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Idris Elba’s Lagos-set work Dust to Dreams, starring music artist Seal, will premiere in the Toronto International Film Festival’s TIFF Shorts program, the lineup of which was unveiled Thursday.

Seal is joined by Nollywood stars Nse Ukpe-Etim, Eku Edewor, Atlanta Bridget Johnson and Constance Olatunde in the drama set against a nightclub on the cusp of a new era as its dying female owner sets a succession plan in motion.

Luther and Hijack star Elba made his directorial debut on the 2018 movie Yardie.

The year’s edition of TIFF Shorts will showcase 48 short films, representing 28 countries, across seven presentations, including Strange Cuts, the Midnight Madness-adjacent strand introduced in 2024.

Further program highlights include the world premieres of Patrick Xavier Bresnan and Ivete Lucas’ The Contestant, featuring David Hasselhoff, and Disc by Cannes alum Blake Winston Rice (Tea), co-written with and starring Victoria Ratermanis and Jim Cummings.

Joecar Hanna’s Talk Me,...

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has unveiled the lineup for its 2025 Short Cuts programme, celebrating the 50th edition of TIFF with a bold collection of 48 short films from 28 countries, including 20 Canadian works. From world premieres led by A-list talent to daring experimental shorts, this year’s selection reflects TIFF’s increasingly global curatorial reach.

Headlining the announcement are three major world premieres: "Dust to Dreams" by Idris Elba, "The Contestant" from Patrick Xavier Bresnan and Ivete Lucas (The Passing), featuring David Hasselhoff, and "Disc" by Cannes alum Blake Winston Rice, co-written by and starring Victoria Ratermanis and Jim Cummings.

Joecar Hanna’s "Talk Me," executive produced by Spike Lee, makes its North American premiere, as does "The Non-Actor" starring Maya Hawke and Victoria Pedretti. The documentary "All the Empty Rooms" from Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Joshua Seftel, executive produced by Adam McKay, will have its international premiere.

For the first time,...

Rome’s Villa Pamphili Park with its ornate flowerbeds, lawns and walkways is the Italian capital’s largest landscaped garden and a place of respite for the local population as temperatures soar in the summer.

The popular jogging, dog-walking and picnicking spot became a crime scene June 7 when a baby girl’s body was discovered by a hedge, followed by that of a young woman a few hours later in another part of the park.

Mystery swirled around their identities. Some media outlets suggested the woman was a Ukrainian refugee, while others ran reports that she was a hacker, who hailed either from Russia or Ireland.

A week later, a 46-year-old U.S. man, described as a film producer and director named Rexal Ford, was arrested on the Greek island of Skiathos on suspicion of being the killer, in an operation involving cooperation between the Italian and Greek police forces as well as the FBI.

Toni Erdmann director Maren Ade will preside over the jury for short films and the La Cinef prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24).

Also joining the jury are King Richard filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green, French actress, singer and songwriter Camélia Jordana, Spanish executive José María Prado, and Croatian filmmaker Nebojša Slijepčević.

They will judge 11 titles competing for the short film prize and 16 student films in the La Cinef selection.

The short film Palme d’or will be handed out at the festival’s closing ceremony on Saturday, May 24. The La Cinef winners will be crowned at...

German director, screenwriter and producer Maren Ade, who made waves at Cannes in 2016 with father-daughter drama Toni Erdmann, has been announced as the president of the Cannes Film Festival’s short film and student film competitions.

She will be joined by director, screenwriter and producer Reinaldo Marcus Green, actress, singer and songwriter Camélia Jordana, producer, photographer and former Director of the Filmoteca Española José María Prado and director and screenwriter Nebojša Slijepčević.

They will decide the short film Palme d’or and the three prizes for the Cinef student film competition.

Eleven short films, selected from 4 781 submissions, are in running for the short film Palme d’Or, spanning nine fiction works and two animated shorts. Five of the contenders are directed by women.

The Short Films Competition

Arguments In Favor Of Love (Disputes En Faveur De L’Amour)

Gabriel Abrantes

Ali

Adnan Al Rajeev

I’M Glad You’Re Dead...

German director, writer and producer Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann, Everyone Else) will preside over this year’s Cannes short film competition jury, as well as the jury for the La Cinef lineup of student films.

Joining Ade on jury duty are King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green, French singer-songwriter Camélia Jordana, Croatian writer-director Nebojša Slijepčević (The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent), and José María Prado, the former director of Filmoteca Española. Together they will award the Short Film Palme d’Or and the three La Cinef prizes.

Cannes on Friday announced the 11 short films and 16 La Cinef student works picked for its 2025 selection. The festival said more than 4,700 shorts were submitted this year.

Ade will hand out the short film Palme d’Or on Saturday, May 24 at the closing ceremony for the 78th Cannes film festival.

The full short film lineup is below:

Short Films Competition

Agapito, dirs. Arvin Belarmino,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSGrand Tour.SAG-AFTRA is on strike against ten major video-game companies after two years of contract negotiations, on which the union has said it remains “far apart” from management on “fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies.”Teamsters Local 399 and other Hollywood Basic Crafts unions have ratified their new contract, securing 7% wage increases for about 8,000 workers.The New York Film Festival (September 27–October 14) has announced its Main Slate selections, including Cannes and Berlinale favorites All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia), Dahomey (Mati Diop), Anora (Sean Baker), and Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes).After a report that David Lynch would likely never direct again due to debilitating emphysema,...

The newly-released horror movie Amelia's Children has impacted fans months after its release thanks to its crazy ending.

Written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes, Amelia's Children delivers a cautionary tale about knowing too much about one's history as a mild-mannered New Yorker takes a DNA test after his girlfriend asks for it.

Exploring creepy themes like abduction along with a hint of supernatural plot devices, the story does not take long to get scary as a lost family is found and ultimately tested.

Read full article on The Direct.

Now available on DVD and On Demand from Magnet / Magnolia, we have an exclusive clip from Amelia's Children that you can watch right now!

"Amelia’S Children is a story of family. When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret."

Written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes, the film stars Brigette Lundy-Paine and Carloto Cotta. For those looking to watch On Demand, it's available on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, Google Play, DirecTV, and more.

The post Watch an Exclusive Clip from Amelia’S Children appeared first on Daily Dead.

Now in theaters and VOD, thanks to Magnet Releasing, we have an exclusive clip from Amelia's Children that you can watch right now!

"When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret."

Written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes, Amelia's Children stars Brigette Lundy-Paine, Alba Baptista, and Carloto Cotta.

The post Watch an Exclusive Clip from Amelia’S Children appeared first on Daily Dead.

Two well-reviewed indies are taking a bow in limited release in the shadow of Dune, A24’s Problemista by Julio Torres, and Shayda from Sony Pictures Classics, the feature debut of Noora Niasari.

Torres, the comedian, actor and writer, in his directorial debut, stars with Tilda Swinton as Problemista gets its release at last after being bumped from August due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. He also penned the screenplay, and produced alongside Fruit Tree’s Dave McCary, Ali Herting and Emma Stone. Premiered at SXSW last year, see Deadline review, and sits at 91% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

This surreal comedy adventure amid the treacherous worlds of New York City and the U.S. Immigration system follows Torres’ Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador trying to land a spot at Hasbro’s incubator program. When he’s fired from the cryogenic center where he tends...

Family isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be in Amelia’s Children, the brand new supernatural horror movie from Magnet Releasing and writer/director/producer Gabriel Abrantes.

Amelia’s Children is Now Playing in select theaters, and it’s also available on VOD outlets beginning today. Whet your appetite with an exclusive clip from the film below.

The clip invites you to meet mother, and you can also watch the official trailer underneath.

In Amelia’s Children, a young man’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal. Full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother, he’s eager to will learn about who he is and where he comes from.

But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret.

The horror film stars Brigette Lundy-Paine,...

Amelia's Children is a generic horror thriller that fails to offer much that is unique or compelling. The movie's aesthetic lacks the ability to evoke emotion, resorting to safe, predictable visual storytelling. The movie's greatest strength is its cast, particularly lead actor Brigette Lundy-Paine.

Amelia's Children boasts a simple setup, one that will likely feel familiar to horror fans. Think 2022's The Invitation, but with Portuguese witchcraft legends as the center of the newfound family's issues instead of vampirism. The movie follows Ed (Carloto Cotta), a thirty-something man who has been trying to learn about his birth family. After his girlfriend Ryley (Brigette Lundy-Paine) gets him an ancestry kit for his birthday, they travel to Portugal to meet his long-lost twin brother Manuel (also Cotta) and their mother Amelia (played in the present by Anabela Moreira and in flashbacks by Alba Baptista).

5/10

Amelia's Children is a horror-thriller film directed by...

A gloriously demented fairy tale about a guileless soccer phenom who reacts to his World Cup loss by adopting a Mozambican who turns out to be an adult lesbian spy in disguise, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s “Diamantino” is one of the most original movies of the 21st century. “Amelia’s Children,” which Abrantes has directed on his own, is not. And yet, this comparatively straightforward psychological horror movie — which adheres to genre convention whenever it can, and has even fewer surprises in store than its premise would seem to suggest — is still playful and perverse enough in its details to indicate a unique talent behind the camera.

Case in point: “Attractive people in a creepy house” might be the single most basic setup a horror movie could possibly have, but Abrantes’ script comes up with a novel way of putting those pieces in place. In a way, “Amelia’s Children...

A Portuguese production, the psychological thriller horror movie Amelia’s Children had its premiere at the MOTELx Lisbon Horror Film Festival last year, then received a theatrical release in Portugal last month. Now Magnolia Pictures is gearing up to give the film a VOD and limited theatrical release in the US on March 1st – and with that date just one month away, we’ve got a trailer for Amelia’s Children embedded above.

Written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes, who previously made the comedy Diamantino with Daniel Schmidt, the film has the following synopsis: When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward...

Family isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be in the haunting new trailer and poster that debuted today for Amelia’s Children, a supernatural horror film from writer/director/producer Gabriel Abrantes.

Magnet Releasing will release the psychological, ghostly horror movie in theaters and on VOD on March 1, 2024.

In Amelia’s Children: “When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret.”

The horror film stars Brigette Lundy-Paine, Alba Baptista, and Carloto Cotta.

All three actors have a background in horror, with Brigette Lundy-Paine recently starring in...

More than 200 international filmmakers have rallied in support of ousted Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian, pledging their names to an open letter imploring the cultural organization to keep the artist director in place. Among the first signatories were Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Joanna Hogg, “Corsage” director Marie Kreutzer, Andrew Ross Perry, and Olivier Assayas. Over the course of the day on Wednesday, another 130 directors joined them, the list swelling to include M. Night Shyamalan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tilda Swinton, and Claire Denis. 260 filmmakers have now signed the open letter.

“We, a diverse group of filmmakers from all over the world, who have deep respect for Berlin International Film Festival as a place for great cinema of all kinds, protest the harmful, unprofessional, and immoral behavior of state minister Claudia Roth in forcing the esteemed Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian to step down despite promises to prolong his contract,” says the letter.

Chatrian...

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: Sad Puppy-Seeing Soccer Himbo Seeks Refugee Son

For lovers of soccer and movies about hot guys being dumb, it’s been the highest of highs and the lowest of lows lately.

“Barbie” became a bona fide cultural phenomenon by giving us something we never knew we needed: Ryan Gosling running around as a sexy Beach professional who does a shockingly decent Rob Thomas impression despite having nothing going on behind his eyes. The performance was a reminder that men are just as capable of playing the ditzy sidekick as...

I honestly never expected Steven Spielberg in a Criterion Channel series––certainly not one that pairs him with Kogonada, anime, and Johnny Mnemonic––but so’s the power of artificial intelligence. Perhaps his greatest film (at this point I don’t need to tell you the title) plays with After Yang, Ghost in the Shell, and pre-Matrix Keanu in July’s aptly titled “AI” boasting also Spike Jonze’s Her, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Computer Chess. Much more analog is a British Noir collection obviously carrying the likes of Odd Man Out, Night and the City, and The Small Back Room, further filled by Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity and Basil Dearden’s It Always Rains on Sunday. (No two ways about it: these movies have great titles.) An Elvis retrospective brings six features, and the consensus best (Don Siegel’s Flaming Star) comes September 1.

While Isabella Rossellini...

In May, the Cannes Film Festival injects a jolt of international cinema into year ahead, and expectations are even greater than usual this time around. In 2022, Cannes was the starting point for everything from future commercial hits “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Elvis” to arthouse successes like “Decision to Leave” and “Eo.” With less pandemic-era stagnation on productions, there are more newly finished (or almost finished) Cannes hopefuls in the mix than anytime in recent memory.

Some of the bigger ones have been widely reported: We already know that Martin Scorsese’s sprawling Osage Nation crime drama “Killers of the Flower Moon” will bring the revered director back to the festival with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in tow, while “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is poised to premiere in an out-of-competition slot 15 years after the last entry did the same thing. There’s also a lot of...

The independent film business is again showing signs of rude health as the global film industry struggles to recover post-pandemic. Sundance is often taken as the pace-setter, and distribution deals were plentiful this year, with seven- and eight-figure sales for the likes of Theater Camp (to Searchlight for an estimated 8 million), Flora and Son (Apple TV+, 20 million) and Fair Play (Netflix, 20 million), just the biggest of around a dozen 2023 Park City pickups. But Berlin’s European Film Market will be the industry’s true acid test.

“Sundance is more U.S.-focused in general,” says Alice Laffillé, vp sales at FilmNation, which did the Apple TV+ deal for Flora and Son. “There are always some big, splashy deals with streamers and U.S. buyers like Neon, A24 or Magnolia. Berlin is the first real international market, where we see where things stand.”

Berlin deals, which often involve the entire world,...

Exclusive: Wild Bunch International (Wbi) has boarded sales on buzzy Portuguese director, artist and producer Gabriel Abrantes’ upcoming English-language feature Amelia’s Children.

The film is among half a dozen new titles being launched by Wbi at the EFM, alongside a raft of previously announced upcoming films, including Cannes hopefuls such as Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Monster.

The company is also handling Berlinale Competition selections, Philippe Garrel’s The Plough and Makoto Shinkai’s hotly awaited anime Suzume, and the Panorama title Heroic, which world premiered at Sundance.

Abrante’s psychological thriller Amelia’s Children is his solo feature debut and his first feature since his 2018 Cannes Critics’ Week winner Diamantino (co-directed with Daniel Schmidt).

The film reunites him with its star Carloto Cotta. Other key cast members are Brigette Lundy-Paine (Atypical) and Alba Baptiste (Warrior Nun).

Cotta plays a man whose search for his biological family leads him and his...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month, including a series on first films featuring David Cronenberg’s Stereo, Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Identification Marks: None, Fatih Akın’s Short Sharp Shock, Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow, and, with Mubi’s theatrical release of her new film Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s Summer 1993.

Additional highlights include Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight starring Vicky Krieps, Sundance favorites with films from Sean Baker, Lynn Shelton, Tom Noonan, and Andrew Bujalski, plus works from Nicolas Roeg, Claude Chabrol, and Aftersun director Charlotte Wells.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

January 1 – Stereo, directed by David Cronenberg | First Films First

January 2 – Short Sharp Shock, directed by Fatih Akın | First Films First

January 3 – River of Grass, directed by Kelly Reichardt | First Films First

January 4 – Identification Marks: None, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski | First Films...

Holidays loom, but don’t fear TBS marathons of A Christmas Story. If, like me, you once enacted some good and let studio classics stream on Criterion during family Christmas, you know the trip home will be easier with December’s additions. (People at Criterion: please don’t report me for logging into multiple devices.) As family arrives, drinks are downed, and questions about what you’ve been up to are stumbled through it’ll be nice to stream their “Screwball Comedy Classics” series—25 titles meeting some deep cuts (10 via Venmo if you’ve recently watched It Happens Every Spring).

Personally I’m most excited about the 11 movies in “Snow Westerns,” going as far back as The Secret of Convict Lake, as recently as Ravenous, with the likes of Wellman, Peckinpah, and Corbucci in-between. I personally cannot stand soccer but I appreciate the World Cup giving occasion for a series...

Critics Week (or La Semaine de la Critique), the selection dedicated to first and second films running alongside the Cannes Film Festival, will boast a jury presided over by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (“The Man who Sold his Skin”).

Ben Hania has directed four features, including “Beauty and the Dogs” which competed in Un Certain Regard in 2017, and “The Man who Sold his Skin” which played at Venice in 2020 and was the first Tunisian film nominated for the Oscars’ international feature film race.

The jury of the 61st edition will be completed by French-Greek actress and director Ariane Labed, Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson (“Woman at War”), Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie, and South Korean journalist and Busan Festival’s topper Huh Moon yung.

Four prizes will be handed out by Ben Hania’s jury, the La Semaine de la Critique Grand Prize, the French Touch Prize of the Jury, the...

Next month’s lineup at The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, featuring no shortage of excellent offerings. Leading the pack is a massive, 20-film retrospective dedicated to John Huston, featuring a mix of greatest and lesser-appreciated works, including Fat City, The Dead, Wise Blood, The Man Who Would Be King, and Key Largo. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre will join the series on October 1.)

Also in the lineup is series on the works of Budd Boetticher (specifically his Randolph Scott-starring Ranown westerns), Ephraim Asili, Josephine Baker, Nikos Papatakis, Jean Harlow, Lee Isaac Chung (pre-Minari), Mani Kaul, and Michelle Parkerson.

The sparkling new restoration of La Piscine will also debut, along with Amores perros, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, Cate Shortland’s Lore, both Oxhide films, Moonstruck, and much more.

See the full list of August titles below and more on The Criterion Channel.

Abigail Harm,...

The Leopards of Tomorrow section marks its 30th anniversary this year.

The Locarno Film Festival will showcase the shorts component of its Leopards of Tomorrow (Pardi di Domani) programme online as part of the 2020 digital iteration.

The festival was forced to cancel its physical 73rd edition which had been due to take place from August 5-15 in Switzerland due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is instead running a series of initiatives under the banner of ‘Locarno 2020 - For the Future of Films’, aimed at continuing its work and support for the independent cinema industry.

The Leopards of Tomorrow section, which...

While we aim to discuss a wide breadth of films each year, few things give us more pleasure than the arrival of bold, new voices. It’s why we venture to festivals and pore over a variety of different features that might bring to light some emerging talent. This year was an especially notable time for new directors making their stamp, and we’re highlighting the handful of 2019 debuts that most impressed us.

Below, one can check out a list spanning a variety of different genres and many are available to stream here. In years to come, take note as these helmers (hopefully) ascend.

Aniara (Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja)

The title shares its name with a city-size spacecraft ferrying humans from Earth to Mars in barely three weeks. It’s a routine trip that’s never run into problems with many passengers already having family on the red planet to greet them upon arrival.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Before we get to our weekly streaming picks, check out our annual feature: Where to Stream the Best Films of 2019.

Ad Astra (James Gray)

With Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and The Irishman, it’s been a strong year for big-budget, auteur-driven cinema, but my pick for the best of the bunch in that regard is James Gray’s Brad Pitt-led adventure Ad Astra. A space epic of immense scale that still contains a personal, beating heart, if you didn’t get a chance to experience this on the biggest screen possible, it’s now available to stream. For more, listen to our podcast discussion.

Other winners include ’Ghost Tropic’, ‘The Fourth Wall’ and ’A Certain Kind of Silence’.

Immigrant drama I Am No Longer Here, from Mexican director Fernando Frias, has won the Golden Pyramid for best film at the 41st Cairo International Film Festival.

Scroll down for full list of winners

Frias’ timely drama centres on a Mexican teenager forced to move to the Us after getting on the wrong side of a drugs cartel. Its young star, Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino, was feted with best actor.

Also in the international competition, Belgian director Bas Devos won the Silver Pyramid for urban night-time odyssey tale Ghost Tropic.

Organised by the Delegation of the European Union with the support of Cineuropa, this year’s edition included panels, master classes and a diverse range of movies. The Chaplin Mega Park theatre in Almaty hosted the fourth edition of the European Film Festival, organised by the European Union Delegation to Kazakhstan with the support of Cineuropa. The festival ran from 5-7 November and presented 16 films produced by the European Union member states, as well as organising exclusive master classes led by European filmmakers. The goal of the festival was to present the premieres of films that best represented European cultural heritage, to increase the general public's interest in cinematographic art and to enhance international cooperation. All of the movies selected have been the winners of high-level international film awards, including Hubert Charuel’s Bloody Milk, Jonas Carpignano’s A Ciambra, Edoardo De Angelis’ The Vice of Hope, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s.

Marco Bellocchio’s “The Traitor,” Roman Polanski’s “An Officer and a Spy” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” lead the race for the 32nd European Film Awards with four nominations apiece in the major categories. The awards, voted on by more than 3,600 members of the European Film Academy, will be presented at the awards ceremony on Dec. 7 in Berlin.

Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite” followed with three nominations in the top categories each, while Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables” and Nora Fingscheidt’s “System Crasher” were both short-listed in two major categories.

“The Favourite” picked up an additional nomination in the comedy category, while “Les Misérables” received a further nomination in the Discovery section for newcomers.

A single nomination each went to “A White, White Day,” “And Then We Danced,” “Beanpole,” “Gundermann” and “Queen of Hearts.”

Competing for best documentary are “For Sama,...

Guillaume Nicloux, the French director of “Valley of Love,” is set to preside over the jury of the Arcs Film Festival, while the iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert (“Elle”) will be the patron of the second edition of the Talent Village.

Created last year, the Talent Village is a development workshop and platform for emerging talents aimed at helping them make their feature debut. Huppert will succeed to Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (“The Hunt”) who was the patron of the inaugural edition.

The festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, will also launch the Cinema Green Lab. Along the lines of its workshop program and award for women filmmakers, the Arcs festival will be hosting screenings of environment-themed movies, workshops discussing eco-friendly initiatives in the film industry, as well as panel discussions about ways to tackle these topics in fiction.

The Arcs fest will also hand out an award...

Exclusive: U.S. art house distributor Kino Lorber is launching film and TV VOD streaming platform Kino Now, we can reveal. The service, which includes options to rent and buy, currently hosts 600 titles from the company’s catalog and includes early access to new releases. The number of titles is set to double by the end of the year.

Kino Lorber, which will unveil the platform at a stateside event this evening, tells us the service will be annually refreshed with more than 50 new theatrical releases from Kino Lorber’s first-run and repertory divisions and more than 500 yearly additional titles as “festival direct” exclusives and indie art house digital premieres.

Movies will be generally available around 30-90 days after their theatrical release but some will also get day-and-date releases. Most titles will be $9.99 or less. New releases and certain films that are considered premium will be $14.99 or $19.99 if they are day-and-date releases.

The Slovakian film festival will honour Portugal’s João Pedro Rodrigues with its Respect Award when it unspools from 10-15 September. One of the younger Slovakian international film festivals, Cinematik, will soon unspool for the 14th time in the spa town of Piešťany. The line-up traditionally includes the Meeting Point Europe section, which rounds up intriguing European productions from the 2018-2019 season, including Yorgos Lanthimos’ much-celebrated royal affair The Favourite, François Ozon’s latest drama By the Grace of God, the disarmingly absurd comedy Diamantino by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God, Bertrant Bonello’s Cannes-premiered Zombi Child and Julian Schnabel’s van Gogh drama starring Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate. Cinematik regularly hosts a competition for Slovakian documentaries in the Cinematik.doc section. The titles that will vie for the award this year are Tomáš Krupa’s award-winning intimate doc examining the taboo topic of death and assisted suicide,...

A soccer star weaving through giant puppies on a stadium pitch clouded by cosmic cotton candy is the wildest and most memorable image from Gabriel Abrantes’s and Daniel Schmidt’s screwball satire, Diamantino, which opens its theatrical run in La today. Debuting at Cannes in 2018, where it won both the Critics’ Week Grand Prize and the Palm Dog Jury Prize for best canine performance, the roving comedy weaves together a wacky plot with hyper-topical subjects like rising neo-facism, genetic modification and the refugee crisis. Named for its protagonist soccer stud loosely inspired by Christian Ronaldo, Diamantino begins with a fall […]...

A soccer star weaving through giant puppies on a stadium pitch clouded by cosmic cotton candy is the wildest and most memorable image from Gabriel Abrantes’s and Daniel Schmidt’s screwball satire, Diamantino, which opens its theatrical run in La today. Debuting at Cannes in 2018, where it won both the Critics’ Week Grand Prize and the Palm Dog Jury Prize for best canine performance, the roving comedy weaves together a wacky plot with hyper-topical subjects like rising neo-facism, genetic modification and the refugee crisis. Named for its protagonist soccer stud loosely inspired by Christian Ronaldo, Diamantino begins with a fall […]...

From “Avengers: Endgame” to “Game of Thrones” and the Mueller report, much about 2019 has been about endings — and debates about new beginnings. Major tentpole events have consumed the public sphere with the expectation of dramatic conclusions and the intrigue of mysterious next chapters.

The best movies, however, don’t need to cling to some larger timeline to prove their worth: They deliver memorable experiences on their own terms, illustrating why the feature-length format remains an essential vessel for creativity. While entertainment pundits continue to muse on whether “film is dead,” the movies keep proving that they most definitely are not.

Here are the very best of them that 2019 has delivered so far.

“Diane”

An intimate story about a woman staring death in the face and struggling to see its reflection in her own life, “Diane” is as depressing as it sounds. On the other hand, Kent Jones’ Tribeca-winning narrative debut...

by Murtada Elfadl

The balancing of many different tones differentiates Diamantino, which just opened in theaters after a hit run at Cannes last year. It's a satire, an allegory, a rom-com and a fantasy -- all of those things in one yet it all jells. Co-directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt kept all these different balls in the air. The story is absolutely bonkers. Let’s see if we can get it straight with the help of the official synopsis:

Portuguese soccer hunk Diamantino blows it in the World Cup finals, he goes from superstar to laughing stock overnight. His sheltered worldview is further shattered after learning about the European refugee crisis and he resolves to make amends by adopting an African refugee – only to find that his new “son” is actually an undercover lesbian tax auditor investigating him on the suspicion of corruption. From there, Diamantino gets swept up...

Politicizing Camp: Abrantes & Schmidt Post a Win with Imaginative Soccer Satire

After a decade decade working in the short experimental form, festival faves Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt provide a love story that would outrage admirers of all things classic. Diamantino is stuck between science fiction and a politically self-aware comedy, this is a fine contemporary piece of camp cinema. Borrowing from pop culture and its ready-made clichés, this is a satirical reinterpretation of soccer megastar Cristiano Ronaldo, the incredibly naive and ignorant world-class player and Portugal’s darling.

During a reenacted 2018 FIFA World Cup, Diamantino misses a penalty which means disgrace to his country, and a career-threatening blow for himself.…...

If co-directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt have done their job correctly, audiences will walk out of their new film Diamantino feeling they were impregnated (to use Iñárritu’s lexicon) with “candy that doesn’t make you sick.”

Diamantino (played by Carloto Cotta) has Cristiano Ronaldo-like fame, but makes a fatal error on the soccer field and loses his superstar status. Left with nothing but his good looks, Diamantino is revealed to be a bewildered and wide-eyed Forrest Gump for the 21st century; a century plagued with right-wing machinations for which the former athlete is duped into lending his image.

We sat down with Abrantes and Schmidt at the 56th New York Film Festival to discuss the political power of mass entertainment, how Diamantino defies categories by playing in Midnight and Avant-garde sections of film festivals, and how the comedy of Lubitsch and crude special effects of Cocteau shaped their modern fairytale.

Gabriel Abrantes returned to the Croisette this year to attend the screening of his 20-minute fantasy short, Directors’ Fortnight “The Marvelous Misadventures of The Stone Lady.” about a female statue that escapes from the Louvre and ventures into the streets of Paris.

The U.S.-born Portuguese director wowed audiences at Cannes last year with his wacky soccer-themed feature, “Diamantino,” co-directed with Daniel Schmidt.

“Diamantino’”s deranged mixture of queer sci-fi, romantic reverie, fairytale pastiche and CGI spectacle won the duo the Grand Prix in Cannes Critics Week, followed by major success on the festival circuit, and sales to over a dozen territories.

“Stone Lady” was earmarked by several critics as a key title to watch at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and received strong applause at its screening on Sunday.

In an interview with Variety, Abrantes explains how he came to choose this follow-up project to “Diamantino” and...

Points for originality should go to “Diamantino,” an amusing but scattershot comedy that revolves around a world-famous Portuguese soccer star patterned in part on Cristiano Ronaldo. Co-directed and written by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, this is a film that takes a lot of chances with its tone as it moves from farcical moments to scenes with earnest political messages.

Diamantino (Carloto Cotta) is a national idol on the soccer field, and whenever he scores a goal he sees enormous fluffy puppies surrounding him. This imagery of the giant puppies is funny because they’re so obviously meant to be small and harmless pets, and here they’re seen stomping around like dinosaurs. These giant fluffy puppies are an apt symbol of Diamantino himself, a sports God who is so absurdly innocent that he can be used by anyone around him for either good or bad purposes.

Diamantino is inspired...

There will be no film precisely like Diamantino this year, a dazzlingly imaginative experience involving shaggy puppy-filled soccer game dreams, nefarious twins, the refugee crisis, and gender fluidity. Directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, following a healthy festival run–which included Cannes (where it picked up the top Critics’ Week prize), Tiff, and Nyff–it’ll now arrive this month via Kino Lorber and the trailer and poster have landed.

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “In their first full feature as co-directors, Abrantes and Schmidt are nothing if not ambitious and have jam-packed this screenplay with enough conspiracy, femme fatales, and bio-domes to suggest Ian Fleming was on board as script supervisor. Unlike the real-life Ronaldo (fair is fair), Diamantino is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer and, regardless of whatever debt it may owe to Derek Zoolander, Cotta’s perfectly dim performance will provide...

"Something magical happened when I played." Kino Lorber has debuted an official Us trailer for the wacky, brilliant, one-of-a-kind "high camp" indie comedy Diamantino, from directors Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt. This Portuguese film premiered in the Critics' Week sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and stopped by a bunch of major film festivals throughout the film. "Tabu's Carloto Cotta gives the finest comic performance in recent memory as the dimwitted Portuguese soccer superstar of the title, a burlesqued version of Cristiano Ronaldo, swept up in a complicated comic conundrum involving the refugee crisis, Secret Service skullduggery, mad science genetic modification, and a right-wing anti-EU conspiracy." This is easily one of the most creative, original, and hilarious films I saw last year and I definitely recommend it - a "high-camp" international discovery that will be a cult classic very soon. Also stars Cleo Tavares, Anabela Moreira, Margarida Moreira,...

“Diamantino” is nothing less (and so much more) than the movie the world needs right now. A hit from the moment it premiered at Cannes last year, this winningly demented 21st century fairy tale centers on a beautiful, child-like soccer phenom named Diamantino, who reacts to a devastating World Cup loss by adopting a Mozambican refugee. The refugee claims to be a teen boy, but is actually an adult lesbian on an undercover mission from the Portuguese government to investigate a money-laundering operation run by the athlete’s evil twin sisters. Also, there’s a mad scientist who’s trying to clone Diamantino in order to create an invincible super team capable of stoking national pride and “Making Portugal Great Again.” Also, there are giant puppies. A lot of them. A litter of Pekingese the size of double-decker buses. And that’s just the basic set-up.

Co-directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt,...

For those that have gone through our massive summer preview, our monthly breakdowns may not bring a great deal of new surprises, but as we take a more granular look at the offerings, there’s certainly more to spotlight. Of course, much of the month will be dedicated to our Cannes coverage, but there’s also a wealth of excellent films coming to theaters and streaming, so check out our picks below.

Matinees to See: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (May 3), Long Shot (May 3), The Wandering Earth (May 5), The Silence of Others (May 8), Detective Pikachu (May 10), Charlie Says (May 10), Perfect (May 17), Photograph (May 17), Echo in the Canyon (May 24), Joy (May 24), The Perfection (May 24), The Fall of the American Empire (May 31), The Image You Missed (May 31), and Leto (May 31)

15. Knock Down the House (Rachel Lears; May 1)

Winner of the top festival favorite prize at Sundance Film Festival, Rachel Lears’ Knock Down the House...

Following the first batches of Cannes Film Festival lineup announcements, the slate has now been unveiled for the sidebar Directors’ Fortnight. Once again a stellar-looking lineup, it includes Robert Eggers’ The Witch follow-up The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, plus new films from Takashi Miike, Lav Diaz, Bas Devo, and Rebecca Zlotowski (pictured above).

There’s also two Sundance films we’ve already reviewed: Wounds and Give Me Liberty. Premiering as a Special Screening is Luca Guadagnino’s new short The Staggering Girl starring Julianne Moore, Mia Goth, KiKi Layne, Alba Rohrwacher, Marthe Keller, and Kyle MacLachlan. See the lineup below, along with the Acid slate.

Directors’ Fortnight Lineup

Feature Films

Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux) – Opening Film

Yves (Benoît Forgeard) – Closing

Alice and the Mayor (Nicolas Pariser)

And Then We Danced (Levan Akin)

The Halt (Lav Diaz)

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää...

The 2019 Driectors’ Fortnight lineup has been revealed, bringing with it new works from “The Witch” director Robert Eggers, Bertrand Bonello, Rebecca Zlotowski, and Takashi Miike. Fortnight is closely associated with the Cannes Film Festival although it is technically its own event that runs parallel to Cannes. Fortnight is celebrating its 51st year in 2019. The festival sidebar has been a launching pad for directors such as Spike Lee, Jim Jarmsuch, and more over the years.

One of the biggest titles set to world premiere is “The Lighthouse,” writer-director Eggers’ first feature since his Sundance horror breakout “The Witch.” For his latest directorial effort, Eggers has cast Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe for a fantasy horror based on old seafarer myths. The movie was shot in black and white and is backed by A24, who picked up last year’s Directors’ Fortnight favorite “Climax.” Another high profile premiere is “The Staggering Girl,...

New films by Robert Eggers, Takashi Miike, Luca Guadagnino and Rebecca Zlotowski to premiere.

Cannes Directors’ Fortnight has unveiled the line-up for its 51st edition, running May 15-25, overseen for the first time by artistic director Paolo Moretti.

Scroll down for full line-up

For his debut edition, Moretti and his programming team have pulled together an auteur-driven selection, mixing established and emerging filmmakers, genre fare and a dash of star power.

“Directors’ Fortnight was born out of a collective and this collective spirit is still alive. The support of the team that I found in place has really touched me,...