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Featuring Francesca Scorsese (daughter of Martin) and Sawyer Spielberg (son of Steven), it’s hard not to go into Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point with curiosity piqued as to what the next generation might have helped to create, beside the point though that might be. Happily, Taormina’s atmospheric film turns out to be a rich slice of retro-styled Americana, replete with the classic movie flourishes of their forebears, from the distant wails of an Amtrak horn, to the precarious picket-fence perfection of a dime-a-dozen suburb.

The set-up is simple. Several generations of the Italian-American Balsano family are heading back to matriarch Antonia’s (Mary Reistetter) home on Long Island to break bread together across one long, eggnog-soaked Christmas Eve. While nominally sharing in the festivities, though, each subset has its own priorities: the little kids, never far from a fractious meltdown, are all about the...

Intimate, disparate moments of an annual holiday tradition are artfully portrayed in director Tyler Taormina’s latest, the Long Island-set Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point. The audience ostensibly tags along to a chaotic yuletide party hosted by the matriarch of the Balsano family, which is attended by every conceivable far-flung relative.

Box office darling Anora, Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner from Neon, goes wide Friday after a slow platform, expanding to 1,104 screens as indies continue to bust onto screens. Searchlight Pictures’ A Real Pain adds eight locations, with Focus Features’ Conclave and A24’s Heretic continuing, and launching, respectively, in wide release.

A Real Pain starring Kieren Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed, adds theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto after a strong opening last weekend, when it took the third-highest per-theater average of the year. It goes to 900+ theaters across all major markets next week.

Opening in moderate release: Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate’s launch of Artist Equity’s Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy at 795 theaters.

Directed by Tim Mielants and written by Enda Walsh, the film is based on the bestselling book of same name by Claire Keegan. It...

It was the day after Halloween, and at The Grove in Los Angeles, Christmas decorations had already been rolled out and strung up. It was fitting for the interview I was about to have with filmmaker and musician Tyler Taormina, who was in between travels for his most recent work, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” but rather than sit outside and enjoy the ambience, I asked if he’d like to head to Barnes & Noble for the first day of their annual November Criterion Collection sale. Seeing his eyes light up with excitement, I realized I had my answer.

Taormina and I were a few years apart at Emerson College in Boston, and though we’d never met, I found an unmistakable familiarity with him as we started to chat and look through Blu-rays and DVDs. Perhaps it resulted from being shaped at the same institution, or maybe...

For the most part, Christmas movies tend to share many of the same characteristics. They often exist to show the magic of the holiday season, the importance of family and loved ones during these moments, or impart the message that giving is more important than receiving. In director Tyler Taorminas Christmas Eve in Millers Point, we get those elements that create some of the best Christmas movies, yet Taormina (who co-wrote the script with Eric Berger) also includes a key element of the season that most holiday films forget about: the melancholy of Christmas.

I see Christmas Eve in Miller's Point as a combination of two storytelling instincts, the first of which is, unsurprisingly, the Christmas movie. This is one of those not just set around the holiday, but about it, and scenes of family togetherness (both fuzzy and prickly) resonate beyond their moment. The other, however, is the snapshot ensemble movie, in which the moment is everything. We're with these people for one night of their lives, and the point is just to be with them, share this experience, and find meaning wherever we decide to see it.

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

Director Tyler TaorminaRelease Date November 8, 2024Writers Eric Berger, Tyler TaorminaCast Lev Cameron, Gregg Turkington, Sawyer Spielberg, Michael Cera, Francesca Scorsese, Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Ben ShenkmanRuntime 106 MinutesGenres Drama, ComedyMain Genre Comedy

A curious union of generality and specificity that, when mixed well, I found potent. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point...

With just three features to his name, Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of small-town America. His 2019 debut, Ham on Rye, tracked a gaggle of high school seniors as they geared up for prom night and life away from home. Shot by Taormina’s regular cinematographer, Carson Lund, the film heralded two motifs that would haunt the director’s cinema. On the one hand, an interest in immortalizing perfectly anonymous stretches of US suburbia as dreamlike, surreal terrains; on the other, an unresolved tension between our need for communion and the forces that inevitably pull us apart.

Everyone longs to connect in Taormina’s films, but few ever manage––a tragic state of affairs that was basically the plot of Happer’s Comet (2022), a nocturnal snapshot of a US town and a few of its residents, all of them captured as they wait, alone,...

What kind of Christmas movie do you get when your director’s inspirations are early-90s Nickelodeon live-action shows and 1960s European cinema? In Tyler Taormina’s case, the answer is Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point.

The movie sees four generations of the Balsano family get together for what, it transpires, may be their last annual Christmas party. With celebrations underway, two of the clan’s younger members sneak out in an act of teenage rebellion, which plays out against a backdrop of wintery and suburban Long Island.

The film is Taormina’s follow-up to the well-received indie pic Ham on Rye. He co-wrote the script with Eric Berger. Michael Cera is a producer and part of an ensemble cast that includes Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Shenkman, Gregg Turkington, Sawyer Spielberg and newcomer Matilda Fleming.

Taormina and the cast of his new movie dropped by the...

It’s the holidays, and strings of gaudy rainbow lights twinkle from gables. In cozy living rooms, the elders doze in their chairs while middle-aged siblings bicker and booze it up around the dining table. Little kids squirm in makeshift beds trying to stay awake for Santa, while truculent teenagers sneak out into the suburban night to do secret teenager things. Ok, so there are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire — instead there is a salad bowl full of red and green M&Ms — but in almost every other respect, Tyler Taormina’s delightful stocking-stuffer “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is as alive to the domesticated magic of the season as a classic carol. Taormina’s fondly multivalent, Millennial-Norman-Rockwell perspective incorporates a child’s experience of the holiday, overlaid with a teen’s and a parent’s and a grandparent’s and so on. It feels as though...

Three features into his filmmaking career, it’s evident that director Tyler Taormina loves faces — though not in the way of Bergman or Cassavetes. Unlike those art house paragons, he doesn’t isolate his characters in order to peer intently into their souls. He collects faces by the dozen and dreams up crowded tableaus.

His debut film, Ham on Rye, presented a mysterious and unsettling teen ritual in which the faces never connected to conventional stories. Five years later, Taormina is still inspired by group dynamics, and he’s still experimenting with the fusion of aesthetics and storytelling, but this time on more familiar terrain. Veering at times into sensory overload as it reconfigures the holiday-gathering template, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point can feel like a party that refuses to end, one that could have used some judicious streamlining. But it’s a memorably adventurous party, fueled by intense hopefulness,...

Michael Cera has two movies he plans to direct in the pipeline.The 35-year-old actor has penned a script with his 'Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point' director Tyler Taormina and his fellow producer on the project, co-writer Eric Berger, for a picture called 'Gummy', but before he can start work on that, there's something else he's hoping to make first.He told Deadline: "[We've written a film] that we’re trying to make that I’ll be directing, that we’ve been pushing along, and are going to hopefully push over the finish line, but we’re kind of in the middle of that. So we just started this team. "I mean, basically I kind of glommed onto their existing team, and we all are just having a really good collaborative feeling.“It’s a movie that I’ve been excited about for a long time, and well, it’s kind of...

Exclusive: Michael Cera caught Tyler Taormina’s feature directing debut Ham on Rye after a friend suggested he check it out. He was so impressed that he signed himself up as a sort of producing “cheerleader” on the filmmaker’s latest picture Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which plays in Directors’ Fortnight on Friday,May 17, at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cera’s quick to point out that Krista Minto, co-writer Eric Berger and others did the heavy-lifting producer duties on the picture that’s almost like a fly-on-the-wall exploration of a sprawling Long Island family’s holiday get-together.

“They’re the ones who actually made the movies,” he stressed.

The film’s Cannes screening comes at a time when Cera, who has made short films, has two films in development, both of which he will direct. One of them is called Gummy, the other is untitled. The untitled one is likely to go first,...

The Christmas movie is a genre unto itself. It includes all types of films, from classics like It’s a Wonderful Life to comedies like Home Alone to actioners like Die Hard. But while any movie can pop a tree and some stockings in the frame, a memorable Christmas movie must do one thing: make the audience feel the spirit of the season, an objective clearly at the heart of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which will see its Cannes world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight program.

The third feature from director-writer Tyler Taormina (Ham on Rye), Miller’s Point employs a framing story about a multigenerational Italian family coming home for the holidays. But the film is more tone poem than plot-driven narrative, with an atmosphere of holiday nostalgia permeating every scene. A soundtrack of ’60s pop hits plays like a loop of Christmas songs, almost tricking the ear,...

Magnify, the rebranded international sales arm of Magnolia Pictures, has acquired global and U.S. sales rights to “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” in the run up to its world premiere at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

Directed and co-writer by Tyler Taormina (“Ham on Rye”), the film stars Michael Cera (“Barbie”), Francesca Scorsese, Maria Dizzia (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Ben Shenkman (“Billions”), Elsie Fisher (“Eighth Grade”), Gregg Turkington (“Entertainment”), Sawyer Spielberg (“Masters of the Air”) breakout actor Matilda Fleming, among others.

Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, the film revolves around a rambunctious extended family descending upon their small Long Island hometown for the holidays where hijinks, generational squabbles, and family traditions ensue.

“Taormina takes a singular approach to the classic holiday family movie, bringing his absurdist humor and dynamic filmmaking to life with a charming and perfectly cast ensemble,” said Lorna Lee Torres, Magnify SVP of Global Sales. “We...

Ham on Rye (2019) and Happer’s Comet (2022) filmmaker Tyler Taormina went into festive mode for his third feature in less than four years. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point moved into production during the summer on Long Island with Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Shenkman, Gregg Turkington, Sawyer Spielberg, and newcomer Matilda Fleming. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, the project will be featured at the American Film Festival’s U.S. in Progress in Wroclaw.

Gist: On Christmas Eve, Balsanos gather for what could be the last holiday in their ancestral home. As the night wears on and generational tensions arise, cousins Emily and Michelle sneak away to a winter wonderland, where suburban teenagers find their rebellious paradise.…...

Sensical, the kids streaming service run by Common Sense Networks, has launched on Prime Video Channels.

The $4-a-month subscription offering gives Common Sense, the for-profit arm of Common Sense Media led by former Sony and Crackle streaming exec Eric Berger, a presence in SVOD, AVOD, mobile and Fast.

Central to Sensical is the idea of non-algorithmic content discovery. Programming is segmented by age group and organized according to criteria like topics of interest, traditional learning, personal characteristics, role models, inclusion teamwork and empathy. The SVOD service has no commercial interruptions.

The content offering combines short-form content from studio and digital-first creators. The uniquely programmed offering features custom playlists and popular titles like Science Max and Operation Ouch stemming from a new alliance with Macademia’s Da Vinci.

The flagship Sensical AVOD service, which launched in 2021, expanded into Fast market this year with the launch of of the Sensical Jr.

Not long ago, an award-winning Polish composer who’d scored dozens of films approached Ula Śniegowska about U.S. in Progress, an industry event conceived as a bridge between the Polish and American markets that runs parallel to the American Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland.

“He approached me saying, ‘I’ve done enough in the Polish market. I need an introduction to the international market. Can you, as U.S. in Progress, help me?’” Śniegowska recalls. “It seems we are a perfect matchmaker for those types of companies to have their work exposed in the U.S.”

Celebrating its 13th edition, U.S. in Progress was launched as a showcase for emerging independent American filmmakers. Each year, the event presents a curated selection of American indie titles in the final stages of production to European sales agents, distributors and festival programmers. This year’s edition takes place Nov. 8 – 10.

Since its inception,...

The winter holiday film niche has always been a uniquely popular one, with an array of heartwarming tales that bring families together on and off-screen for plenty of laughs and endearing moments. While we're just now getting into the summertime with some of the year's biggest blockbusters right around the corner, per a report from Deadline, a new holiday feature is already on the docket. Filming has reportedly wrapped on the upcoming holiday indie flick Christmas Eve In Miller's Point, with Michael Cera and several other notable actors rounding out the cast.

Related: Michael Cera Returns Home to a Strained Family in New Trailer for The Adults

Christmas Eve In Miller's Point is a Christmas comedy helmed by Tyler Taormina, whose previous work in the indie scene includes mystery dramas Ham on Rye (2019) and Happer's Comet (2022). He's co-writing the project with frequent collaborators Kevin Anton and Eric Berger, and co-producing alongside lead actor Michael Cera,...

Exclusive: Filmmaker Tyler Taormina (Ham on Rye) has wrapped production on Long Island on Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point, a Christmas comedy to star Michael Cera (Life & Beth), Elsie Fisher (Barry), Maria Dizzia (The Good Nurse), Francesca Scorsese (We Are Who We Are), Ben Shenkman (Billions), Gregg Turkington (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), Sawyer Spielberg (Masters of the Air) and newcomer Matilda Fleming.

Written by Taormina, Eric Berger and Kevin Anton, the film watches as four generations of the Balsano family gather for what may be the last Christmas in the family home. As they lose themselves in rowdy celebration, cousins Emily and Michelle sneak away to a winter wonderland, where suburban teenagers find their rebellious paradise.

The project hails from Omnes Films and was produced in association with Crypto Castle Productions and Puente Films. Producers included Cera, Krista Minto, Taormina, David Croley Broyles and Duncan Sullivan. The executive producers are Jeremy Gardner,...

San Francisco, April 5 (Ians) The much awaited first orbital flight of SpaceX’s Starship could lift off as early as April 10, however, some barriers remain, according to media reports.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, in mid-March, said that the landmark flight might launch as soon as the third week of April. But recent developments suggest that the attempt could come even sooner than that.

The new date comes as the US Federal Aviation Administration (Faa) released an air traffic advisory identifying April 10 as a primary launch date, TechCrunch reported.

In addition, Musk liked a tweet that simply reads “April 10” with a Gif of a rocket launching.

SpaceX has also rolled its Ship 24 out to Starbase’s orbital launch pad over the weekend. And on Monday, the company also conducted fueling tests with Booster 7 on the orbital launch mount, with Ship 24 on the ground nearby, Space.com reported.

However, the Faa...