News

French production giant takes majority stake in production company behind Netflix’s Oscar winner and ITV comedy Plebs.

Newen Studios has acquired Rise Films, the producer behind Netflix’s Oscar-winning doc Icarus.

The TF1-owned French production giant has taken a majority stake in London-based Rise, which was founded in 2006 by managing director Teddy Leifer.

Rise is best-known for its high-end documentary output which, alongside Icarus, includes Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning The Invisible War, Emmy-winning The Interrupters, Sundance winner Dreamcatcher and The Art of Political Murder.

The company is also a prolific producer of programming for broadcasters and streamers, with HBO...

In Corsage, Vicky Krieps delivers a performance brimming with salty despondency and inner life. Gasping for breath in the garment from which this film takes its title, the Luxembourgish actress stars as Elisabeth Eugenie, the 19th-century Hungarian queen and Hapsburg empress tasked with quietly presiding over a kingdom in its early stages of unraveling. The director is Marie Kreutzer, an Austrian filmmaker whose previous effort, The Ground Beneath My Feet, told another story of a woman and an unraveling. While that film competed for the Golden Bear, Corsage took Kreutzer all the way to Cannes, making a splash in Un Certain Regard and justifiably rewarding Krieps for her work.

Taking cues from Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Pablo Larraín, Kreutzer leans on a recent maxim: the only socially acceptable way to examine monarchy in this day and age is to do so through the eyes of an unruly, besieged, forward-thinking...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

The 4K Lost Highway restoration begins its run as a 20-film Dario Argento retrospective continues.

Roxy Cinema

Scanners plays on 35mm Friday night; on Saturday, a print of Marie Antoinette screens, Steve Gunn plays live music over some of the greatest films ever made—Ken Jacobs, Shirley Clarke, Maya Deren—and Nick Pinkerton and Sean Price Williams’ secret-screening series “City Dudes” returns; Merchant-Ivory’s Maurice plays Saturday and Sunday, while on the latter day a mixture of digital and 16mm shorts shows for Pride.

Anthology Film Archives

Essential Cinema has a Warhol double on Friday, while “Imageless Films” returns.

Museum of Modern Art

One of the year’s great retrospectives looks at deep cuts of Shochiku Studios, while a slashers retrospective is underway.

Film Forum

A 35mm print of Diva continues, while The Discreet Charm of...

As Paramount+ prepares for UK rollout this week and in advance of tonight’s swanky London do, the streamer has greenlit a seven-strong international slate including a French fantasy horror thriller, series on the Circeo Massacre, two shows from Mexico and two from Germany including The Sheikh.

Scroll down for the full slate below as Paramount+ deepens its international push and prepares to unveil the shows at an event with the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Jessica Chastain and Gillian Anderson, amongst other A-listers. Paramount+ has taken over London’s West End for the day with a Walk of Fame-esque Walk of Stars, with 50 illuminated stars including Stallone, Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Viola Davis.

Paramount Global plans to commission 150 international originals for Paramount+ within three years

The slate, Paramount+’s second major international roster, includes France’s Marie Antoinette Serial Killer, a fantasy horror thriller about four young American girls who...

Exclusive: Deadline has an exclusive track from Dustin O’Halloran and Herdís Stefánsdóttir’s score for The Essex Serpent, which is set for digital release today via Lakeshore Records.

The Apple TV+ limited series from See-Saw Films follows London widow Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), who moves to Essex to investigate reports of a mythical serpent. Seaborne forms a surprising bond of science and skepticism with the local pastor (Tom Hiddleston), but when tragedy strikes, locals accuse her of attracting the creature.

When O’Halloran and Stefánsdóttir boarded the project, they looked to evoke the dark depths of Victorian England through the utilization of both electro acoustics and strings. “From our first conversations with director Clio Bernard, we knew we would be creating something layered and multidimensional,” the composers told Deadline in a joint statement. “This was our first collaboration together as composers and it allowed us to explore subjects like fear of the unknown,...

Oscar winner Meryl Streep's designer outfits in The Devil Wears Prada and Helen Mirren's royal robes from The Queen have both earned nominations from the Costume Designers Guild for their ninth annual awards ceremony next month. The films' wardrobe experts, Patricia Field and Consolata Boyle respectively, will compete for the Excellence in Contemporary Film Award against Nancy Steiner for Little Miss Sunshine, Lindy Hemming for Casino Royale, and Michael Wilkinson for Babel. Nominees for costumes in period film include Milena Canonero for Marie Antoinette, Sharen Davis for Dreamgirls, and Penny Rose for Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The winners will be revealed at the ceremony on February 17 which takes place in Beverly Hills, California.

CANNES -- In the revisionist "Marie Antoinette", writer-director Sofia Coppola and actress Kirsten Dunst take a remote and no doubt misunderstood historical figure, the controversial and often despised Queen of France at the time of the French Revolution, and brings her into sharp focus as a living, breathing human being with flaws, foibles, passions, intelligence and warm affections. The movie slices through the cobwebs of history to seek the heart of the young Austrian princess whom 18th century political diplomacy thrust into a maelstrom of court intrigue and poisoned personal relationships without even asking if she minded.

This is not a portrait, even though it is based on Antonia Fraser's biography "Marie Antoinette: The Journey", that will play well in France. Here she is a favorite villainess. Nor will the film be an easy sell in other territories, where Coppola's contemporary sensibilities and dialogue may feel anachronistic. The film certainly is far afield from her popular "Lost in Translation" even though both films concern characters that suffer anxiety and ennui from cultural dislocation.

The film opens here this week, where it can expect mixed to hostile reactions from critics, but may possibly intrigue moviegoers keen to see a different version of well-known events. When it opens domestically Oct. 13, Sony will have to shrewdly market the film to pull in a young crowd for whom Marie Antoinette is a figure in a wax museum.

One more comparison to "Lost in Translation": Marie Antoinette's protracted arrival in her new home in France and especially the Palace of Versailles indelibly expresses the young woman's discomfort and loss of bearings just as Bill Murray's arrival in Tokyo. Each is a stranger in a strange land of unfamiliar and even upsetting customs.

The problem Coppola confronts is that Marie Antoinette is a protagonist to whom things happen. She has little if any control over her destiny other than to indulge, famously, in a decadent lifestyle and cavort with her ladies in waiting in Le Petit Trianon. News, tragic or otherwise, arrives by messenger, and those around her are either wily or unwise.

Coppola's solution to this dramatic handicap is to conspire with her star to achieve an empathetic portrait of a life spent in a gilded, vast prison. Most of the movie is shot in and around Versailles. Sometimes scenes occur on the very spot of the actual events. It's hard to imagine this picture even happening without the cooperation of the French government; mere sets were never going to get the job done.

What the history books tell us about Marie Antoinette's lavish lifestyle, with her rising each morning to a retinue of women who dress her, the movie correctly sees as an indignity: Who wants to get dressed in front of virtual strangers?

The marriage at 14 to her husband, Louis (Jason Schwartzman), the Dauphin and heir to the throne, creates the central relationship of the movie. The young man's unwillingness or inability to consummate the marriage for an astonishing and awkward seven years inspired gossip and derision, mostly directed at the undeserving Dauphine. An undercurrent of malicious chitchat becomes a kind of white noise in many palace scenes.

Dunst radiates innocence even as she is losing that innocence. She transfers her love to pets and, when children finally do arrive, to the babies. She refuses to relinquish her willfulness or determination even though these traits do not stand her in good stead at Versailles.

Schwartzman gives a wry and funny performance as a man even more ill suited to his historical role than his wife. The movie never gets to the bottom of his difficulties and indifference, wisely resisting the temptation to impose a modern interpretation on this relationship. Instead, Coppola hews to her heroine's point of view. In the final reel, the couple does achieve a maturity, only to be cut short by angry mobs and revolution.

Terrific performances litter the film: Rip Torn's Louis XV, a shrewd man with hearty appetites of flesh and stomach; Asia Argento as his sultry and crude mistress, Madame Du Barry, despised by all but her lover; Steve Coogan as the courtly Austrian ambassador, who tries to steer Marie Antoinette through the tricky shoals of court politics; Danny Huston as her favorite older brother, the only male with whom she has any real rapport; and Marianne Faithful as her politically astute mother, Maria Teresa. Unfortunately, the movie never quite does justice to a Swedish count, played wanly by James Dornan, whom the Queen takes as a lover.

The costumes, dazzling shoes and jewels are pure pleasure to behold, and Lance Acord's cinematography keeps things simple no matter how lavish the settings. The bursts of rock music on the soundtrack often takes you out of the picture, but this is an indulgence one easily grants to Coppola, who otherwise achieves a harmonious blend of history and contemporary perceptions.

Actress Kirsten Dunst has come under fire from historians for her "frightful" interpretation of tragic French queen Marie Antoinette. Dunst plays the 18th Century monarch in Sofia Coppola's racy new biopic, which was booed by critics at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Now her overtly sexual performance has been attacked by France's Marie Antoinette Association as well, who insists the queen's bedroom antics are not factually based. The association's president Michele Lorin says, "I've seen the trailer for the film on the internet. It is a fright. We've spent years trying to convince people that the queen was not just a libertine who told the starving to eat cake. What do you see on the trailer? You see Marie Antoinette eating cake. You see her lying naked on a chaise longue. I fear the film is going to set us back many years." However, Dunst retorts the movie should not be taken too seriously. She says, "It's kind of like a history of feelings rather than a history of facts. So don't expect a masterpiece theatre, educational Marie Antoinette biopic."...

In the revisionist Marie Antoinette, writer-director Sofia Coppola and actress Kirsten Dunst take a remote and no doubt misunderstood historical figure, the controversial and often despised Queen of France at the time of the French Revolution, and brings her into sharp focus as a living, breathing human being with flaws, foibles, passions, intelligence and warm affections. The movie slices through the cobwebs of history to seek the heart of the young Austrian princess whom 18th century political diplomacy thrust into a maelstrom of court intrigue and poisoned personal relationships without even asking if she minded.

This is not a portrait, even though it is based on Antonia Fraser's biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey, that will play well in France. Here she is a favorite villainess. Nor will the film be an easy sell in other territories, where Coppola's contemporary sensibilities and dialogue may feel anachronistic. The film certainly is far afield from her popular Lost in Translation even though both films concern characters that suffer anxiety and ennui from cultural dislocation.

The film opens here this week, where it can expect mixed to hostile reactions from critics, but may possibly intrigue moviegoers keen to see a different version of well-known events. When it opens domestically Oct. 13, Sony will have to shrewdly market the film to pull in a young crowd for whom Marie Antoinette is a figure in a wax museum.

One more comparison to Lost in Translation: Marie Antoinette's protracted arrival in her new home in France and especially the Palace of Versailles indelibly expresses the young woman's discomfort and loss of bearings just as Bill Murray's arrival in Tokyo. Each is a stranger in a strange land of unfamiliar and even upsetting customs.

The problem Coppola confronts is that Marie Antoinette is a protagonist to whom things happen. She has little if any control over her destiny other than to indulge, famously, in a decadent lifestyle and cavort with her ladies in waiting in Le Petit Trianon. News, tragic or otherwise, arrives by messenger, and those around her are either wily or unwise.

Coppola's solution to this dramatic handicap is to conspire with her star to achieve an empathetic portrait of a life spent in a gilded, vast prison. Most of the movie is shot in and around Versailles. Sometimes scenes occur on the very spot of the actual events. It's hard to imagine this picture even happening without the cooperation of the French government; mere sets were never going to get the job done.

What the history books tell us about Marie Antoinette's lavish lifestyle, with her rising each morning to a retinue of women who dress her, the movie correctly sees as an indignity: Who wants to get dressed in front of virtual strangers?

The marriage at 14 to her husband, Louis (Jason Schwartzman), the Dauphin and heir to the throne, creates the central relationship of the movie. The young man's unwillingness or inability to consummate the marriage for an astonishing and awkward seven years inspired gossip and derision, mostly directed at the undeserving Dauphine. An undercurrent of malicious chitchat becomes a kind of white noise in many palace scenes.

Dunst radiates innocence even as she is losing that innocence. She transfers her love to pets and, when children finally do arrive, to the babies. She refuses to relinquish her willfulness or determination even though these traits do not stand her in good stead at Versailles.

Schwartzman gives a wry and funny performance as a man even more ill suited to his historical role than his wife. The movie never gets to the bottom of his difficulties and indifference, wisely resisting the temptation to impose a modern interpretation on this relationship. Instead, Coppola hews to her heroine's point of view. In the final reel, the couple does achieve a maturity, only to be cut short by angry mobs and revolution.

Terrific performances litter the film: Rip Torn's Louis XV, a shrewd man with hearty appetites of flesh and stomach; Asia Argento as his sultry and crude mistress, Madame Du Barry, despised by all but her lover; Steve Coogan as the courtly Austrian ambassador, who tries to steer Marie Antoinette through the tricky shoals of court politics; Danny Huston as her favorite older brother, the only male with whom she has any real rapport; and Marianne Faithful as her politically astute mother, Maria Teresa. Unfortunately, the movie never quite does justice to a Swedish count, played wanly by James Dornan, whom the Queen takes as a lover.

The costumes, dazzling shoes and jewels are pure pleasure to behold, and Lance Acord's cinematography keeps things simple no matter how lavish the settings. The bursts of rock music on the soundtrack often takes you out of the picture, but this is an indulgence one easily grants to Coppola, who otherwise achieves a harmonious blend of history and contemporary perceptions.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures presents in association with Pricel and Tohokushinsha an American Zoetrope production

Credits: Writer-director: Sofia Coppola; Based on the book Marie Antoinette: The Journey by: Antonia Fraser; Producers: Ross Katz, Sofia Coppola; Executive producers: Fred Roos, Francis Ford Coppola; Director of photography: Lance Acord; Production designer: KK Barrett; Music producer: Brian Reitzell; Costumes: Milena Canonero; Editor: Sarah Flack. Cast: Marie Antoinette: Kirsten Dunst; King Louis XVI: Jason Schwartzman; King Louis XV: Rip Torn; Comtessse de Noailles: Judy Davis; Madame Du Barry: Asia Argento; Empress Maria Teresa: Marianne Faithful; Joseph: Danny Huston; Aunt Victoire: Molly Shannon.

No MPAA rating, running time 123 minutes.

BERLIN -- One of the best war movies ever made, Downfall is a powerful and artistically masterful re-creation of the last days of the Third Reich. A film that will set new standards in the art of committing history to celluloid, it is sure to spark strong word-of-mouth and generate ticket sales on the art house circuit -- and could pick up major awards.

Downfall tells not only the historically accurate tale of the last days of Hitler and his henchmen, which they spent in a bunker under the streets of Berlin, but also, in state-of-the-art battle sequences, of the civilians and soldiers fighting and dying on the savaged streets above as the Soviet Army turned the city into a pile of rubble.

The combined power of the chamber play unraveling in the bunker and the horrible epic slaughter in the streets above (which, of course, Hitler could have stopped at any time by surrendering) elevates the film from a historical re-enactment to a full-fledged war movie, on par with Saving Private Ryan and Das Boot in every regard. With its horrific and realistic depiction of the human beings who caused all this, Downfall could be the most important movie ever made about World War II.

The script, written masterfully by producer Bernd Eichinger (The Name of the Rose, The House of the Spirits), closely follows the definitive book Inside Hitler's Bunker, by renowned historian Joachim Fest, as well as on the reminiscences of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, whose story was turned into an excellent interview/documentary under the title Blind Spot (two sections of the interview frame the dramatized action of Downfall). Although the young Junge acts as a kind of main character, Eichinger has resisted the temptation to invent any nonhistoric characters for the viewer to sympathize with. What we get in Downfall is as close to what really happened as we will ever see on celluloid.

The actors are on the money, which makes Oliver Hirschbiegel's direction look nothing less than brilliant. And the same goes for An Dorthe Braker's inspired casting. Indeed, a major difference between this film and earlier depictions of Hitler is that these actors are all believably German, neither just blond and blue-eyed stereotypes nor craven caricatures of evil. It is easy to imagine any of them as the guy next door -- or even as yourself, given the circumstances. This is Hirschbiegel's artistic triumph: He makes sure we see that the "face of evil" didn't come from outer space but from among us.

Juliane Koehler plays Eva Braun with a weird, demented carelessness -- she is almost ecstatically happy to die with her Adolf (whom she marries at the very end), but at the same time she seems stupidly to have no real comprehension of the destruction going on around her. She is Marie Antoinette in a dirndl. When Magda Goebbels, played dignified and murderous by Corinna Harfouch, poisons her own children so they won't have to face the disappointment of growing up in a world without Nazism, you wonder whether the Third Reich was state or religion.

But the sensation of the film is Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) in a stunning performance as Hitler. Physically, Ganz slumps, shrinks and scowls -- Hitler's health was failing at this point, and Ganz captures the sunken little man perfectly. Most importantly, not once does he slip into a caricature of evil. Ganz shows you a human being. When he refuses to leave Berlin and save himself, you can see that in his mind he is performing an act of heroism.

The perverted humanity of Hitler and his henchmen may be a problem for some reviewers and community leaders, who may fear that neo-Nazis will watch the movie and be moved, not horrified, by Hitler's last days. That's a small risk, though, for a film that succeeds on all levels in saying so much not only about the horrors of the 20th century, but about human nature as well.

Downfall (Der Untergang)

World Sales: EOS Distribution

Production company: Constantin Film

Co-Producers NDR, WDR, Degeto Film, ORF and EOS Production and RAI Cinema

CREDITS

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Writer: Bernd Eichinger, based on the book Inside Hitler's Bunker by Joachim Fest and "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary" by Traudl Junge and Melissa Mueller

Producer: Bernd Eichinger

Production Executive: Christine Rothe

Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann

Production designer: Bernd Lepel

Music: Stephan Zacharias

Casting: An Dorthe Braker

Costume designer: Claudia Bobsin

Editor: Hans Funck

Special effects: Die Nefzers

Sound Design: Stefan Busch

Sound: Roland Winke

Sound mixing: Michael Kranz

Line producer: Silvia Tollmann

Cast:

Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz

Traudl Junge: Alexandra Maria Lara

Magda Goebbels: Corinna Harfouch

Joseph Goebbels: Ulrich Matthes

Eva Braun: Juliane Kohler

Albert Speer: Heino Ferch

Prof. Schenck: Christian Berkel

Prof. Dr. Werner Haase: Matthias Habich

Hermann Fegelein: Thomas Kretschmann

Helmuth Weidling: Michael Mendl

Wilhelm Mohnke: Andre Hennicke

Heinrich Himmler Ulrich Noethen

No MPAA rating

Running time -- 150 minutes...

Reese Witherspoon will star in "Daughter of the Queen of Sheba", a big-screen adaptation of Jacki Lyden's nonfiction book that Paramount Pictures is in negotiations to acquire. The mother-daughter tale will be produced by Susan Cartsonis and Matt Williams. No start date has been set, and no director is attached. Meryl Streep has expressed interest to also star, pending a helmer. Karen Croner (1998's "One True Thing") adapted the project, based on Lyden's memoir of growing up with a mother whom everyone labeled as crazy but actually suffered from what is now known to be manic-depression. Lyden's mother often would become convinced she was a woman with power, such as the Queen of Sheba or Marie Antoinette, then act out her delusions. Her mother's escapes from reality inspired Lyden to seek a career in radio journalism, where she could "escape" to exotic places like Baghdad to cover the Persian Gulf War, among other places. Lyden's feelings of helplessness growing up, her mother's refusal to seek treatment and her mother's relationships with the opposite sex -- which, in turn, affected Lyden's relationships -- are among the complex issues explored in the script. Lyden is repped by literary agent Sylvie Rabineau. Witherspoon, repped by WMA and Management 360, is in production on Focus Features' "Vanity Fair" and next stars in MGM's "Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde."...