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Remember Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s exploration of marriage and relationships starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise? Of course you do!

Now, get ready for Traumnovelle, a new adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s famed erotic short story that inspired Eyes Wide Shut and that opens the Oldenburg Film Festival on Wednesday.

The drama, from German director Florian Frerichs (The Last Supper), stars Nikolai Kinski (Vikings: Valhalla, Masters of the Air) and Laurine Price (Phoenix, American Crime Story) as a respectable upper-middle-class couple that gets drawn into a secret world of erotic fantasy. The film also stars Detlev Buck, Bruno Eyron, and Nora Islei, with cameos from Sharon Brauner and Sharon Kovacs. Produced by Warnuts Entertainment and Studio Babelsberg, the movie will hit German cinemas in early 2025, courtesy of Apollo Film.

Before walking the red carpet in Oldenburg, Frerichs and Kinski took time out for a Zoom chat with THR about the film,...

The Oldenburg International Film Festival, often dubbed Germany’s Sundance, will this year pay tribute to one of the country’s most revered filmmakers, Dominik Graf, with a special retrospective.

The 31st edition of the festival, running from Sept. 11 to 15, will spotlight Graf’s prolific career, as one of Germany’s few masters in genre filmmaking.

Graf, 71, began his career in the 1970s, inspired by American indie directors like Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich and French auteurs such as Jean-Pierre Melville, using arthouse techniques and storytelling for crime, comedy and other genre tales.

The festival’s retrospective will showcase six of Graf’s most influential films, including thrillers Die Katze (1988) and Die Sieger (1995/2018 director’s cut), both of which have become genre-defining in German cinema and exemplify Graf’s distinctive, taut, economical approach to plot and character.

Alongside his feature film work, Graf is credited with setting new standards for...

It has been 25 years since Nicole Kidman uttered the last word in the final film of legendary director Stanley Kubrick, the posthumously released exploration of the mysteries of marriage and relationships, Eyes Wide Shut.

Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, the actress looks back on working with the filmmaker on the 1999 drama, which she calls “a career in itself,” and its record-breaking production length.

Eyes Wide Shut, based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, took 400 days to shoot in the late 1990s and began while Kidman was still in her 20s; her co-star and then-husband Tom Cruise was arguably Hollywood’s hottest star. The shoot began, as Kidman recounts in the new interview, with the couple spending a lot of time with Kubrick — a living legend but one who demanded they not “put him on a pedestal.” The three became comfortable enough with one another that the two actors...

At the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford and his wife Alice come together in that most normative of spaces: an Fao Schwarz toy store. As they watch their daughter look at potential presents, Bill feebly tries to explain his sexual sojourn through the city we just watched, one prompted by Alice’s confession of lust for a random sailor. Upon the completion of Bill’s story, Alice declares, “There is something we need to do as soon as possible.” What’s that, her husband and the audience asks? Fuck.”

The camera holds on her face for a beat or two and then cuts to black. End of movie.

Between Nicole Kidman’s percussive line delivery, Tom Cruise’s bewildered expression, and the sudden cut to credits, Alice’s statement feels definitive. Yet, like every other part of Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s final film, the word is both precise and beguiling,...

The dog days of summer are upon us, where it’s impossible to do much besides crank the air condition and plop down on the couch.

This is actually an okay option, especially considering how great the lineup of new movies is on Netflix. While there aren’t any truly terrific Netflix original movies this month (although Jamie Foxx’s vampire-hunting buddy comedy “Day Shift” almost made the list), there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to new library titles on the streaming service.

In August there’s something for everyone on Netflix, from Keanu Reeves as a paranormal detective (“Constantine”) to a controversial Tom Cruise classic (“Eyes Wide Shut”) to a 1980s favorite that only gets better with age (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”). Plus so much!

“Constantine” Warner Bros.

If you’ve watched the new Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” you undoubtedly took...

Photo: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ The late and undoubtedly great Stanley Kubrick passed away on March 7, 1999. This was a fact that was well established in Kubrick’s mind and something which he gave major thought to as he started to write his last film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, with Frederic Raphael based on the novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. With this loose adaptation of a cryptic novel, Kubrick strove to create without a doubt his darkest film in an already dark filmography with films like ‘The Shining’ that are full of blood, murder, and sexual assault. Things to do: Subscribe to The Hollywood Insider’s YouTube Channel, by clicking here. Limited Time Offer – Free Subscription to The Hollywood Insider Click here to read more on The Hollywood Insider’s vision, values and mission statement here – Media has the responsibility to better our world – The Hollywood Insider fully focuses on substance and meaningful entertainment,...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

A Mike Nichols documentary, Dazed and Confused with live commentary by Richard Linklater and Jason Reitman, and more have been added to the Sundance 2016 line-up.

As Heat turns 20, Michael Mann discusses the making of a crime drama classic with Rolling Stone:

One of the biggest scenes was the shoot-out at the end, and one of the big challenges about it is that we couldn’t do it consecutively. We could only get downtown on Saturday and Sunday. So it was six days of shooting, but we had to do it on a Saturday and Sunday, then do something else and then come back the following Saturday and Sunday to do the next section.

Once upon a time, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were supposed to be Jewish.

Bill and Alice Harford, the decidedly gentile married couple that the actors portrayed in 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, are about as kosher as a bacon milkshake. But when Stanley Kubrick first conceived of adapting Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle in the Seventies, the filmmaker allegedly envisioned the male lead as Woody Allen, a man so Jewish that Shabbat practically observes him.

Kubrick's initial casting idea, which is all but inconceivable to anyone who's seen the finished film,...

“It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.” – Stanley Kubrick, Oct. 20, 1971.

There are few unrealized projects in the history of cinema more tantalizingly fascinating than Stanley Kubrick’s planned feature about Napoleon. Even in 1967, at the time of its initial pre-production (the first time around), it seemed like a potentially great idea. But now, looking back with Kubrick’s entire body of work as a reference point, it truly does stand as a project this legendary filmmaker should have been destined to make. Thanks to a mammoth and comprehensive collection of materials fashioned into Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, edited by Alison Castle and published by Taschen, we can for the first time see how Kubrick prepared for the film and what he had in mind for its ultimate big-screen presentation.

I recently had the privilege of attending a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece A Clockwork Orange in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the film and to mark the release of the Blu-ray box set ‘Stanley Kubrick: Visionary Filmmaker Collection.’ What made this particular screening special was an introductory Q&A session with the film’s star Malcolm McDowell, Kubrick’s widow Christiane and her brother, longtime Kubrick collaborator Jan Harlan.

Hosted by Warner Brothers and HMV at a plush but intimate screening room (about 40 seats) in the Soho Hotel, McDowell quipped, when first handed a microphone, “Why do I need a microphone, there are only 3 people here!?” Asked if it felt like 40 years since the release of the film, he replied “Honestly, it’s gone in the blink of an eye. Now, if I had been in a prison cell, I’m sure it would have been a very slow 40 years,...

We missed a big piece of casting news about a week ago, which was that Rachel Weisz had signed on for Fernando Meirelles' film 360. The picture is scripted by the ubiquitous-of-late Peter Morgan, based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler. (The gent who wrote Traumnovelle, which was last adapted to film as Eyes Wide Shut.) Now joining Weisz in the film is Anthony Hopkins. There's also an interesting duo in talks. (Not much of a secret -- their names are right there in the headline.) Production Weekly tweeted the news, saying that Frances McDormand and Eminem were in talks to join Hopkins and Weisz. Frankly I need a moment to get my head around the Eminem aspect. Not even that he's bad; he was often quite good in 8 Mile. But he's rather fallen off the map since then. I saw him perform in 2009, alongside Jay-z at Activision's DJ Hero...

R Lee Ermey has been sounding off like he’s got a pair in a recent interview regarding Stanley Kubrick’s last movie, Eyes Wide Shut. The film suffered a long shooting period – almost two years with Kubrick’s meticulous attention to every detail bordering on mania. The film was an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. Talking to Radar Online, Ermey, who starred as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, said:

“Stanley called me about two weeks before he died. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him – exactly the words he used.”

Ermey, a former Us Marine, doesn’t mince his words:

“He was kind of a shy little timid guy.

Few films are as worthy of a second viewing than Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. For those who only saw Kubrick's last film upon its initial release right after his death in 1999, the IFC Center is offering another (rare) chance to see it on the big screen May 22-24 during their Kubrick retrospective. Ten years ago, Eyes Wide Shut was met with great anticipation and even greater disappointment from fans and critics alike. The casting of then-real-life couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a plot based on the novel Traumnovelle (Dream Story) by Arthur Schnitzler was deemed to be, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, 'The Sexiest Movie Ever.' Except the film, which came out shortly after Kubrick's death, didn't invite easy thrills; it was steeped in sex, but it wasn't exactly sexy. It's uncomfortable to watch an actual couple fondle each other and talk about love...