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Born as a reflection of our waking reality, Science Fiction is more than just a mere futuristic view of life as we know it, but it acts as a warning of it. The Science Fiction Genre has been a pivotal one in human history. While some often credit Mary Shelley's 1818 novel ‘Frankenstein’ as the first true science fiction novel, themes, and tropes that are characteristic of modern science fiction can be traced to the 2nd-century novel ‘Verae Historiae’ or ‘A True Story’ by Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata. Regardless, this speculative fiction has evolved alongside humanity, drawing inspiration from its technological advancement to focus on potential scientific advancements to explore complex societal issues, philosophical questions, and humanity's potential future. Many, especially nowadays, see Science Fiction as a mere entertainment genre that alongside fantasy acts as a form of escapism. Yet, upon further analysis, it can function as a tool...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

The Limits of Control and Unfaithful screen on 35mm; Claire Denis’ No Fear, No Die and the rare Turkish film Yol play Sunday.

Film Forum

An Ealing Studios retrospective starts; the 4K restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Grido continues and Willy Wonka screens on Sunday.

Bam

Films by Harmony Korine, Todd Haynes, and Martin Scorsese play this weekend in “Outrage: Movies and the Culture Wars, 1987–1996.”

Museum of the Moving Image

The Frank Oz series continues, while Vanishing Point screens on Sunday.

Metrograph

Napoleon Dynamite, Throne of Blood, and Wild at Heart show on 35mm; a Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn program begins; The World Is a Stage, Nicolas Uncaged, My Crazy Uncle (or Aunt), Insomnia, and Crush the Strong, Help the Weak continue.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive retrospective of Portuguese cinema continues.

IFC Center

A...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

In honor of Ken Kelsch, Abel Ferrara’s The Blackout and The Addiction screen on 35mm; prints of Douglas Buck’s Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America and the 2006 Sisters remake screen Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Film Forum

A 4K restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Grido begins; 42 screens on Sunday.

Bam

A series of New York coming-of-age movies begins, including Crooklyn on 35mm.

Film at Lincoln Center

The new 4K restoration of Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors continues.

Museum of the Moving Image

Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein plays in 3D on Friday; a Frank Oz series.

Metrograph

Light Sleeper and The White Ribbon show on 35mm; Around Ludlow, The World Is a Stage, and a Jeff Wall program begins; My Crazy Uncle (or Aunt) and Insomnia continue.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive...

Despite its ups and downs, I’ve always respected the Alien franchise for daring to try something new with every new entry. From Vietnam allegories to reimagining Chariots of the Gods as a Lovecraftian origin story for the Xenomorphs, the series challenges the very concept of genre as it explores what might go wrong when humanity comes into contact with a truly perfect organism.

And with Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus paying homage to the most underrated movie in the franchise during its horrific final act, today I’d like to look back on Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s unfairly maligned Alien: Resurrection and dive into why I think this oddball gem of a film deserves more love.

Like many sequels, the story of Resurrection begins soon after the release of its predecessor. Desperate for a course-correction after the grimdark prison story of Alien³ left audiences feeling frustrated, Fox attempted to recruit established filmmakers like Danny Boyle,...

With Alien: Romulus hitting our screens soon, it is as good a time as any to cast a discerning eye over the history of this at times breath-taking and always fascinating franchise and remind ourselves of some of the best scenes that it has given us.

Related: Win Alien 6-film Box Set Collection on Blu-Ray

In the interests of those important tenets of equity and inclusion, we’ll have one from each film….

Alien

The original, and still considered by many to be the high water mark of the franchise. A phenomenal “haunted house in space” nerve-jangler, Alien has enough iconic scenes to fill this article and many more. As obvious a choice as it might be, we are of course going with the chest-burster scene.

John Hurt’s Kane, awake from a face-hugger induced coma, is merrily stuffing his face in the mess hall, until what initially looks like...

Disney+ has unveiled the trailer for “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” the streamer’s highly anticipated original series starring Daniel Brühl as the iconic fashion designer.

Produced by Gaumont (“Lupin”) and Jour Premier, the six-part series chronicles the rise of Karl Lagerfeld through the world of 1970s Parisian high fashion. It will be available to stream on Disney+ in France and international territories, and on Hulu in the U.S., on June 7. “Becoming Karl” world premiered at Canneseries, where it received a standing ovation and warm reviews.

The lushly lensed series opens in 1972, when the 38-year-old Lagerfeld is a ready-to-wear designer, unknown to the general public. He falls in love with a sultry dandy, Jacques de Bascher (Théodore Pellerin), who inspires him to challenge himself and act on his ambition to become the world’s most famous French fashion designer. He faces off Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois), who reigned supreme with...

Writer and director Ari Aster has begun production on his newest film, “Eddington,” and he has assembled quite a cast.

Now boasting two Oscars, Emma Stone will appear in the film, as will Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix, marking his second collaboration with Aster after last year’s love-it-or-hate-it-but-definitely-respect-it “Beau is Afraid.” Oscar-nominee and current Harkonnen meme king Austin Butler, Marvel’s future Reed Richards Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Tony winner Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, and Clifton Collins Jr. round out the incredibly stacked cast.

A24, which has released all of Aster’s features (“Hereditary” and “Midsommar” before “Beau”) announced the “contemporary western” that is “coming soon” via Instagram. Aster has parted ways with his usual cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski and is working with the legendary Persian-French lenser Darius Khondji, whose credits include “Uncut Gems,” “The Lost City of Z,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Stealing Beauty,” “Seven,” and “ The City of Lost Children.

Cannes rejected it. The Oscars ignored it. But “Amélie” lives on, as everyone’s favorite crème-brulee-cracking, stone-skipping Montmartre mischief-maker and romantic go-between is back in theaters come Valentine’s Day, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

“Amélie,” directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and written by the French filmmaker with Guillaume Laurant, remains one of the 21st-century arthouse’s most imaginative confections, the rare film perhaps more misunderstood now than it was when it came out in 2001. Make no mistake that “Amélie” was huge then. There was the box office, the awards, the infectious swells of composer Yann Tiersen’s music in the air (at least in my headphones), and then came the imitators. I remember in college a close friend had a poster of the film pinned to her dorm room wall, a bemused Audrey Tautou upright in bed flanked by framed pictures of an Elizabeth-collared dog and a white-feathered fowl, and...

Sony to open fantasy drama on Valentine’s Day 2024 in 250 theatres.

Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) has acquired all rights in North America excluding French Canada to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie and will reissue the film on February 14, 2024 – 22 years after the original release through Miramax.

The move comes as theatres continue to court older audiences and anticipate a tricky year ahead in light of supply issues stemming from the six-month production halt during the Hollywood strikes.

Amelie stars Audrey Tatou in the title role as an altruistic waitress in Montmartre, Paris, who finally sets out to do something for herself. Mathieu Kassovitz also stars.

Music Box Films has dropped the trailer for “The Crime Is Mine,” François Ozon’s screwball comedy set in 1930s Paris starring Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Rebecca Marder and Isabelle Huppert.

A showbiz caper with a feminist edge in the vein of Ozon’s “8 Women” and “Potiche,” “The Crime Is Mine” will open in New York on Dec. 25, followed by Los Angeles and a national expansion.

Tereszkiewicz, who won a César award for best newcomer for her performance in “Forever Young,” stars as a struggling actress, Madeleine, who lives with her best friend, Pauline (Marder), an unemployed lawyer, in a cramped flat. Opportunity knocks after a lascivious theatrical producer who made an inappropriate advance toward Madeleine turns up dead. Madeleine admits to the crime and is acquitted on the grounds of self-defense — and in result becomes a star, as well as a feminist icon.

“The Crime Is Mine” was freely adapted...

Studiocanal are proud to release Delicatessen the wonderfully dark, critically acclaimed surreal comedy from directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, in a sumptuous new 4K restoration, and making its Uhd debut.

Directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro dazzling fantasy adventure The City Of Lost Children was released earlier this year by Studiocanal.

Delicatessen is set in a distant, apocalyptic future, conventional society has reached a state of collapse. Grain is now used as currency and meat has become a rare commodity. Meanwhile an unemployed clown finds work as a maintenance man in a squalid apartment block situated above a butcher’s shop.

Having fallen in love with the owner’s daughter he soon discovers the sinister truth behind the ominous landlord’s unsavoury intentions. Between blossoming romance and disappearing tenants his only hope for survival could be the members of a subterranean militia of vegetarian freedom fighters. Or is it too late already?...

Great sci-fi movies not set in the future offer alternative histories, revelations about the ancient world, and stories closer to home. By focusing on the present or the past, these movies easily combine sci-fi with other genres like steampunk, horror, surrealism, and Western themes. These movies blur the lines between sci-fi and related genres, creating visually enchanting narratives that explore themes of imagination, innocence, ambition, sacrifice, and the blurred line between illusion and reality.

Great sci-fi movies not set in the future subvert what audiences typically expect from the genre. Indeed, sci-fi is commonly associated with future timelines and showcasing the evolution of technology, society, and humanity itself. However, the future is just one of the many settings where sci-fi movies can tackle and develop these overarching themes.

The most important sci-fi movies ever made occur throughout the vast spectrum of both time and space, and there are many great...

For the third year running, Annecy’s artistic residency program accompanied three selected projects on a six-month adventure, beginning with a three-month script workshop before moving to Annecy’s Papeteries Image Factory for a similar bout of tailored mentorships and visual experimentation. At the end, the filmmakers launch their development titles at the MIFA market.

“Often when filmmakers start a project, they are expected to advance too quickly, without the necessary time for reflection and experimentation,” said coordinator Géraldine Baché. “They have to rush into production because time is money, so we wanted to give them that time, to offer three months to come and explore, to test things and find a kind of visual identity for their project.”

These are the three projects from this year’s selection.

‘The Bird Kingdom’

“The Bird Kingdom”

Set in a fantasy version of the Brazilian Sertão where men can transform into birds,...

To celebrate the release of The City of Lost Children – released on 4K Uhd, Blu-ray & DVD 3rd April – we have a 4K Uhd up for grabs!

The City of Lost Children, in a spectacular new 4K restoration, and making its Uhd debut, is a dazzling fantasy adventure from Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, creators of the critically acclaimed 1991 cult hit Delicatessen. They bring their surreal vision to the story of Krank, a tormented scientist who sets about kidnapping local children in order to steal their dreams and so reverse his accelerated ageing process. When Krank’s henchmen kidnap his brother, local fisherman and former circus strongman One (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman) sets out on a journey to Krank’s nightmarish laboratory, accompanied by a little orphan girl called Miette (Judith Vittet).

With stunning visuals from Oscar-nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji, costumes from Jean Paul Gaultier (The Fifth Element) and a haunting...

To celebrate the release of The City Of Lost Children – released on 4K Uhd, Blu-ray & DVD 3rd April – we have a 4K Uhd up for grabs!

The City Of Lost Children, in a spectacular new 4K restoration, and making its Uhd debut, is a dazzling fantasy adventure from Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, creators of the critically acclaimed 1991 cult hit Delicatessen. They bring their surreal vision to the story of Krank, a tormented scientist who sets about kidnapping local children in order to steal their dreams and so reverse his accelerated ageing process. When Krank’s henchmen kidnap his brother, local fisherman and former circus strongman One (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman) sets out on a journey to Krank’s nightmarish laboratory, accompanied by a little orphan girl called Miette (Judith Vittet).

With stunning visuals from Oscar-nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji, costumes from Jean Paul Gaultier (The Fifth Element) and a haunting...

Alien: Covenant (Screengrab: 20th Century Fox), Hulu logo Screenshot: AVClub In space, no one can hear you yawn. That was the general consensus last December when it was revealed that the ninth film in the Alien franchise, which launched in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking horror/sci-fi fusion, was on...

Daniel Brühl is set to star as late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld in “Kaiser Karl,” the anticipated Disney+ original series which Gaumont (“Lupin”) is currently producing. The show is currently shooting in France, Monaco and Italy.

The six-part series will chronicle the rise of Karl Lagerfeld through the world of 1970s Parisian high fashion. In 1972, a 38-year-old Karl Lagerfeld aspired to become the most famous French fashion designer, at a time when Yves Saint Laurent reigned supreme. Lagerfeld went on to become the head designer and creative director of Chanel, Fendi and his own label.

The series will also explore the rivalry between Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent’s partner Pierre Berge, as well as his love story with Jacques de Bascher.

Along with depicting the clan rivalries and ego battles of the high fashion world, the series will also portray the epic partying and decadence, tragic love affairs and...

Warning! Spoilers ahead for Stargirl: The Lost Children #4!The choice that wound up creating the Flashpoint timeline is one that's going to haunt the Flash for the rest of time. Barry Allen's creation of the most unstable DC world is something that has officially put a permanent stain on his otherwise stellar reputation.

While he's always understood the consequences his powers could have if used improperly, Barry used them to rectify a painful loss. After discovering that the Reverse-Flash was responsible for killing his mother, the Flash decided to go back in time and save her. Unfortunately, it had the unintended result of creating the Flashpoint timeline, a diverging universe where the world's greatest heroes were missing and an Atlantean/Amazon war threatened to tear the world apart. Thankfully, Barry came to his senses, but his alterations to DC's history allowed the timeline to be manipulated by outside forces...

Warning! Spoilers ahead for Stargirl: The Lost Children #4!It looks like one selfish choice of Batman has resulted in a powerful tragedy that's rocked the DC Universe. Bruce Wayne's actions in Flashpoint Beyond has had unforeseen consequences that have made some of the most vulnerable heroes suffer.

Fans don't need to be told that Bruce Wayne incurred a painful loss when his parents were gunned down in Crime Alley when he was just a child. It's the moment that caused him to devote his life to justice and put him on a path to becoming one of the Dcu's greatest heroes. However, after Bruce became aware of the Flashpoint timeline, he discovered that there was an alternate path where his parents lived. Not wanting to lose them again, Batman stole a snowglobe from the Time Masters and used residual temporal energy to trap the Flashpoint timeline inside it as a pocket universe,...

Sad news to report today as acclaimed Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti has died at the age of 85. The composer was best known for his frequent collaborations with David Lynch. His niece, Frances Badalamenti, told THR that he died on Sunday of natural causes, surrounded by family at his home.

Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting and beautiful theme for Twin Peaks was merely one of his many collaborations with David Lynch. He composed music for Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive. He also returned for the Twin Peaks revival series on Showtime. Badalamenti’s work can be heard on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, The City of Lost Children, Arlington Road, The Beach, Auto Focus, Cabin in the Woods, A Very Long Engagement, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, The Wicker Man,...

Composer and longtime David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti has died at age 85.

Badalamenti composed the iconic score for “Twin Peaks” and other Lynch projects including “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway,” “The Straight Story,” and “Mulholland Drive.” He also wrote new music for the 1992 “Twin Peaks” prequel film “Fire Walk with Me” and for the 2017 third season on Showtime, “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Throughout his career, Badalamenti worked with artists like David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Nina Simone, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and LL Cool J. In addition to his film work, he composed the opening theme to the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

Badalamenti’s nephew posted on social media to confirm his passing. “My great uncle Angelo Badalamenti has crossed the barrier onto another plane of existence,” he wrote. “Between his work on ‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Twin Peaks,’ ‘Cabin Fever,’ ‘Nightmare on Elm Street 3,’ and a plethora of others, plus...

A legendary, Emmy-nominated composer known for his work with David Lynch, we’ve learned the sad news this afternoon that Angelo Badalamenti has passed away at the age of 85.

Born on March 22, 1937 in New York City, Angelo Badalamenti earned three Primetime Emmy Awards nominations for the musical composition and main title theme music he contributed to David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” and Badalamenti also composed the scores for Lynch’s movies including Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Drive.

In 1991, Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” theme won him a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, cementing its status as one of the all-time great TV themes.

With nearly 100 credits under his belt, Angelo Badalamenti also scored countless other movies including A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Wild at Heart, The City of Lost Children, Arlington Road, The Beach,...

Since 1999, the reputation of "Stir of Echoes" — based on the book by science-fiction writer Richard Matheson — has continued to improve with age. It remains a standout in the long line of gripping ghost stories that came before it, and it helped set the stage for more mainstream paranormal hits down the line like "The Conjuring," in a time when meta-slasher films had taken over in a post-"Scream" horror landscape. Kevin Bacon gives a tortured performance as a man forced to solve the mystery behind the death of a local girl after she begins haunting him. After his New Age sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) hypnotizes him, Bacon's character Tom can't stop seeing horrific visions, including one memorable scene where he pulls out his own bloody tooth.

"Stir of Echoes" was released in the wake of the huge success of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense," and was completely overshadowed by it.

The fact that “Amélie” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first movie in nine years is quietly being dumped on Netflix without festival play or advance press of any kind after Jeunet insisted that he would only partner with the streamer as “a last resort” is really the only review you should need when it comes to “Bigbug,” of 2050 (mark it on your calendars). And yet — as this feature-length cluster headache makes perfectly clear — humankind has already surrendered itself to the mercy of our corporate machine overlords, meaning that even the most exasperated critic has to pump out at least 600 words just to convince the tiny God-king inside the Google algorithm not to banish their content to the elephant graveyard that is page two of the search results. So let’s get on with it.

A filmmaker whose breakthrough successes don’t entirely diminish the feeling that he was put on this...

Jean-Pierre Jeunet put his stamp across the 1990s and 2000s with a unique blend of zany personality, thoughtful character portraits, and sharp, multi-dimensional humor. So much was running in films like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, both co-directed with Marc Caro, that they could have boiled over, yet somehow remained focused works that played completely as the ownerships of their creators. After a brief misfire when stepping into the world of Hollywood blockbusters with 1997’s Alien: Resurrection—an early forebear of the “indie director to studio tentpole” pipeline that gobbles up every promising young filmmaker these days—Jeunet found his peak as a solo director in the early aughts: Amélie and A Very Long Engagement brought his particular style into a new era with remarkable sophistication and retention of his characteristic charm.

Then a curious thing happened. Despite being a beloved international director arguably at the height of his career,...

The Oscar-nominated film-maker behind Amélie has created a hit-and-miss comedy about a futuristic world and an android revolt

Machines might seem an antithetical thing to get sentimental about, but in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s view of them as imperfect, quirk-prone and funny, they’re pretty much human. The film-maker cobbles together off-kilter worlds where everything is mechanized yet nothing works properly, daily life turned into an absurd burlesque of glitches, miscommunications, system errors and sound-the-alarm snafus. In early-career triumphs like Delicatessen or The City of Lost Children, Jeunet assembled Rube Goldberg contraptions with such fastidious personal care that they couldn’t help but be imbued with the idiosyncrasies of their creator. Sometimes, he’ll apply this notion in a more figurative way to satirize the catch-22-clogged French bureaucracy, a giant engine seemingly built to malfunction. He gets in one or two such cracks with his latest film Bigbug, in which...

As the first film from the director of “Amélie” in nearly a decade, “Bigbug” is kind of a big deal. Sadly, it’s also a big disappointment — easily the most obnoxious Netflix original in some time, owing to the company’s trust in a director whose overactive imagination demands some kind of boundaries.

At precisely the moment pandemic-confined audiences want to get out and breathe fresh air, Jean-Pierre Jeunet gives them a suffocating scenario in which a squabbling French family is trapped in their retro-modern home with several android assistants. The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future — one in which all the houses look exactly the same on the outside, but are maintained by eccentric AI indoors (where the film spends 98% of its time).

In “No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre surmised that “hell is other people.” In this zany sci-fi riff on that idea,...

It’s something completely different . . . a genuine obscurity, a Swiss spy fantasy from the 1960s with major appeal to fans keen on (not in this order) art cinema, Fritz Lang, superspy romps, surreal silent serials, Eurocult actors, and visuals with a New Wave-ish flair. Teams of assassins vie for an atom secret held by mad scientist Daniel Emilfork. The spies target his gorgeous, innocent daughter Marie-France Boyer, but she’s obsessed with a romantic memory from ‘last summer in Shandigor.’ Jean-Louis Roy’s unique, precision-crafted gem evokes the graphic-novel pulp appeal of Dr. Mabuse, Alphaville, Judex or Diabolik — yet it is unlike any of them. It’s comic nonsense, but also earnest and original.

The Unknown Man of Shandigor

Blu-ray

Deaf Crocodile Films

1967 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 90 min. / Street Date January 22, 2022 / L’inconnu de Shandigor / Available through Vinegar Syndrome / 34.98

Starring: Marie-France Boyer, Ben Carruthers, Daniel Emilfork, Jacques Dufilho, Serge Gainsbourg,...

After earning much acclaim for his early features Delicatessen, Amélie, and The City of Lost Children, it’s now been nearly a decade since the last fully-fledged feature from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. The French director is now returning next month with his Netflix movie Bigbug and the full trailer has now arrived.

Starring Dominique Pinon, Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Youssef Hajdi, Alban Lenoir, and François Levantal, the sci-fi comedy is set in the year 2045 in which a group of bickering suburbanites find themselves stuck together when an android uprising causes their well-intentioned household robots to lock them in for their own safety. With a characteristically vibrant palette, the director doesn’t seem to be breaking any new ground, but hopefully it’s a fun, satirical romp.

See the trailer below.

Bigbug arrives on Netflix on February 11.

The post Bigbug Trailer: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Stages...

The 2021 Fantasia Film Festival wrapped a little over a week ago now, and today I’ve got a pair of reviews on tap from the fest that feature two truly audacious genre-bending projects that I highly recommend fans keep an eye out for in the coming months. So, read on to check out my thoughts on Phil Tippett’s stop-motion masterpiece Mad God and the twisty-turny sci-fi thriller Ultrasound from Rob Schroeder.

Mad God: A film 30 years in the making, Phil Tippett’s Mad God is truly a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience that I’d liken to meeting the maniacal and menacing love child of Ray Harryhausen, Hieronymus Bosch, and The City of Lost Children. Like an esoteric descent into the deepest, darkest pits of hell, Mad God is a haunting journey highlighting the atrocities of war, the drain of capitalism, and the danger of politics as it follows a...

Easily one of the most strikingly bold films of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival, Phil Tippett’s Mad God feels like a journey into a realm filled with death and destruction, brimming with haunting visuals unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And for those who may not know, Tippett is one of the greatest creative minds to have ever worked in Hollywood, lending his talents to a variety of projects including the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, RoboCop, Dragonslayer, Willow, Howard the Duck, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and so many more.

For the last 30 years, Tippett has been working independently on Mad God, an audacious stop-motion project that feels like the love child of Ray Harryhausen’s work and The City of Lost Children, and now, the film is finally being released into the world. Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Tippett about...

This article contains spoilers for Dark City (1998).

Back in the late 90s, UK cinemas were still running an annual promotion where you got to see as many recently-released films as you liked for the tidy sum of £1 each. The promotion was usually only set up for one day, so movie buffs used to plan that day with extreme dedication. You had to line up the screening times just right to make sure no film overlapped, but if you had nerves of steel and a butt lining to match? Yeah, you could squeak through five major releases for £5 and feel insufferably smug about it.

Alex Proyas’ Dark City was one of the movies caught in the net of that promotion in 1998, and I remember being bowled over by how surprisingly weird it was. Clearly influenced by Metropolis, Brazil, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s The City of Lost Children, the...

Watch the Trailer for Mandibles: "When simple-minded friends Jean-Gab and Manu find a giant fly trapped in the boot of a car, they decide to train it in the hope of making a ton of cash."

Written and Directed by Quentin Dupieux

Starring Gregoire Ludig, David Marsais, Adele Exarchopoulos, India Hair, Romeo Elvis,

Coralie Russier, and Bruno Lochet

Magnet Releasing will release Mandibles everywhere July 23rd, 2021

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Third Killer Shorts Screenwriting Competition Announced: "Calling all horror writers! The third annual Killer Shorts Horror Short Screenplay Competition is accepting entries from July 1st, 2021.

The Killer Short Contest celebrates horror short screenwriters from around the world, connecting them with managers, producers, and filmmakers. The Top 10 scripts will be read by a star-studded panel of judges, with over $5,000 worth of prizes up for grabs including Final Draft 12 screenwriting software, Shudder subscriptions, career consultations, memberships to Stan Winston’s School of Creative Arts,...

French filmmaker Alexandre Aja’s newest film, Oxygen, finds Mélanie Laurent trapped inside a cryogenic chamber with a little less than 90 minutes of air left in her tank. A survival thriller set in the confines of a single pod, the Netflix feature is another entry into Aja’s single-location series, one that elevates into an expansive thrill ride of excitement and focused adrenaline.

Laurent gives all of herself as Elizabeth Hansen, a woman with no memory of how she got into the chamber, and with little resources at her disposal, outside of an AI assistant named M.I.L.O. As Aja’s first film shot in his home country in over a decade, Oxygen represents a leap in Aja’s filmmaking, combining the horror elements of his past films with a thrilling setup, a topsy-turvy script, and clear direction from the genre aficionado.

Aja chatted with The Film Stage...

Producers William G. Santor, CEO of Productivity Media, and Nicholas Tabarrok, President of Darius Films have lined up a stellar cast featuring Ron Perlman (Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy), Academy-Award nominee Harvey Keitel, Elias Koteas, Joel David Moore (James Cameron’s Avatar) and new discovery 10 year old Emma Ho, for their new action drama The Baker.

Directed by Jonathan Sobol who’s credits include The Padre starring Nick Nolte and Tim Roth, The Art of the Steal starring Kurt Russell and Matt Dillon and A Beginners Guide to Endings starring Scott Caan, J.K. Simmons and Harvey Keitel, The Baker is written by Paolo Mancini & Thomas Michael, the duo who wrote and starred in the festival favorite Hank and Mike featuring Joe Mantegna. Production is set to commence in the Cayman Islands as part of a sweeping multi-film production deal with the Islands’ Film Commission, the Cayman’s Ministry of International Trade,...

An Oscar-nominated screenwriter known for such films as The City of Lost Children and Amélie, Guillaume Laurant found an exciting introduction to the world of animation in Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body.

The first animated film to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Nespresso Grand Prize, the imaginative, romantic and surreal Netflix pic follows a severed hand as it escapes from a dissection lab, embarking on a journey through Paris to reconnect with its body.

Written by Laurant and Clapin, the film is an adaptation of Laurant’s 2006 novel, Happy Hand. “This novel was meant as a counterpoint to the first novel I had written, which was a very personal one,” Laurant tells Deadline. “It’s based on what the French writer Marcel Aymé did, in terms of having a fantastic element that is introduced in a very real setting.”

An inventor of spectacular fables, Laurant had been...

Epix describes its upcoming 10-part series “Perpetual Grace, Ltd” as a “modern noir drama.” But Jimmi Simpson’s way of pitching the show, which also stars Ben Kingsley and Jacki Weaver, might offer you just a little more insight into what’s in store for viewers who tune in for the premiere this Sunday. Or possibly make it even less clear, but more intriguing.

“It’s like a stylized ‘The City of Lost Children.’ And then it pauses and tells you about love and how real it is. It just lands, too,” the “Westworld” alum told TheWrap during an interview at the Television Critics Association press tour in February.

Ok, let’s rewind so you understand a little better why Simpson is comparing “Perpetual Grace” to a 1995 sci-fi, surrealist film starring Ron Perlman, which tells the story of a scientist who kidnaps children to steal their dreams, in hopes that they slow his aging process.

Delicatessen (1991)Growing up in the mid-to-late nineties, the pan-and-scan generation, I can remember the first time I saw a movie that was shot by Darius Khondji. Se7en, the cinematographer’s first American film and best-known work, looked scarier that any movie I’d seen other than The Shining; it was miasmic and biblically unclean, with deep shadows that seeped and stuck like gunk, rain pelting from a pre-apocalyptic sky. Then came The City of Lost Children, a dark storybook fantasy of Gilliam-esque camera angles, about a squalid port town lost in fog and a mad scientist’s lair built on piles out in a sludge-green sea. That one I watched maybe twenty times, always with sympathy for the disembodied brain Uncle Irvin and for Krank, the child-snatching villain who cannot dream.Later there was Alien: Resurrection, the video for Madonna’s “Frozen,” and The Ninth Gate, another movie I had...

Ron Perlman says: "Acting is like a drug, like shooting heroin and getting this incredible sensation”. In recent years, however, the star of such magnificent films as Cronos, The City of Lost Children and, certainly, Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy diptych, has taken as well the role of producer through his company Wing and a Prayer, so that he can be "more realistically involved with a movie, finding what’s worthy of my time as opposed to what’s not worthy of my time.” Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, Asher is Perlman’s latest production, in which the man himself plays the titular character, the quintessential solitary and professional hitman who will have to face a turning point in his life linked to issues like aging, health, and love, the...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Happy Monday, readers! We took a little weekend break over the last few days, but we’re back today with our tenth installment of Daily Dead’s 2017 Holiday Gift Guide. Now that we’re less than three weeks away from Christmas, that means shopping season is beginning to kick into high gear, and today we’re celebrating all sorts of amazing artwork that can be purchased online by the likes of Francesco Francavilla, Matty Ryan Tobin, “Ghoulish” Gary Pullin, Ken Taylor (and other assorted artists featured in his shop), BeastWreck, Electric Zombie, Jason Edmiston, Chris Kuchta, Pixel Elixir, Quiltface Studios, and assorted prints from Hero Complex Gallery and Gallery 1988.

And as usual, what we’re listing in today’s Hgg is only just a fraction of what’s out there, so be sure to take a look around each of the respective online stores because there are a Ton of...

The first trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming film The Shape of Water has just come online and it looks like an imaginative wonderland. Something about the presentation reminds me of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children. There is… Continue Reading →

The post Trailer and Poster Released for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water appeared first on Dread Central.

Author: Dave Roper

So, we come to the end of this particular series. We’ve covered a number of aspects of the creative input into film-making, including actors, actresses, writers composers, and directors (in two parts). We’ve stopped short of costume, make-up, special effects, art design and others, however our final stop is Cinematography. The Dop exerts plenty of influence over the look of the film. Yes, lighting, production design and the director’s vision are key too, but the consistency and persistence with which certain directors stick with and return to a trusted Dop shows just how much they contribute.

Darius Khondji – Seven

Seven has a unique visual aesthetic. Plenty of films have gone for the “always raining, always dark” approach, but contrast Seven with something like AvP: Requiem for a shining example of how hard it is to pull off effectively. And contrast is the word. Seven...

Author: Jon Lyus

Director James Gray has made a number of superlative films. Films such as We Own the Night, Two Lovers and 2013’s under-seen classic The Immigrant each have Gray’s trademark of a startlingly assured hand. His latest film, which had its European premiere in London this evening, is another exploration of human identity albeit in a far more adventurous form.

The premiere Of The Lost City Of Z was held at The British Museum in London and was attended by actors Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Harry Melling, Tom Mulheron, and director James Gray.

The Lost City of Z

That’s quite a cast, and with cinematographer Darius Khondji (who created some of this writer’s most cherished images in The City of Lost Children) audiences are in for a treat.

Colin Hart and Scott Davis were on the red carpet this...

Fan favorite actor Ron Perlman took to his official Facebook page and Instagram account to put his name in the running to play the mutant Cable in Director Tim Miller's "Deadpool 2" starring Ryan Reynolds. The actor has started a campaign to get cast in the film which would see Reynolds reprise his role as Wade Wilson aka 'Deadpool' alongside the time-traveling mutant Cable.

Perlman has posted photographs of himself side-by-side with Cable from the comic books and the resemblance seems uncanny.  The actor shared a pic on Instagram with the caption "Even my fave artist got into the fray..." implying comic book artist Shaine Schroeder who first posted an image of Perlman and Cable. Perlman added another comparison of himself and Cable on his official Facebook account with the caption: "Or hair. I'm the only one with Cable's friggin Hair!." 

Even my fave artist got into the fray.

Steampunk Convention Chugging into Boonton, NJ

The art of steampunk culture, celebrated in films like Brazil (1985), The City of Lost Children (1995) and The Golden Compass (2007), as well as on Canadian rock band Rush’s 2012 outing Clockwork Angels, will be the subject of an upcoming outdoor gathering of fans in Boonton, NJ on April 29 through May 1, 2016. …

Hnn | Horrornews.net - Official News Site...

To celebrate the new Blu-ray & DVD Double Play release of The City Of Lost Children — out 14th March — we have a copy to give away. This dazzling fantasy adventure is directed by Marc Caro (Delicatessen) and Jean-Pierre… Continue Reading →

The post UK Readers: Win a City of Lost Children Blu-ray/DVD Combo! appeared first on Dread Central.

This week on Off The Shelf, Ryan is joined by Brian Saur to take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for the week of November 17th, 2015, and chat about some follow-up and home video news.

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Episode Links & Notes Follow-up Wireless Headphones / Bluetooth Transmitter MST3K Kickstarter Update Arrow Low-Quantity Update News Vudu Expands Warner 4K Movie Offering Upcoming Scream Factory Blu-ray Releases Twilight Time Pre-orders: Friday, November 20th New Releases The Apu Trilogy A Bullet For Joey Catch My Soul Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies The City of Lost Children The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki Deadliest Prey Deadly Prey Faults Faust Gatchaman The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies Extended Edition The House on Carroll Street In Cold Blood Jimmy’s Hall Living In Oblivion Man From U.N.C.L.E. Meru Pitfall Requiescant Troll / Troll 2 We’re Back! A Dinosaur...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

The Apu Trilogy (Satyajit Ray)

Although it premiered 60 years ago this week at the Museum of Modern Art, Satyajit Ray‘s Pather Panchali remains among both the most accomplished of debuts and cinema’s most universally relatable experiences. Accentuating the basics of human emotions to result in the most complex of reactions, Ray’s subsequent trilogy of films follows the hardships of a Bengali boy as he passes into adulthood, a delicately powerful tale of transition that’s now been gloriously restored.

November 17th is looking to be a great day for genre-related home entertainment releases as we’ve got quite an eclectic array of titles coming out this Tuesday. For those who may have missed it earlier this year, The Stanford Prison Experiment is arriving on DVD this week and the good folks at Scream Factory are keeping busy once again with their HD releases of both Troll films as well as the 1987 thriller White of the Eye.

Olive Films is also resurrecting a bevy of cult classics this week on both Blu-ray and DVD and for those of you Amazon shoppers out there, you can pick up the 20th anniversary edition of The City of Lost Children (which is amazing if you’ve never seen it) exclusively on their site.

The City of Lost Children 20th Anniversary Edition- Amazon Exclusive (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Blu-ray)

On a futuristic oil rig,...

In a slightly odd but welcome move Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will finally release Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s cult classic The City of Lost Children as an Amazon-exclusive Blu-ray release on October 13. The release is timed with the French film's 20th Anniversary.

Though it wasn't their first film, the visually striking City of Lost Children helped to launch the careers of Jeunet (Amelie) and collaborator Marc Caro (Dante 01) as well as Ron Perlman. The film was incredibly influential and a progenitor of the "steampunk" aesthetic in film

Synopsis:

A scien [Continued ...]...