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In a diary entry from May 1967, read by Jessie Buckley at the start of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, the subject writes: “Ah, the trees, how tortured they are. If anyone has to ask me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed and stark and misshapen but ferociously tenacious.” That observation swiftly captures O’Brien’s passionate love-hate relationship with her homeland. At the same time, it anchors this intimate portrait in nature, the refuge to which the writer would return throughout her turbulent life, finding more freedom in the fields of County Clare than anyplace else.

One of the many pleasures of Sinéad O’Shea’s engaging, tender and lovingly crafted documentary is listening to the writer talk, in countless archival interviews and even more so in a wide-ranging sit-down with the filmmaker near the end of O’Brien’s life. It’s like listening to music,...

Selena Gomez and Eva Longoria completely owned Only Murders in the Building Season 4, Episode 3.

Sure, Martin Short and Steve Martin had their fun moments with their movie twins, but let’s be real — Mabel and Mahbel were the undeniable queens of the episode!

Not that I’d ever want Mabel ditching Oliver and Charles — she totally belongs with them –but just imagine if Gomez and Longoria teamed up for their own show. It would be the bomb! They were an absolute blast together!

(Disney/Patrick Harbron)

Our trio’s movie twins arrived in New York City for a one-day “character study,” as Oliver called it, courtesy of the Brothers sisters.

Naturally, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time — Detective Williams had just dropped some juicy intel on Sazz’s murder.

Mabel and Charles were totally against the idea of Longoria, Levy, and Galifianakis following them around when they were knee-deep in an investigation,...

It’s a classic story prompt: The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s delirious and delicately monumental “The End,” the man is an über-affluent family. The “door” (so to speak) connects the scorched ruins of our planet to the cavernous underground bunker where these characters have buried themselves for the last 25 years. The knock reverberates with a force powerful enough to dislodge all the feelings they’ve worked so hard to bury along with them — the humanity they’ve had to deny somewhere deep within themselves in order to make peace with the humanity they chose to leave behind on the surface.

Despite the broad familiarity of its premise, however, this story doesn’t unfold like any post-apocalyptic fable before it. For one thing, it’s a full-throated musical that starts with Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton leading the rest of the...

What will the existence of the elite class, whose conspicuous consumption is a status symbol and has a negative impact on the environment, look like once everything has been completely destroyed? Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End imagines what that future could look like, joining the ranks of other recent films that have put outrageous privilege in their often sanctimonious cross hairs. But the willful blindness of the ruling class is something that Oppenheimer has intimately grappled with in his documentary work, namely The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and he attempts to carve out a unique approach to eating the rich on screen by dressing up his venom in the fanciful garbs of a Golden Age musical.

Set 20 years after an environmental collapse has wiped out society, The End takes place in a lavish underground bunker within the depths of a salt mine. This is the home...

Hollywood stars took to social media on Thursday after it was announced that Donald Sutherland died at the age of 88.

Sutherland died Thursday in Miami after a long illness, CAA’s Missy Davy told The Hollywood Reporter.

The renowned actor had an illustrious six-decade career, starring in varied roles with his breakthrough performances including the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. Throughout his career, the actor starred in such films as Klute, Kelly’s Heroes, Don’t Look Now, Ordinary People, 1900, The Hunger Games series and Ad Astra.

In 2017, he received an Honorary Award from the Academy.

Sutherland is survived by his wife, Francine Racette; sons Roeg, Rossif, Angus and Kiefer; daughter, Rachel; and four grandchildren.

Kiefer paid tribute to his late father online, writing, “With a heavy heart, I tell you that my father, Donald Sutherland, has passed away. I personally think one of...

In the "Star Trek: The Original Series" season 3 episode "Requiem for Methuselah," the Enterprise crew has become infected with a deadly disease. They travel to a remote and presumed-uninhabited world called Holberg 917-g looking for the substances they require to make a cure. They find, living there, a mysterious aristocrat named Flint (James Daly) who lives in a posh mansion surrounded by ancient works of Earth art, alongside his attractive young ward Reyna (Louise Sorel). Flint's mansion is protected by a strange, orb-shaped robot, and an investigation finds that Flint's possessions are written in the handwriting of Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Brahms, and other notable artists. Reyna and Kirk (William Shatner) immediately take a shine to each other and play a game of pool while Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) goes looking for the desired medicine.

Flint eventually reveals that he is immortal, having learned artistic mastery in his six millennia of life.

T.S. Eliot, box office pundit: The wasteland of April was the cruelest month for theaters. To say May will be an improvement damns with faint praise; April was less than $440 million, down 52 percent from 2023. What May really needs is a performance not unlike the one we saw a year ago, when “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” lead the month to just under $800 million total.

To achieve that in 2024, there are five films that must reach their potential. All are positioned to reach $100 million in U.S./Canada, although not necessarily by the end of May.

Perhaps the trickiest one to guess is the “The Fall Guy” (Universal). It has the best start-of-summer date, stars the red-hot Ryan Gosling, and received good reviews, yet the consensus among a range of insiders is it may be only the fourth biggest among May releases.

Films like “The Fall Guy” really need to...

For his forthcoming one from the heart, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola has once again violated the cardinal rule of the entertainment business: Never invest your own money in the show. Reports are that to bankroll the $120 million epic he has literally mortgaged the farm, or vineyard. The investment is slated to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14.

We — and he — have all been here before. Coppola last went into hock for another long-aborning and cost-overrunning project, which 45 years ago, almost to the day, also premiered at Cannes: the now legendary Apocalypse Now (1979).

At the time, Coppola was bathing in the afterglow of one of the most astonishing back-to-back double, or triple, plays in the industry’s history: The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), the operatic two-part saga of mob family business in which organized crime serves less as a metaphor for American capitalism than its purest expression (“Michael,...

We were already prepared for the devastation Taylor Swift’s eleventh album The Tortured Poets Department might yield but no one could have imagined that she had two albums’ worth of material for everyone to sift through. Her latest is mix of Midnights synths and Folklore/Evermore indie-folk, giving insight into the romantic chaos behind one of her biggest career years yet. Here’s what we learned from all 31 new songs.

The Tortured Poet In Question Is Matty Healy

For the past couple months, fans had been anticipating a tell-all...

The musical fantasy film Cats, released in 2019, turned out to be a box-office bomb despite the big names attached to it. To start with, the movie was based on American composer and impresario of musical theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s eponymous Broadway musical.

A still from Cats

Webber’s Broadway musical Cats has impressed millions of fans over the years. However, the movie adaptation failed to bring the same magic to the screens and became a huge disappointment for the composer. So much so, that it led to the impresario buying a dog just to live with the trauma of having his musical butchered for the screens.

Andrew Lloyd Webber Had to Get a Dog After Watching the 2019 Cats Movie A still from Cats

While Tom Hooper’s Cats was based on Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s musical, the musical itself was based on T. S. Eliot’s 1939 poetry collection Old...

European giant Beta Film, known for ambitious titles such as “Babylon Berlin” and “The Swarm,” has shared with Variety in exclusivity a first-look picture of 1o-part series “Rise of the Raven,” which it hails as “one of the most epic European TV productions of all time.”

“Rise of the Raven” weighs in as a passion project of Hungarian-born and Canada-based producer Robert Lantos, behind “Sunshine,” “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Barney’s Version,” “Eastern Promises” and “Crimes of the Future.”

A highlight at Beta Film’s showcase this Tuesday at the London TV Screenings, “Rise of the Raven” turns on the extraordinary feat of Hungarian army commander Janos Hunyadi, played by discovery Gellért L. Kádár, who in 1456 won a bloody, brutal Battle of Belgrade against a vast Ottoman force twice the size of his troops who were often farm labourers armed with just slings and patriotic fervor.

Hunyadi largely halted a full Ottoman...

Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...

Wim Wenders, the director of the Oscar-nominated Perfect Days on Hirayama’s (Kôji Yakusho) big lesson for his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano): “Come on, start living in the now. Now is now and then is then.” Photo: Master Mind Ltd.

On Tuesday, Wim Wenders' Perfect Days (co-written with Takuma Takasaki and starring Cannes Film Festival Best Actor winner Kôji Yakusho) received a Best International Feature Oscar nomination. Wenders has three Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominations:

Wim Wenders with Anne-Katrin Titze on using Yasujirō Ozu’s 3:4 format for Perfect Days and Anselm: “I got so much attached to it.”

In the second instalment with Wim Wenders we discuss the Yasujirō Ozu format and Cinemascope; Ts Eliot’s Little Gidding and returns to the...

Warning: major spoilers for the Bodies finale.

“I hope they feel like they’re coming down from a trip or out of a trance,” said Bodies showrunner Paul Tomalin when asked what he hoped viewers would take away after watching his adaptation of Si Spencer’s graphic novel of the same name. Job done. Eight-episode mystery Bodies tells an extremely ambitious story, and deserves to be filed alongside 1899, The Oa and Sense8 in Netflix’s trip/trance sci-fi category.

Fans of that category will know that it’s a perilous place to be when it comes to recommissioning. All of the shows above were cut short after failing to break through to a wide-enough audience – perhaps as a result of their complicated philosophical and sci-fi ideas, or perhaps for not managing to prove quite as much fun as their high concept ideas promised.

Luckily for viewers, Bodies’ characters and plots...

Emma Watson was eager to explore more diverse film roles after completing the Harry Potter series. But she felt she truly got Hermione out of her system after doing this one film stunt.

Emma Watson was able to fully part ways with her ‘Harry Potter’ character thanks to this film Emma Watson | Arturo Holmes/Getty Images

Watson felt the 2012 film Perks of Being a Wallflower helped separate herself further from her Harry Potter counterpart. Watson portrayed a charismatic young student who takes a peer of hers under her wing. The film’s director, Stephen Chbosky, warned Watson how big the role would end up being for her.

“At our initial meeting, he said, ‘Okay, not only is this going to be one of the most important parts you play, you’re also going to have the summer of your life and meet some of your best friends,’” Watson recalled to Entertainment Weekly.

On Drake’s “All the Parties,” his voice emerges from what sounds like an ambient fever dream with ethereal synths swirling his words as he latches onto a familiar melody: “It’s 6, our town a dead-end world,” he sings, with autotune blipping his voice, “East End boys and West End girls, yeah.” Then he repeats that last line, just like the Pet Shop Boys did when they recorded the song “West End Girls” close to 40 years ago.

“West End Girls” was the British synth-pop group’s first single, which came...

The mysterious sanctuary hidden away in the Jemez mountains was known only as Box 1663 in the mid 1950s. The mission of its 13,000 residents was to create “the gadget.” Living there was a challenge. “It’s a prison camp for eggheads,” whispered one scientist.

As a young newsman, I decided I had to find a way to visit Los Alamos, even though I knew it would take time — perhaps years. I finally made it in 1956 (details below). And I re-visited it this week when I viewed Christopher Nolan’s new epic Oppenheimer, a brilliantly engrossing movie receiving unstinting raves from the critics.

Audiences worldwide will discover not one movie but two with contrasting themes – one a gripping heroic thriller about the dawn of a troubled nuclear age, the other an absorbing, if talky, political drama steeped in Cold War politics.

Cinephiles will be thrilled with Nolan’s succinct, if choppy, scenes...

The Animated World is a regular feature spotlighting animation from around the globe.Joy Street.When T.S. Eliot famously asked “Do I dare to eat a peach?” in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he was alluding to social and bodily anxiety, and the sticky traps that can ensnare the unsuspecting. Eliot’s J. Alfred finds a reason to be anxious about even the most mundane objects or situations—though eating in public (especially syrupy fruits) is a common anxiety. And while a peach should be an innocuous, enjoyable object, in practice a ripe peach can spontaneously turn an ordinary person into a spectacle. Or so Eliot and others assume. Anxiety is a powerful and nebulous force that affects most people some of the time, and some people all of the time, and whether or not it is generated by body issues, it is always felt in the body.

The satirical masterpiece goes well beyond what one expects from folk horror, with Edward Woodward as the priggish cop sent to investigate a pagan island

After 50 years, here is a re-release for that gamey satirical masterpiece of folk horror – although “prog horror” is perhaps a better description. Folk horror, like film noir, is a term that seems to have been first used by critics before film-makers themselves, but The Wicker Man is so much better and more distinctive than any film that comes under the folk-horror heading that it’s virtually a one-movie genre in itself. It now appears billed as a “final cut”: a restoration complete with the footage that was excised when it was released as a B-picture support to Don’t Look Now in 1973.

It is a brilliant conspiracy-chiller set on May Day on a remote fictional island off the Scottish coast, ruled over by the haughty...

Alice Troughton’s first feature is a jewel, an exquisitely made chamber piece with Richard E. Grant as J.M. Sinclair, an acclaimed novelist on his way down, Julie Delpy as Helene, his art-curator wife, and Daryl McCormack as Liam, a would-be novelist who idolizes Sinclair. With a clever script that keeps us off guard, the setting of a gracious country estate whose sumptuous visuals mask a dark undercurrent, and a score that entices us into an increasingly unsettling world, The Lesson is a small delight.

The opening scene makes it seem as if we can see the film’s whole trajectory. Liam is being interviewed about his first novel, whose plot about a great patriarchal writer is obviously based on Sinclair. The narrative then flashes back to the beginning of the story, when Liam is hired to tutor the Sinclairs’ son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), for his entrance exams to Oxford University.

The 76th annual Tony Awards have already made history. For the first time, two of the acting nominees identify as non-binary: Harrison Ghee who is contending for lead actor in musical for “Some Like It Hot” and Alex Newell, vying for featured actor in a musical for “Shucked.” Their nominations have been warmly embraced. But 40 years ago, a history-making acceptance led to death threats.

At the 37th annual Tony Awards on June 5, 1983, producer John Glines thanked his lover when he accepted the best play honor for Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” a three-act drama set in New York in the 1970s and early 80s starring Fierstein as a gay, drag queen and torch singer. “He expressed gratitude to an assortment of people , ‘lastly but most importantly, to the one person who believed and followed the dream from the beginning, who never said ‘You’re crazy; it can’t be...

This article contains spoilers for the "Succession" series finale, as well as discussions of sensitive, potentially triggering content.

There were a few different moments in the "Succession" season 4 finale where it seemed like someone might be about to die. When Kendall drank a "meal fit for a king" concocted from a stomach-churning mix of ingredients (some well past their use-by date), for example. Or when Kendall, in a rage, grabbed hold of Roman's head like he was trying to crush his skull. Ultimately, though, the corporate battlefield dealt out its losses in a different way.

For Kendall, that meant Shiv turning on him at the last moment and tipping the board vote in favor of selling Waystar Royco to Swedish tech billionaire Lukas Matsson. To add insult to injury, Roman casually told Kendall that their father never considered Kendall's children to be "real" heirs, since neither of them are his biological children.

The scandalous love triangle between poet Robert Graves, his feminist wife and a charismatic American writer is the subject of this erotic and entertainingly silly film

Britain’s premier literary throuple is the subject of this gamey, borderline-silly but watchably acted movie, which might have sat more comfortably as a three-part Sunday night TV drama. Robert Graves (Tom Hughes) is the poet traumatised and creatively blocked by his experiences in the great war, Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) is his forward-thinking feminist wife, and Laura Riding (Dianna Agron) is the charismatic American writer who comes to live with them in a scandalous menage.

Laura entrances them both sexually and stirs Robert’s stagnant juices in every sense, leading him to invent an entire pagan aesthetic around his adoration for her as the “goddess” at the centre of his poetic being – with Nancy’s slightly wan permission. But Riding’s irreverent lustiness...

Art made during Covid––more specifically during quarantine and before / at the very beginning of the vaccine rollout––will surely hold an added weight as history is written. In those very hard times, what did we write? What did we read? What did we watch? T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, directed by Sophie Fiennes and performed by her brother Ralph, is a decidedly worthwhile artifact of this precarious time.

An adaptation of the series of four poems written just before––and then during––World War II by Eliot, the film is an elevated recording of the stage performance Ralph Fiennes took on in 2021. Fiennes himself is credited with the stage direction, his sister with the film direction, both working well. Hildegard Bechtler’s production design is spare yet effective, the lighting by Tim Lutkin pointed and emotional. The camera remains mostly stationary, though the editing jostles between full-frame wides and quietly intense close-ups.

In college one night, I got very stoned and read T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” I was gripped by it, and felt I understood it — a feat I’ve never come close to accomplishing since. Yet I don’t think I was under some delusion about having glimpsed the poem’s essence. Eliot was a mystic doomsayer whose verse was torn, as if by shrapnel, with fragments of misanthropy and heartbreak. He channeled the despair of the 20th century but did it with a glint of rapture (to contemplate it was to be alive). To connect with his poetry, you almost need to leave rationality behind, to give yourself over to the experiential quality of Eliot’s words. I think the reason I could grasp Eliot while stoned is that I forgot I was reading “poetry,” forgot that I was facing stanzas arranged in elegant pieces on a page. Instead I was living each word,...

Sophie Fiennes on Ralph Fiennes starring and staging T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: “The thing that Ralph does brilliantly is the distribution in the space of the ideas. How he places them.”

In the second instalment with Sophie Fiennes we discuss her superb and faithful capturing of Ralph Fiennes’ stage production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Helen Gardner’s The Art Of T.S. Eliot, Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami, Samuel Beckett, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry.

Sophie Fiennes with Anne-Katrin Titze on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “I possibly wouldn’t have been as interested in becoming a filmmaker if I hadn’t had become acquainted with that poem at a very early age.”

Within days of speaking with Sophie, by chance every film I happened to watch contained a quote from the Nobel Prize-winning poet.

There has always been something otherworldly about Ts Eliot, a spectral quality deeply in accord with cinema. Francis Ford Coppola knew to include in Apocalypse Now (1979) a scene in which Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) reads parts of Eliot’s The Hollow Men, that in the epigraph (“Mistah Kurtz – he dead”) quotes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the basis of the film. Dennis Hopper, playing the photojournalist, paraphrases the poem’s famous last line.

Sophie Fiennes’ superb and faithful capturing of her brother Ralph Fiennes’ stage production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets yields wonderfully thoughtful camera movements and angles (cinematography by Mike Eley) and also takes us out of the theater space to breathe the same landscapes Eliot so unmatchedly described in Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. He was always already there. “And...

Sophie Fiennes with Anne-Katrin Titze on Slavoj Žižek: “I absolutely love working with him. Just being immersed in those ideas.”

From her short, Lars From 1 - 10, with Lars von Trier on Dogma 95, to Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami with Grace Jones; The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and The Pervert's Guide To Cinema with Slavoj Žižek; Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow with Anselm Kiefer; a short in Hopper Stories (commissioned by Arte France and produced by Didier Jacob), inspired by the Edward Hopper painting First Row Orchestra, and now the remarkable documentary T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, starring Ralph Fiennes - Sophie Fiennes is one of the most discerning and astute filmmakers on the subjects she chooses to document.

Slavoj Žižek Cantor Film Center at NYU on October 14, 2015 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Slavoj Žižek's musings on our enjoyment of ideology, and the fact that stepping out of it hurts, were...

April is the cruelest month, but evidently not for one-man shows starring Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes.

The “Schindler’s List” and “Harry Potter” star’s sister Sophie Fiennes directs a film version of “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” the stage production he brought to London and throughout the UK back in 2021. During the lockdown, Fiennes committed to memory the “Wasteland” poet’s four epic poems written during World War II about man’s relationship to time and the divine. His performance, praised as “magnetic” by The Telegraph, was filmed at the end of his run.

IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the film version, opening April 28 at the IFC Center in New York City, courtesy of Kino Lorber. An expansion in theaters nationally will follow.

Fiennes’ filmed performance of Eliot’s masterworks is a co-production between The Bath Theatre Royal and Royal & Derngate, Northampton and Lone Star Productions, Amoeba Film and Lonely Dragon Films.

Lawrence Pitkethly, who produced and directed multiple documentary series shown on PBS and other broadcasters, died Feb. 24 at Albany Medical Center near his home in Hudson, N.Y., of cardiopulmonary arrest linked to complications from Parkinson’s. He was 79.

Pitkethly is best known for “American Cinema” (1995), a 10-part, $7 million series for PBS, BBC and Canal Plus covering U.S. filmmaking that he produced, co-wrote and co-directed. It examined film genres, the rise and fall of the studio system, the creation of stars and other aspects of American movies through interviews with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Sydney Pollack, George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Joel Coen and other major players. John Lithgow served as host; Matthew Modine, Kathleen Turner and Cliff Robertson narrated.

Earlier, Pitkethly co-wrote and co-directed “Voices and Visions” (1988), a 13-part series on American poets, which profiled artists like Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath.

Much...

Exclusive: Kino Lorber has acquired all North American distribution rights to Four Quartets, the film version of the Ralph Fiennes-starring stage adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem.

Directed by Sophie Fiennes, the film will get its U.S. premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival later this week followed by a theatrical release this spring.

One of the giants of modern literature, the poet, playwright, critic, and editor T.S. Eliot is best known as one of the central figures of the Modernist movement in poetry. Consisting of four poems published over a six-year period – Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, each titled after the landscape that inspired their writing – Four Quartets is widely considered Eliot’s masterpiece and the culminating achievement of his career as a poet, offering four interwoven meditations on the nature of time and the quest for spiritual enlightenment.

As much as we love Mystery Science Theater 3000, Red Letter Media, and The Flop House, it’s time that we face the truth: there’s really no such thing as a bad movie. Sure, there are movies we may personally dislike for one reason or another, but when we use phrases like “so bad it’s good” or “guilty pleasure,” we’re twisting ourselves into knots trying to say something quite simple: this movie makes me happy, regardless of its quality or what other people think.

The film-centric social media site Letterboxd has made that fact plain with a newly-released list of movies with low ratings and over 1000 likes. In other words, these are movies that users give one or two stars (out of five), and yet still like by pressing the “heart” icon.

The list of fifty includes many titles familiar to fans of the aforementioned shows and podcasts.

When film and stage director Sam Mendes first showed his script for “Empire of Light” to his regular collaborator, cinematographer Roger Deakins, the subject of how to shoot the personal, bittersweet story didn’t even come up, he says.

Rather, it was all about whether Deakins felt something for the central characters, Hillary (Olivia Colman) and Stephen (Micheal Ward), two lost souls brought together by a once-fabulous movie palace in an English seaside town, and whether he wanted to tell their story, Mendes says.

“For Roger,” he explains, speaking at the Camerimage International Film Festival in Torun, Poland, “It’s not like every movie has to be ‘1917’ or ‘Skyfall.’ He wants the movie to be good. It’s why he’s had such a fantastic career – he’s worked on so many different scales. It’s not led by the visual – it’s led by the soul of the film.

“Is it still Ok to call you my disco pickle?” By the time that Florence Shaw, Dry Cleaning’s conversational poet-in-residence, asks that question on “Hot Penny Day,” a tune that marks the halfway mark for the group’s second album, Stumpwork, the answer will invariably be yes. Any reluctant cukes likely would’ve moved on to another record several tracks earlier since the group makes such a divisive racket. As on Dry Cleaning’s lauded debut, New Long Leg, the quartet specializes in the audio equivalent of a double...

The Forest Maker (Der Waldmacher) director Volker Schlöndorff on meeting Alternative Nobel Prize winner Tony Rinaudo in Berlin, 2018: “Six weeks later I was already meeting him again in Bamako, Mali …”

The Forest Maker (Der Waldmacher) from director Volker Schlöndorff is an evermore important film essay on the decades-long work of Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo with African farmers and the community at-large. Idriss Diabaté from Ivory Coast, Senegal’s Alassane Diago, and Laurene Manaa Abdallah from Ghana are credited as co-directors and provide us with vital insights in their own individual sections.

“Nothing is lost” Rinaudo says and everything can be regrown again. Angela Winkler, star of Volker’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, lends her enchanting voice to the prologue, which recounts an old African legend about the cradle of mankind, as collected by Carl Einstein.

Volker Schlöndorff with Anne-Katrin Titze on Sebastião Salgado:...

The director talks about his intellectual, political and hilarious body of work, as a retrospective is staged with contributions from his former students Carol Morley and Jarvis Cocker

In 1969, John Smith, now one of Britain’s most revered artist film-makers, but then a foundation student at North East London Polytechnic, was sitting in a pub transfixed by a Perspex sign. “Suddenly I realised – ah! – ‘toilets’ was an anagram of Ts Eliot. I thought: I must make a film about this one day.” Thirty years later, he was in another pub, his local in Leytonstone. “It had such a scummy toilet. I must have thought: this is a real wasteland.” And so he made The Waste Land (1999), an off-kilter adaptation featuring gurgling cisterns, khazi lighting, and a tired, maybe-pissed punter incanting Eliot’s line “the nymphs have departed” as a camera pans across a condom machine. It’s modernism Pete-and-Dud style.

Phone Call from a Stranger: Buscemi Conducts a Conduit of Trauma in Striking One-Woman Show

Conjuring everything from Jean Cocteau to T.S. Eliot, Steve Buscemi unites with The Messenger (2009) scribe Alessandro Camon for his first narrative feature in fifteen years, the diametrically opposed The Listener. A one-woman grandstand for Tessa Thompson (also producing), the only actor onscreen guiding multiple phone conversations through miscellaneous vestiges of desperation during a routinely numbing night shift as a helpline volunteer, it’s a hypnotic exercise predicated by moments of suggested violence, trenchant melancholy and often poetic rumination on human resilience despite the odds.

A cast of notables provide the vocal counterparts for Thompson, some immediately recognizable and others not, but Buscemi presents conversational vignettes both soothing and upsetting.…...

Exclusive: Dominic West, who portrays British monarch in-waiting Prince Charles in the upcoming fifth season of The Crown, has told us that season six, which shoots from August, “will be as tumultuous as it gets”, because it will explore the tragic death of Princess Diana.

Season five is already in the can and will stream on Netflix later this year.

West, star of TV hits The Wire and The Affair, and recent movie Downton Abbey: A New Era, spoke to Deadline on Sunday night during a poetry reading at London’s Delaunay restaurant.

The soiree, which included the recital of three T.S. Eliot poems, was held for The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, an event established thirty years ago by Hart, the novelist, poet and a leading light of London’s literary and theater set until her death in 2011. Hart’s 1991 novel Damage was adapted for the screen by David Hare...

Exclusive: Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner Ralph Fiennes’ hit London stage production Four Quartets is getting a screen version directed by his sister Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema).

WestEnd Films is launching international sales on the project at the upcoming Cannes market.

Early in the pandemic, No Time to Die, Harry Potter and Schindler’s List star Fiennes set himself the challenge of committing T.S. Eliot’s classic poem Four Quartets to memory. The result was an acclaimed stage version which ran to packed houses across England and at the Harold Pinter Theater in London.

Written by Eliot in the shadow of the Second World War, the ever-relevant poem is a searching examination of who – and what – we are.

The idea for the film, which is currently in post, was developed alongside the rehearsals for the stage production. Martin Rosenbaum (The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology), Shani Hinton (Grace...

“Vikings” creator Michael Hirst takes on his childhood hero in “Billy the Kid.” Starring Tom Blyth as the legendary gunslinger, born Henry McCarty, the eight-episode series – co-produced by Epix Studios and MGM International Television Productions, in association with Viaplay – is currently screening at French TV festival Series Mania ahead of its April 24 premiere.

“It’s probably true that you shouldn’t meet your heroes; I have met a couple of mine and it didn’t go particularly well. But what I want more than anything else is for people to love this Billy,” Hirst tells Variety in Lille.

“Michael [Wright, president of Epix] allowed me to tell a story I wanted to tell, which doesn’t happen very often. This show is saying to people: ‘You think you know Billy the Kid because you have heard his name.’ You think he is a bit of a rough guy, a gunman and a killer.

Ramon and Silvan Zürcher deliver another droll, primary-colored wonder that never reveals its secrets — sexual, sinister, and otherwise — with “The Girl and the Spider.” Here, the brothers turn their camera from “The Strange Little Cat” (their previous film) to another creature that proves a point of connection for the residents of a Berlin apartment complex teeming with troubled people whose secret longings are rising to the surface. “The Girl and the Spider” won the Best Director prize at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, and after a hearty festival rollout that included Toronto and New York and inclusion on Cahiers du Cinema’s list of last year’s 10 best films, it’s finally coming to U.S. theaters. Exclusively on IndieWire, watch the trailer for the film below.

“The Girl and the Spider” opens with a Pdf floor plan of an apartment layout, and ends with a young woman perhaps vanishing. The...

While the structure is fairly standard and its overall aesthetic sometimes appears limited by scope, The Laureate is a solid, heady account of a particularly tumultuous time in the life of poet Robert Graves. Written and directed by William Nunez, the film is set in the mid-to-late 1920s as Graves (a brooding Tom Hughes) battles Ptsd after returning from war. In fact, his injuries proved so severe he was presumed dead and declared as such ahead of his return home. Despite a celebrated early career, he struggles to develop new work while withering in a cottage named World’s End. His wife Nancy (Laura Haddock) serves as his sole champion, a progressive voice in her home and larger community.

When Robert comes across the work of writer Laura Riding, he is compelled to reach out to her. Before long Nancy encourages her husband to invite Laura to come live with...

Dramatizing the lives of beloved writers is always problematic, because the act of writing itself is so inherently un-dramatic. Nonetheless, writer-director William Nunez’s “The Laureate” manages to eke . Well-acted, nicely crafted and a handsome period piece within modest means, this isn’t the most novel, memorable or intellectually deep enterprise of its type. But it will satisfy viewers looking for a slightly racier variation on “Downton Abbey” terrain. Gravitas Ventures is opening it on a couple dozen U.S. screens Jan. 21.

A framing device here is a notorious 1929 incident in which more than one participant in a domestic ménage leaped from a fourth-floor London window. After an ambiguous introduction of that event, as well as Graves’ serious Ptsd from WWI service, we rewind a bit earlier to the Oxfordshire home dubbed “World’s End” he shared with feminist painter-illustrator wife Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) and their young daughter Catherine...

The Imaginary Friend (1994).Unknown to many, Nico D'Alessandria (1941–2003) was one of the most important directors of independent Italian cinema. His stories of outcasts and ghost-like characters create a unique kind of poetic cinema, in which reality becomes a dream and the dream becomes reality. If one could sum up his work and personality in one word, that word would be independence. D’Alessandria’s absolute freedom of thought and action from both mainstream and art-house cinema proved to be too much not only for audiences, but also for producers, distributors and critics, leading to his work being frequently misunderstood if not entirely forgotten. Throughout his career he made only three feature films and his total dedication to his work took him so far as to mortgage his house.D’Alessandria’s films were all shot in the last two decades of the 20th century, but his story as an author and director begins much earlier.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has made no secret of his distain for Hollywood’s movie adaptation of his long-running musical “Cats.”

Though the cinematic version offered up the rarity of A-list talent like Taylor Swift, Judi Dench, Jennifer Hudson, Jason Derulo and James Corden pretending to be full-sized felines, “Cats” was widely panned and flopped at the box office in spectacular fashion. It was so “off-the-scale wrong” that Lloyd Webber, who composed the Tony-winning show, bought a therapy dog to cope with the trauma.

There was a singular bright spot in an otherwise catastrophic experience, the 73-year-old composer now admits — and that was writing the song “Beautiful Ghosts” with Swift. Lloyd Webber revisited the making of the cinematic disaster at Variety Legit: Return to Broadway presented by City National, an event that brought out stage stars such as Beanie Feldstein and Sharon D. Clarke, and directors like Jerry Zaks (“The Music Man...

“The Girl and the Spider” opens with a Pdf floor plan of an apartment layout, and ends with a young woman perhaps vanishing. The tantalizing mysteries in the latest film from the “Strange Little Cat” team of Ramon and Silvan Zürcher never quite reveal themselves in this story about two roommates torn asunder and to separate middle-class flats in Berlin. While the mad entropy of this chamber piece — filled with doppelgängers, women coming and going from rooms, as T.S. Eliot might say — will drive some viewers barking insane, .

One half of the splitting duo (and it’s never clear if she and her now-ex-roommate were ever quite romantic) is Mara (Henriette Confurius), whose odd tactile obsessions puncture the entire film and are immediately announced in the opening scene: she is oddly soothed by the sight and sound of a jackhammer. She hangs around in the wings, picking at a herpes blister,...

Sandra Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim makes academic history in Netflix’s The Chair premiere — but her achievement comes with some serious drawbacks, too.

In the six-episode comedy that dropped in full on Friday, Oh stars as the first female and woman of color to serve as chair of the English department at the fictional Pembroke University. In the series premiere, though, she doesn’t get much time to bask in that milestone; in fact, her actual office chair breaks and collapses about three seconds into her first day on the job, which, in hindsight, she should have taken as some sort of omen.

I’m beginning to think this Satan character holds a grudge, you know? He tries to take over the world with his kid Damien in The Omen (1976)? A bust. Teenage Damien takes another run at it in Damien Omen II (1978) and survives, but daddy is nowhere to be seen. Deadbeat. So here we are with The Final Conflict (1981), Damien grown up and preparing the throne for pa, but this time, God’s got his own present to deliver. “When does the Devil get a break?” and other burning questions are answered in this low-key yet overall effective finale. (If only temporary.)

Released by 20th Century Fox in North America in late March, The Final Conflict rolled out to the rest of the world shortly thereafter, and made its money back despite less than glowing reviews. And while some of the complaints are valid -- it doesn’t really have that...

If Wes Anderson hasn’t already been ordained as the king of twee, he certainly will be with The French Dispatch. There can never have been a film so entirely marked and dominated by preciously perfectionist compositions, arcane detail, meticulous camera moves, ornate décor, historical and design minutiae, styles of typography, precision diction, arch attitude, obsessive attention to cultural artifacts and loyalty to Oscar Wilde’s notion that art needn’t express anything other than itself. This is Anderson in full flower, one that only grows in a rarified altitude. As such, it will provoke the full range of reactions, from the euphoric among pure art devotees to outright rejection by, shall we say, those not on speaking terms with ultra-refined tastes.

World premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, this is a film about and for The New Yorker constituency. If Anthony Lane doesn’t like it, there...

Praised by Jonas Mekas as the "the most important North American avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s," Canadian filmmaker and critic R. Bruce Elder's work places images of nature and the body within rigorous theories on art, spirituality, and philosophy. Now playing for free on Nomadica (hosted by the Laba Libera Academy of Fine Arts) until May 30, his 1982 film Illuminated Texts is one chapter of his magnum opus, the film cycle The Book of All The Dead. In fact, Illuminated Texts only makes up three hours of the cycle's 46 hours, which consists of 20 films made between 1975 and 1994. But the questions that the encyclopedic film raises about image-making technology, forms of knowledge, and the discord of human history, are wholly realized. Illuminated Texts begins with a satirical opening involving a pushy professor who imposes false mathematical teachings onto his all-too-willing and dim-witted pupil. This forceful institutional pedagogy is challenged by the film's subsequent chapters,...