News

Nancy Wilson reaches out to her late mother in “You and Me,” the title track to her upcoming solo debut out May 7th.

Co-written with longtime Heart collaborator and friend Sue Ennis, the tune opens with subtle acoustic guitar. Vintage footage of Wilson and her late mother flash across the screen alongside the heartfelt lyrics: “You and me/Mama welcome back I feel you here/Gravity/Always pulls us back together for all time.”

“’You and Me’ is a zero gravity conversation with my mom that exists outside of time and space,...

The ABC has commissioned two new live-action children’s series, Aquarius Films’ Parent Up and Fremantle Australia’s The Pm’s Daughter.

Both supported by Screen Australia, the series will go into production this year, joining MaveriX, Itch season 2 and Hardball season 2 on ABC Me’s narrative drama slate.

A comedy action series for 8-13 year olds, Parent Up is created and executive produced by Justine Flynn (The Unlisted). It follows Yu Na and Min Park, who want more excitement in their lives. However, they don’t realise just how crazy their lives will become when they discover their once unremarkable parents are actually international spies and have disappeared in suspicious circumstances.

Writing with Flynn are Michelle Lim Davidson, Andrew Lee, Tiffany Zehnal, Melissa Lee Speyer, Tristram Baumber, Sophia Chung, Hyun Lee, Alice McCredie-Dando and David Park.

Directors will include Nick Verso, Chase Lee, Hyun Lee, Darlene Johnson, Neil Sharma and Flynn.

The long-term collaborators shot the film in secret late last year; it is being produced by Ireland’s Element Pictures, BBC Film and Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions. After shooting, finishing and premiering The Human Voice with Pedro Almodóvar late last year, Tilda Swinton is clearly setting an example for staying productive during the Covid-19 era. The Eternal Daughter, her latest collaboration with British great Joanna Hogg, has just been announced, with A24 taking world rights in advance of next month’s EFM. With filming having wrapped in December last year in Wales, under Covid-secure guidelines, the project gives Swinton a headlining role for Hogg, after her supporting turns in The Souvenir and the upcoming The Souvenir: Part II. They began their film careers together when Swinton starred in Hogg’s school graduation film, Caprice, in 1986. Suggesting a turn towards the gothic for Hogg, the film, billed as a “ghost story” and a.

Apple tapped director Lulu Wang to showcase the cinematic features of the tech company’s latest iPhone.

Wang, who wrote and directed 2019 feature film “The Farewell,” directed a new short for Apple in celebration of Chinese New Year, “Nian,” which puts a fresh twist on a well-known Chinese folktale. (Watch above or at this link.) The 11-minute film was directed by Wang and her team from “The Farewell” and shot on an iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Apple, which just reported a blowout holiday 2020 quarter with a record $65.6 billion in iPhone sales, has touted the iPhone 12 Pro models as the best smartphone it’s ever made for filmmakers. They’re the first iPhones that can record Hdr video in Dolby Vision, as well as provide the ability to edit 4K video at up to 60 frames per second directly on the phone. During the launch event last fall, Apple showed a 60-second film...

Element Pictures, Jwh Films producing, BBC Film backed development and production.

A24 has acquired worldwide rights to ghost story The Eternal Daughter that reunites Tilda Swinton with The Souvenir films director Joanna Hogg.

The Eternal Daughter shot in secret in Wales and wrapped production in December.

The story centres on a middle-aged daughter and her elderly mother who confront long-buried secrets when they return to their former family home, now a nearly vacant hotel.

At time of writing it was unclear whether A24 would launch sales at the virtual EFM in March.

Element Pictures and Jwh Films are producing, and...

Michael Apted, the director of Coal Miner’s Daughter, the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough and the Up documentary series, has died at the age of 79. Apted’s reps the Gersh Agency confirmed the filmmaker’s death to Variety, though a date or cause of death was not revealed.

“Director Michael Apted will always be remembered for the groundbreaking documentary Up series,” the Academy tweeted Friday. “A past president of the Directors Guild and Academy Governor, he also made many acclaimed feature films, from Coal Miner’s...

Michael Apted, the acclaimed British director behind the revolutionary series of decades-spanning Seven Up documentaries and features including Coal Miner’s Daughter, Nell and The World Is Not Enough, has died. He was 79.

Roy Ashton at the Gersh Agency confirmed Apted’s death to The Hollywood Reporter. A spokesperson for the DGA said he died Thursday night in Los Angeles. No cause of death was immediately available.

Apted made his feature directorial debut with the war saga The Triple Echo (1972), starring Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, and his résumé also included Continental Divide (1981), featuring John Belushi as a romantic lead; the crime drama Class Action (1991), starring Gene Hackman; and ...

Heretic worked on Greek portion of filming, on the island of Evia and the famous Onassis yacht.

Ruben Östlund has wrapped the shoot for his next feature Triangle Of Sadness in Greece, overcoming a series of pandemic-related challenges for the production.

Triangle Of Sadness – now budgeted around $15m (€13m) – completed a nine-week shoot on November 13 and is Östlund’s biggest production to date as well as his first in the English language. It also marks his follow-up to The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2017 and secured an Oscar nomination.

The Swedish filmmaker said: “It was...

This bizarre, creepy and maudit masterpiece of silent expressionist horror is an independent 1950s production that never had a chance commercially. Butchered by a second distributor, its ignominious fate was to wind up as a movie-within-a-movie footnote for Steve McQueen. Cohen/BFI’s ‘rescue’ remastering of John Parker’s picture does some things great — we never thought we’d see it look this good. But the overall package packs a big disappointment, as I’ll explain.

Dementia (1955)

Region B Blu-ray + Pal DVD

BFI

1955 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 56 min. / Street Date October 19, 2020 / £15.89

Starring: Adrienne Barret, Ben Roseman, Bruno VeSota, Ben Roseman, Angelo Rossitto.

Cinematography: William C. Thompson

Film Editor: Joseph Gluck

Original Music: George Antheil

Music director: Ernest Gold

Featured Vocal: Marni Nixon

New Concepts in Modern Sounds: Shorty Rogers and his Giants

Written, Produced and Directed by John J. Parker

I screened John Parker’s Dementia at UCLA in 1972, at...

Mike Cecchini Dec 15, 2019

The big finale of HBO's Watchmen comes together in episode 9! Here's all the references to the book we were able to catch.

This article contains Watchmen spoilers.

Watchmen episode 9 “See How They Fly” wraps it all up. And you’d think that after nine time-hopping episodes they might be ready to wrap up all of their homages and references to the original book. You would be wrong.

But not everything comes from the book. The episode’s title, “See how they fly” is a lyric from The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece “I Am The Walrus” which features the sinister/joyful (and Watchmen-relevant) refrain of “I am the eggman.” Now, with that out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Lady Trieu

- We’re once again back on Nov. 1, 1985...this time to witness the conception of Lady Trieu. Her mother, Bian (who in the...

Riverdale is known for its crazy storylines, and given that this was the midseason finale, we were expecting the cream of the crop.

And we were not disappointed. 

Take a look back at the wildest moments of the night.

Caution: spoilers ahead.

And don't forget that you can read the full review of Riverdale Season 4 Episode 9, too. We've even linked to it for you!

1. Polly Clawed off a Nurse's Face

We haven't seen Polly for a hot minute.

If I'm being exact, I think the last time we saw her was when she tried to drown Alice as part of some Farmie "rebirth" ritual.

When we finally caught up with her, she was tied up to a bed after disfiguring a nurse at Shady Grove named Betty.

Yes, disfiguring. 

2. Alice Tries to Attack her Daughter with a Butcher Knife

Honestly, the headline says it all. Both Alice and Polly went...

“I think storytelling is really our hope because there is such divisiveness right now in the world. And, I think that stories enable us to hear each other and see different sides of an experience,” documentarian Rory Kennedy told Variety at the 2019 Student Academy Awards on Thursday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

Kennedy was one of the five presenters for this year’s Student Academy Awards — along with Melina Matsoukas, Gregory Nava, Phil Lord and Chris Miller — which honored 16 student winners from colleges and universities around the world.

While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has existed since 1929, the student academy wasn’t founded until 1972 in an effort to encourage student filmmakers while acknowledging them for telling stories that do more than just entertain. Robert Zemeckis, Spike Lee and Patricia Riggen were past Student Academy Award recipients.

Kennedy praised this year’s “extraordinary winners,” saying,...

Updated with medals awarded: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Miller & Son from the American Film Institute’s Asher Jelinsky the gold medal in the Narrative domestic category at the 46th Student Academy Awards. It was won of seven golds handed out during the medalists ceremony at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

The Academy last month selected 16 winners of the annual Student Academy Awards, chosen from 1,615 entries from 255 domestic and 105 international colleges and universities. The wins make them eligible to compete for this year’s Oscar competition in the Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film or Documentary Short Subject categories.

Past winners have garnered 62 Oscar nominations and won or shared 12 awards.

The medals were handed out Thursday by presenters Phil Lord, Chris Miller, Melina Matsoukas, Gregory Nava and Rory Kennedy.

First-timers on this year’s list included for Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne in Switzerland,...

Director Kosai Sekine visited the third edition of the Japannual Film Festival to present his two movies “Love at Least” (2019) and “Tower of the Sun” (2018).

Kosai Sekine made his debut in 2005 with the short-film “Right Place”. In the following year, he won the Young Director Grand Prix Award in Cannes for “Daughter”. Since then, he has been working in the advertisement and music industry. He made commercials for Toyota, Google, Uniqlo, and many other companies. In 2010, Sekine directed the “Nike Music Shoe” campaign, which earned him the Silver Award at Cannes Lions.

With “Love at Least” as a fictional, and “Tower of the Sun” as a documentary movie, the Japanese director enters the territory of full-length theatrical motion pictures. Enough reasons to sit down with him and do a full-length interview.

You are already very successful in commercials as well as in the short film business. When did you decide to shoot a feature film?...

Students at the American Film Institute lead the way for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s annual Student Academy Awards.

The Academy named 16 students as winners on Thursday, including three in the narrative category from AFI. The competition received 1,615 entrants from 255 domestic and 105 international colleges and universities, the Academy said.

AFI was the only school to take more than one award. AFI students Asher Jelinsky (“Miller & Son”), Hao Zheng (“The Chef”) and Omer Ben-Shachar took home awards in the narrative category. Last year, the University of Southern California was the only school to take home more than one award, with four.

Also Read: New Academy President on the Next Oscars: 'I Don't Think We Need to Be Changing the Show'

Winners of the Student Academy Awards are eligible to compete for Oscars in the Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film or Documentary Short Subject category. Past...

Francisco Hervé of Panchito Films, Moisés Sepúlveda from Madriguera Films and Daniela Raviola, three of Chile’s most exciting international-minded independent producers, have together launched a new indie production house, Juntos Films.

Hervé has written, directed and produced (María Paz González ‘s “Daughter”) several feature films, documentaries and TV series which have screened at major festivals around the world. He is a member of the Eurodoc producers’ network and teaches at the University of Chile and Catholic University of Chile in Santiago.

“For year’s we’ve been working on our own, like lonely wolves. Collectively though, we find that in creative work the sum is more than the value of the parts,” he told Variety about the merger.

Raviola has produced short films, television, documentaries, animation and served as General Producer of the International Animation Festival Chilemonos and Mai! Animation Market. She worked with Hervé at Panchito where she...

A teen girl and a robotic mom deal with parenting issues at the end of the world in I Am Mother.

facebook

twitter

tumblr

I Am Mother is one of those original Netflix movies that feels both ambitious and undercooked. It takes place, we are told at the outset, in an undefined future where an “extinction event” has taken place, wiping out most if not all of the human race. But stored in an underground bunker in case of just such a crisis are some 63,000 frozen human embryos, all carefully tended by an a robot named Mother, who hatches one of the embryos in the bunker’s medical lab and grows it via montage into a teenage girl named Daughter (newcomer Clara Rugaard).

Mother acts as Daughter’s parental figure, friend, playmate, doctor and teacher, and when the girl is naturally curious about what lies outside the bunker, Mother regretfully...

Frankenstein 1970

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1958 / 2:35:1 / 83 Min. / Street Date – April 9, 2019

Starring Boris Karloff, Don Barry, Jana Lund

Written by Richard H. Landau

Cinematography by Carl E. Guthrie

Directed by Howard Koch

Color TVs, swimming pools and cars (especially cars). American culture of the 50s was fueled by desire for the newest status symbol – even the title of the latest monster movie was pitched to the upwardly mobile – get behind the wheel of the atomic powered Frankenstein 1970.

Take a look under the hood though and apart from a few modernistic bells and whistles (most notably its CinemaScope framing) director Howard Koch’s movie is doggedly retrograde. The swooning ingenues, skeptical villagers and dank dungeons – all would have fit comfortably in a Universal horror film of the 30’s.

The movie’s real attraction is a more than welcome blast from the past – Boris Karloff returns to Mary Shelley’s monsterverse...

Chambers Trailer Netflix‘s Chambers (2019) movie trailer stars Uma Thurman, Tony Goldwyn, Sivan Alyra Rose, Griffin Powell-Arcand, and Marcus Lavoi. Chambers‘ plot synopsis: “Chambers centers on a young heart attack survivor who becomes consumed by the mystery surrounding the heart that saved her life. However, the closer she gets to uncovering the truth about her [...]

Continue reading: Chambers (2019) TV Show Trailer: Sivan Rose Receives a Heart Transplant from Uma Thurman’s Daughter [Netflix]...

Korean distributors are having to fight ever harder for their share of Korea’s theatrical market share. Threats on the horizon include a slide in the performance of local movies, consolidation, the arrival of new players and the challenge from streaming services.

South Korea’s theatrical box office is now bigger than that of France or Germany despite a smaller population. But it has largely stopped growing and may be at a turning point. Admissions have plateaued since 2013, and gross revenues have increased largely due to ticket price increases.

The country’s powerhouse exhibition companies Cj-cgv and Lotte have responded by expanding abroad. But for distributors, it means a fight on many fronts.

The clearest evidence that the old order was under threat came last year when Lotte Cultureworks (formerly Lotte Entertainment), dethroned Cj Entertainment as the country’s top distributor for the first time in 15 years. Success came from...

Kirsten Howard Joseph Baxter May 9, 2019

Netflix post-apocalyptic film, I Am Mother, stars Hilary Swank, Clara Rugaard and a creepy maternal robot voiced by Rose Byrne.

A while ago, we first heard that Oscar winner Hilary Swank was teaming up with first time director Grant Sputore for a new sci-fi/horror film called I Am Mother. We were curious, because Swank's previous forays into the horror genre weren't exactly...good, for the most part. The Gift was solid enough with Sam Raimi at the helm, and The Reaping and The Resident both initially looked promising, but didn't ultimately make the grade, so it was interesting to us that the actress had chosen to dip her toe back into the scream queen water some years later, especially with an unproven director at the helm. Yet, when the film became bound for Netflix direct distribution, the logic became a bit clearer.

While the...