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"You need ambition. You'll run the music school." Vertigo Releasing from the UK has unveiled their official trailer for a French family comedy called The Marching Band, which was originally titled En Fanfare in French. This feel-good story about two estranged brothers reconnecting first premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Premiere section. Acclaimed conductor Thibaut has leukemia and needs a bone marrow donor. Learning he was adopted, he finds an older brother – a musician and factory worker. Their reunion sparks a fraternal, musical journey amidst the town's factory closure. The film already became a hit in France last year – it earned an impressive €18 million at the French box office and was nominated for 7 César Awards in total, including Best Film & Best Actor. The Marching Band stars Benjamin Lavernhe, Pierre Lottin, Sarah Suco, and Jacques Bonnaffé. It's set for a release this May in the UK, but still...

As one of the most prolific and successful mystery writers of the past 30 years, it's unsurprising that many of Harlan Coben's novels have been adapted for the small screen by a streamer like Netflix. Featuring more twists and turns than a country lane, Coben's stories are perfectly suited to the miniseries format. However, some have been more successful than others. Of the eight Coben books so far adapted, most have enjoyed a generally positive critical reception.

Productions of Safe, The Stranger, The Woods, The Innocent, Stay Close, and Fool Me Once have all been rated as "Fresh" on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes – further highlighting just how suited Coben's writing is to television. However, the burgeoning Coben-verse hasn't been a total success. Gone for Good and Hold Tight have both failed to impress critics, while other shows have been more polarizing than their overall critical scores suggest.

Harlan Coben's...

Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Luc Godard is a difficult filmmaker to pin down because while his thematic concerns as an artist have remained more or less consistent over the last seven decades, his form is ever-shifting. His filmography is impossible to view in a vacuum, as his work strives to reflect on the constantly evolving cinema culture that surrounds it: Godard always works with the newest filmmaking technologies available, and his films have become increasingly abstracted and opaque as the wider culture of moving images has become increasingly fragmented. Rather than working to maintain an illusion of diegetic truth, Godard’s work as always foreground its status as a manufactured product—of technology, of an industry, of on-set conditions and of an individual’s imagination. Mubi’S Godard retrospective exemplifies the depth and range of Godard’s career as...

Extremely well received at last month’s edition of Tiff, Martin Provost’s Violette becomes purchase number two (after Bethlehem) in just as many weeks for Jeff Lipsky’s Adopt Films. Screen Daily reports that the NYC-based distrib will release the biopic in May or June of next year.

Gist: Co-written by Provost, Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccatty, Emmanuelle Devos stars in the eponymous role as the bisexual postwar author Violette Leduc, who was born out of wedlock and raised in poverty and went on to become the world renowned writer of The Bastard. This sees Sandrine Kiberlain star as Simone de Bouvoir, Jacques Bonnaffé as Jean Genet, Olivier Py as Maurice Sachs and Olivier Gourmet as Jacques Guérin.

Worth Noting: Leduc actually saw her novel novel Thérèse and Isabelle be adapted into a 1968 film by director Radley Metzger and starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael.

Do We Care?...

Exclusive: Venice winner Sacro Gra sells to eight more territories.

Doc & Film International has closed multiple deals on Martin Provost’s recent Toronto world premiere Violette including a Us sale to Adopt Films.

Rights have gone to Mongrel/Metropole in Canada, Golem in Spain, Madman in Australia and New Zealand, Kool Distribution in Germany, Immovision in Brazil, Cineplex in Colombia, Folkets Bio in Sweden and Xenix in Switzerland.

Further deals closed with Cdi Films in Argentina, Swallow Wings in Taiwan, Filmladen in Austria and Cinema Mondo in Finland.

Diaphana will launch the film in France in November, Big Bang in Belgium and Contact in the Netherlands.

Emmanuelle Devos stars in the eponymous role as the bisexual postwar author Violette Leduc, who was born out of wedlock and raised in poverty and went on to become the world renowned writer of The Bastard.

Violette also stars Sandrine Kiberlain as Simone de Bouvoir, Jacques Bonnaffé as [link...

Doc & Film International has closed multiple deals on Martin Provost’s recent Toronto world premiere Violette including a Us sale to Adopt Films.

Rights have gone to Mongrel/Metropole in Canada, Golem in Spain, Madman in Australia and New Zealand, Kool Distribution in Germany, Immovision in Brazil, Cineplex in Colombia, Folkets Bio in Sweden and Xenix in Switzerland.

Further deals closed with Cdi Films in Argentina, Swallow Wings in Taiwan, Filmladen in Austria and Cinema Mondo in Finland.

Diaphana will launch the film in France in November, Big Bang in Belgium and Contact in the Netherlands.

Emmanuelle Devos stars in the eponymous role as the bisexual postwar author Violette Leduc, who was born out of wedlock and raised in poverty and went on to become the world renowned writer of The Bastard.

Violette also stars Sandrine Kiberlain as Simone de Bouvoir, Jacques Bonnaffé as Jean Genet, Olivier Py as Maurice Sachs and Olivier Gourmet as Jacques Guérin. Provost...

Agnès b. owns a film theater in Hong Kong, produces films such as "Spring Breakers," dabbles in the world of film festival partnerships and maintains a line of clothing called "On aime le cinéma." But that's not enough for the fashion designer to prove with her debut feature "Je m’appelle…Hmmm" that she has a true cinematic eye to accompany her highly praised fashion one. Recounting the age-old story of incest with no new insight or innovation, the movie follows 11 year-old Céline Meunier (Lou Lélia Démerliac) who, at a school field trip, seizes the opportunity to run away from home and from her abusive father (Jacques Bonnaffé). She then meets Peter, a 40 year-old English truck driver who has nothing to lose (Douglas Gordon), and accompanies him on his journey back to his homeland, where she forms an intense bond with him. Facing unrealistic expectations for a first-time director, Agnès b.

A red letter day. There's a new Senses of Cinema out and it opens with the first part of Daniel Fairfax's interview with Jean-Louis Comolli, who edited Cahiers du cinéma from 1965 to 1973. Senses editor Rolando Caputo: "At the time, Cahiers was undergoing its so-called 'Marxist-Leninist' phase, with a heavy overlay of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory." And Slavoj Žižek would have been in his late teens, early 20s. At any rate: "Put simply, at stake was the demystification of the 'cinematic apparatus' to demonstrate how ideology was both embedded within the technology of cinema and an effect of its representational modes."

Fairfax: "Having steadily made films over the last 40 years — including the magisterial series on the French electoral machine, Marseille contre Marseille (1996) — Comolli has also pursued a prolonged theoretical pre-occupation with the cinema, which, in various ways, is profoundly defined by his earlier participation in Cahiers. Refreshingly, he has never sought to repudiate his radical past,...

"Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I've always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it." That's Guy Maddin, as quoted by Kim Morgan, introducing Maddin's Spiritismes, happening now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris ("During 'séances'... Maddin and his actors will allow themselves to be possessed by the wandering spirits of the dead, to bring their movies back to life") through March 12:

Filmmaking, dead made undead, is happening live at the Centre — lost or unrealized films by directors as diverse as Jean Vigo, Kenji Mizoguchi, Lois Weber, William Wellman, von Stroheim (I will appear in that particular Poto-Poto), Alexandre Dovjenko and more are coming — rising from the dead, in their own unique way. Maddin will be shooting one film a day.

The first images for Behind The Walls have surfaced on the film’s Official Facebook Page, and they look pretty neat! If you haven’t heard about the film, I’ve included the synopsis below as well. It was written and directed by Pascal Sid and Julien Lacombe. It stars Laetitia Casta, Thierry Neuvic, Roger Dumas and Jacques Bonnaffé.

Centre of France, 1922. Suzanne, a young novelist lacking inspiration decides to isolate herself in the countryside to write her new book. As Suzanne discovers a sealed-up room in the basement of her house, she starts writing oddly easily. Visions and nightmares soon strike her while the villagers grow worried as several little girls mysteriously disappear…

Source: Behind The Walls Official Facebook Page...