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Stars: Berik Aytzhanov, Anna Starchenko, Azamat Nigmanov, Yerken Gubashev, Nurbek Mukushev | Written and Directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Many people feel that the film Steppenwolf was based on Hermann Hesse’s novel ‘Steppenwolf,’ first published in German in 1927. But that would be a mistake to believe that. Because, according to director Adilkhan Yerzhanov, the film is nothing like the novel, except that it examines the dichotomy between the spiritual and animalistic natures in man.

Over the years, Arrow Video have distributed many foreign language films to English-speaking audiences. This way we can experience the amazing filmmakers from around the world. Now Steppenwolf gets its turn to shine on Blu-ray!

Tamara (Anna Starchenko), a young lady consumed by trauma, searches for her missing son, Timka, in a small town dominated by riots and violence. In a desperate attempt to get him back, she teams up with an amoral former police investigator (Berik Aitzhanov...

Are you ready for the return of the king? It's been 13 years since Francis Ford Coppola helmed a feature film — that would be 2011's weird horror flick "Twixt" — and now he's back in the director's chair to realize his dream project. In the 1980s, Coppola started writing "Megalopolis," an epic, sprawling drama that could very well be his biggest movie ever. He would tinker with the work over the years and finally start shooting second unit footage in 2001.

And then disaster struck, literally. The film's script dealt with the aftermath of a disaster that befalls New York City, and just as Coppola was gearing up to get "Megalopolis" off the ground, the 9/11 attacks changed everything. Realizing that no one at the time would be in the mood to watch a post-disaster movie set in New York, Coppola shelved the project — but he never forgot about it.

Now, the seemingly impossible...

There is a certain inevitability about a film inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel “Steppenwolf,” first published in German in 1927, and two famous Westerns of the 1950s — John Ford’s “The Searchers,” and Howard Hawks’ “Red River.” The film, also called “Steppenwolf,” has its world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Big Screen Competition section. Its teaser debuts on Variety exclusively (below).

In acclaimed Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s latest film, two characters who are essentially loners existing outside of the usual moral boundaries of the world come together united in a common task: to save a small boy who has gone missing.

Yerzhanov takes universal themes from Hesse’s novel and the later Hollywood Westerns, to plumb the depths of where man’s spirituality disappears into the depths of his animal origins. To explore what he calls a story of “two different heroes, two opposing characters, who...

Italian multi-hyphenate Vera Gemma, who is the daughter of iconic Spaghetti Western star Giuliano Gemma, grew up in the shadow of her father’s fame. But in “Vera” — Austria’s candidate for the best international feature Oscar, directed by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel — she’s the one in the spotlight.

The moving but never maudlin portrait of the burden of being born into celebrity launched from the 2022 Venice Film Festival’s cutting-edge Horizons section, where it had the rare distinction of winning awards for both best director and actress before going on to garner more praise on the fest circuit.

Below, Gemma speaks to Variety about how the film mirrors her real life, navigating her father’s legacy and making carbonara for Quentin Tarantino.

How did this film about you originate?

We met while they were making a doc titled “Mister Universo” about an animal tamer and I was...

On January 1, 2022, A.A. Milne's 1926 children's novel "Winnie-the-Pooh" lapsed into the public domain. Filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield immediately took the opportunity to turn the notoriously gentle fable about a talking stuffed bear into a brutal, gory, low-budget horror movie. In his film, the young Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) has returned to his childhood home in the 100-Acre Wood after growing up. Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and Piglet (Chris Cordell), in his absence, were forced to eat Eeyore and grew into human-hating, murderous behemoths. The two creatures spend the bulk of the movie stalking around a remote vacation home murdering its tenants. 

The film is just as stupid as it sounds, but its premise was wild enough that crowds gathered out of curiosity. Made for a mere $100,000, "Blood and Honey" grossed $5.2 million worldwide. Not too shabby for a cheap, crude horror flick. In its opening weekend, the film garnered just enough excitement...

There must have been something in the air at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where two of the top prizes went to Belgian films about the impossible standards set up by masculinity leading to tragedy. Lukas Dhont’s Close, which centers on the end of the friendship between two teenagers over a harrowing school year, won the Grand Prix. The Jury Prize went to Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains, which concerns the end of a friendship between two men who meet as boys during a summer that marks them for the rest of their lives.

Whatever its pictorial beauty, often significant, this adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s bestseller exemplifies my distaste for films that depict toxic masculinity without questioning it, or even suggesting there is nothing heroic or brave about refusing to leave behind damaging practices as long as they perpetuate some limited idea of what constitutes manhood.

Producers Eric Kopeloff and Philip Schulz-Deyle have optioned Hermann Hesse’s “Demian” and plan to adapt the novel into a feature film. Nick Kreiss (“Afraid”) has penned a screenplay with cinematographer Andre Lascaris (“About Alex”) and under the supervision of the Hesse estate.

The book was a bestseller in the U.S. and its story of spiritual enlightenment and self-discovery resonated first with readers in the post-World War I period and then later with members of the American counterculture of the 1960s, who embraced the novel yet again. It found favor with the likes of Timothy Leary and Colin Wilson, who became enthusiastic boosters of the Hesse canon. Kopeloff thinks the time is ripe for a new generation to rediscover “Demian.”

“We’re living in a digital age, where a lot of our lives are dictated by social media,” he says. “There’s an externalization of identity. This story is a fresh contrast.

Ramin Bahrani, Oscar-nominated writer/director of The White Tiger, discusses a few of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The White Tiger (2021)

Man Push Cart (2005)

Chop Shop (2007)

99 Homes (2015)

The Boys From Fengkuei (1983)

The Time To Live And The Time To Die (1985)

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976)

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

La Terra Trema (1948)

Umberto D (1952)

Where Is The Friend’s Home? (1987)

Nomadland (2020)

The Runner (1984)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989)

A Moment Of Innocence a.k.a. Bread And Flower Pot (1996)

The House Is Black (1963)

The Conversation (1974)

Mean Streets (1973)

Nashville (1975)

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972)

The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Paris, Texas (1984)

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Vagabond (1985)

Luzzu (2021)

Bait (2019)

Sweet Sixteen (2002)

Abigail’s Party (1977)

Meantime (1983)

Fish Tank (2009)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Malcolm X (1992)

Nothing But A Man (1964)

Goodbye Solo (2008)

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)

Dekalog (1989)

The Double Life Of Veronique...

What better way to get your kids to focus on their homework than by invading their social media space? Laura Dern figured that out by dropping in on her 15-year-old daughter Jaya Harper's TikTok account. On Sept. 15, Harper—whose dad is Dern's ex, Ben Harper—posted a short video to the platform of her mom reading a passage from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. "Let's spend our time making a TikTok. You want to make a TikTok? I've got an idea. Let's transform TikTok since I'm homeschooling you," the Big Little Lies star, who joins countless parents teaching from home amid the coronavirus pandemic, said while staring into the camera. "Let's read our homework...

Stefan Ruzowitzky, director of the Oscar-winning “The Counterfeiters,” and “The Grudge” screenwriter Stephen Susco have boarded “Alone,” a remake of the 2007 supernatural Thai thriller by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom.

The new film follows conjoined twin sisters from an Asian family in Boston whose loving relationship is tested when one of them befriends a boy, leading to her demand for a surgical separation from her sibling. During the operation, the forsaken sister dies. Years later, the deceased girl’s vengeful ghost returns to haunt her twin.

Former 20th Century Fox exec Paul Higginson and Alexander van Dülmen and Stephan Wagner of Berlin-based Carte Blanche Intl. are producing the film. Budgeted at between $5 million and $10 million, “Alone” is set for a targeted 2021 Stateside shoot on the East Coast as a U.S.-European co-production.

Van Dülmen said he was a big fan of the original film and also acquired distribution rights...

The film is directed by Swiss duo Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond.

In advance of the Berlinale, German powerhouse Beta Cinema has snapped up international rights to Berlinale competition entry My Little Sister (Schwesterlein) from Swiss director duo Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond.

My Little Sister stars in Silver Bear winner Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger (Personal Shopper). Also in the cast is Marthe Keller.

The film is produced by Ruth Waldburger’s Vega Film in co-production with Rts, Srg/Ssr, and Arte. It is the latest venture from Swiss director-duo Chuat and Reymond (The Little Bedroom), who co-directed all...

Period crime thriller from Oscar-winner Stefan Ruzowitzky co-stars Murathan Muslu.

Beta Cinema has picked up international sales on Oscar-winning Stefan Ruzowitzky’s next feature Hinterland to star Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) and Murathan Muslu.

Principal photography is set to take place in autumn on the period crime thriller co-written by Ruzowitzky with Robert Buchschwenter and Hanno Pinter. The story takes place in Vienna at the beginning of the 1920s as a former detective returns home after seven years in a Russian PoW camp and joins forces with a forensic specialist on a murder investigation.

Square One Entertainment has picked up...

A major glossy magazine that used to be devoted largely to music -- but long ago fell under the spell of Hollywood celebrity -- still continues to cover music, specializing in listicles that seem designed mainly to provoke ire in those who care more about music than does said magazine (named after a classic blues song, in case you can't guess without a hint). This summer it unleashed a list of songs that, with that aging publication's ironically weak sense of history, managed to overlook the vast majority of the history of song. To put it bluntly, if you're claiming to discuss the best songs ever written and you don't even mention Franz Schubert, you're an ignoramus. My ire over this blinkered attitude towards music history festered for months, so I finally decided to do something about it by writing about some of the timeless songs omitted in the aforementioned myopic listicle.

As Saint Jerome noted so wisely, "Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?"

Accordingly, anyone who's been bombarded with the TV ads for Josh Trank's Fantastic Four shouldn't be chastised for sprinting away from any multiplex screening of this latest Marvel concoction. Those trailers showcase a film lacking in verbal and visual wit, actors seemingly bereft of sparkle, and disfigured creatures that wouldn't appear out of place in a Toho production of the 1950s (e.g. Half Human in 1958; Rodan in 1957). While none of those early impressions are that wide off the mark, the first 45 minutes or so of this effort, nonetheless, are promising.

Before we go down that path, let's just note for those familiar with Trank's debut feature, the pretty terrific Chronicle (2012), Fantastic Four will seem like a bloated, less imaginative revamp in comparison.

Exclusive: Oscar-winning Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) is to direct Hermann Hesse’s 1930 international bestseller and cult novel Narcissus and Goldmund.

Producers Helge Sasse (Tempest Film) and Christoph Müller (Mythos Film) are in Cannes to meet potential partners for the international project which is set to have a double-digit million Euros budget.

Ruzowitzky, who has just completed shooting the Us thriller Patient Zero in London, is also writing the screenplay for the story with a setting in the late Middle Ages.

Principal photography is set to begin in late summer 2016.

Other novels by Hesse such as Siddharta, Steppenwolf and Demian were adapted by filmmakers in the past for the cinema, with German broadcaster Ard tackling his 1909 novella Die Heimkehr in 2011.

Narcissus and Goldmund is one of the first projects being planned by former Senator Entertainment CEO Helge Sasse at his new production outfit Tempest Film which he launched last summer with Solveig Fina.

Christoph Müller’s Berlin-based...

Jimmy Fallon has become an expert at convincing celebrities to do weird things with him, It is unclear whether it took any persuasion to get Jared Leto to participate in the bit they performed last night — and whether Leto thought it was a bit at all. Also read: What's Next for Acting Oscar Winners Cate Blanchett, Lupita Nyong'o, Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto? Remember, during Leto's successful awards season campaign last year, the world learned that the former teen heartthrob has quite the spiritual and philosophical side to him. He grew up on a hippie commune, loves the book “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse,...

Joanna Hogg's H in Exhibition, Liam Gillick, with Anne-Katrin Titze at Dolce & Gabbana: "Before the film happened, I've been thinking a lot about the problem of cinema. That's when the phone rang."

I met up for coffee with the man who plays H in Joanna Hogg's Exhibition, to talk about his work as a first time actor, Cary Grant improvising for Leo McCarey with Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, Alain Delon with Maurice Ronet interpreting Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley in Purple Noon, and his newfound appreciation for the Grudge Match antics between Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone. Liam Gillick talked parallel lives, what cinema means to contemporary artists, and how it felt to become material. Robert Bresson and Hermann Hesse were assigned as homework by Hogg to prepare him for his role opposite Viv Albertine's D in Exhibition.

Liam had just arrived...

Billy Corgan treated Chicagoans to an eight-hour electronic jam on the theme of Siddhartha on Friday. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman held the performance, based on Herman Hesse's 1922 existentialist novella about a young man's quest for self-discovery, at his café, Madame ZuZu's Tea Shop and Art Studio in Highland Park. 

Corgan announced the free event through Facebook last week. The performance, he said, "will be centered around an ambient/musical interpretation of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha; built by modular synthesis, on the fly. Readings of the text to go hand...

Greetings from the apocalypse! That may be this column's reassuring greeting each week, but damn if it hasn't proved prescient as all get-out. It seems like we can't go a week this summer without at least one movie where extinction-level events occur with pornographic intensity ("Man of Steel," "This is the End," "After Earth," the upcoming "Pacific Rim" and "The World's End"). Not that I'm complaining. Bring on the rubble, Brad Pitt!

Friday, June 21

Pow! In Theaters

Brad Pitt, big-budget zombie movie. Those are two phrases you thought you'd never hear put together by anyone not on mescaline, but "World War Z" is upon us and we must act for the preservation of our species! Pitt plays an all-purpose Un investigator/ badass named Gerry Lane who is dispatched to find patient zero in a zombie plague scorching the Earth in an all-encompassing way. Will the human race survive? Will...

Get ready for a new cinematic trope: Boy loses religion. Boy goes to weirdo college, sleeps beside a lesbian, and starts drinking beer. Boy regains religion after sliding a huge condom over a church steeple and being elected the campus Pope. Boy begins a relationship with a religious girl who enjoys traipsing among the impoverished in India.

God. No God. Ale. Lesbian. Condom. God. Gets girl.

Imagine Animal House starring Rick Santorum. No, make that Mitt Romney. No, that's unfair. How about Donny Osmond?

Based on what I've been told is an autobiographical, 1.5 million-copy bestseller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller, the book has been adapted for the screen with lots of love -- and less skill -- by Miller, Ben Pearson, and director Steve Taylor.

What's significant here is that much of the budget for the film was raised by the book's fans on Kickstarter.

Having written the hackles-raising The Gospel According To Jesus Christ, Portuguese poet, journalist, and novelist José Saramago was well experienced in humanizing the heavenly. Before his death in 2010, the Nobel-laureate aimed higher still with Cain, a slim, self-satisfied book that pits the supposed original murderer against the rightful title-bearer: God. The skepticism once applied to the New Testament is here applied to the Old, and though re-contextualizing the story of Cain and Abel isn’t a new idea—Hermann Hesse’s Demian also comes to mind—Saramago’s charming pugnacity and probing curiosity kick up some fresh dust. That ...

As the publisher's website explains, New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914-1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful."

Few American publishers have been more useful to the cause of poetry. Yes, Nd has published much great prose as well, both original (notably a huge number of Henry Miller essay collections), and in translation (Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the success of which funded many other projects; Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea) or reprinted/collected (Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories), but poetry -- less often supported by the major presses, especially early in a poet’s career -- is where the press has made its biggest impact.

Storytellers is an ongoing attempt to tease out bits of history or literature that would make damned good films. Because if we throw enough ideas out there, Hollywood might accidentally make something good.

"At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the past nine years and ten months of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States." -Joshua Norton

After a decade of business missteps left him destitute, on September 17, 1859, San Francisco resident Joshua Norton issued a proclamation in San Francisco newspapers (who printed it as a joke) that he was declaring himself the emperor of the United States, ordering the armed forces to immediately dissolve Congress, and for the representatives of the various states to meet at the San Francisco music hall for...

The Oscar-nominated screenwriter who adapted James Joyce's Ulysses for the big screen has died, aged 72.

Fred Haines lost his battle with lung cancer at his home in Venice, California on 4 May.

Haines' controversial Ulysses, which featured a cast full of Irish actors, was banned in Ireland until 2000, but, despite mixed reviews, it earned the screenwriter an Oscar nod.

Haines also adapted and directed Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which became a cult success in the mid 1970s.

• Quick Links > Bent Hamer > Factotum> Matt Dillon> Lili TaylorThere is a mark of pride among artists, writers in particular, who could fill multiple volumes with their employment histories. I remember reading a novel by a sci-fi/fantasy/pulp author named Steve Perry (The Man Who Never Missed -- highly recommended, think Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha in outer space with guns and kung-fu), who, in the bio at the end of one his novels listed the variety of jobs he’d held previous to becoming a professional writer. At least a dozen were listed, everything from hospital gift show cashier to martial arts instructor. C.J. Henderson, a New York based hard-boiled horror author and film critic (and an acquaintance of mine), lists nearly thirty different jobs he’s held on the bio section of his website. The thing about writing is that it usually doesn’t pay very well,

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