News

Gravitas Ventures acquired U.S. and Canadian distribution rights to Lou Simon’s crime thriller, “9 Windows,” the indie distributor announced Friday.

The first-of-its-kind all-virtual production from producers Bryce Dicristofalo and Todd Slater of Brick Lane Entertainment is a modern day retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic “Rear Window.”

“9 Windows” is the first ever feature-length, live action film shot entirely on an extended reality film stage. It stars Independent Spirit Award nominee Michael Forsythe and Michael Paré.

Gravitas is slated to release the film on digital and cable VOD on Oct. 15.

“Gravitas Ventures is excited to bring ‘9 Windows’ to North American audiences in October. This Hitchcockian thriller will be a perfect viewing for horror fans this Halloween season,” Mackenzie Maguire, Gravitas Ventures’ acquisition manager, said in a statement.

“Technology has changed everything. We no longer have to look through our neighbors’ windows, because people are willing to share intimate...

Gravitas Ventures has acquired the North American distribution rights to Lou Simon’s “9 Windows,” a modern re-telling of Director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, “Rear Window.”

A modern take on the Hitchcockian classic, “9 Windows” made history as the first feature-length, live-action film shot entirely on an extended reality film stage. The film stars Independent Spirit Award Nominee Michael Forsythe and Michael Paré

“On the day of her graduation, Liza and her parents are driving to a restaurant to celebrate when a truck slams into their car. Eighteen months after the car accident, Liza is unable to walk and lives alone after her parents’ death. Feeling responsible, Liza spends her days trolling vloggers on a local website. Late one night, a new video is uploaded in which a man sets fire to a dog. She reports it to the police, but the police detective, Boyle, cannot be bothered with a misdemeanor.

In 2021, Wesley Snipes used an Esquire "What I've Learned" column to make a fascinating confession: "I've got to learn how to be a movie star."

Snipes was 58 at the time of the article's publication, and enjoying a career renaissance due to his portrayal of actor-director D'Urville Martin in Craig Brewster's uproarious "Dolemite Is My Name." Though he'd officially made his comeback as an aging gang leader in Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" four years prior, Martin was the perfect vehicle through which Snipes could examine the frustration of an ambitious artist shunted from A-list roles to low-aiming exploitation flicks.

Snipes' Martin is a bitter, alcoholic filmmaker trying, and failing miserably, to make nightclub comic Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy) look like a Blaxploitation action star on par with Richard Roundtree. Martin is a defeated man, and it's hard not to sense Snipes reckoning with the sun setting on his own action-hero stardom.

With fears our winter travel will need a, let’s say, reconsideration, the Criterion Channel’s monthly programming could hardly come at a better moment. High on list of highlights is Louis Feuillade’s delightful Les Vampires, which I suggest soundtracking to Coil, instrumental Nine Inch Nails, and Jóhann Jóhannson’s Mandy score. Notable too is a Sundance ’92 retrospective running the gamut from Paul Schrader to Derek Jarman to Jean-Pierre Gorin, and I’m especially excited for their look at one of America’s greatest actors, Sterling Hayden.

Special notice to Criterion editions of The Killing, The Last Days of Disco, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle, and programming of Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load, among the better debuts in recent years.

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

-Ship: A Visual Poem, Terrance Day, 2020

5 Fingers, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1952

After Migration: Calabria,...

Filmmaker Gale Anne Hurd will receive the 2015 David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Motion Pictures. The award will be presented to Hurd at the 26th Annual Producers Guild Awards ceremony on Saturday, January 24, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The Producers Guild of America made the announcement today.

“I am humbled to be mentioned in the same breath as the legendary producer David O. Selznick, and to receive an award in his name is truly an honor in and of itself,” said Hurd. “But even more important to me is the recognition it represents from my esteemed peers and colleagues at the Producers Guild of America.”

Gale Anne Hurd is one of the entertainment industry’s most esteemed producers of Academy Award-winning films and Emmy Award-winning programs that shatter box office and ratings records.

Hurd worked on Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond The Stars and went on...

It’s unclear who dubbed Gale Anne Hurd the “First Lady of Sci-Fi,” but it’s a title she owns with every fiber of her being. James Cameron's former confidante (and wife), Hurd started as an executive assistant to Roger Corman before producing such films as "The Terminator," "Aliens," "The Abyss," "Tremors," "The Relic," "Armageddon," Ang Lee's "Hulk," "and "Aeon Flux.” Today, she’s more popular ever, the matriarch and hype woman of the highest rated cable television show, AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” For her undeniable contributions to the world of blockbuster cinema, the Producers Guild of America has announced that it will bestow Hurd with its highest honor. The PGA announced today that Gale Anne Hurd will receive the 2015 David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Motion Pictures. Previous winners include Barbara Broccoli & Michael G. Wilson, the producers behind the James Bond franchise, Working Title Films’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner,...

Actress Elizabeth Pena died October 14 of natural causes after brief illness. She was 55.

Pena received an Independent Spirit Award for her work in John Sayles’ Lone Star. She was perhaps best known for her roles in La Bamba and Down And Out In Beverly Hills, and for a recurring role in Modern Family as Pilar, the mother of Sofia Vergara‘s character. She also recently played the mother of the principal character in the recently wrapped first season of El Rey Network‘s Matador, and recently appeared in TNT’s Major Crimes.

The El Rey Network issued a statement about Pena’s death: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of our friend and colleague, Elizabeth Peña. She was a role model, a truly extraordinary performer and an inspiration in every sense of the word. Our thoughts are with Elizabeth’s family and friends during this difficult time. She ‎will be deeply missed.

The crew of an offshore oil rig unwittingly disturb a creature which makes its way on to the rig and quickly starts to work its way through the crew. A tropical storm has hit, which caused most of the crew to be evacuated. Can the remaining few, with communications cut off, survive until the storm breaks and help arrives?

*****

An initial word of warning about that poster. The creature that is on the loose in this film bears no resemblance to that set of jaws. The poster makes it look like some sort of leviathan is surfacing to swallow the rig whole, whereas what we actually have is a man in a black suit, filmed in snapshots and at quirky angles to make it look like, well, something other than a guy in a black suit. This is basement-budget film-making of the first order, with all of the problematic connotations...

Subject: Helen Hunt, 47-year old American actress

Date of Assessment: April 6, 2011

Positive Buzzwords: Longevity, television, girl next door

Negative Buzzwords: Oscar, limited range, feature films

The Case: This week, we're dealing with yet another damn Academy Award winner and perhaps one of the greatest indicators that awards don't matter beyond a short-term improvement of the salary. In 1998, Helen Hunt won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in As Good As It Gets; she subsequently enjoyed a short run in a few high-powered blockbusters but then suddenly dropped off the Hollywood radar. Yet since the tender age of 10 years, Hunt's been working as an actress, although she didn't rise into mainstream popular culture until 1992's debut of "Mad About You." After seven seasons, a few Emmy awards, and a couple of blockbuster movies (including the aforementioned Oscar-winning role), Hunt pulled a Hollywood disappearing act for the most part. Indeed, the 1990s were hers,...

Wesley Snipes is Marcus, a CIA operative tasked with gaining the trust of Robert Davi’s shady arms dealer, Mr Smith so that when Mr Smith meets up with the corrupt hedge fund manager with whom Smith is working, he can take them both out. Six months later, Marcus is Smith’s head of security and they are on their way to a meeting, when the hedge fund manager will hand over $100m to Smith. Smith suffers a heart-attack on the way there, before the rest of Marcus’s team then intervene, having decided they would rather steal the $100m than see through the mission as originally intended. Marcus must fight off his own team, as well as wrestle with his conscience over all that he has done as a “special operative”.

*****

I was determined to come to Game of Death with an open mind. I have been a big fan of Snipes for years,...

There are performances whose brilliance doesn't become evident until an actor has amassed a body of work big enough for us to examine with a critical eye. At a turning point in Wesley Snipes' career came The Waterdance, a small drama about paraplegics from directors Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg. Snipes was hot off of New Jack City, and about to spend the next ten years as one of America's leading action movie stars. The Waterdance marks Snipes' last appearance as a working character actor before moving on to movie stardom in 1992's White Men Can't Jump, and re-examining his role as Raymond Hill in the film reveals a versatility that Snipes seems to have actively shunned by choosing projects that portrayed him primarily as a hard-ass action hero.

The Waterdance stars Eric Stoltz as Joel Garcia (a surrogate for paraplegic screenwriter Jimenez) as he struggles to heal from...