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Few 2024 films yet to be released theatrically in the US have the same buzz as Alan Guiraudie‘s “Misericordia.” After a remarkable festival tour last year, the latest from the “Stranger By The Lake” director finally hits theaters in NYC and LA next month, with a wider rollout to follow.

And “Misericordia” is a tense, nervy queer thriller in the same vein as Guiraudie’s 2013 masterwork.

Continue reading ‘Misericordia’ Trailer: Alain Guiraudie’s Latest Erotic Thriller Hits NYC & LA Theaters On March 21 at The Playlist.

“Stranger by the Lake” director Alain Guiraudie is back with another unsettling queer exploration, this time with 2024 Cannes premiere “Misericordia.” Here, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) comes back to his hometown in rural France to mourn the death of his former boss. Who he also might have been in love with. It’s complicated, but if you’ve never known what it’s like to be the only hot person in a small town, Jérémie’s arrival makes the case that it’s less than desirable, and even dangerous. Especially as the townspeople, including a local bishop, start feasting on him.

The film opens in select theaters from Sideshow and Janus Films on March 21, with Guiraudie traveling to the U.S. for Q&As. IndieWire shares the trailer exclusively below.

Returning to Saint-Martial, Jérémie stays longer than one should, reconnecting with his boss’ now-widowed wife, and his childhood best friend Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand...

No streaming service does a director retrospective like the Criterion Channel, and March offers two masters at opposite ends of exposure. On one side is Michael Mann, whose work from Thief through Collateral (minus The Keep) is given a spotlight; on the other is Alain Guiraudie, who (in advance of Misericordia opening on March 21) has five films arriving. (2001’s duet of That Old Dream That Moves and Sunshine for the Scoundrels have perhaps never streamed in the U.S. before.) Meanwhile, three noirs from Douglas Sirk are programmed alongside a Lee Chang-dong retrospective that features three new restorations.

Showcases will be staged for Dogme 95, Best Supporting Actor winners, and French Poetic Relaism. Welles’ The Trial gets a Criterion Edition alongside Demon Pond; Horace Ové’s newly restored Pressure makes a streaming premiere alongside spruced-up copies of Amadeus, Love Is the Devil, Port of Shadows, and Burning an Illusion, as...

After William Friedkin’s Cruising spent the better part of the aughts as the subject of earnest, if guarded, revisionist critique, how does the film hold up in our current era of representational politics and trigger warnings? And why does it feel like how you answer that question will determine which side pocket you keep your handkerchief in?

The gay side of Film Twitter had previously treated Friedkin’s 1980 ode to fisting, frottage, and flash cuts with a level of curiosity nearly equal to the fury of the disco era’s gay community. What currency could an undercover police officer’s punk-disco battle with the monsters in his closet possibly have when held against the ironic sense that an avowed sexual assaulter with a fondness for golden showers will soon be the one to usher in a rollback of LGBT gains at every level? But in its day, Cruising was...

The Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (Haf) has revealed 25 in-development projects set for its 23rd edition, with titles produced by acclaimed filmmakers such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Aditya Vikram Sengupta, Sylvie Pialat, Lee Sinje, Stanley Kwan and Yeh Ju-Feng. A standalone animation section will also be introduced for the first time.

Part of the Hkiff Industry Project Market, Haf is scheduled to take place from March 17-19 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, in conjunction with Hong Kong Filmart.

Scroll down for full list of projects

Out of 276 submissions from 45 countries and regions, “those shortlisted are remarkable for their...

The Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (Haf) has revealed 25 in-development projects set for its 23rd edition, with titles produced by acclaimed filmmakers such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Aditya Vikram Sengupta, Sylvie Pialat, Lee Sinje, Stanley Kwan and Yeh Ju-Feng. A standalone animation section will also be introduced for the first time.

Part of the Hkiff Industry Project Market, Haf is scheduled to take place from March 17-19 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, in conjunction with Hong Kong Filmart.

Scroll down for full list of projects

Out of 276 submissions from 45 countries and regions, “those shortlisted are remarkable for their...

If you’ve never known what it’s like to be the only hot person in a small town, Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia” is here to show you just that, in all its darkly comic anguish.

The “Stranger by the Lake” director’s latest film, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival before touring Telluride, Toronto, and New York, will open in select theaters on March 21. IndieWire exclusively announces the film’s release from Sideshow and Janus Films here. “Misericordia” finds Guiraudie returning to the land of queer desire, though this time with Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) coming back to his hometown to mourn the death of his former boss. Whom he may have been in love with.

A national rollout will kickoff after the film opens at IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center in New York and the Landmark’s Nuart Theatre.

While back in his hometown of Saint-Martial in rural France,...

It was another bustling, not to mention fruitful, year for horror. And because the amount of new horror releases is staggering, especially when looking beyond the popular and commercial side, it is very understandable if a lot of titles flew under radars.

So, like previous years, the objective of this end-of-year list is to bring attention to just ten of those overlooked, underrated, and less-known newer horrors that can be considered hidden gems of 2024.

Dead Teenagers

Pictured: Jordan Myers and Chris Hahn in Dead Teenagers.

Quinn Armstrong, who gave us the dark comedy Survival Skills, is behind the Fresh Hell Presents trilogy. This set of self-contained horrors began with the conversion therapy haunter The Exorcism of Saint Patrick, then tackled neo-Nazis and werewolves in Wolves Against the World. The final installment, Dead Teenagers, sounds the most conventional of the batch; young friends are picked off by a mysterious killer. Soon enough,...

Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia,” Carlos Marqués-Marcet “They Will be Dust” and Yeo Siew Hua’s “Stranger Eyes” all won big at Spain’s auteurist haven Valladolid Film Festival on Saturday, in a second edition under José Luis Cienfuegos whose prizes served as a vindication of the changes he has wrought at the festival as well as an indication of some ways European arthouse is going.

All three directors’ awards build on prior upbeat reception. Playing Cannes Premiere, “Misericordia,” which scooped Valladolid’s best picture Golden Spike and its screenplay trophy, was hailed by Variety as a “darkly comic backwoods fable of pansexual desire and small-town sociopathy” which marks a “welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific ‘Stranger by the Lake.'”

The Valladolid jury, made up of Greek director Sofia Exarchou, Spanish actress Aida Folch, critic and editor Devika Girish, German producer Ingmar Trost and Spanish director and writer Luis López Carrasco,...

In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Maverick director Alain Guiraudie rarely makes concessions.

Through offbeat titles like 2013’s “Stranger by the Lake,” 2016’s “Staying Vertical” and 2022’s “Nobody’s Hero,” the French filmmaker has explored death and desire with an unflinching eye, offsetting social bemusement with an awe for nature. His work is defiant, queer, and idiosyncratic, which makes a recent bout of institutional support all the more surprising – especially to the auteur himself.

After launching out of at Cannes, Guiraudie’s latest film “Misericordia” – produced by Charles Gillibert’s CG Cinema and released in France by Les Films du Losange — then hit a fall festival grand slam, playing in Telluride, Toronto and New York before making the shortlist for France’s International Feature. Time will tell whether the newly revamped committee goes with Guiraudie’s psychosexual thriller over Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s “The Count of Monte Cristo...

Fans of Alain Guiraudie’s work may take the opening sequence of Misericordia as a sign that they’re in familiar terrain. A view from behind the windshield of a car winding its way through back roads to a small hillside village, it announces the premiere chronicler of lust and violence in the French countryside’s return to the milieu in which he made his name.

Indeed, Misericordia finds Guiraudie revisiting old standbys—a linking of queer desire and mortality, a distanced but lighthearted absurdism, and a refusal to get moralistic about transgressive behavior—under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.

The driver in that opening sequence is Jérémie (Felix Kysyl), a baker returning to Saint-Martial, the provincial village of his youth, for the funeral of his mentor. Jérémie is put up by the baker’s widow,...

Some might say that from the French auteur Alain Guiraudie we should expect the unexpected, but his signature films could be boiled down to navigating social situations in peculiar settings. For instance, with his biggest festival hit Stranger By The Lake (2013), it was the exploration of “cruising” and the possibility of romance in a secluded gay community affected by an investigation of a murder that happened inside it. Likewise, his recent Nobody’s Hero (2022) was basically a bedroom farce set against the backdrop of terrorist attacks in Clermont-Ferrand.

Misericordia is more difficult to define, since it combines the genres of mystery-thriller, relationship and psychological drama with hints of a character study and, once again, farce, in a remote, sparsely populated French village. It premiered in Cannes and we caught it...

Una mirada entre bastidores al mundo contemporáneo y cambiante de la moda y el lujo franceses. © Apple TV+

Apple TV+ ha presentado el tráiler de La Maison, una serie ambientada en un icónico taller de alta costura en París.

La Maison sigue a dos familias rivales ilustres, disfuncionales y poderosas, que compiten por dominar el despiadado mundo de la alta costura. Cuando un escándalo afecta a la icónica casa de modas, la familia debe reinventarse con la ayuda de una joven diseñadora para salvar y reconstruir la centenaria Maison Ledu. Aprovechando todo esto, la despiadada directora ejecutiva del poderoso grupo de lujo Rovel, lanza una ofensiva para adquirir lo que considera su premio más importante: Maison Ledu. Se trata de algo más que adquirir una nueva marca; se trata de venganza.

La serie de 10 episodios está protagonizada por Lambert Wilson (De Gaulle), Amira Casar (Call me by your name), Carole Bouquet...

Apple TV+ today unveiled the trailer and key art for La Maison, the upcoming French-language family drama set within an iconic Paris-based high-fashion atelier.

A behind-the-scenes look at the contemporary ever-evolving world of fashion and aspirational French elegance and luxury, La Maison follows two rival illustrious, dysfunctional, and powerful families as they vie for dominance in the cutthroat high-fashion world.

The 10-episode original series will debut globally with the first two episodes on Friday, September 20, 2024, on Apple TV+, followed by one episode weekly on Fridays through November 15, 2024.

High fashion meets high stakes in this behind-the-curtain look at how an iconic fashion house is thrown into scandal and reinvention by a viral video featuring star designer Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson), leaving his family’s iconic and legendary haute couture house, Ledu, hanging by a thread.

Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s former muse still in his shadow, collaborates with visionary next-generation...

Apple TV+ today revealed a first look at ‘La Maison,’ the upcoming French-language 10-episode one-hour family drama set within an iconic Paris-based high-fashion atelier.

A behind-the-scenes look at the contemporary ever-evolving world of fashion and aspirational French elegance and luxury, the series follows two rival illustrious, dysfunctional and powerful families as they vie for dominance in the cutthroat world of high fashion.

High fashion meets high stakes in this behind-the-curtain, look at how an iconic fashion house is thrown into scandal and reinvention by a viral video featuring star designer Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson), leaving his family’s iconic and legendary haute couture house Ledu hanging by a thread. Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s former muse who is still in his shadow, teams up with next-generation, visionary designer Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot) to save, evolve and renew the century-old Maison Ledu. Taking advantage of Vincent’s demise, Diane Rovel...

Today, Apple TV+ revealed a first look at La Maison, the upcoming 10-episode, one-hour, French-language family drama set within an iconic Paris-based high-fashion atelier.

A behind-the-scenes look at the contemporary, ever-evolving world of fashion and aspirational French elegance and luxury, La Maison follows two illustrious, dysfunctional, and powerful rival families as they vie for dominance in the cutthroat world of high fashion.

The series will make its global debut with the first two episodes on Friday, September 20, 2024, on Apple TV+. It will then air one episode weekly on Fridays through November 15, 2024.

High fashion meets high stakes in this behind-the-curtain look at how an iconic fashion house is thrown into scandal and reinvention by a viral video featuring star designer Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson), leaving his family’s iconic and legendary haute couture house, Ledu, hanging by a thread.

Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s former muse still in his shadow,...

Marking a welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific “Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie gives the Cannes Premiere section one of its darkly sparkling standouts with the unsettlingly offbeat “Misericordia.” In the director’s best work, Guiraudie’s trademark is to infuse genre dalliances with mordant wit and a deliciously peculiar, defiant queerness. And while it may initially appear to be straightforward — and while it thankfully avoids the wild tonal swings of muddy tragicomedy “Staying Vertical” (2016) and rather baffling terrorism sex-farce “Nobody’s Hero” (2022) — nobody could ever accuse this increasingly twisted psychodrama of playing it straight.

From the start, there’s something off. The prologue is a driving sequence, shot from the point of view of the unseen driver, through the narrowing country roads of hilly southwestern France. There is nothing overtly odd going on, even the landscape is banal, shot in hazy earth tones by Claire Mathon’s clever,...

In a career spanning four decades and eight features, Alain Guiraudie has cemented himself as one of our most astute chroniclers of desire. If there’s any leitmotif to his libidinous body of work, that’s not homosexuality (prevalent as same-sex encounters might be across his films) but a force that transcends all manner of labels and categories. His is a cinema of liberty: of vast, enchanted spaces and solitary wanderers who wrestle with their passions, and in acting them out, change the way they carry themselves into the world. Desire becomes an exercise in self-sovereignty, a way of reasserting one’s independence––a rebirth. It is often said that cinema is an inescapably scopophilic realm, where the act of looking is itself a source of pleasure, but Guiraudie has a way of making that dynamic feel egalitarian, as thrilling for those watching as it is for those being watched.

Cannes is over, the prizes have been given out at Saturday’s awards ceremony., and buyers have gone home, but the deals haven’t stopped. Some of the buzziest titles ahead of the festival are still are awaiting buyers. This year’s market hasn’t been weighed down by the writers or actors strikes in the same way as last year, meaning companies like A24, Neon, Apple, and more have jumped in on exciting packages of possibly future contenders, while art house, specialized distributors like Sideshow and Janus Films, Mubi, and Metrograph have been especially active.

Below we’re tracking everything that gets acquired throughout the festival and beyond.

Films Acquired After the Festival “Gazer”

Section: Director’s Fortnight

Director: Ryan J. Sloan

Buyer: Metrograph Pictures

Date Acquired: May 29

Cast: Ariella Mastroianni

Buzz: As IndieWire exclusively reported, Metrograph went big on this neo-noir thriller with a unique concept from a...

Kiss Me or Kill Me: Guiraudie Stirs a Sinister Solace in the Backwoods

Alain Guiraudie returns to the ruinous climes of rural malcontentedness with his latest, Miséricorde, which means ‘mercy.’ Of course, the meaning of mercy takes on ironic dimensions as this narrative unfolds about a potential interloper returning to the place of his youth, where masculinity and sexuality play a significant role in his fate. Like his 2013 masterpiece Stranger by the Lake (read review) and 2016’s Staying Vertical (read review), Guiraudie remains keenly interested in exploring the sometimes detrimental effects an isolated, bucolic environment can have on the gay male experience, where violence and dread are inextricable elements in the pursuit of pleasure—physical or otherwise.…...

Revisiting the murder mysteries of his award-winning 2013 feature, Stranger by the Lake, but with a more darkly comic tone found in much of his other work, French writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s latest, Misericordia (Miséricorde), plays like two films at once: The first is a sinister, small-town homicide story in the vein of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in which a man shows up to wreak havoc on the seemingly innocent. The second is a twisted variation on Pasolini’s Teorema, in which a family is torn apart by a visitor’s pervasive sexuality and refusal to leave them alone.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France,...

Alain Guiraudie is back at Cannes with a bittersweet and unexpectedly warmhearted dark comedy about latent homosexual desire, “Miséricorde.” Remember, the French writer/director is the filmmaker behind the 2013 perverse gay classic “Stranger by the Lake,” a simmering and sinister cruising tale about how our drives toward death and sex are of the same flesh. “Miséricorde,” debuting in the Cannes Premiere section, is a decidedly lighter-on-its-feet (in all senses of the idiom) story of a lonely and faithless man’s obsession with his dead former boss, who’s also the father of the childhood best friend he maybe once loved.

When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial, a provincial village nestled in a wood in Southern France, he immediately bonds with his former boss’ widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Is it romantic obsession, or projecting a mother figure upon her? Or is Jérémie really in love with her dead husband, and...

Les Films du Losange has taken international sales rights to French filmmaker and Cannes regular Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, set to world premiere at Cannes Film Festival’s in the non-competitive Premiere section.

The film, from prolific producer Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema, is described as a tense rural drama set in an oppressive French village where inhabitants struggle to hide their most intimate secrets and shameful sins.

Guiraudie returns to Cannes after premiering Staying Vertical in Competition in 2016, Stranger By The Lake in Un Certain Regard in 2013, The King Of Scape in Directors’ Fortnight in 2009 and No Rest For The Brave,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSStranger by the Lake.Production has begun on Alain Guiraudie’s next noir-esque feature, Miséricorde, with Dp Claire Mathon—their third collaboration after Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Staying Vertical (2016). The plot centers on a 30-year-old man named Jérémie who returns to a village in southern France, his prior home, for an old friend’s funeral, only to find himself at the center of a police investigation.Recommended VIEWINGJanus Films have shared a trailer for a new 4K restoration of Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964). A virtuosic, formally experimental work of militant cinema, it tells the story of Manoel, a cowherd who, after murdering a ranch owner, flees to join a religious cult headed by a self-proclaimed saint, only to find himself back among violence. A landmark of Brazil’s Cinema Novo...

Amidst the potential 2024 majors––Jia Zhangke, Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, Paul Schrader, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa but a handful––we should invest as much hope in a new film from Alain Guiraudie. Late last year we reported on his feature Miséricorde (Mercy in English), and this week CG Cinéma’s Romain Blondeau announced the commencement of shooting with Claire Mathon (his Dp on Staying Vertical and Stranger By the Lake) in tow.

Miséricorde is said to follow a noir-like plot concerning Jérémie, a 30-year-old who returns to his native Saint-Martial for a friend’s funeral. While there “he must contend with rumors and suspicion, until he commits an irreparable act and finds himself at the centre of a police investigation.” Knowing Guiraudie’s unflinching visions of violence and sexuality (not least in his superb novel Now the Night Begins), I am already girding my loins. Catherine Frot, Felix Kysyl,...

The Mandela Effect.

After dedicating an entire month to Erotic Thrillers like Bound and Stranger by the Lake, October has been blissfully fun and silly. Last week, we celebrated our 250th (!!!) episode last week with Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. This week we paid homage to Jason Voorhees with a look at one of Friday the 13th title: Part 2!

In the sequel to Sean S. Cunningham‘s game changer, poor Alice (Adrienne King) is brutally killed off immediately. After a five-year-jump, a new group of horny counsellors prepare to open Camp Blood. These red shirts include iconic Final Girl Ginny (Amy Steel), her sad sack boyfriend Paul (John Furey), as well as hot and fit Terry (Kirsten Baker) and pervy Scott (Russell Todd). And then there’s poor sweet Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor) and disabled Mark (Tom McBride).

What these new twenty-somethings don’t realize that Jason Voorhees (Steve Dash and...

Just weeks before Alain Guiraudie is set to begin production on his seventh feature film, we learn (via the lesinrocks folks) that the cast of Miséricorde is comprised of veteran actress Catherine Frot along with Felix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. Guiraudie will be reteaming with cinematographer Claire Mathon for a third time – they previously paired on Stranger by the Lake and Staying Vertical. Mathon was most recently on the set for Pablo Agüero’s Saint-Ex. Sold by the Les Films du Losange folks, with production beginning in next month we figure that a Cannes showing is not in the cards with a Locarno or Venice premiere more probable.…...

What a goose!

After closing our month of erotic thrillers with a look at the Wachowski sisters’ queer neo-noir Bound and the ultra sexy queer French thriller Stranger By the Lake, we’re kicking off spooky season (and our 250th episode!) with a look at Tim Burton‘s 1999 ode to Hammer Horror: Sleepy Hollow!

In Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is sent to Sleepy Hollow to investigate the decapitations of three people. While there, he becomes romantically entangled with Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci) and discovers that the murderer is the legendary apparition The Headless Horseman (Christopher Walken and Ray Park).

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and RSS.

Episode 250: Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Watch your head because we’re kicking off spooky season (and our 250th episode!

Parking Lot.

What a sexy delight Erotic Thriller Month has been! We’ve tackled a diverse batch of films within the subgenre over the last four weeks, including Brian De Palma’s controversial classic Dressed to Kill, Paul Feig’s bisexual suburban noir A Simple Favor, and the Wachowski sisters’ sexy neo-noir Bound.

Have we saved the best for last? Well that would depend on how unsimulated you like your gay sex!

In writer/director Alain Guiraudie‘s French gay thriller, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) frequently visits a nude beach, cruising for anonymous gay sex. He strikes up a friendship with outsider Henri (Patrick D’assumçao), but spends most of his time seeking out the enigmatic Michel (Christophe Paou).

When Franck stays late one evening, however, he sees Michel drown another man in the lake. Can he be sure what he saw or turn off his attraction to the sexy man with the moustache?...

Ovinal neo-noir.

September has been the month of erotic thrillers on the Horror Queers podcast, and after spending the first two weeks discussing Brian De Palma’s controversial masterpiece Dressed to Kill and Paul Feig’s suburban noir A Simple Favor, we’re now moving into a queer cinema classic in the Wachowski sisters’ 1996 neo-noir Bound!

Bound sees Violet (Jennifer Tilly) set her eyes on Corky (Gina Gershon) in an elevator. Unfortunately, Violet is the girlfriend of violent gangster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), while Corky is fresh out of prison and doing renovations on the apartment next door. As the two women launch into a passionate love affair, they assemble an intricate plan for Violet to escape from Caesar, with two million dollars of the mob’s money. As you might expect: not everything goes according to plan.

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday.

Beta Cinema has boarded international sales on “Not a Word,” which will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the competitive Platform section. The cast is led by Maren Eggert, who won the best acting award at the Berlin Film Festival for “I’m Your Man.”

The film is written and directed by Hanna Slak, whose credits include the Slovenian Oscar entry “The Miner,” and was lensed by Claire Mathon, the cinematographer of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” “Saint-Omer,” “Stranger by the Lake” and “Spencer.”

Eggert plays ambitious musician and conductor Nina. When her teenage son, Lars, has a strange accident at school, she decides to take a break from city life and together they head to their vacation home on an island on the rugged Atlantic coast. Bound in silence, their already brittle relationship is pushed to the edge.

Jona Levin Nicolai co-stars as the provocative teenage son while Maryam Zaree,...

Iconic French fashion house La Maison is to be spotlighted in an Apple TV+ drama series starring seven-time César Award nominee Lambert Wilson.

La Maison will take a behind-the-curtain look at how a family dynasty of an iconic fashion house is thrown into scandal and reinvention by a viral video featuring star designer Vincent LeDu (Wilson), leaving his family’s legendary haute couture house hanging by a thread. Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s former muse who is still in his shadow, teams up with next-generation, visionary designer Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot) to save and recreate the century-old Maison Ledu, claiming their rightful place in both the LeDu family and the fashion world.

Related: 2023 Apple TV+ Pilots & Series Orders

Wilson, who played The Merovingian in The Matrix trilogy and is this year’s Locarno Jury President, leads a cast featuring Carole Bouquet (En Thérapie), Zita Hanrot (Fatima), Pierre Deladonchamps (Stranger by the Lake...

In our sequel to 2022’s Essential Queer Horror Movies list — which included newer films “Titane,” “Stranger By the Lake,” and “Fear Street” —we bring you even more of the best recent LGBTQ films in the genre.

Queue up these queer-friendly slashers such as “Bodies Bodies Bodies” and “Scream VI,” truly mind-bending A24 offerings like “Saint Maud” and “Climax,” as well as some terrific under-the-radar horror comedies like “Dead” from New Zealand.

Scream VI (2023)

Jasmin Savoy Brown’s character Mindy Meeks-Martin, the savvy rules follower of survivor of 2022 installment “Scream,” has a much bigger storyline as she and girlfriend Anika Kayoko (Devyn Nekoda) tangle with another Ghostface killer.

Stream on Paramount+

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

In this very funny and very Gen Z thriller, things go spectacularly wrong when Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings new girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to a weekend party while a hurricane is brewing. Sophie’s wealthy friends look...

Leaving behind the fairy-tale enigma of his last film, Undine, Christian Petzold returns in Afire to the unembellished realism more characteristic of his work, even when he has flirted with genre, from noir to melodrama to Hitchcockian thriller. The German auteur also departs from the densely populated cities that have chiefly been his canvas, dropping his characters into the seemingly tranquil setting of a sleepy beach town on the Baltic Sea and a summer home in idyllic woodlands. But the skies are turning red as forest fires loom closer, ash is raining down and wildlife is fleeing.

The anxiety caused by natural disaster is echoed by the festering self-doubt of the central character, Leon (Thomas Schubert), who has escaped Berlin to work on the manuscript of his new novel, his spirits dampened by the tepid response of his publisher. He’s accompanied by Felix (Langston Uibel), whose family owns the...

Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire.

While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.

The series was created and penned by Jose Caltagirone (“Les Combattantes”) and Valentine Milville (“The Bureau”), and will star a high-profile French ensemble cast, including Lambert Wilson (“Benedetta”), Carole Bouquet (“En Therapie...

French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie to also sit on New Currents jury.

The 27th Busan International Film Festival (Biff) has announced the line-up for its two Asian competition juries with Unifrance president Serge Toubiana set to preside over the New Currents jury.

New Currents is Biff’s main competition section, which introduces first or second feature films of emerging directors that the festival sees as potential future leaders in Asian cinema.

Toubiana will be joined on the jury the French director Alain Guiraudie, whose Stranger By The Lake won the Queer Palm and directing prize when it played in Un Certain...

Indian Media World Shaken By Hostile Takeover Bid For Ndtv

Indian billionaire Guatam Adani looks set to acquire India’s premiere independent news broadcaster New Delhi Television (Ndtv) after his Adani Group exercised a right to buy a 29.18 stake under a loan agreement taken out by its founders more than a decade ago. The Adani Group has indicated that it plans to make an offer for a further 26 stake to give it a controlling 55 share in the company.

Ndtv was founded by the husband and wife team, economist Prannoy Roy and journalist Radhika Roy, in 1984. The company has put out a statement saying that Adani’s move to execute the right to buy clause had been undertaken without first consulting the co-founders, who hold a 32.26 stake.

Ndtv is regarded as one of the last homes of independent journalism in India and there are fears that a takeover by the Andani Group,...

We’ve all looked at skyscrapers thrusting tall and proud into the unsuspecting sky and snorted to think of what was subconsciously driving the (inevitably male) architects. Right? Of course we have. Yet I cannot think of a single film before this one that takes our presumptions and seems to say, “Yes, heh heh, yesssss,” with a glint in its eye. I mean, sure, Kate Winslet’s snide aside in Titanic to White Star exec Bruce Ismay about Freud’s “ideas about the male preoccupation with size” is one thing. Eiffel is something else entirely. Also what it does is almost surely subconscious, too, which is sort of perfect. *snort*

This French romantic drama posits that engineer Gustave Eiffel had no interest in his company — which had just delivered the Statue of Liberty to New York City as a gift to America — building a massive tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris.

“Rule 34,” a challenging and sexually explicit film from Brazilian director Julia Murat, has emerged as the surprise winner of the Golden Leopard award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival — an edition where typically audacious and formally ambitious work dominated the program. Marking a strong ceremony for female filmmakers, the main competition jury at the Swiss festival also handed an impressive three awards — best director and a brace of acting prizes — to gritty coming-of-age drama “I Have Electric Dreams,” an auspicious debut feature from Costa Rican writer-director Valentina Maurel.

A character study of a young female law student pursuing a parallel calling in amateur online pornography — while defending female abuse victims in her day job — “Rule 34’s” title stems from the popular online meme that “if it exists, there’s a porn version of it.” Murat’s film wasn’t among the buzzier entries in this year’s competition,...

German director Kilian Riedhof’s drama You Will Not Have My Hate is inspired by the experiences of French writer Antoine Leiris, whose wife was killed in the Bataclan nightclub during the November 13, 2015 Paris terror attacks, leaving him to raise their young son alone.

Leiris became a symbol of quiet defiance in the face of the attackers following a Facebook post, in which he expressed his determination to build a new life with his son based on happiness and love, rather than hatred.

The post went viral and Leiris found himself at the heart of a local and international media storm.

Reidhof and co-writers Marc Blöbaum and Jan Braren adapted the film from Leirin’s autobiographical novel ‘You Will Not Have My Hate’ charting his emotional journey from the night of the attack; to struggling with his loss and then finding the courage to embark on a new life.

Strand Releasing has acquired all North American rights to Alain Guiraudie’s “Nobody’s Hero” which is handled by Films du Losange and world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

The movie, which opened the Berlinale Panorama section, is set in Clermont-Ferrand revolves around Frederic, a 35 year-old man who falls in love with with a middle-aged sex worker who is married.

“Nobody’s Hero” marks the third collaboration between Strand and Guiraudie which began with the helmer’s most successful film “Stranger By The Lake,” followed by his Cannes Competition title, “Staying Vertical.”

“Alain has been a dear colleague to our company, and we are so happy to be working with him again on this wonderfully exuberant comedy that is not only funny, but humane and completely original,” said Strand Releasing’s Jon Gerrans who negotiated the deal with Alice Lesort for Films du Losange. Guiraudie previously contributed to Strand Releasing’s...

As far-right sentiment surges in France ahead of April’s presidential elections — and lawmakers continue to concern themselves with hijab bans — the time is urgently right for artists to challenge the country’s enduring history of Islamophobia. On the face of it, “Nobody’s Hero” seems like a useful contribution in that regard. Set amid the tense aftermath of a radical terrorist attack in the placid central French city of Clermont-Ferrand, Alain Guiraudie’s latest feature centers on a weak-willed white man caught between being an ally and an oppressor to a homeless Muslim youth in his neighborhood, wryly commenting on a middle-class society that oscillates between liberal altruism and wary prejudice. Yet this promising setup is derailed by a separate, not especially complementary narrative detailing the same protagonist’s troubled romance with a married local sex worker: Moonlighting as a broad bedroom farce, this heavily plotted but oddly low-energy film...

Alain Guiraudie’s “Nobody’s Hero,” which opened the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, is lighter than his last two films, the critically adored “Stranger By the Lake” (a Hitchcockian tale of murder and cruising) and its less loved follow-up, “Staying Vertical.” But one thing it shares with them is its abundance of naked flesh and candid sex.

The wry opening scene introduces Médéric (Jean Charles Clichet), an unattached thirtysomething who lives in Clermont-Ferrand in central France. The gray, rainy town is presented as being resolutely ordinary, and so is Médéric, a freelance computer programmer who is always either sucking on his e-cigarette or jogging up and down the hilly streets in unflattering running gear. He isn’t wholly conventional, though. After a moment’s hesitation, he marches up to a fiftysomething prostitute (Noémie Lvovsky) and announces that he wants to have coffee with her. True, he wants to have sex with her,...

Cinephiles love to quote Roberto Rossellini, after his viewing of Chaplin’s oft-maligned late work A King in New York: “This is the film of a free man.” Alain Guiraudie, among the more accomplished French filmmakers of this century, is one of few who directs with that similar sense of freedom––which is not to say he’s on the same canonical level as Chaplin, or most other auteurs, where that line is invoked. Although there are many ways one can interpret the adjective “free,” Guiraudie’s work seems very related to his unconscious, manifesting the eclectic amorous desires that bubble up from there, in strange combinations that push the boundaries of queer sexuality ever further. And there’s also the sense that audience and industry reaction––especially after Stranger By the Lake brought him wider attention a decade ago––is not something that makes him second guess his natural instincts.

This weird social satire has various themes which director Alain Guiraudie seems unable to take seriously and be funny about

Alain Guiraudie is emerging as a distinctive, perplexing, even exasperating film-maker. In a 20-year career in French cinema, he has long had a soft spot for the playful, the anarchic and the fantastical. Yet maybe we outside France were misled by his outlier hit in 2013, Stranger By the Lake. This was the film with which Guiraudie made his sensational international breakthrough: a gripping homoerotic cruising thriller. This was my own introduction to his work and perhaps it was the atypically serious tone of that which caused me to be disconcerted by the directionless silliness of his follow-up Rester Vertical, or Staying Vertical, in 2016.

Now here is a semi-comic social satire or whimsy; or a jeu d’esprit whose esprit is difficult to locate. It has various themes and ideas which...

Berlinale Series Market, Co-Production Market name selections.

The world premiere of French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero will open the Panorama section at next month’s Berlin International Film Festival, marking the first time the director has screened at the event.

Nobody’s Hero is one of 16 world premiere additions to the Panorama strand, joining the 13 titles confirmed last month for a complete list of 29 films.

Scroll down for the full list of new titles

The film takes place after a terrorist attack in Clermont-Ferrand in France, and centres on a likeable man in his mid-thirties, an older...

Viens je t’emmène (Nobody’s Hero)

Another project we thought had an outside chance at premiering in 2021 (and might have been passed on due to it being a comedy), Alain Guiraudie‘s Viens je t’emmène is now lined up for an early 2022 release. Produced by Charles Gillibert and written by Guiraudie and Laurent Lunetta, Guiraudie’s sixth feature is nowhere near in tone compared to Cannes Comp titles Stranger by the Lake (2013) or 2016’s Staying Vertical. Starring Noemie Lvovsky, Jean-Charles Clichet, and Ilies Kadri, this looks to be paranoia bliss.

Gist: Named for a song by Frances Gall, Christmas Eve is ruined by an act of terrorism in the city of Clermont-Ferrand.…...

The films of French director Quentin Dupieux spin self-contained worlds that revolve around absurd obsessions: an automobile tire with an urge to kill (“Rubber”), a man consumed with desire for a fringed leather jacket (“Deerskin”), and now, in the low-key, blank-stare silliness of “Mandibles,” two dimwitted dirtbags determined to train a shockingly large pet housefly to steal.

Tall, oafish, jorts-wearing Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and smaller, squirrely Jean-Gab (David Marsais) are affable idiots. Jean-Gab is happy to walk away, at a moment’s notice, from the small gas station he manages without locking up, while Manu is first seen sleeping on a beach, unaware he’s being soaked by the encroaching tide. They’re thirtysomething fools, a live-action Beavis and Butthead whose only constant is their lifelong friendship, one punctuated by inside jokes, private handshakes, and a recurring habit of getting stuck in the middle of a thought with a very French “duh” on their lips.