News

Billy Bob Thornton might be starring in the latest in a long line of successful shows in the Taylor Sheridan-verse with "Landman," but like every actor, his filmography has its share of duds. The star, who propelled himself to stardom by writing, directing, and starring in the 1996 drama "Sling Blade," wasn't always able to match the quality of that breakthrough performance, as evidenced by his Rotten Tomatoes page.

The site that claims there are only two perfect Alfred Hitchcock movies might not be the most reliable source, but it gives us an overall sense of how Thornton's films have been received, and there are plenty of missteps here, from the Western flop "South of Heaven, West of Hell" and its 14% critic score to the comedy-drama "Waking Up in Reno," which earned just 8% and which Todd McCarthy of Variety called "a hillbilly romantic comedy in which the hillbillies show up...

Joachim Lang’s bleak film shows a preening Goebbels and a careworn Hitler as they battle to convince the German public, and themselves, they will win the war

In an appropriate spirit of cynicism and bleakness, German director Joachim Lang has made a film about the private life of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the Hexenmeister or chief sorcerer of lies, and his always strained relationship with Hitler. Robert Stadlober plays the preening and self-pitying Goebbels and Fritz Karl is a careworn Hitler. Franziska Weisz plays Goebbels’s wife Magda, who at first resented his infidelities with showbusiness starlets but for the sake of the Fatherland submitted to the public image of a good Nazi wife and mother of six adorable children – whom Joseph and Magda finally murdered in the bunker before killing themselves.

In its subversive, austerely satirical way, the film feels almost like a B-side to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s...

Homing in on one of the key Spanish titles which could move the box office needle, Film Factory Ent. has jumped on worldwide sales rights to multifaceted romantic tragicomedy “Always Winter” (“Siempre es invierno”) the latest movie from David Trueba, a consummate film director and journalist and celebrated novelist hailed by France’s Le Figaro as the “wonder boy of the Iberian cultural scene.”

Film Factory has also shared in exclusivity with Variety a first-look still from the film.

First presented at September’s San Sebastian, “Always Winter” reunites Film Factory with Trueba, actor David Verdaguer and Ikiru Films, Atresmedia Cine and La Terraza Films, sales agent, co-writer and director, star and producers of 2023’s “Jokes & Cigarettes,” which broke out to an appreciable €891,991 at Spanish theaters. Verdaguer, the lead in “Always Winter,” went on to win the 2024 Spanish Academy best actor Goya for his performance in “Jokes & Cigarettes.

Robert Harris’ novel “Conclave,” a political papal thriller set in the Vatican as cardinals jostle and conspire to elect a new Pope, was released in September 2016, coincidentally just weeks after House Productions, which would produce the film adaptation, had been officially launched by Tessa Ross and Juliette Howell.

Some eight years later, and “Conclave” — directed by Edward Berger and with Ralph Fiennes in the lead role — is now one of the titles to beat in awards season, going into the Oscars with eight nominations (including best film) and the BAFTAs with leading haul of 12, and with a box office already approaching $90 million.

For House, which worked on several noted film and TV projects in the meantime, producing the Zac Efron-fronted wrestling drama “The Iron Claw,” exec producing last year’s Oscar winner “The Zone of Interest” (considered by many to be one of the top films of 2023) and being...

Shot largely from the point of view of its two main characters, RaMell Ross’s masterly film takes you to the wrenching heart of this American south tale of brutal 60s racism

An unwritten rule of cinema is that great books very rarely make great movies. It’s not inevitable that a film adaptation of a literary classic will turn out to be a stinker, but plenty do: take Roland Joffe’s disposable and tawdry version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Brian De Palma’s notorious butchering of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and my personal nadir, Peter Jackson’s mangling of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. There are ways of side-stepping the curse of the literary adaptation, of course, a recent example being Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a picture that kept the title and the location of Martin Amis’s novel...

“It’s so nice to talk to The Hollywood Reporter,” Olivia Williams says, as we start our interview, “because I really had that Hollywood experience. I went from living in a damp basement flat in Camden Town to, in a matter of days, flying in a private jet to go on set of a huge Hollywood movie.”

Over the course of a single year, from 1997 to 1998, Williams (before then a jobbing British theater actress, doing commercials for Dove shower cream — “they asked me to audition in a bikini…I felt like giving up”) starred in three studio films: Kevin Costner’s The Postman, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The Postman was a legendary flop. Rushmore an indie breakout. The Sixth Sense a gargantuan, global hit. Williams, it appeared, had arrived.

“I went from galloping horses with Kevin Costner — doing my own stunts, thank...

Your browser does not support the video tag.

The Zone of Interest ending offers a haunting conclusion to the chilling and contemplative Jonathan Glazer film. Glazer is known for his other highly original concept films such as 2013's Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson and for directing several Radiohead music videos including "Karma Police". Glazer earned his first two Oscar nominations at the 2024 Academy Awards for The Zone of Interest, one for Best Director and the other for Best Adapted Screenplay, although his film is quite different from the 2014 novel of the same name written by Martin Amis.

The Zone of Interest begins and ends with a black screen accompanied by atmospheric orchestral music that resembles the unsettling sounds of machinery and suffering. The film is thoughtfully abstract and artistically innovative given its dire subject matter. The Zone of Interest presents a series of evoking scenarios with direct contradictions between...

Have you ever wondered how far fans might go in their adoration for a celebrity? Enter Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and Kristen Stewart, who were shot to fame in 2008 with the release of Twilight.

Among the many outlandish fan stories from this era, Pattinson’s might just take the cake. Imagine being a heartthrob and dealing with fans who went to the extreme to show their devotion by urinating on The Batman star himself! Yes, you read that right. When Twilight mania struck, it was a bizarre yet entertaining moment, proving fans would walk through fire and brimstone for their idols.

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight | Credit: Summit Entertainment

Pattinson’s run-ins with fans certainly show that when it comes to Twilight fandom, things can get hilariously out of hand. But sometimes, they take it a bit too literally!

Robert Pattinson’s Most Bizarre Encounters With a Twilight...

Though the Holocaust had no one architect, Rudolf Höss remains singularly responsible for the speed and efficiency of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, later emulated at the other Nazi death camps, thanks to his approval of the use of the deadly Zyklon B gas. And for his efforts at the first Auschwitz camp in Oświęcim, Poland, he was rewarded by being made commandant of death camp administration throughout the Nazi-occupied lands. This is the monster on full display in Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest.

While the novel’s protagonist is named Paul Doll, Glazer chose to name Christian Friedel’s character Rudolf Höss. This immediately points to Glazer’s interest in bringing in the weight of a well-recorded historical character living in a specific place and time: the Höss household next to Auschwitz I in Oświęcim from 1943 to 1944. Much of the film follows...

The author of the definitive account of the Third Reich on revisiting nazism one last time, the ongoing need to discredit Holocaust denial and fact-checking Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest

Richard J Evans was regius professor of history at Cambridge University from 2008 to retirement in 2014. In the millennium year, he served as the expert witness for Penguin Books in the libel case brought unsuccessfully by Holocaust-denier David Irving. Evans’s three-volume history of the Third Reich, completed in 2008, is the definitive account. A new book, Hitler’s People, re-examines that history through the life stories of prominent Nazis and supporters of the regime.

After completing your trilogy on the Third Reich, why did you want to return to this material now?

There were several reasons. One was that the biographical approach to German history became very unfashionable – because historians were wary of the Nazi cult of personality.

For the last 10 years, A24 has been home to movies that wouldn’t have been made anywhere else, as low and mid-budget films are almost obsolete in the mainstream Hollywood landscape. But following their commitment to funding risky visions of outsider filmmakers, the Indie outfit has built a pretty strong brand identity and is now set to join forces with one of the best in the game.

Steven Spielberg, who previously spoke highly of A24’s Oscar-nominated The Zone of Interest, is now teaming up with the indie distributor for an adaptation of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

Steven Spielberg and A24 Join Forces for The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store Adaptation Steven Spielberg | Source: Wikimedia Commons

Since its publication, James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store has garnered all kinds of praise, with Barack Obama even naming it among his favorite books of 2023. The story, which follows the lives...

Director Jonathan Glazer has always traversed genres. He started his sparse career with the anti-heist Sexy Beast, then moved onto the mystery drama Birth and sci-fi/horror film Under the Skin, before finally arriving at this year's The Zone of Interest, his most undefinable film to date. Only his fourth film in a two-decade career, The Zone of Interest is a loose adaptation of Martin Amis's novel about the camp commandant of Auschwitz and his wife. With audiences' usual impression of Holocaust films being dramas like Schindler's List and The Pianist, a Holocaust film coming from the director of the last decade's strangest horror film initially sounded like a puzzling, left-field turn, until Glazer finally unveiled his decade-in-the-making project at Cannes this year when it all made sense. The Zone of Interest, which opens in limited theatrical release this coming Friday, is nothing like the prestige, awards-vying Holocaust dramas...

Exclusive: Coming off his breakout role in Zone of Interest, Christian Friedel has signed with UTA for representation.

Friedel stars as the lead in Jonathan Glazer’s critically acclaimed feature The Zone of Interest, based on the book of the same name by Martin Amis. The film made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 to remarkable reviews, where it was awarded the coveted Grand Prix and has since received a number of accolades including two Oscars for best sound and best international feature film.

Friedel was recently cast in a significant role in season 3 of the Emmy-winning global phenomenon anthology series The White Lotus. He is set to star alongside Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, Aimee Lou Wood, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey and Leslie Bibb, among others. Production is currently underway in Thailand.

Friedel’s first theater engagements took him to the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich, the Munich Kammerspiele,...

Twenty-six years ago, I had the great fortune to stand on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium and accept the Oscar for best feature documentary during the 70th Academy Awards. It was for the The Long Way Home, a very personal story as it recounted what many of my relatives and hundreds of thousands of Jews endured after the Holocaust, forced to live in Displaced Persons camps while the British government kept them from emigrating to what was soon to become the state of Israel. Others who were trying to make their way to the United States and other places were stymied by strict immigration laws that kept them in the Dp camps, many located in the same Nazi death camps where they had supposedly been “liberated” at World War II’s end. They were the fortunate ones. More than 50 members of my family, including my grandparents and my youngest uncle,...

Oppenheimer took home the most golden statues — including director Christopher Nolan’s very first Academy Award — at the 2024 Oscars, which was hosted once again by Jimmy Kimmel.

Christopher Nolan’s J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic led the pack with 13 nominations and ultimately won best picture, best director, best actor (Cillian Murphy), best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.), best cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema) and best original score (Ludwig Göransson). It was followed by Poor Things, which won four awards (including best actress for Emma Stone) and was nominated for 11. Killers of the Flower Moon earned 10 noms but left the show empty-handed, while Barbie was nominated for eight Oscars and won best original song for “I’m Just Ken.”

The 96th Oscars were held on Sunday, March 10 at Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood. Those who missed the live telecast can stream the ceremony on demand on Hulu.

Many of the Oscar-nominated movies are...

The UK-Polish historical drama about Auschwitz concentration camp, ‘The Zone of Interest’, won the Oscar for the Best International Feature Film. Actor Dwayne Johnson and rapper Bad Bunny announced the winning film, which is based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis.

The film was nominated alongside “Io Capitano” (Italy) , “Perfect Days” (Japan), “Society of the Snow” (Spain) and “The Teachers’ Lounge” (Germany).

While accepting the honour, the film’s director Jonathan Glazer thanked everyone and said: “Our film shows what dehumanisation leads.”

Starring German actors Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller as the Nazi commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig, it focuses on the pair as they strive to build a dream life for their family in a home next to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.

Last month, ‘The Zone of Interest’ won a BAFTA for the best film not in the English language.

The Zone of Interest, the German-language Holocaust drama directed by Jonathan Glazer and starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, has won the United Kingdom its first-ever Academy Award for best international feature at the Oscars 2024.

In his speech for his Cannes Grand Prix-winner, Glazer linked the film’s subject to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, where the October 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel have led the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government to launch a ground invasion into Gaza that has now left over 30,0000 Palestinians dead.

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” Glazer told the audience, who had honored him with a standing ovation upon his win. “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst.”

Glazer went on to explain how the film, which focuses on the quotidian life of the family of the Nazi commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp against the literal...

The Zone of Interest marks a historic win for the UK at the Oscars, becoming the first winner in the Best International Feature Film category. Despite being told in multiple languages, the film was selected as the UK's submission due to director Jonathan Glazer's British roots. The film tells a haunting story centered around Auschwitz, shedding light on a family's proximity to horrific crimes during World War II.

By taking home the Oscar for Best International Film, The Zone of Interest has broken a longstanding record. Since the Oscars category for Best International Feature was first introduced in 1947, a submission from the United Kingdom has never taken home the converted award. With The Zone of Interest's big win at the 96th Academy Awards, it has become the first winner of the Best International Feature Film category for the UK.

Despite the film being told entirely in German, Polish,...

Long-working British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer celebrated his first Academy Award win at the 96th Oscars, taking home the Best International Feature Film prize for “The Zone of Interest.”

The Holocaust drama, starring Christian Friedel and “Anatomy of a Fall” Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller as the German Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his sociopathic wife Hedwig, has been steadily wending its way through the awards season since earning the Grand Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Glazer loosely adapts a Martin Amis novel for this searing story about the Höss’ indifference to the Auschwitz horrors happening on the other side of their bucolic garden; the family lives with their three children in an emotionless bubble while Jews are exterminated en masse.

“Zone of Interest” never shows those horrors on screen, instead relying on Johnnie Burn’s Oscar-nominated sound design to convey the horrifying reality as screams and shots and roiling furnaces...

Accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, its director called for an end to the conflict in the Middle East

Oscars 2024 live updatesOscars 2024: the full list of winners

Jonathan Glazer, the director of Auschwitz-set film The Zone of Interest, won cheers and applause at the Academy Awards for a speech in which he decried the current conflict in the Middle East.

Glazer took to the stage to accept the Oscar for best international film – the first time Britain has won the prize – for his German-language, Polish-shot adaptation of the Martin Amis novel.

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2024 Oscars Predictions:

Best Adapted Screenplay Oppenheimer, from left: Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, 2023. © Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Weekly Commentary: Cord Jefferson stands on the brink of potentially making history in the adapted screenplay category with “American Fiction,” potentially becoming only the second...

With the final voting complete, the 96th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 10 and air live on ABC at 8:00 p.m. Et/ 5:00 p.m. Pt. We update predictions through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2024 Oscar picks.

The State of the Race

Summer blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” are back to vying against each other in this category now that the Academy has switched two-time screenwriter Oscar nominees Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s outrageous based-on-an-unwritten-character scenario from Original back to Adapted.

Also nominated twice for screenwriting, Christopher Nolan painstakingly created a twisty ticking-bomb timeline for “Oppenheimer,” which is adapted from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s lauded tome “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Every word counts as a gamut of real-life characters move in and out of the frame, always centered on the point-of-view of scientist Oppenheimer and...

Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-nominated "The Zone of Interest" is terrifying, and yet, nothing explicitly horrific appears on screen. Using the power of suggestion and ominous sound design, Glazer's film brings us the horrors of the Holocaust without ever actually depicting them. Inspired by a true story, and the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, "The Zone of Interest" follows Rudolf Höss, a Nazi commandant who lives with his family in a beautiful country house.

As it so happens, the idyllic-looking home is right at the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the atrocities going on beyond those gates are constantly suggested through billowing smoke and off-camera screams and gunfire. It's a chilling, effective film that underscores the banality of evil. Höss and his family are fully aware of the horrors of the concentration camp they're living right up against, and they simply don't care — they go...

Interviews with ‘brutally honest’ voters reveal strong support for Holocaust drama, setting stage for a potential Oscars upset against bookies’ favourite Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest, the Holocaust drama directed by Jonathan Glazer and adapted from the novel by Martin Amis, could pull off a shock upset in the best picture Oscar race and beat Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, as a series of interviews with anonymous Oscar voters appears to indicate a surge of support for the film.

After the voting window for the Academy Awards closed on Tuesday, the intervening period before the results are announced on Sunday week is filled with fevered speculation. Much of the fuel is provided by anonymised interviews with Oscar voters, known as the Brutally Honest Oscar Ballots, in which real-life Academy members talk through how they arrived at their particular choices, and in doing so shed much light on how individual films and...

Los Angeles, Feb 19 (Ians) Indian actress Deepika Padukone presented the honour of Best Film not in English language to Jonathan Glazer for ‘The Zone of Interest’ at the BAFTA Awards.

The actress looked every inch gorgeous as she took the spotlight dressed in a silver shimmery sequined saree with a matching blouse by ace couturier Sabyasachi at the event.

‘The Zone of Interest’ was contending alongside films such as “20 Days in Mariupol”, “Anatomy of a Fall”, “Past Lives” and “Society of the Snow”.

This is not the first time Deepika has taken the center stage for an international award event.

Just last year, she was seen at the Oscars, when she introduced the song ‘Nattu Nattu’ from the movie ‘Rrr’.

Talking about ‘The Zone of Interest’, it is a UK-Polish historical drama about Auschwitz concentration camp.

The film is based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis.

–Ians

dc/khz...

London, Feb 18 (Ians) The UK-Polish historical drama about Auschwitz concentration camp, ‘The Zone of Interest’, based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, has won the BAFTA for the best film not in the English language, reports BBC.

Directed by Jonathan Glazer, the film, which has also been nominated for Oscars, focuses on the family of the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five children living a regular life next door to the chamber of horrors.

Hoss ran Auschwitz between 1940 and 1943, and used poisonous insecticide Zyklon B to gas prisoners. An estimated 1.1 million were murdered at Auschwitz, one million of whom were Jews. Yet, just metres away, his family enjoyed their spacious house, plentiful food and manicured garden — separated from the camp by a concrete wall, notes BBC.

Glazer, who made the film near the site in Auschwitz, chose to hint at the terrible events inside the camp.

Sandra Hüller is having a great award season this year with two of her films receiving a total of ten nominations, including a Best Actress nomination for her. While Hüller earned her nomination for Anatomy of a Fall, she also played the lead in the historical drama, The Zone of Interest, which is also up for nominations. She revealed that she almost missed the news of her nomination due to a situation with the garbage disposal at her home.

Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall

Hüller played a writer, Sandra Voyter, trying to prove her innocence in her husband’s death in Justine Triet’s French legal drama, Anatomy of a Fall. She played Hedwig Höss, wife of the German Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss, in Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest.

Sandra Hüller Almost Missed Her Nomination News Due To A Garbage Disposal Situation

Sandra Hüller in Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Jonathan Glazer is set to introduce his widely acclaimed, Oscar-nominated and deeply devastating Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum on Thursday (Feb. 15).

In undoubtedly the most important premiere in “The Zone of Interest’s” global rollout, the Polish premiere sees the British director return to Auschwitz, where he shot elements of the movie and where the real-life story is set. Following the screening, Glazer will take part in a discussion with museum director Piotr Cywiński, producer Jim Wilson, producer Ewa Puszczyńska and production designer Chris Oddy.

The film — which bowed in Cannes and won the Grand Prix — centers on the family life of Rudolf Höss, the architect and commandant of Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million people were murdered by the Nazis during WWII, juxtaposing the blissful domestic existence he enjoys alongside his wife against the backdrop of one of history’s darkest chapters. Christian Friedel...

The Zone of Interest.Watching The Zone of Interest (2023) is an act of endurance. The latest film by British director Jonathan Glazer depicts the lives of the commanding officer at Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children, with most of the action set within and around their idyllic home. Viewers must face the intolerable sight of the house existing right alongside the concentration camp, with the camp’s roofs hovering above the adjoining perimeter fence. On the camera’s side of this divide, the children swim and Hedwig attends to her garden. Unlike most films about the Holocaust, representations of the Nazi regime’s victims are only occasionally in the foreground, yet—through distant screams, the flicker of flames, alarm sounds, and splatters of blood—the atrocity is present. Meanwhile, the film’s focus is on those who enact this atrocity: how they eat together,...

It’s an old canard in the movie business: Never underestimate a Holocaust movie when it comes to Oscar attention. From Hungary’s Best Foreign Language winner “Son of Saul” (2016) and Oscar-winners “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), “Cabaret” (1973), “Sophie’s Choice” (1983), and “The Pianist” (2004) to Steven Spielberg’s Best Picture winner “Schindler’s List” (1994), many Holocaust subjects, especially shorts and documentary features, have won Oscars. Documentaries like “Anne Frank Remembered” won for 1995, “The Long Way Home” for 1997, “The Last Days” for 1998, and “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport” for 2000, and more recently, the nonfiction short “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life” won for 2014 — just one week after its subject, Alice Herz-Sommer, the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, passed away.

This season’s most decorated Holocaust film, “The Zone of Interest” (Metascore: 91) has multiple Oscar advantages. First, the film, which British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer adapted from the Martin Amis novel of the same name,...

Only the constant pall of smoke, and a dread-inducing soundscape, tell of the horrors beyond the wall as the idyllic life of the commandant of the death camp and his family rolls by in Glazer’s Oscar-nominated film

Before you read on, a word of caution. There are some films – many of them – that impress on a first viewing but which start to trickle away, like a handful of sand, the moment you leave the cinema. Then there are others, far fewer in number, that strike like a lightning bolt on a first watch and stay with you, scarring themselves into your psyche and subtly but permanently shifting your movie-viewing paradigm on its axis. Jonathan Glazer’s masterful and chilling The Zone of Interest fell into the second group for me. I left it shaken and stricken; it stayed with me, stubbornly, over the months that followed.

As most film fans will agree,...

The German actors play Hedwig and Rudolf Höss in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant new film about the Auschwitz commandant and his wife. They discuss the challenging shoot, ancestral guilt – and what persuaded them to take on the roles in the first place

Can you put a face to the banality of evil? How about two? On a bright London morning, Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel are back from having their picture taken. The German actors are here to discuss The Zone of Interest, the film they have made with the director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), loosely inspired by Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name. But for a moment, we talk instead about Friedel’s liking for porridge; how Hüller, by contrast, doesn’t eat this early. And they smile and pause, aware of what comes next.

In The Zone of Interest, Hüller and Friedel play a couple...

Jonathan Glazer's film, The Zone of Interest, takes a different perspective on the Holocaust by focusing on the everyday life of a camp commandant and his family rather than showing the horrific events at Auschwitz. The movie explores the theme of the banality of evil and how ordinary people can contribute to systems of evil without directly portraying the atrocities committed. While the film differs significantly from Martin Amis's book of the same name, it still delves into the futility of love and the capacity of individuals to uphold evil, making it a haunting and thought-provoking piece.

Jonathan Glazer, director of cult favorites such as Sexy Beast and Under the Skin, is finally back after almost a decade away. His newest film, The Zone of Interest, tells the story of a camp commandant at Auschwitz, the deadliest and most notorious of the concentration camps during the Holocaust. However,...

This afternoon the full list of nominations for the 2024 BAFTA Film Awards were announced in London, with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things leading the nominees.

Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest received nine nominations, the same as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Other notable films we’ll be looking out for on the night include Andrew Haigh’s brilliant and touching film All of Us Strangers, and the enthralling Anatomy of a Fall.

British films are well represented with Rye Lane, Scrapper and How to Have Sex among the nominees.

The 77th annual British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards will be held on Sunday, the 18th of February. We’ll see you there.

Full List of 2024 BAFTA Nominations

Best Film

Anatomy Of A Fall Marie-Ange Luciani, David Thion

The Holdovers Mark Johnson

Killers Of The Flower Moon Dan Friedkin,...

A prequel television series to classic crime drama Sexy Beast will stream on Paramount+. Here’s the trailer…

Writer and director Jonathan Glazer is currently enjoying a plaudits for his Holocaust drama The Zone Of Interest. Based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, it follows Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hess and his wife as they try to build a life living next door to the concentration camp.

Chosen as the British entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, the film is due to be released in UK cinemas on the 2nd February.

Astonishingly, Glazer has only made four feature films in his career thus far – Sexy Beast in 2000, Birth in 2004, Under The Skin in 2013 and Zone Of Interest. Sexy Beast continues to have notable impact too, staying in the cultural conversation long after it was released. The film followed Ray Winstone as Gary ‘Gal’ Dove, a criminal...

How, given the weight of history, and the history of all the other films on the subject, can you make a new film about the Holocaust?

That was the central challenge facing British writer-director Jonathan Glazer and the creative team behind A24’s The Zone of Interest.

“When Jon and I started, back in 2014, to talk about this, about making a film on this subject, we of course knew Schindler’s List and Son of Saul and everything in between,” says Zone producer James Wilson. “And our conversations were all about, ‘What new is there to say about the Holocaust?’ Except that it was evil, which everyone knows and which felt like a straw target.”

Glazer had been “circling around” the idea of doing a Holocaust film for years. “But because the subject is so vast and because of the sensitivities involved, I felt I first needed to educate myself in a deeper way,...

Exclusive: Ahead of this weekend’s Golden Globes, where it’s set to contend for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Picture – Non-English Language, and Best Original Score, Jonathan Glazer’s acclaimed Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest has been set for a special screening at the United Nations in New York on January 5, marking a first for studio A24.

The screening, organized by A24 with support of the UK and Polish Missions, will host Un Ambassadors, journalists, student groups, and more. The hope, particularly in light of current events, is to bring even more attention to the film considered the most searingly resonant examination of The Holocaust in recent memory, and one of the most significant works of this century.

The Zone of Interest is loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, though not a direct adaptation of the source material. Examining the human capacity for committing atrocities, the...

“Poor Things,” “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “American Fiction,” “All of Us Strangers,” and “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” all received Best Adapted Screenplay bids from the Critics Choice Awards thus giving their Oscar hopes in this category a timely boost. Some of them were lauded even further at the Golden Globes, which nominated “Poor Things,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” alongside “Barbie,” “Past Lives,” and “Anatomy of Fall” in a combined Best Screenplay category.

So, those are the preferences of those two awards groups. But what about the tastes of the academy? Well, below is a chart detailing the last 10 Oscar winners for Best Adapted Screenplay. We’re going to break this down to see what the academy likes and try to apply the findings to this year’s race.

As you can see, novels are the academy’s favorite source material, accounting for...

With the 2024 Oscars shortlists for 10 categories arriving in late December, one key element to look out for is the international contenders with the legs to make it into categories past Best International Feature Film. This time last year, Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” established itself as a possible Best Picture nominee with multiple craft mentions, and by the March ceremony, the Edward Berger film collected the majority of Academy Awards given to below-the-line artisans.

This year, lightning may strike twice, as established Hollywood filmmaker J.A. Bayona’s “Society of the Snow” (Netflix), Spain’s official submission for Best International Feature Film, landed on four shortlists. A last-minute premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the moving retelling of the harrowing story of how the Uruguayan rugby team survived a plane crash in the Andes in 1972 has been building momentum as a must-watch among voters this holiday season.

Still...

How do you embody pure evil? While the discussion swirls regarding precisely how much Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is meant to humanize the Nazis, by the film’s final moments, there’s no mistaking the director’s point in showing the physical distress on one’s body enacting daily atrocities. Christian Friedel, who plays commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp Rudolph Höss, was up for the difficult task of portraying this seething wickedness while attempting to keep control of his relationship with his wife (Sandra Hüller) and family connection intact.

With the Cannes winner expanding in theaters, I spoke with Friedel about why Glazer didn’t want him to read the Martin Amis novel in preparation, looking to The Act of Killing as inspiration, the physicality of his performance, and what he’s gleaned from multiple viewings of the film.

The Film Stage: I know you worked...

In the comments section of last year’s Best Movie Posters of the Year I got a nice shoutout from an unexpected and most welcome source: the Alhambra Cinema in Keswick, in England’s Lake District. Built in 1913, the Alhambra is apparently the sixth oldest continuously-running cinema in the UK. I’ve been writing introductions to these annual Movie Poster of the Year roundups for fifteen years and so I am quite happy to cede the floor this year to the good folks at the Alhambra, because who better to talk about movie poster design than the people who run one of the cinemas that rely on it?Excellent choices and all great posters. For our cinema in the Lake District, the five quads we have outside make a big difference. When a poster is truly impactful, it definitely draws people in (I would only have added “The Duke” and...

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller bravely take on the terrible challenge of being German actors playing Nazis in Jonathan Glazer’s unsparing Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest.” It’s a task each turned over quite a lot in their minds before agreeing to play Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his sociopathic wife Hedwig, who lived with their children in a hardly oblivious bucolic bubble next to the Auschwitz concentration camp at the start of World War II.

“We talked about, in a very intense way, the subject matter, about the fact that, to play these two characters documentary-style, is this right? Is this good? How can you do that?,” Friedel told IndieWire in a Zoom interview from the New York offices of A24, which releases the film this week in select theaters.

Friedel, who is warm and chipper in conversation but totally devoid of emotion onscreen as Höss, is...

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.

When it comes to entertainment, the holiday season means an endless procession of specials and familiar movies. But for all the holiday favorites, there’s no shortage of new streaming releases to catch this December. Theaters, meantime, are also filled with prestigious movies. Here are some of this month’s most promising offerings, from Eileen, starring Anne Hathaway, to Wonka, starring Timothée Chalamet. (Plus: Check out our favorite...

The Zone of Interest may depict Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) with creeping inference, but director Jonathan Glazer is straighter about his subject than Martin Amis, who wrote the novel upon which this film is based. Whereas Amis fictionalised Höss as ‘Paul Doll’ and placed him in a love triangle that never happened, Glazer depicts the commandant and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) closer to how they really were — banal functionaries.

Rudolf and Hedwig live with their five children in a house on the edge of Auschwitz concentration camp. Frau Höss takes great pride in her home and especially her garden, cultivating vegetables and flowers in pots, beds and trellises. Hedwig seems unbothered by the walls and barracks that tower over her petty domain and she shows little concern for the hum of distress that emanates from the camp, even the screams and gunshots. Rudolf is unmoved, too, coasting...

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest is arriving in cinemas imminently. You can see the final trailer for the film here.

While we expected nothing less, we’ve been hearing some interesting things about Jonathan Glazer’s soon-to-release holocaust drama, The Zone Of Interest.

Glazer’s last film, Under The Skin, was released almost a decade ago. Despite featuring a bona fide movie star in the form of Scarlett Johansson, the film was unconventional in almost every way. It famously was both booed and cheered at its Cannes debut, and we imagine that as something of a provocateur, Mr Glazer was probably delighted by that response.

Under The Skin was even made unconventionally, using hidden cameras and using people off the street who at some points didn’t even know they were ‘acting’ in a major A24 production. From what we’re hearing,The Zone Of Interest seems to...

Jonathan Majors Career Timeline In A Glimpse(Photo Credit –IMDb)

Jonathan Majors has gained much recognition for his role as Kang the Conqueror in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He started his career on the small screen and is now associated with one of the highest-grossing studios. However, his professional life has taken a hit with the assault charges against him, and the trial is underway; let us look at his career timeline from When We Rise to Creed III and Loki 2.

The actor was born in California and studied at Duncanville High School. He was so inspired by Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, especially by Heath Ledger’s Joker, that he joined the theatres. He then went to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts to get his bachelor’s degree and earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama in 2016.

Jonathan...

Ten years after Jonathan Glazer debuted Under the Skin, he’s now reteamed with A24 for the chilling Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. Based on Martin Amis’s Auschwitz-set novel, the film features Toni Erdmann star Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel as we witness their daily activities outside the concentration camp. Shot by Łukasz Żal with Mica Levi reuniting to score, A24 has now unveiled the second trailer and new poster ahead of a December 15 release.

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Ten years after Under the Skin, the brilliant, elusive Johnathan Glazer returns with one of the most haunting films of this or any year. It’s adapted from Martin Amis’ acidic 2014 novel, though to call this an adaptation would be like saying a thunderstorm adapts the wind. Just as he did with Under the Skin, Glazer takes but a sliver of the source text and lets...

“We’re making Big Brother in the Nazi House,” Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal said director Jonathan Glazer told him when they started plotting their haunting and experimental Holocaust drama The Zone Of Interest.

The pic, written and directed by Glazer, is based on the novel by the late Martin Amis and follows Rudolf Höss, head Commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. The couple leads an idyllic life in a handsome villa, cavorting with their numerous children at a nearby lake and in their pool and a large garden that abuts the wall of the concentration camp. There’s no real plot or arc to the narrative. Instead, the film offers up the horrifying reality of the family’s life for the audience to inspect.

Led by years of research in collaboration with the Auschwitz museum, the production recreated the Höss house and shot the picture with what Żal described as complete objectivity.

To work on The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing Holocaust drama about the domestic life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family, Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal had to “forget everything I was taught” about making “beautiful images.”

Glazer’s film, loosely adapted from the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, follows the seemingly mundane activities of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, played by Christian Friedl and Sandra Hüller, as they strive to build a dream life for their family in their house and garden next to the camp. The smooth, stunning monochrome aesthetic Zal perfected on his (Oscar-nominated) lensing of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold War would not do for Glazer’s story, which aimed to evoke the banality of evil by refusing to show Höss and Hedwig as anything but what they were: Ordinary, even boring, people who carried out unspeakable evil.

Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant Cannes Grand Prix winner (and a highlight in the Main Slate of the 61st New York Film Festival), The Zone of Interest (UK Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film), starring Sandra Hüller (of Justine Triet’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy Of A Fall) and Christian Friedel (of the Babylon Berlin series) took the best of Martin Amis’s novel and left all exaggerations aside. It is unmistakably a masterpiece and one of the best films in the 2020s so far. The excellent score by Mica Levi prepares us from the get-go. The noise in each viewer’s mind will fill in images, the information you know or surmise. The disquieting sound design is by Johnnie Burn, who also did Glazer’s Under The Skin and is a longtime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator, including this year’s Poor Things.

The power of...