News

In 2008, Ira Sachs got fired by his manager. The most indie spirited of independent filmmakers had refused to play the game for too long, and the bill had finally come due.

“I understood it in a way,” Sachs, more than a decade and a half-dozen features removed from that experience, says. “Because I was not entering the business, and his job was to facilitate the business of Hollywood, which was not what I was interested in doing. They were trying to get me jobs as opposed to what I was trying to do, which was produce my own work.”

For the record, Sachs thinks that he never would have gotten the gigs that his representatives wanted him to land. But the experience helped rethink his value in an industry that usually measures those things in terms of box office grosses.

“Before that, I thought I was kind of owed a career based on certain successes,...

Thanks to the sheer number of holiday films Hallmark releases every year, the network has built up quite a stable of artists. Some of these actors appear in just a few Christmas movies between other projects, while others have essentially built a career around their work with Hallmark. And while it's easy to look at the ads for Hallmark holiday movies and see a variety of plug-and-play, generic brunettes, each of the channel's leading men has their own niche and strengths that they bring to their performances. 

Some are best known for playing the reluctant prince of an unknown European principality who ends up romancing a small-town American girl, while others are better suited to play ruggedly handsome Christmas tree farmers or small business owners who woo career-oriented gals from the big city with their rural charms. Just like snowflakes, no two male Hallmark stars are quite alike -- and...

Hallmark’s new Countdown To Christmas movie The Christmas Charade could be the network’s closest movie to James Bond! Starring in this holiday espionage thriller is Rachel Skarsten, and Corey Sevier. This is a Jazz Ramsey reunion. Moreover, it looks like these two actors are doing some dancing and even stunts.

In this movie, a librarian suddenly finds herself undercover for the FBI! Does she have what it takes to stay out of danger as they catch the bad guys?

Here are all the details about this upcoming movie.

Photo: Corey Sevier, Rachel Skarsten Credit: ©2024 Hallmark Media/Photographer: Courtesy Vortex Media What Is Hallmark’s The Christmas Charade About?

This year Countdown To Christmas includes a romcom espionage mashup called The Christmas Charade. This stars Rachel Skarsten and Corey Sevier. TV Insider revealed what this movie is about.

Anyone who knows Whitney knows that she is one of the most cautious people they know.

“As We Know It,” an apocalyptic zombie comedy starring Chris Parnell and Pam Grier, has sold rights to Buffalo 8.

The Santa Monica-based production and distribution company will release the movie in theaters on Nov. 10 with plans for streaming and video-on-demand in late November or early December.

“We are thrilled to announce the release of this captivating and clever comedy, infused with an exhilarating twist of a zombie apocalypse horror,” Buffalo 8’s head of distribution Nikki Stier Justice said in a statement.

Set in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, the comedy-horror-romance movie follows a struggling writer named James Bishop, who is dealing with a messy breakup with the help of his best friend while trying to finish his latest book before the impending nuclear zombie apocalypse. The cast also includes Mike Castle (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”), Oliver Cooper (“Project X”), Taylor Blackwell (“Resident Alien”) and Danny Mondello (“Sidetalk”).

Josh Monkarsh wrote...

When it comes to “Passages,” Ira Sachs’ witty, wise and very sexy Parisian drama, it all started with Franz Rogowski, who plays the film’s self-absorbed film director, Tomas. “I had seen Michael Haneke’s “Happy End” starring Franz,” remembers Sachs, the auteur of richly textured, grown-up gems such as “Love is Strange,” “Little Men” and “Keep the Lights On,” recently joining me for an interview about his latest, opening in theaters this week.

Continue reading ‘Passages’: Ira Sachs On His New Film’s Nc-17 Rating, The Movie’s Intimate Sex Scenes & Finding Pleasure In Men Behaving Badly [Interview] at The Playlist.

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) seems to have it all: a career as a director, marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw), and the freedom to pursue his desires as he wishes. In Passages’ first scene, he works on his latest film. But he’s alienated Martin, and their marriage is on its last legs. He pursues his desires in a willful, selfish manner; although he’s queer and rather androgynous, his behavior reflects the worst aspects of masculine pretense. His philandering has led to a new relationship with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a teacher, but the fact that he barges in on her while she’s working epitomizes his flaws.

Director Ira Sachs’ second film for the French Sbs Productions company is set in a Paris familiar from Maurice Pialat and Philippe Garrel films, but the director brings an outsider’s perspective. Sachs’ style brings an uncomfortable intimacy to Tomas’ relationships, breaking conventional rules...

Actor and producer Jonathan Lipnicki has joined production, post-production and distribution company Buffalo 8 as an executive producer.

Lipnicki made a mark with his performance alongside Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire,” before becoming the lead in the family franchise “Stuart Little.” He will soon be seen in the upcoming TBS show “The Joe Schmo Show,” Peter Pardini’s film “Man Goes on Rant” and Britt Robertson-led film “The Re-Education of Molly Singer.”

Lipnicki will play a key role in packaging and project development within Buffalo 8’s EP services division, identifying storytelling opportunities and bringing together top-tier talent based on his extensive relationships spanning Hollywood studio films through to the independent sector.

Founded in 2010 by Luke Taylor and Matthew Helderman, Buffalo 8’s credits include Netflix original film “Rodney King,” directed by Spike Lee, “Little Men” from director Ira Sachs, which played at Sundance and Berlin and Netflix documentary series hit “Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes...

In his third feature outing with ascendant genre filmmaker Ari Aster on Beau Is Afraid, Lars Knudsen produced the duo’s most ambitious, thought-provoking and outlandish work yet — a nightmare comedy of staggeringly detailed vision that is sure to engender conversation.

A nearly-three-hour epic reuniting the pair with A24, this deeply unsettling and quite funny feature burrows into the psyche of Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a man-child riddled with anxiety who exists in a world in which each of his worst fears is bound to come true. The film bears the framework of a Grimm’s fairy tale à la Hansel and Gretel, watching as Beau finds himself in increasingly surreal scenarios while on a journey on foot to his mother’s house.

For Aster and Knudsen, Beau Is Afraid comes on the heels of Midsommar, an astonishingly dark folk horror starring Florence Pugh, which the former insists is “a joke.

There are unlikable protagonists, and then there’s Tomas, the tragicomically insufferable narcissist at the center of Ira Sachs’ Passages. A German film director living in Paris, Tomas is, to borrow an overused term, “toxic” — a guy who lies and leeches, connives and cajoles, fucks and finagles his way through the world, his talent and impish, overcaffeinated magnetism clearing the path.

The most endearing thing about Tomas is how utterly decipherable his awfulness is. The fragility of his ego and his insatiable need to be not just desired, but revered, coddled, stimulated — you name it — are so evident as to be almost touching. (If it wasn’t clear: Folks who require niceness in a main character, this one’s not for you.)

Played by a sensational Franz Rogowski (Transit, Great Freedom), Tomas is also an undeniable force of nature. That goes a long way toward explaining the grip he has...

Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety — tempestuous passions torn asunder, sometimes by external forces like capitalism, which complicated the search for a home through New York’s cutthroat real estate market in “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men.” His latest film — the sexy, frustrating, loose-yet-compact, altogether irresistible three-hander “Passages” — also concerns property contracts and a homeless protagonist. However, this one’s got nobody but himself to blame for that predicament, fluent as he is in the same toxic strain of amour fou that previously perfumed the air in “Keep the Lights On” and especially Sachs’ debut, “The Delta.” As in that film — also pitched at the admirably humble quotidian scale Sachs hasn’t felt the need to exceed in more than a quarter decade — “Passages” follows a bisexual chaos agent so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can’t see where his self-exploration ends and insensitivity to those around him begins.

Isla Fisher (Wolf Like Me) and Greg Kinnear (Shining Vale) will topline the family comedy The Present, from director Christian Ditter (How to Be Single), which has entered production in Los Angeles.

In the film from Stuart Ford’s independent content studio AGC Studios, a brilliant boy discovers he can manipulate time using an enchanted family heirloom, then teaming up with his siblings to go back to the eve of their parents’ separation in hopes of changing the outcome. As their schemes become more elaborate, the siblings will learn about family bonds and what they can and can’t control. Fisher and Kinnear are playing the parents in search of reconciliation, with Easton Rocket Sweda (General Hospital), Shay Rudolph (The Baby-Sitters Club) and Mason Shea Joyce (Euphoria) portraying the siblings who just might be the only people who can make that happen.

Ross Butler (Shazam!) also stars in the film...

Isabelle Huppert as Frankie: "“The great thing about Huppert is that when you work with her you feel as if she had never made a film before … and that she will never make another film.” Photo: UniFrance

For someone who has chronicled the lives, loves, tragedies and triumphs of New Yorkers in such films as Love Is Strange and Little Men, Ira Sachs decided to depart from the familiar and head to the Portuguese mountainside town of Sintra, just outside Lisbon, for a narrative about a film star dying from terminal cancer who gathers her family around her for a final farewell.

Sachs grew up with French cinema and lived in Paris in the mid-Eighties when he overdosed in the Left Bank’s warren of screening rooms. “I didn’t speak the language very well, and I didn’t now that many people. As a result I ended up going to the movies.

It's been filmed with Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Winona Ryder, but its been 20 years since the last Little Women and Sony have deemed it high time for a revisit. Louisa May Alcott's classic novel is being adapted on this occasion by newcomer Olivia Milch (daughter of Deadwood's David).The book, as you'll be aware (if only from watching Friends), revolves around the March family: a household of four sisters and their mother ("Marmee"), with Father March away being a chaplain in the American War of Independence. The story takes in the girls' governessing, learning the piano, ice skating, having snowball fights, catching scarlet fever and getting married. Jo is the cool one, Meg is the mumsy one, Beth is the quiet one and Amy is the young one. The saga continued in Good Wives, Little Men and Jo's Boys.The last film version was Sony's too, with Ryder,...

It's our second Snow White-related taster of the day. But which will give the tale the kiss of life and which is the poisoned apple?

You may remember, if you think back hard, that we reviewed the trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman earlier today. It's a new reworking of the Snow White story where Kristen Stewart plays Snow White, Charlize Theron plays the evil queen, Thor plays the hunstman and the audience plays the part of whoever it is in Snow White that looks bored and slightly appalled by everything they see.

Since then, however, there have been developments. In the wake of the Snow White and the Huntsman trailer, Mirror, Mirror – a competing Snow White movie directed by Tarsem Singh – has rushed out a trailer of its own. This, clearly, means war. Both films are determined to be the dominant Snow White film of sping/summer 2012. Your...

Cue Boyz II Men's "End of the Road." Or Led Zeppelin, that'll work, too.

I can't believe Entourage is over. Oh wait, that's right, it's not. They should've called this episode "The End...Until We're Done Shooting the Movie." But, luckily for us, this finale was everything the audience hoped it would be. When the credits first rolled, I had a huge smile on my face - and then I thought about it for a while and turned it over in my mind.

The longer I contemplated, the more a question bobbed to the surface: If something seems too good to be true, is it?

Let me start out by saying, if one more person uses the word "Bromance" to describe this series, I'll gag. I do, however, think that talking about genuine, enduring friendship - the kind that we cultivate as kids and hopefully remains pristine throughout life...

HBO

They say that all good things must come to an end.

“Entourage” went out with a bang in the series finale on Sunday night. In the final half-hour, the series creator/chief writer Doug Ellin resolved all of the loose ends leading up the last episode.

As the episode begins, Vince walks in and tells the boys that he is “absolutely” in love with Sophia, the Vanity Fair writer, and he wants to marry her. “This is it.”

“Let...

In the new adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel, the two leads switch between the roles of Frankenstein and his 'hideous progeny', telling the story from the creature's point of view

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper . . ." Thus Mary Shelley, prefacing the revised 1831 edition of her Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. By then she had possibly surmised that a novel she wrote when she was not quite 19 had begun to take on the poetic force of myth. Several unlicensed stage versions had thrilled the rowdier London venues through the 1820s, and Shelley understood that polite society did wonder how a mere girl had conceived of "so very hideous an idea".

Today nearly everybody knows – or thinks they know – the tale of Frankenstein: an unhinged visionary doctor who makes the crude shape of a man from grave-robbed body parts and brings it to life,...