeped in symbolism and unsettling atmosphere.

Under the iron grip of an oppressive government—where reality is distorted, war serves as a smokescreen, and even the sky conceals ominous secrets—one woman, Denise, begins to see through the illusion. As she teeters between obedience and resistance, she faces an impossible choice: surrender to the lie or fight for a truth that could cost her everything. Haunting and thought-provoking, South of Hope Street lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.

This article contains spoilers.

South Of Hope Street (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

The film opens with workers leaving an office. A loudspeaker urges...

Priscila Presley can’t wait to see Pamela Anderson in ‘The Naked Gun’ reboot.The 79-year-old actress - who is the ex-wife of the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ Elvis Presley - starred opposite the late Leslie Nielsen as detective Frank Drebin’s love interest Jane Spencer in the 1989 action-comedy film and the two sequels that followed.Priscilla is excited to see Pamela, 57, enter the franchise in an as-yet unknown role, although she is expected to be the love interest of Liam Neeson, who will be playing Frank Drebin Jr., the the son of Nielsen's detective.Speaking on a panel at Fan Expo San Francisco, Priscila said: “I guess they're going to do a new one now. I hear Pamela Anderson is going to play my part, and I'm sure she'll be good. I'd like to see her and how she plays it.”Reminiscing about her late co-star Nielsen...

With the UK streaming release of South of Hope Street this week, writer/director Jane Spencer talks about exploring ‘the big questions’, working with Michael Madsen, black shoes and shunning the Hollywood system.

Your latest film, the visually arresting dystopian drama South of Hope Street, depicts an oppressed society surrounded by wars. As Writer. Director what inspired you to make it?

I have always been very much interested in ‘the Big Questions’: Why do we exist? What, exactly, Are we? Why are we here? A great way to pose these questions is to place us against the forces that do not allow free thought, and to think about these questions.

I wanted t to explore this in an allegory, a sci-film film, with all the characters representing forces in our world: forces of repression, forces of peace, mystery, poetry. Films like this are films that are inspiring to me,...

“South of Hope Street” is a new live-action science fiction ‘dystopian’ feature, written and directed by Jane Spencer, starring Judd Nelson, William Baldwin, Tana Frederick, Michael Madsen, Asser Yassin, Craig Conway, Meredith Ostrom, Wendy Thomas, Niklaus Trenk, Pascal Ulli and Elana Krausz, streaming November 15, 2024 on Paramount+:

“…in 2038, Earth enters a mysterious universe. People hide behind a gigantic wall and engage in wars.

“Meanwhile, ‘Denise’ walks on thin ice spurred on by ‘Tom’, a caretaker, who promises that a renaissance is on its way…”

Click the images to enlarge…...

Anatomy of a Fall actress Sandra Hüller could be making a roast for Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun reboot, so how hot and wet do you like it? A report from industry insider Daniel Richtman says Sandra Hüller is in talks to play the romantic lead in the forthcoming comedy, starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin from the Police Squad series and Naked Gun film trilogy.

In the Naked Gun trilogy, Lt. Frank Drebin falls in love with Jane Spencer (Lisa Marie Presley), an assistant for industrialist Vincent Ludwig, utterly unaware of his villainy. After a slapstick-ridden meet-cute, Frank and Jane form a heated courtship accompanied by steamy home-cooked meals, ultra-protected sex, and trips to the baseball field.

How Liam Neeson and Hüller’s characters cross paths in the Naked Gun reboot remains a mystery. We must also wait...

Image Source: Getty / Charley Gallay

In the past two years, Priscilla Presley's life has been back in the spotlight. Between 2022 and 2023, not one but two films were made with Elvis Presley as the subject: Baz Luhrmann's Oscar-winning "Elvis" and Sophia Coppola's "Priscilla" - the latter of which is based on Priscilla's 1985 memoir, "Elvis and Me." The film stars Jacob Elordi as the King of Rock and Roll, with Cailee Spaeny portraying Priscilla from ages 14 to 27, the ages she was romantically involved with Elvis. "Priscilla" is a personal and intimate look at Presley's early relationship with and marriage to Elvis, which has often been overshadowed by the late singer's fame. "It's very difficult to sit and watch a film about you, about your life, about your love," Priscilla said during a September press conference at the Venice Film Festival "Priscilla" premiere (via Variety). "Sofia did an amazing job.

Thanks to the brilliant team of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker, audiences have been laughing along for 43 years to one of the best comedies ever made, Airplane! And thanks to this same team, audiences got the gift of seeing actor Leslie Nielsen, best known for dramatic roles in classic films like Forbidden Planet and The Poseidon Adventure, playing comedy for the first time. And thanks to Nielsen's commitment to portraying Dr. Rumack, the discombobulated physician trying to save the passengers on a doomed airliner, as if he were the most serious character in the most serious disaster movie ever made, Nielsen's career as a comic performer was born, some 30 years after his first onscreen appearance. Airplane! was a send-up of 1957's Zero Hour, a low-budget "airliner in peril" movie, and some of the movie's dialogue was lifted directly from the film and inserted into the Airplane! script.

Georgann Johnson, best known for her roles on TV and Broadway, died on June 4. She was 91.

The actress died in Los Angeles, daughter Carol Prager announced in the obituary section of the Los Angeles Times.

Johnson was born on August 15, 1926, in Decorah, Iowa, and worked as a character actress in more than 115 films and TV series including Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Too Close For Comfort and Archie Bunker’s Place.

It was in the 1953 Broadway revival of "Room Service" that Johnson met actor and future husband, Stanley Prager. After Prager's death in 1972, she was married to Honorable Jack Tenner, a Superior Court Judge and civil rights activist, until his death in 2008.

Other notable credits included Life Sentence (1953) opposite James Dean, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) opposite Paul Newman and Midnight Cowboy (1969), which won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Johnson also appeared in Three's Company as John Ritter's mother in 1983.

On daytime soap operas,...

Jane Spencer

Just over three years ago, I interviewed Jane Spencer about her film The Ninth Cloud. That film will enjoy a special screening in London, where it's set, on the12th of February, and Jane is working on a new film, South Of Hope Street. She took time out from her busy schedule to catch up and discuss her current projects.

"It's a science fiction piece. It also has a female lead. I'd compare it to a film like Alphaville," she says of South Of Hope Street. "Michael [Madsen] has a cameo role in it as a kind of hippy character, and that's funny for him. Also we have Hilmir Snær Guðnason, who was in a film called 101 Rejkjavik a while back, and he's brilliant. And an Arab actor named Zafer El-Abedin who plays an immigrant in the film, he's wonderful also. Tanna Frederick is my lead actress. She's...

Passing through London

She’s a poet, a theatre director and a self-proclaimed former starving artist. Now the prolific Jane Spencer has brought her third film, The Ninth Cloud, to Raindance, and she’s talking about it with an enthusiasm the feels like more than the usual promotional line. With just a hint of Texan still present in her accent, she speaks with the characteristic pace and excitability of her adopted New York City, but it’s London where her film is set, and she quickly recalls her own time living there when I ask her how the complex story in this film developed.

“I got the idea from, oh gosh, when I was in London I guess I had some personal tragedies and I guess at one time I developed this thing about wearing a coat,” she begins.

The heroine of her film, Zena, wears a big black coat...

Jane Spencer is joining Fusion as the network's new editor-in-chief of digital platforms, CEO Isaac Lee announced Monday. Spencer, who was a founding editor of The Daily Beast and served there as a managing editor and executive editor until 2012, also worked extensively as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Also read: Reuters Finance Blogger Felix Salmon Departs for Fusion “Jane's distinct voice, passion, and editorial perspective will be a tremendous asset to us all as we look to inform and empower our young, diverse audience with content that is smart, inclusive, authentic, and entertaining,” said Lee. See video: Fusion's ‘No,...

In 100 years of cinema, no American woman director has ever been invited to join the pantheon of international auteur directors. Non-American women directors like Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Liliana Cavani, Claire Denis, Marleen Gorris, Agnieszka Holland, Lynne Ramsay, Agnes Varda, Lina Wertmuller among others-- directors with bodies of work that match those of their male counterparts-- hardly exist in America, with the possible exceptions of masterful experimental directors, Maya Daren and Nina Menkes.

Kathryn Bigelow, who could be a top contender for American auteur director, had to leave America, after six years of unemployment, to seek financing in Europe, and is still not included with men among auteur directors. Other successful women directors who have made both commercially and critically successful features in America are mostly film and TV stars: Drew Barrymore, Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, Barbra Streisand, Betty Thomas, to name a few. These directors have done fine work, but mostly within the confines of the studio system where, just once in a blue moon, a director like Nora Ephron, Catherina Hardwicke, Mimi Leder or Nancy Meyers can carve a niche.

The question arises, who are the American women directors whose films reveal the work of an auteur director? One could jump in with dozens of directors, from Anders, Arzner, Bigelow, Cholondenko, Coppola, Coolidge, Dash, Dunham, Hardwicke & Holofcener— just to start through the alphabet, but like Bigelow, none of these excellent directors is embraced as an auteur by the paternalist American film establishment.

In the United States less than 5% of feature films are directed by women, so for a director to emerge who is not already a women celebrity, is virtually impossible. Women directors usually make just one film before getting taken down early in the pipeline: if it’s not the misogynistic Hollywood studio system that expels them, their films are given paltry distribution and P&A budgets, or sometimes gender-biased critics comprised of over 80% males will likely taint their reviews.

One perfect example of a very fine American woman director whose body of work clearly distinguishes her as an auteur director is Jane Spencer. Jane Spencer is the director of the beloved low-budget indie feature Little Noises that premiered at Sundance some years ago to ecstatic reviews— and enamored audiences, and of Faces On Mars, which premiered in Europe at Solothurn. Her new film, The Ninth Cloud, which is being repped for distribution by Shoreline Entertainment is a dreamy, surreal marvel, which could do very well on the 2014 international festival circuit.

For Spencer, who dreams big, but must keep her budget small, ingenuity is the name of the game. As she says, “My dream as a kid was to direct big David Lean-style epics, so working within the framework I can create, I try to imbue my indie films with giant, epic themes.” Imagine if women directors like Spencer were afforded the budgets and opportunities to realize their immense talents for creating epic, visionary films.

I have always thought that film directors are like alchemists and magicians, but women directors have to be able to master another kind of magic as well: film financing in a void. Most women directors must cobble their production budgets together in any number of mysterious ways, and I wanted to know how Spencer had done it again. How did she succeed in making yet another wonderful feature film? How had she found the money?

Spencer answered the question with a question: “In an industry so difficult for women directors, how can any women director raise the money to make a film? You are basically forced to think outside the box. You just can’t give up. You try all the traditional methods: submit your script to actors, agents, studios, production companies, get it to friends in the business. They almost always lead to dead ends.

“So, finally, you go out and find it dollar-by-dollar— private equity from investors who like the project obviously, private loans you— yourself— take out. You get everything on the cheap, but keep the quality; get everyone to do you favors, but make sure they ‘get it’ and believe in the film. That’s the only way an American woman can make an indie feature film.”

Spencer shot The Ninth Cloud on super 16mm. Having a film camera instead of shooting digitally gives The Ninth Cloud a look that is simultaneously both very modern and nostalgic. As Spencer says, “It allows for the documentary, free-camera look I wanted to capture inspired by films like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Darling, and Billy Liar. These low-budget 1960’s British kitchen sink films were an inspiration for Spencer, her Production Designer/Producer Richard Hudson and her Dp, Sam Mitchell. She goes on, “I wanted the film to express an impressionistic vision of Zena’s (the main character) world.”

In the film, in which we follow the dreamy, strange Zena, through what turn out to be her final days....Spencer glorifies the vulnerable Zena through a nuanced appreciation for her ability to “see.” Keeping her indie budget low, Spencer uses inexpensive, old film technology to record her character’s fleeting, childlike, and magical perception of the world around her—and it works beautifully. The film captures the elusive, dream-like moments, as fleeting as a painter’s sudden awareness of reflected sunlight glancing off rippling water-- impressionism-- that gets at the essence of art, and is the very reason we revere our great male “Masters of Cinema.”

As Spencer puts it: “I wanted to depict, from a women’s perspective for once, the victorious dreamer. One doesn’t have to accept ‘reality’ to live a meaningful life. Whatever your journey is—stay with your dream. You cannot be dissuaded by pressure to conform to social norms, systems, or institutions that tell you ‘cannot' because it’s 'unrealistic' or 'impossible.'"

We all know that numerically, becoming a female film director in America is virtually impossible— as former DGA president, Martha Coolidge says: “like winning the lottery.” It’s a bizarre anomaly that America, the leader of the free world, virtually excludes women from its most culturally influential global export—media. Hollywood’s level of support of women film directors is among the worst in the world, something that is now accentuated by the recent drafting of international charters that promote the gender equity among women directors in many countries outside the United States.

However, making feature films that move and inspire audiences is Spencer’s quest and she has not been dissuaded by statistics. She says: “This was a very, very difficult film to finance. We had some wonderful equity investors, our own company invested a lot of the money-- especially for post, and there turned out to be not many pre-sales. It was very much patchwork financing, very hard, and we filmed it over the space of a year, in sections, because budget-wise, we had to.”

Even after her critical success at Sundance her studio meetings were difficult. After years of struggling to get financed out of L.A., Spencer happened to move to Europe for personal reasons, and immediately had much better luck.

"We got it done-- though at times we didn’t think we would. We started financing in 2008 when the financial crisis happened, so some of our financiers fell out. Our wonderful male lead at the time, Guillaume Depardieu, whom I adored, died of pneumonia on a set in Romania. I really wondered if this film would happen - for a moment. But then the producers and I got right back up on our feet and started financing it again. We found the amazing lead actress Megan Maczko in a play on London’s West End....Michael Madsen, who is great in the film—so sympathetic -- playing a dishwasher/poet (instead of a guy with a gun) - was lovely and stayed with the project....and we got the great French actor Jean Hugues Anglade onboard - We got right back up on our feet and started financing it again. By 2011 we had finished shooting. We’ve been in post for two years: all of 2012 and much of 2013.”

All the hard work has been well worth the effort. Spencer’s multi-layered film is woven with themes of Djuna Barnes and Baudelaire and traverses the landscapes of Marcel Carne and Antonioni. What makes the film so exceptional is how freshly these motifs have been re-imagined through this director’s effortless lens. The Ninth Cloud is at once tender and deeply moving, yet it manages to reject sentimentalities while glorifying its heroine and uplifting the audience.

Will women directors like Spencer ever join the pantheon of international male auteur directors? That depends upon the whether or not the U.S. cultural consciousness evolves to finally embrace gender equity in our nation’s most influential global export—media. Only then will women directors get the budgets and opportunities to test their metal and take their rightful places in the annals of American cinema.

The Ninth Cloud will be opening in select theaters internationally starting 2014.

Please visit The Int’l List of Living Women Directors: http://www.womendirectorsinhollywood.com/

Marie Giese is American feature film director, a writer, a member & elected Director Category Representative for women at the DGA. She graduated from Wellesley College and UCLA graduate film schooland co-founded the foremost international web forum for political action for women directors (Visit Here). An activist for parity for women directors in Hollywood, she is in development to direct two feature films Rain and Treasure Hunt...

Syfy has released the first clip from Arthur Sinclair's horror project Robocroc, which premieres September 14 at 9/8c on Syfy. Check it out!

When a top-secret unmanned spacecraft disintegrates on re-entry, its mysterious military payload crash-lands in the crocodile habitat of a place called Adventure Land, a combination water park, amusement land and world-famous crocodile exhibit. Following its pre-programmed instructions, the payload - a next-generation nanotech-based combat drone - finds a host in the form of the park's prize twenty-foot Australian Saltwater crocodile, Stella. She is the largest saltwater croc in captivity. Immediately upon infecting its host, the drone payload's nanobots begin to transform Stella from an organic, living creature into a lethal killing machine with only a single directive: survival! Before Chief Zoo-keeper Tim Duffy and reptile biologist Jane Spencer are able to figure out what's going on, they find the park taken over by the government team responsible for the secret project.

For the majority of this trailer you’ll probably find yourself thinking this film looks like a Syfy knock-off of Piranha 3Dd but with a crocodile terrorizing a water park instead. Except this is no ordinary crocodile - it’s RoboCroc!

When a top-secret unmanned spacecraft disintegrates on re-entry, its mysterious military payload crash-lands in the crocodile habitat of a place called Adventure Land, a combination water park, amusement land and world-famous crocodile exhibit. Following its pre-programmed instructions, the payload – a next-generation nanotech-based combat drone – finds a host in the form of the park’s prize twenty-foot Australian Saltwater crocodile, Stella. She is the largest saltwater croc in captivity. Immediately upon infecting its host, the drone payload’s nanobots begin to transform Stella from an organic, living creature into a lethal killing machine with only a single directive: survival! Before Chief Zoo-keeper Tim Duffy and reptile biologist Jane Spencer are...

A movie about a crocodile transformed into a metallic, man-eating war machine is in the works. Of course it’s a new Syfy movie! Who else these days would make a movie about a mutant half-robot/half-reptile? The future of nature gone amok is on its way, and its name is RoboCroc!

UFO International Productions is the company behind RoboCroc. If you follow Syfy Original Movies. you’ve probably already seen a couple of their more recent titles: Triassic Attack, True Bloodthirst, Black Forest, and The Boogeyman. RoboCroc is currently in pre-production; there are no stars or director attached at this time. There is, however, a synopsis – a synopsis that pretty much spoils the entire movie before it’s even been made.

For those of you who don’t actually want to wait a year or two for RoboCroc to become a reality, you can always just read the three-paragraph...

Many times, producers have attempted to turn a successful television series into a big blockbuster movie. Sometimes the resulting movie requires too much knowledge of the original series and non-fans are lost (The X-Files: Fight the Future). Sometimes, the film bears little or no relation to the original series and is not strong enough to stand on its own (Starsky and Hutch). Sometimes the connection goes the other way around, and a poor to middling film becomes a hit television series (Stargate, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But every now and again, a film inspired by a television series stands on its own as a huge success, enriching the television series for its fans and providing a solid couple of hours’ entertainment for non-fans. These are just six of the best.

Dad’s Army (dir. Norman Cohen, 1971)

Dad’s Army was a phenomenally successful British sit-com of the 1970s. Based on...