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While we’re in the middle of the fall festival season, with Telluride, Venice, and TIFF in the rearview, and NYFF, BFI London, and AFI Fest on the horizon, it’s time to round up some of our early favorites. We’ve polled our contributors from Venice and TIFF to share their top picks, which one can see below along with our ongoing coverage here.

David Katz (@davidfabiankatz)

1. Saint Omer (Alice Diop)

2. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)

3. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)

4. Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)

5. The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)

6. Love Life (Kôji Fukada)

7. Blonde (Andrew Dominik)

8. A Couple (Frederick Wiseman)

9. In Viaggio (Gianfranco Rosi)

10. The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)

Luke Hicks (@lou_kicks)

1. Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino)

2. Other People’s Children (Rebecca Zlotowski)

3. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)

4. The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)

5. Athena (Romain Gavras)

6. White Noise (Noah Baumbach)

7. The Banshees of Inisherin...

North of Normal TIFF Contemporary World Cinema Section Reviewed for Shockya.com by Abe Friedtanzer Director: Carly Stone Writer: Alexandra Weir Cast: Sarah Gadon, Robert Carlyle, James D’Arcy, Amanda Fix, River Price-Maenpaa, Benedict Samuel Screened at: Critics’ link, CA, 9/1/22 Opens: September 11th, 2022 (Toronto International Film Festival) Society has ideas for how people should be […]

The post TIFF 2022: North of Normal Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Exclusive: Fresh off starring in Toronto Film Festival drama North Of Normal, Sarah Gadon is set to make her directorial debut on feature Lullabies For Little Criminals, based on Heather O’Neill’s 2007 novel which won the Canada Reads competition.

Alias Grace and True Detective star Gadon will adapt the screenplay and also produce alongside Brightlight Pictures’ (Firefly Lane) Shawn Williamson and Emily Alden. Production is slated to take place in Montreal.

The movie will follow thirteen year-old Baby who vacillates between childhood comforts and adult temptation. Her father, Jules, takes better care of his drug habit than he does of his daughter, however when her blossoming beauty captures the attention of a charismatic and dangerous local it creates a volatile situation which threatens to crush Baby’s spirit.

Gadon’s latest feature is Carly Stone drama North of Normal which launched on Sunday at TIFF. The Canadian actress stars with Robert Carlyle,...

North of Normal is an affecting drama about the life-altering impact of a youth in the wild. Happily, it embraces subtlety rather than over-the-top histrionics, resulting in a study of teenage wildlife that resonates strongly. Premiering at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, director Carly Stone’s second feature is a wise, warm, appropriately wounded winner. It is based on Cea Sunrise Person’s memoir of growing up in the Yukon with an aimless teenage mother, a free-spirited grandfather, and an assorted cast of hippie hangers-on. Sounds like we could be approaching sitcom territory, doesn’t it? Bravo to Stone, then, for never allowing the story to stray off course.

North of Normal begins in 1979, dropping us directly into a commune-ish existence in northern Canada. As explained via voiceover, Grandpa Dick “put his family into a Vw van and drove north,” strong in the belief that the wilderness would solve his family’s problems.

They headed north to the wilderness in the 1970s, when Michelle (Sarah Gadon) was 15 and pregnant with Cea, “because if there was one thing Papa Dick was sure of, it was that the wilderness would solve all their problems.” They ended up in the Kootenay Plains, up in Alberta, where “Papa Dick” (Robert Carlyle) headed up a commune that sounds an awful lot like a cult.

Cea Sunrise Person first told her story in her 2014 memoir, “North of Normal,” which has been adapted into a film of the same name by director Carly Stone and screenwriter Alexandra Weir.

Continue reading ‘North of Normal’ Review: True Off-The-Grid Story Is Captivating & Well-Acted [TIFF] at The Playlist.

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As the Toronto Film Festival marks a big post-pandemic return to the physical realm with something almost normal for its 47th edition, the biggest sighs of relief may well come from local Canadian filmmakers and premiere party organizers.

“You cannot launch a festival film digitally. You need to build up hype in person. You need to meet people in person to be able to forge relationships to launch your film,” Markhor Pictures producer Shehrezade Mian, who is launching Antoine Bourges’ Concrete Valley immigrant drama in Toronto as part of the Wavelengths sidebar, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Mian insists fellow filmmakers who screened their films at scaled-down Toronto festivals in 2020 and 2021 had their launch plans undermined by play on digital platforms. “The buzz this year is so much more hyped and so much more intense,” she added.

Director Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, who is bringing her...

The public-facing festival runs September 8-18.

For the first time since 2019, the international industry is looking forward to getting back to a fully in-person TIFF where there will be plenty to discuss with old friends besides the invigorating roster of premieres.

Scroll down for acquisition titles

The public-facing festival (September 8-18) is many things and one of them is a conveyor belt of awards season premieres. These get scrutinised by the many awards strategists, buyers and sellers in attendance, who will want to know can these films survive at the box office, and can they sustain box office at times...

The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced the international arm of its festival. Taking place September 8 through 18, TIFF previously unveiled Sally El Hosaini’s opening night film “The Swimmers” as well as Special Presentations including the world premieres of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” and Nicholas Stoller’s “Bros.”

“The Woman King,” “Catherine Called Birdy,” “The Menu,” “Moonage Daydream,” and “My Policeman” additionally debut at the festival.

Now, the Contemporary World Cinema slate has been announced for 2022 TIFF. The lineup includes features from more than 50 countries spanning the globe. The respective world premieres for “Bones of Crows” and “The Swearing Jar” are among programming highlights, as well as the North American premieres for Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” and Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Eo.”

“We are so proud of the TIFF Docs and Contemporary World Cinema programs,” Anita Lee, chief programming officer,...

Yesterday Toronto International Film Festival programmers added a huge dose of Canadiana to the 2022 line-up sprinkling even more films. Among the new reveals we find the Contemporary World Cinema, TIFF Docs and Short Cuts programmes taking off with the Contemporary World Cinema added a whopping eleven maple leaf offerings which include Charlotte Le Bon‘s Quinzaine preemed Falcon Lake (read review), Graham Foy‘s The Maiden (a Giornate degli Autori selection) & the world premiere screening to Carly Stone‘s North of Normal. Another film title that we predicted in Darlene Naponse’s Stellar will also receive its world premiere.…...

Exclusive: Michael Mann’s upcoming race car drama Ferrari is building on its already stacked ensemble as sources tell Deadline, Jack O’Connell, Patrick Dempsey and Sarah Gadon have rounded out the cast. Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley and Gabriel Leone are already set to star. Dempsey will play Piero Taruffi and O’Connell will play Peter Collins with Gadon playing Linda Christian. Mann is directing with production set to start on August 1 in Italy.

The film is set during the summer of 1957. Ex-racecar driver, Ferrari (Driver), is in crisis. Bankruptcy stalks the company he and his wife, Laura (Woodley), built from nothing ten years earlier. Their tempestuous marriage struggles with the mourning for one son and the acknowledgement of another. He decides to counter his losses by rolling the dice on one race – 1,000 miles across Italy, the iconic Mille Miglia.

Troy Kennedy Martin co-wrote the script with Mann, which is...

Exclusive: NBA forward Patrick Patterson has partnered with producer Joel Reilly to launch Undisputed Pictures, a new production company with operations in both the U.S. and Canada, which will develop, finance and produce a slate of film, TV, media and entertainment projects, teaming up with Oscar nominated producer David Permut on its new feature, Dock.

The film will tell the story of Major League Baseball pitcher Dock Ellis, an outspoken player for the Pittsburgh Pirates during the 1970s, who led the team to a World Series championship in ’71. Ellis was a fierce advocate for Black players’ rights who famously claimed to have pitched a no-hitter while on LSD. Pic will examine issues of mental health and drug addiction, as it follows Dock’s journey to overcome his demons.

Joey Poach (The Polka King) penned the script for the sports drama, which is currently in development. Patterson,...

Filming has wrapped in Canada on under-the-radar Canadian feature North Of Normal, we can reveal.

Starring in the Carly Stone-directed drama are Sarah Gadon (Alias Grace), newcomer Amanda Fix, Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting), newcomer River Price-Maenpaa, James D’Arcy (Avengers: Endgame) and Benedict Samuel (Gotham).

Based on her memoir, North Of Normal follows author Cea Sunrise Person’s unconventional childhood in the Canadian wilderness, her complicated relationship with her perpetually pot-smoking teen mom, and her path to a version of normalcy on the runways of Paris.

Kyle Mann (Edge Of Winter) and Jonathan Bronfman (Edge Of Winter) are producing from Alexandra Weir’s script. Weir was previously a creature technical director on movies including The Avengers and Rango. Mann, Bronfman and Stone previously teamed up on 2018 SXSW title The New Romantic.

Supervising producers are Jason Jallet and Andrew Bronfman. Executive producers comprise Gadon, Berry Meyerowitz, Jeff Sackman, Noah Segal, Adrian Love,...

Kim Convenience‘s Jean Yoon, who stars as the family matriarch, said that a lack of Asian women in the comedy’s writers room made the her time on the series less than ideal.

On Sunday, just days after co-star Simu Liu post a lengthy Facebook post revealing her experience on the series, Yoon defended the Shang-Chi star against The Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle. The writer dissected Liu’s criticisms and shared that the series had a number of Asian woman writers. Yoon came to her on-screen son’s defense.

“Dear sir, as an Asian Canadian woman, a Korean-Canadian woman w more experience and knowledge of the world of my characters, the lack of Asian female, especially Korean writers in the writers room of Kims made my life Very Difficult & the experience of working on the painful show,” she responded to Doyle.

“Your attack on my cast mate @SimuLiu,...

Netflix might be skipping this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but the streaming giant is offering a bit of a mea culpa in its April offerings, which come with some exciting options from bonafide auteurs who also happen to be Cannes regulars, including Lee Chang-Dong, Andrea Arnold, and Quentin Tarantino. Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner “I, Daniel Blake” will also join Netflix’s ranks next month, along with classics like “All the President’s Men,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “Deliverance.”

In April, Netflix will add Lee’s lauded Cannes competitor “Burning,” which missed out on Oscar love but picked up plenty of other accolades during last year’s awards circuit, including a number of nods for star Steven Yeun. It will be joined by Arnold’s 2016 Palme d’Or entry “American Honey,” along with an extended version of Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”.

The streaming service will also...

The real joy of watching Jessica Barden on screen comes from her willingness to get dirty - both metaphorically and literally, in some cases.

The 26-year-old The End of the F***ing World star isn't afraid to explore the messy, gritty aspects of life that young women endure day in and day out, from getting their periods at the worst possible moment to sexual encounters that fall into a slippery gray area of consent. The latter aspect features heavily in Barden's new romantic comedy, The New Romantic, which isn't your average uplifting romance. In fact, its edgier undertones are exactly why Barden signed onto the film in the first place.

Instead of a heroine with a glamorous job in fashion and a sprawling big-city apartment, Barden plays Blake, a near-broke college senior whose sex column at the school's newspaper is so boring that it's on the cusp of cancellation. That...

Camila Mendes didn’t shy away from provocative subject matter in her first film, “The New Romantic,” which focuses on people in a purely transactional relationship — also known as sugar babies.

“The common misconception is people compare sugar babies to prostitutes, [which is] a very ignorant way of looking at sugar babies,” Mendes told TheWrap. “They have a choice, they made that choice, and they are comfortable with that choice. I don’t agree with this habit that people have of judging women for being comfortable with their sexuality or using their sexuality. Sexuality is such a personal matter. If you are comfortable doing something with your body, why should you stop yourself from doing that? Because of what the world thinks? It’s just unfair and I think people should have the freedom to make that choice for themselves.”

Mendes got involved with the project after the film’s director, Carly Stone,...

Following Wednesday night’s “Riverdale” episode, ‘The Midnight Club” — in which fans were transported back to the 1990s for a homage to the 1985 John Hughes flick “The Breakfast Club” — star Camila Mendes says she has another idea for a special episode.

“I would love to do a ’40s episode,” Mendes told TheWrap in an interview on Thursday. “A very comic book original. Archie, Betty, Veronica. [A] slap stick, comic-book-feel episode. That would be fun.”

Seeing as Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s CW series is actually based on the comic book series starring Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle, the serpents, Josie and the Pussycats (and Sabrina Spellman), that sounds like the perfect idea for the next tribute installment.

Also Read: 'The Midnight Club': 6 Best '80s and '90s Movie References in 'Riverdale's Tribute Episode

Of course the actual Archie Comics characters, which first appeared in print in 1941, led happier,...

As the short-lived Starz drama “The Girlfriend Experience” stylishly portrayed the lives of modern-day sex workers, a new romantic comedy hopes to do the same for a similar trend — the sugar baby. (A sugar baby is a younger person who accepts gifts from an older person in exchange for a romantic — and often sexual —relationship.) In “The New Romantic,” which released its first official trailer Friday, this unique relationship gets its very own bubbly teen rom-com treatment.

“The New Romatic” stars a bevy of Ya-focused TV talent, including Camlia Mendes (“Riverdale”), Jessica Barden (“The End of the F***ing World”), and Hayley Law. Barden plays a young journalist who, disillusioned with the romantic options in her peer group, begins dating an older guy in exchange for gifts. Mendes plays the seasoned pro who first introduces Blake to the world of sugar babies, and Law rounds out their friend trio.

“The New Romantic...

Between “To All the Boys I Loved Before,” “Set It Up,” and “Love, Simon,” 2018 has had some truly great and fun Ya romcoms. And next on the list looks to be Carly Stone’s debut feature “The New Romantic.” Check out the official synopsis below.

Frustrated with the lack of chivalrous guys her own age, a college senior gives up on dating for love to date an older man in exchange for gifts instead.

Continue reading ‘The New Romantic’ Trailer: Jessica Barden Stars In 2018’s Next Ya Romcom Contender at The Playlist.

"Maybe relationships aren't supposed to be for love...?" The Orchard has revealed the trailer for an indie romantic comedy titled The New Romantic, from first-time Canadian filmmaker Carly Stone. Jessica Barden (from "Penny Dreadful and "The End of the F***ing World") stars as Blake, a young college senior who decides to become a "sugar baby" and date an older man in exchange for gifts, rather than love. "As she documents the adventure in the hopes of winning a journalism award with a generous cash prize, she sets out on a quest to figure out if society is right to judge these woman and if her own self worth comes with a price." I'm sure we all know what lessons she's going to learn. The cast includes Hayley Law, Brett Dier, Timm Sharp, Avan Jogia, and Camila Mendes. This premiered at SXSW, and it looks spunky and cool. Here's the...

Indie distributor The Orchard picked up U.S. distribution rights for another South by Southwest award-winning film on Tuesday, securing rights to “The New Romantic,” written and directed by newcomer Carly Stone.

Stone won the Best First Feature jury award at SXSW for the film. The Orchard also acquired the U.S. rights to “The Dawn Wall,” which won the SXSW audience award in the documentary spotlight category.

“The Orchard is the perfect home for our film,” said Stone in a statement. “They’re passionate, cool and understand how to connect to our target audience.”

“The New Romantic” is positioned as a millennial romantic drama and stars Jessica Barden (“End of the F****ing World”), Hayley Law (“Riverdale”) and Camila Mendes (“Riverdale”).

The film follows Blake Conway, an aspiring journalist and hopeless romantic college senior,...

Exclusive: The Orchard has acquired U.S. rights to Carly Stone’s The New Romantic which won the first time writer-director Best First Feature jury award at this year’s SXSW and will open this fall launching in New York and Los Angeles.

Pic follows aspiring journalist, hopeless romantic and college senior Blake Conway (Jessica Barden) who is terrified of graduating. In order to escape her looming post-graduation fate that includes student debt and zero romantic prospects, she becomes a sugar baby. As she documents the adventure in the hopes of winning a journalism award with a generous cash prize, she sets out on a quest to figure out if society is right to judge these women and if her own self worth comes with a price. Riverdale‘s Hayley Law and Camila Mendes also star. Kyle Mann and Michael Risley of Drive Films produced as well as financed the film.

Where to draw the line between friends with major benefits and something, say, slightly illegal? For college student and aspiring professional journalist Blake (Jessica Barden), the question seems more academic than practical, even when she’s the sugar baby dating a wealthy older man in return for some attractive perks.

Writer-director Carly Stone’s interest in the topic is only slightly more considered, since she’s really more interested in crafting an incisive millennial rom-com, but The New Romantic comes off as too forced and calculated. Setting the bar for the film impossibly high with repetitious references to Nora Ephron classics like Sleepless...

Exclusive: Writer-director Carly Stone, whose feature directorial debut The New Romantic just premiered in competition at SXSW and won her the Best First Feature jury award, has signed with ICM Partners and Good Fear Management. ICM is also handling sales on the coming-of-age pic. Stone, who graduated from AFI, also writes for the CBC sitcom Kim’s Convenience, which earlier this month won Best Comedy Series at the Canadian Screen Awards. The New Romantic stars The End of t…...

Exclusive: Writer-director Carly Stone, whose feature directorial debut The New Romantic just premiered in competition at SXSW and won her the Best First Feature jury award, has signed with ICM Partners and Good Fear Management. ICM is also handling sales on the coming-of-age pic. Stone, who graduated from AFI, also writes for the CBC sitcom Kim’s Convenience, which earlier this month won Best Comedy Series at the Canadian Screen Awards. The New Romantic stars The End of t…...

An indictment of modern hook-up culture, The New Romantic offers an often surprisingly funny look at one aspiring journalist’s experimentation with a sugar daddy relationship. Jessica Barden stars as Blake, an undergraduate who’s trying to win the $50,000 Hunter S. Thompson prize for Gonzo journalism that will help her pay off her student loans. Set on a small-town Ontario campus, The New Romantic offers an accurate look at college life as Blake finds her community and attempts to discover herself. The film echoes Blake in that just as she lacks some of the answers, so too does the narrative, as we see her naïveté perspective in scenes like Blake turning to YouTube tutorials to understand what a “sugar baby” relationship exactly entails.

As the film opens, Blake writes a hopeless romantic column aspiring for something more than just casual intimacy from Tinder, inspiring her roommate Nikki (Hayley Law) to...

Juried prizes were presented tonight at the 25th annual Swsw Film Festival. Jim Gaffigan, in Austin to represent the Miranda Bailey-directed ensemble comedy “You Can Choose Your Family,” presided as host. The venue was the Paramount Theatre, a 103-year-old landmark just blocks from the Texas Capitol.

SXSW will continue screening films through Saturday, when most of the festival’s audience awards recipients will be announced. The exception is for the headlining films, such as “A Quiet Place,” “Blockers,” and “Ready Player One” — those verdicts follows on March 19.

This year’s line-up comprised 256 total features and shorts, culled from 8,183 submissions. Best narrative feature “Thunder Road” was adapted from the namesake, one-take short that won a Grand Jury award at Sundance in 2016.

Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” (2010) and Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Short Term 12” (2013) are among the best-known past jury victors at SXSW. IndieWire’s Dana Harris helped choose the Louis Black “Lone Star” honoree,...

A charming little nugget of a romantic-comedy that tentatively explores the existence of love stories in a world that seems to have outgrown them, Carly Stone’s “The New Romantic” is a movie for a generation that finds themselves uncomfortably wedged between “Sleepless in Seattle” and boning via Bumble — a generation that was raised on “Sex and the City,” but never got to live in Carrie Bradshaw’s New York. Blitzing through her feature debut in a quick 82 minutes, Stone doesn’t waste any time swirling all of those touchstones together and distilling them into the form of a girl named Blake (engagingly played by “The End of the F***ing World” star Jessica Barden).

The sex columnist for the newspaper at her sleepy Canadian college, Blake is introduced — in true Bradshaw fashion — via a voiceover reading of her latest article. Mentioning how she binged Nora Ephron movies when she had mono in high school,...

Making her first feature with the atypical romantic comedy The New Romantic, writer/director Carly Stone brought the film to this year’s SXSW Film Festival, joining stars Jessica Barden (a breakout talent of recent vintage with Netflix series The End of the F***ing World), Hayley Law and Brett Dier at Deadline’s Studio to discuss the film. Pic centers on Blake (Barden), a young woman who, frustrated with a lack of chivalry among guys her own age, turns to life as a sugar…...

Girl Talk is a weekly look at women in film — past, present, and future.

While Hollywood continues to struggle towards parity in the director’s chair, the film festival world is playing major catch-up. At this year’s SXSW Film Festival, the push towards parity is becoming more of a reality than ever before, as 33% of all feature films at the fest are directed by women, while the shorts section boasts 59% female directorship across its slate. It’s a stark difference to the studio side of the industry.

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s latest study, “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair? Gender, Race & Age of Directors across 1,000 films from 2007-2017,” found that, of the 109 film directors associated with the 100 top movies of 2017, 92.7 percent were male; 7.3 percent were female. Days later, the San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film followed with the “Celluloid Ceiling” study,...

Exclusive: Graduating from college can be an exciting moment in one’s life. It also can be scary as hell. Director-writer Carly Stone brings the fear of post-college life in this clip from The New Romantic starring The End of the F***ing World standout Jessica Barden. The clip features aspiring journalist and college senior Blake Conway (Barden) talking to her editor (Avan Jogia) about going on a questionable date for her column. The New Romantic marks Stone’s feature…...

With Sundance 2018 wrapped up, the next major American festival is South by Southwest Film Festival and today they’ve announced their lineup. Opening with John Krasinski’s horror film A Quiet Place, it also includes some of our most-anticipated films of the year: Jody Hill’s Observe & Report follow-up The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter (which Netflix has announced they’ll release), Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, and Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens follow-up, the sci-fi film Fast Color (pictured above) starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Check out the lineup below for the festival that takes place March 9-18 in Austin. It also includes many Sundance 2018 titles, and you can see our reviews of those here.

Narrative Feature Competition

Ten world premieres; ten unique ways to celebrate the art of storytelling. Selected from 1,408 narrative feature submissions in 2018.

Family

Director/Screenwriter: Laura Steinel

When an emotionally stunted 30 year-old woman is tasked...

"If they hear you, they hunt you." Before it's released in theaters this April, John Krasinski's new post-apocalyptic movie A Quiet Place will have its world premiere as the opening night movie at South by Southwest.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world that's been ravaged by monsters attracted by sound, A Quiet Place was directed and co-written by John Krasinski, who also co-stars alongside Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, and Millicent Simmonds.

Part of the Headliners screening slate, A Quiet Place will make its world premiere on March 9th ahead of the film's April 6th theatrical release from Paramount Pictures. This marks the third feature film behind the camera for Krasinski, who directed Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and The Hollars, as well as three episodes of The Office, on which he played the iconic character of Jim Halpert.

Other genre movies screening at SXSW, including the Midnighters slate, will be announced on February 7th,...

Jordan Peele’s The Last O.G to screen in Independent Episodic; Timur Bekmambetov’s Profile among SXSW line-up.

Source: Paramount Pictures

SXSW top brass on Wednesday (January 31) said the world premiere of John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place will open the 25th edition of the festival, which runs in Austin, Texas, from March 9-18.

Krasinski directed and stars in horror-thriller A Quiet Place alongside his wife Emily Blunt in the tale of an isolated family living in silence for fear of attack by an unknown force than tracks sound. Platinum Dunes produced the feature, which opens in the Us through on April 6 through Paramount.

SXSW launches the inaugural Independent Episodic section this year, an expansion on the Episodic section launched in 2014. Overall, the festival will screen 132 features, with additional titles to be announced.

The full line-up will include 44 films from first-time filmmakers, 86 world premieres, 11 North American premieres and five Us premieres. The films were culled...

The SXSW Conference and Festivals has announced its features lineup and opening night film, plus a selection of episodic titles for the 25th edition of the Film Festival, running this March in Austin, Texas. This year’s festival will open with John Krasinski’s Paramount-produced “A Quiet Place,” playing as part of the festival’s Headliners section. Elsewhere, the film lineup is stacked with a number of offerings from female filmmakers, including its Narrative Feature Competition, which includes eight films (out of ten) directed or co-directed by women, from Megan Griffiths’ “Sadie” to Stacy Cochran’s “Write When You Get Work.”

Other sections of the festival also include a heavily female bent, including three films in the Headliners section (which currently includes five titles), and the Narrative Spotlight section, which includes new films from Lynn Shelton, Miranda Bailey, Julia Hart, and Suzi Yoonessi. Those titles are joined by a slew of other SXSW regulars,...

The American Film Institute announced today the films that will screen in the World Cinema, Breakthrough, Midnight, Shorts and Cinema’s Legacy programs at AFI Fest 2015 presented by Audi.

AFI Fest will take place November 5 – 12, 2015, in the heart of Hollywood. Screenings, Galas and events will be held at the historic Tcl Chinese Theatre, the Tcl Chinese 6 Theatres, Dolby Theatre, the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian, the El Capitan Theatre and The Hollywood Roosevelt.

World Cinema showcases the most acclaimed international films of the year; Breakthrough highlights true discoveries of the programming process; Midnight selections will grip audiences with terror; and Cinema’s Legacy highlights classic movies and films about cinema. World Cinema and Breakthrough selections are among the films eligible for Audience Awards. Shorts selections are eligible for the Grand Jury Prize, which qualifies the winner for Academy Award®consideration. This year’s Shorts jury features filmmaker Janicza Bravo,...