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Joshua Oppenheimer is tired.

The two-time Academy Award nominee isn’t simply spent at the tail end of an exhausting week for the American body politic. Nor has he tossed and turned his way through countless sleepless nights, doomscrolling through the nightmare scenarios of what a second Trump administration could mean for Americans’ civil rights, the rule of international law, women’s bodies, the fate of the planet — take your pick.

Speaking with Variety at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where the “Act of Killing” director’s first fiction feature, “The End,” is the closing film, Oppenheimer has just arrived from Japan, where he spent two weeks with his husband, a Japanese novelist, visiting the in-laws while his partner researches his next book.

The filmmaker barely managed to sleep on the plane, though he is poised, thoughtful and gracious to a fault as he powers through his festival press junket. He is also determined and defiant,...

Creating an original musical in the year 2024 is an achievement in its own right, even if it’s only part of the reason why Joshua Oppenheimer’s new narrative feature “The End” is so audacious. Audiences seem to flock to new musicals like “Wonka” and “Mean Girls” because they offer an only slight alteration on a previously existing work of intellectual property that they are already familiar with, and even this year’s divisive “Emilia Pérez” has ostensibly sold itself on being a “musical for people that hate musicals.” If there’s anything that “The End” does that is most worthy of admiration, it’s that Oppenheimer does not insert a hint of derisiveness or irony within his razzle dazzle, Golden Age style musical. If it weren’t for the very specific correlations made to recent events in world history, “The End” could have feasibly have been released in the...

Joshua Oppenheimer, who has been nominated for an Academy Award, is making his first narrative feature picture, “The End,” a post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. The movie is about how people connect in a world where the environment is breaking down.

The movie is set 25 years after Earth stops being livable. It takes place in an underground bunker where a biological family and their friends are shocked when a stranger shows up. Oppenheimer started the project after doing a lot of study on how the rich stay alive. He went to see former Soviet command bunkers and decommissioned nuclear missile silos that were being turned into high-end underground spaces.

Oppenheimer told people at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, “It’s a miracle this got made.” Live musical performances shot in a salt mine were just one of the many ambitious parts of making the movie. It was only...

Greece’s Thessaloniki Film Festival ends this evening with a screening of The End, the latest feature project from the enigmatic filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

Best known for his intellectually rich and Oscar-nominated non-fiction works The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Oppenheimer’s latest is his first fiction project, and for it he has recruited one of the most impressive ensembles of the year. Starring are Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), BAFTA-nominee George Mackay (1917), and Emmy-nominee Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit).

Styled as a Golden Age Hollywood musical, The End is set in a post-apocalyptic world twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable. A biological family and their companions – part-found-family, part-hired-help – live in harmony in a subterranean bunker. But the arrival of a stranger smashes the synthetic veil of their strictly organized world. The ensuing struggle to maintain their...

Lo protagonizan Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Moses Ingram y Michael Shannon. © Avalon

Neon ha publicado el primer tráiler de The End, un musical post-apocalíptico (por muy extraño que suene) del director de The Act of Killing y The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer.

The End sigue a una de las últimas familias de la Tierra, compuesta por un exmagnate energético (Michael Shannon), una exbailarina (Tilda Swinton) y su hijo (George MacKay), quienes viven en un lujoso búnker en unas minas de sal junto a un doctor (Lennie James), un mayordomo (Tim McInnerny) y una amiga (Bronagh Gallagher), hasta que la llegada de una chica superviviente (Moses Ingram) empieza a sacudir la aparente perfección de sus vidas y a sacar a la luz todas las verdades y sentimientos reprimidos que han ido forjando en su idílico mundo.

La película está protagonizada por Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Michael Shannon, Bronagh...

Tilda Swinton and George Mackay star in apocalyptic musical The End, and the first trailer has landed. Right here.

Actor George Mackay is set return to the world of big screen musicals with The End, which is, er, joyously set during the apocalypse.

The cast also includes Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny and Lennie James.

The songs were written by Marius De Vries and Josh Schmidt. De Vries won a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello award for his score to Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, while The End marks the feature debut of Schmidt. Joshua Oppenheimer, best known for the award-winning documentaries The Act Of Killing (2012) and The Look Of Silence (2014) directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg.

George MacKay is no stranger to movie musicals. In 2013 he starred in Dexter Fletcher’s film adaptation of Stephen Greenhorn’s ebullient Proclaimers musical Sunshine On Leith...

Neon has debuted a trailer for the apocalyptic musical feature ‘The End.’ featuring Tilda Swinton and George McKay.

From director Joshua Oppenheimer comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.

The family consists of a couple and their young adult son who has never seen the outside world. There’s also a maid, a doctor, a butler and a young woman who managed to survive and find her way in. Initially feeling righteousness over their survival, the couple are soon haunted by regret for those they lost and guilt over their own contribution to the apocalypse.

The movie stars Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917) and Moses Ingram.

Also in trailers – “She’s been feeding us government secrets…” Trailer drops for Netflix series ‘Black Doves’

The post “Who could we trust?” Tilda Swinton stars in trailer for ‘The End’ appeared first on HeyUGuys.

„The End“ von Joshua Oppenheimer mit Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon und George MacKay gehörte zu den großen Filmen der diesjährigen Herbstfestivals. Nun gibt es einen ersten US-Trailer des apokalyptischen Musicals, das in Deutschland bei Mubi gestartet wird.

Dass „The End“ in jedem Kinojahr zu den ungewöhnlicheren Filmen des Jahres zählen würde, sollte feststehen. In unserer Besprechung aus San Sebastián schrieben wir: „Und jetzt, tada, ein Musical über das Ende der Welt. Oder besser: über die Familie, die das Ende der Welt mitverschuldet hat und nun zu sechst seit 20 Jahren in einem Bunker in einer Salzmine weit unter der Erde haust. Von Joshua Oppenheimer in seinem Debüt als Spielfilmregisseur, der legendäre Dokumentarfilmer, dem es für ,The Act of Killing‘ gelungen war, Mitglieder indonesischer Todesschwadronen ihre Taten in nachgestellten Filmszenen durchspielen zu lassen. Wenn man so will, ist es von dort nur ein kleiner Schritt zu ,The End‘, der auf oft faszinierende,...

What if you were trapped in a bunker with Tilda Swinton, and she kept breaking out into song?

That’s (an extremely reductive version of) the premise for “The End,” director Joshua Oppenheimer’s oddball post-apocalyptic musical, for which Neon released a trailer on Monday. The trailer teases a romantic musical set in a billionaire family’s bunker after the end of the world they helped cause, with elegant sets and an unusual tone.

The film is Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Oppenheimer’s (“The Act of Killing”) first narrative feature, which he wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg and produced with Signe Byrge Sorensen and Swinton. The film stars Academy Award winner Swinton (“Michael Clayton”), George Mackay (“1917”), Moses Ingram (“The Queen’s Gambit”), Bronagh Gallagher (“The Commitments”), Tim McInnerny (“One Day”), Lennie James (“The Walking Dead”), and Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon (“Nocturnal Animals”). The music is by Joshua Schmidt (“Midwestern Gothic...

It’s difficult to imagine that following apocalyptic events, the remaining humans will arbitrarily feel like busting out singing. But that’s what writer-director Joshua Oppenheimer envisions in The End. Described as a cautionary tale, The End opens in theaters on December 6, 2024.

The cast includes Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917), and Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit). Bronagh Gallagher (Brassic), Tim McInnerny (Gladiator II), and Lennie James (Fear the Walking Dead) also star.

“From Academy Award-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world. Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger,...

Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Michael Shannon, and Moses Ingram sing for their lives in “The End.”

Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic family drama “The End” stars Swinton as a mother who protects her family by living in a bunker for decades after the world has ended. George Mackay, her plays her son, has never seen the outside world. Shannon co-stars as his father, while Moses Ingram plays a stranger who arrives, interrupting their carefully crafted underground world.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine. Son, a naïve twenty-something who has never seen the outside world, is fascinated by the newcomer, and suddenly, the delicate bonds...

"I think I like her!" "But you've never met anybody before..." Neon has unveiled the full trailer for a unique musical creation called The End, the first narrative feature film directed by the acclaimed doc filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. This cynical take on the end of the world is a Golden Age-style musical about the last human family. Described as a poignant and deeply human musical about a wealthy family living in an ornate bunker in a salt mine. An urgent and unforgettable cautionary tale, The End stars Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, with Moses Ingram. Featuring original songs from Joshua Schmidt (music) and Joshua Oppenheimer (lyrics). The cast also includes Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James. I've heard mixed on this - some people love it, some people hate it, as if the movie was trolling the audience the entire time. A musical about a family of rich idiots?...

Almost three years have gone by since Joshua Oppenheimer, the director behind the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, announced that he was teaming up with Neon to make his narrative feature debut with The End, “a golden-age musical about the last human family.” That film went into production last year, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), George MacKay (1917), Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Bronagh Gallagher (Pulp Fiction), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Lennie James (The Walking Dead), and Danielle Ryan (The Silencing). Now it’s making the festival rounds, building up to a December theatrical release. The film is scheduled to start playing in New York and Los Angeles on December 6th, with the limited release expanding on December 13th. As those dates are swiftly approaching, a trailer for The End has...

Neon has revealed the trailer and poster for the apocalyptic musical film The End, which was co-written and directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. The movie will open in Los Angeles and New York on Dec. 6 and in select cities on Dec. 13.

From Academy Award-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.

Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine.

Son, a naïve twenty-something who has never seen the outside world, is fascinated by the newcomer, and suddenly, the delicate bonds of blind optimism that have held this wealthy clan together begin to fray.

As tensions rise, their...

From Academy Award®-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer comes Neon’s The End, being described as “a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.” Watch the official trailer below.

End of the world musical The End will release in theaters on December 6, 2024.

An urgent and unforgettable cautionary tale, The End stars Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Academy Award® nominee Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917) and Moses Ingram.

The screenplay is by Joshua Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair), with songs by Joshua Schmidt (music) and Joshua Oppenheimer (lyrics).

Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James also star.

The post ‘The End’ Official Trailer – Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Star in Apocalyptic Musical appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam has announced the 55 documentary projects selected for this year’s IDFA Forum, chosen from among 820 entries.

Among the prominent names heading to the forum, which runs November 17-20, is Emmy winner Eva Mulvad (The Cave), who will pitch her upcoming project House of the Holy Father, co-directed with Andreas Koefoed. “In an intriguing cinematic exercise that straddles fiction and documentary,” a release notes, “the film seeks to bare intricate workings of domination and manipulation, as ex-members of the notorious Christian sect Faderhuset direct scenes with well-known Danish actors, including Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik.”

Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann, who has won prizes at film festivals around the world, will participate in the Rough Cut Presentations section with Issa’s House, a film set in the West Bank. Another film shot in...

Joshua Oppenheimer and George Mackay during the press conference After establishing himself as a successful documentarian with The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer tackles a musical about the end of the world with his fiction debut, The End. Set in a near-future, a family has retreated to a bunker underground. There a Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton) and their Son (George Mackay) live with a butler (Tim McInnery), a doctor (Lennie James) and Mother’s friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who also essentially takes care of the housework. Their world is one of recreated comfort, packed with famous artworks, where the older members of the household carefully curate their own version of history, which they pass on to the son, who was born into the environment. Their equilibrium is rocked when a Girl (Moses Ingram) unexpectedly enters their world as the family and their new guest...

Die deutsche Filmemacherin Pia Marais bringt ihr neuestes Werk „Transamazonia“ mit „Systemsprenger“-Star Helena Zengel in der Hauptrolle zum Filmfest Hamburg. Zusammen mit dem US-Regisseur Joshua Oppenheimer, der sein fiktionales Debüt „The End“ zeigt, ist beiden eine kleine, aber feine Werkschau gewidmet.

Joshua Oppenheimer (l.) und Pia Marais (Credit: Kathreine Gowman/Daniel Bergeron/Filmfest Hamburg)

Das Filmfest Hamburg (26.9.-5.10.) widmet der deutschen Filmemacherin Pia Marais und dem US-amerikanischen Regisseur Joshua Oppenheimer in der Reihe „Gegenwartskino im Fokus“ eine kleine, aber feine Werkschau, bei der unter anderem die neuesten Werke „Transamazonia“ und „The End“ im Mittelpunkt stehen werden und es jeweils auch Werkgespräche geben wird.

Die in Südafrika geborene, aber aus Deutschland heraus Filme machende Regisseurin Pia Marais wird gerne wegen ihres Studiums an der Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin der sogenannten Berliner Schule zugeordnet. Was ihre Festivalerfolge anbelangt, kann man da auch mitgehen: Ihr neuestes Werk „Transamazonia“ (am 27.9. um...

Where to begin with The End? It’s such an odd concoction of ideas and styles, it’s hard to know. The concept of bringing unlikely things together has, of course, worked for Joshua Oppenheimer in the past. Asking genocidal mass killers to re-enact their crimes for a documentary is not something most people would have hit upon but the director made it viscerally pay-off with The Act Of Killing.

This time around, however, while his audacity remains, his delivery falls short. Set in a dystopian future, the action takes place in a scraped out bunker, filled with dunes of salt. Walk through a door, though, and you’re suddenly in what appears to be a tasteful upper middle-class home, lined with art masterpieces from the likes of Renoir with not a speck of dirt to be seen. This is where, what we assume to be one of the world’s last families,...

by Abirbhab Maitra

In 2012, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, European auteur Michael Haneke discussed the challenges of dramatizing events with significant historical context in film. He argued that dramatization can lead to manipulation, stripping historical objectivity and imposing a subjective truth on the narrative. In his view, directors should take extra care to maintain a sense of responsibility towards both the historical events and the audience’s perception, encouraging them to confront history as their own, free from any kind of manipulation. Haneke illustrated his point by referencing Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog”, which prompts spectators to reflect on their position in relation to the depicted events without succumbing to the comforts of melodrama.

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Joshua Oppenheimer‘s 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing”, explores these ideas of confronting history through an objective lens. Based on the events...

by Cláudio Alves

Ambitious mess will always be more exciting and artistically valuable than cautious mediocrity. The timid filmmaker has their place, but they'll never rise above those whose ideas reach for the sky, the heavens, the likely impossible. Or, in Joshua Oppenheimer's case, those who burrow down below, digging to the center of the Earth, mayhap to hell. For his feature debut, The End, the director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence goes underground, setting the scene in a not-so-distant future when the Earth has been left ravaged by climate change and other related catastrophes, virtually inhabitable, so hostile to life that those who survive must fight one another for the scant resources around…...

Exclusive: Perfect Days, the comeback feature from legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders, has become boutique operator Curzon Cinemas’s longest-running film after passing 30 continuous weeks this past Friday.

Perfect Days has played at Curzon Bloomsbury in London for 206 continuous days. The film passes Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, which played for 26 continuous weeks, to become the operator’s longest-running title under modern tracking. Perfect Days is currently the 7th highest-grossing film at Curzon Bloomsbury of all time.

Wenders’s quietly radical, Tokyo-set drama, stars Japanese actor Koji Yakusho as a man with a love of trees and literature who mysteriously opts for a simple life by working as a toilet cleaner. The film debuted in Competition at Cannes in 2023 where Yakusho won Best Actor.

All rights on the film for the UK, Latam, India, and Turkey were acquired by Mubi from The Match Factory at Cannes 2023. The pic recorded...

Filmfest Hamburg has unveiled the full programme for its 32nd edition, which is set to open with Louise Courvoisier’s Cannes prize-winner Holy Cow and close with Pedro Almodovar’s Golden Lion-winner The Room Next Door.

French filmmaker Courvoisier will be accompanied by lead actors Clément Faveau and Malwéne Barthelemy at the opening gala on September 26 for the German premiere of her debut feature, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes where it won the Youth Prize. The coming-of-age film will be released by Pandora Film in German cinemas on January 2.

The Filmfest’s new director Malika Rabahallah and...

Plot: Many years after an apocalyptic event they may have contributed to, a wealthy family survives in a luxurious underground fortress.

Review: One of the best things about attending a festival like TIFF is that you often walk into movies without preconceived notions. Films playing at the festival are so new that they barely have any stills available, much less any trailers, so you walk into them pretty much blind. The downside is that, once in a while, you end up seeing a movie that sounds intriguing, but pretty much right off the bat, once you see a few minutes of it, you’re hit by a sinking feeling that, “oh no, this might not be for me.”

Indeed, The End wasn’t for me. While I’m a sucker for movies about the apocalypse, and the premise (and dream cast) are intriguing, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative debut is a slog to get through.

The Latin American premiere of Christopher Andrews’ TIFF selection Bring Them Down starring Barry Keoghan and a screening of Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 modern classic La Haine feature in the 20th Monterrey International Film Festival line-up.

Running September 25-October 2, the festival in northern Mexico led by general manager Diana Cobos brings Cannes, Sundance and Berlin selections in its World Highlights strand, including the Latin American premieres of Piero Messina’s Another End starring Gael Garcia Bernal, and Sugercane by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat.

The festival includes the Monterrey Classics section with screenings of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos,...

Chatting with the head of a prominent documentary-production company recently, I asked if hybrid filmmaking had reached its natural limit. Could it conceivably be pushed further? He posited these limitations might be behind a recent trend of documentarians pivoting to fiction: Kirsten Johnson is making a Susan Sontag biopic with Kristen Stewart; Frederick Wiseman made his first narrative feature A Couple after half a century spent in non-fiction; Roberto Minervini’s The Damned and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh both premiered at Cannes this past Spring; most recently, RaMell Ross adapted the Pulitzer-winning novel Nickel Boys. Documentarians are realizing that if fiction and non-fiction are both highly constructed, then why not work this construction openly, with the added perks of larger budgets and access to stars?

Joshua Oppenheimer joins that cohort with The End, a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. From the jump, The End embodies a more classical filmmaking mode.

A film crew took advantage of the Venice Film Festival spotlight Wednesday and wore clothing on its prestigious red carpet embroidered with the distances from the Lido to various locations where Russians are holding Ukrainian prisoners.

Their documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth, directed by Olha Zhurba, celebrated its world premiere in the Out of Competition strand.

Each piece of clothing, made in collaboration with Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist and designer Alisa Liubomska, featured embroidery carrying eight names of different detention sites and their respective distances in kilometres from the Lido. “Each of these names symbolizes the lives of thousands of Ukrainian men and women,” the team said.

“We wanted to remind people of the horrific conditions in which detainees are held, the illegitimate trials and fabricated charges, the torture, and the deaths,” said Zhurba. “About everything that Russia, as a terrorist state, is doing with impunity to individuals who should...

Exclusive: Mubi, the global distributor, streaming service and production company, has acquired all rights in UK, Germany and Austria to Joshua Oppenheimer’s (The Act of Killing) new feature The End, which had its world premiere at Telluride this weekend.

The ambitious film is imagined as a Golden Age-style musical and cautionary tale about the last human family.

Starring are Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), BAFTA-nominee George Mackay (1917), and Emmy-nominee Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit).

Screenplay is by Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair), with songs by Joshua Schmidt (music) and Oppenheimer (lyrics). Marius de Vries is the executive music producer.

The official synopsis reads: “Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily...

Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer shines a light on humanity’s darker side. His acclaimed works The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence uncovered atrocities in Indonesia with unflinching honesty. For his narrative debut, The End, Oppenheimer tackles similarly profound themes through a unique lens.

Set decades after climate change renders Earth uninhabitable, the film centers on an affluent family holed up in an underground bunker. For twenty-five years, they’ve hid from the devastated world above. Down here, Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, and their son (George MacKay) live in lavish, museum-like conditions. But to maintain their insular bubble, they must deny responsibility for the crisis.

Oppenheimer uses gilded cages and original songs to examine how privilege can breed willful blindness. Digging into guilt, denial, and desperate rationalizations, he peers into humanity’s capacity for self-delusion. The family’s cushy isolation gets disrupted by an outsider’s arrival, shaking foundations and dislodging long-buried feelings.

It’s a classic story prompt: The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s delirious and delicately monumental “The End,” the man is an über-affluent family. The “door” (so to speak) connects the scorched ruins of our planet to the cavernous underground bunker where these characters have buried themselves for the last 25 years. The knock reverberates with a force powerful enough to dislodge all the feelings they’ve worked so hard to bury along with them — the humanity they’ve had to deny somewhere deep within themselves in order to make peace with the humanity they chose to leave behind on the surface.

Despite the broad familiarity of its premise, however, this story doesn’t unfold like any post-apocalyptic fable before it. For one thing, it’s a full-throated musical that starts with Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton leading the rest of the...

The odd, accidental synchronicity of the movie business brought us double volcano movies, double asteroid/comet movies, double Pinocchio movies and double Truman Capote movies in rapid succession, along with four body-swapping movies over two years back in the 1980s. But “The End,” which premiered on Saturday night at the Telluride Film Festival, may be part of the weirdest trend in cinematic coincidence of them all: film-festival movies that are musicals, even though there’s absolutely nothing in the subject matter to make you think they should be.

First there was Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” which caused a sensation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival by taking a story of a Central American drug lord who undergoes gender reassignment surgery and filling it with songs. The Venice Film Festival struck next with “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which finds Todd Phillips turning his sequel to the Oscar-winning 2019 drama “Joker” into a musical,...

What will the existence of the elite class, whose conspicuous consumption is a status symbol and has a negative impact on the environment, look like once everything has been completely destroyed? Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End imagines what that future could look like, joining the ranks of other recent films that have put outrageous privilege in their often sanctimonious cross hairs. But the willful blindness of the ruling class is something that Oppenheimer has intimately grappled with in his documentary work, namely The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and he attempts to carve out a unique approach to eating the rich on screen by dressing up his venom in the fanciful garbs of a Golden Age musical.

Set 20 years after an environmental collapse has wiped out society, The End takes place in a lavish underground bunker within the depths of a salt mine. This is the home...

With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer approached the documentary form in a radical, seemingly unthinkable way, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served on the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera. Why should his narrative debut be any more conventional?

For “The End,” Oppenheimer conceives a peculiar post-apocalyptic musical, confined to an underground bunker where an elite set of people have hoarded fine art and expensive wines for a cataclysm that, perversely enough, they may well have instigated. Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about a “very wealthy, very dangerous family” (in his words), but ultimately chose to steer the project in a very different direction.

With its turgid 148-minute running time and defiant lack of compelling conflict, “The End” doesn’t pander to mainstream sensibilities. Rather, Oppenheimer appeals to the art-house crowd with a serious-minded rumination on...

Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay star in “The End,” a new post-apocalyptic musical about the last human family on Earth. I mean, we’re sold already, but further tantalizing is the fact that “The End” is the narrative debut and long-overdue latest film from filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. If Oppenheimer’s name rings a bell, it should. He’s the director behind the heralded Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” (2012) and “The Look of Silence” (2014), the former film listed in our feature about the Best Documentaries Of The 2010s.

Continue reading ‘The End’ First Look: Photos & Poster Of Joshua Oppenheimer’s Golden Age Musical With Tilda Swinton & Michael Shannon at The Playlist.

Almost three years have gone by since Joshua Oppenheimer, the director behind the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, announced that he was teaming up with Neon to make his narrative feature debut with The End, “a golden-age musical about the last human family.” That film went into production last year, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), George MacKay (1917), Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Bronagh Gallagher (Pulp Fiction), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Lennie James (The Walking Dead), and Danielle Ryan (The Silencing). Now it’s making the festival rounds, with the Telluride Film Festival unveiling the image that can be seen above, and a teaser poster arriving online just ahead of the film’s screenings at both Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival. The poster can be seen at the bottom of this article.

The world premieres of “The Piano Lesson,” “Conclave” and “Saturday Night” will take place at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival, which begins on Friday in the Colorado mountain town.

“The Piano Lesson” is an August Wilson adaptation directed by Malcolm Washington and starring Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington; it will be released by Netflix. “Conclave” is a Focus Features drama set admidst the election of a new pope, and the first film for German director Edward Berger since his Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front.” And Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” a Sony release, tells the story of the first episode of the long-running comedy series “Saturday Night Live.”

Other films in this year’s Telluride lineup include “The End,” a dystopian sci-fi musical starring Tilda Swinton and marking the narrative debut of “The Act of Killing” director Joshua Oppenheimer; “Nickel Boys,” a Colson Whitehead adaptation from RaMell Ross; and “The Friend,...

“Songs of Slow Burning Earth,” the sophomore feature by Ukrainian director Olha Zhurba, has been acquired by Prague-based sales outlet Filmotor ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary will screen Out of Competition in the Official Selection.

The film is described as an “audiovisual diary of Ukraine’s immersion into the abyss of the first two years of Russia’s full invasion,” according to a statement. “[It] is made up of places, occasional characters, rare dialogues, intraframe sounds and silences that capture the chronology of how the war became normalized. Against the backdrop of this (meta)physical landscape of collective disaster, a new generation of Ukrainians aspires to imagine the future.”

Filmotor’s Michaela Čajková comments: “I was immediately taken with the film and with its well-built long cinematic scenes. It is a visually stunning piece of cinema that offers a sublime look at the full-scale invasion,...

La sección oficial a competición del Ssiff se llena de grandes nombres. © 72Ssiff

Hace unas semanas se dieron a conocer los títulos españoles que competirán por la Concha de Oro en la 72ª edición del Festival de Cine de San Sebastián, que se celebrará del 20 al 28 de septiembre. Éstos son Soy Nevenka, de Icíar Bollaín, El llanto de Pedro Martín-Calero, Los destellos, de Pilar Palomero, y Tardes de soledad, de Albert Serra.

Hoy se han anunciado títulos restantes de la sección oficial a competición del festival, los cuales acompañarán a Bollaín, Martín-Calero, Palomero y Serra en la contienda por el prestigioso galardón. Entre los títulos más destacados encontramos Cónclave, The End, Hard Truths y The Last Showgirl.

Cónclave, de Edward Berger, director de Sin novedad en el frente, se presenta como un fuerte contendiente a la Concha de Oro. Este film tendrá su premiere mundial en el Festival de Cine...

New films from directors Mike Leigh, François Ozon, Edward Berger, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Costa-Gavras will vie for the Golden Shell at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Organizers on Tuesday announced the competition line-up for the 72nd edition of San Sebastian, which runs from September 20-28.

Highlights include Leigh’s hotly-anticipated new film Hard Truths, which will see the iconoclastic British director reunite with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste; and Conclave, Berger’s follow-up to his multiple-Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front. The Vatican thriller stars Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal tasked with supervising a conclave following the sudden death of the Pope to choose a successor.

Veteran political filmmaker Costa-Gavras (Missing, Z) returns to San Sebastian with Last Breath, a drama about a palliative care doctor. Ozon will make his sixth appearance in the festival’s official selection with When Fall Is Coming, a French drama starring Hélène Vincent,...

Two Netflix Originals and new movies from Mike Leigh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Gia Coppola and Edward Berger will vie for San Sebastian’s top Golden Shell this September.

The festival features a main competition that is stronger than usual on both bigger-name directors and ‘A’ list stars, such as Tilda Swinton in Oppenheimer’s “The End,” Jamie Lee Curtis and Pamela Anderson in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” and the ensemble cast of Berger’s “Conclave” that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini.

Bound for Toronto and Telluride before San Sebastián, Oppenheimer’s “The End” stars Swinton, George MacKay and Michael Shannon in what is described as a post-apocalyptic “Golden Age” musical.

“Conclave,” from “All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger,” is a psychological thriller written by Peter Straughan, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Robert Harris and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow.

International documentary filmmakers and industry reps are gathering at Sheffield DocFest in the U.K. at a moment of political tumult in Europe. British voters head to the polls for a general election on July 4; in France, President Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called snap legislative elections after a French ultranationalist party surged in voting for the European Parliament. Germany’s far-right AfD party also scored substantial gains in that European Parliament vote. Overall, the center held — more or less.

If there’s anything the documentary community is used to dealing with it’s turbulence, whether at the macro level of major change in the business itself, or at the micro level of getting a film production off the ground. The message to DocFest attendees this week has been to insist on solidarity – to support each other — in the face of geopolitical and economic uncertainty.

Patrizia Mancini, Head of...

Launched last year by Wes Anderson’s producing partners at Indian Paintbrush, Galerie has emerged as a well-curated film club publishing unique selections of films from artists with their personal annotations. With past lists from the likes of James Gray, Ed Lachman, Mike Mills, Karyn Kusama, Ethan Hawke, and more, today we’re pleased to exclusively share a sneak peek from the lists of two celebrated Chilean filmmakers, Pablo Larraín and Sebastián Lelio, which have recently landed on the site.

Both filmmakers are currently working on their latest projects: Larraín is helming the Angelina Jolie-led Maria Callas drama, while Lelio is handling the musical The Wave, inspired by Chile’s “feminist May” movement in 2018. While in post-production on the projects, they’ve shared their curated collections.

The Spencer and El Conde director features Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing on his list,...

Copenhagen documentary film festival: Alessandra Celesia’s urgent documentary about the residents of an estate in Belfast speaks to the lasting trauma of political violence

Alessandra Celesia’s film is part seance, part news story: a documentary about the run-down New Lodge estate in Belfast. It is primarily about the families who still live with the unresolved agony of the Troubles a quarter of a century on, the psychic residue of political violence coexisting with sexism, domestic abuse, substance abuse and futile rage against drug dealers in working-class neighbourhoods. But there is something else too. Along with TV news stories about the Queen’s death there is the sensational revelation that for the first time, the Catholic community in Northern Ireland now outnumbers the Protestant. The thought can hardly be said out loud; could it be that times are changing and reunification – that concept which caused so much bloodshed – is...

U.S. content management, financing and sales banner Cinetic Media has secured world rights to the life affirming doc “Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other,” about legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz and artist and author Maggie Barrett, his wife.

Rising filmmaking duo Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter of London-based Manon et Jacob are making their documentary debut, with Ouimet serving as producer alongside multi-Oscar nominated Danish producer Signe Byrge Sørensen of Final Cut Four Real.

“Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other” is having its world premiere March 16 in the Dox:award main competition at Copenhagen’s leading documentary festival Cph:dox, and also screen in the international competition section of Thessaloniki Documentary Festival on the same day.

Pedigree co-producing partners attached include Fremantle-owned doc label Undeniable, helmed by Mandy Chang, and long-time Final Cut for Real U.S. partners Louverture Films.

The character-driven documentary chronicles the loving yet...

Ottessa Moshfegh may have been channeling Hitchcock for her screenplay for William Oldroyd’s “Eileen,” but star Marin Ireland turned to a much different filmmaker for creative inspiration on the 1960s-set noir. The film was co-written by Luke Goebel.

Ireland, nominated for Best Supporting Performance for “Eileen” opposite Anne Hathaway, who was also nominated, came by IndieWire’s spot at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards red carpet to talk the 2023 Neon release. In the film, Ireland plays the mother of a teenager who’s been arrested for his father’s murder, and she’s hiding a secret.

“I had read the book years earlier, and I was like, what are we doing? Where did this come from?” Ireland said of her first meeting with Moshfegh. “She told me about this documentary she had watched called ‘Lost for Life’ about teens who were convicted as adults, who were serving life sentences,...

Exclusive: Ahead of EFM 2024, XYZ Films has promoted James Emanuel Shapiro to President of Domestic Distribution, upping Alex Williams to Sr. Manager, Acquisitions and Development.

Shapiro, formerly the Executive Vice President of U.S. Distribution, reports to XYZ CEO Nick Spicer and Partner Nate Bolotin. The promotions come following XYZ’s recent hiring of Celine Lin for the role of Senior VP of International Sales.

XYZ launched its domestic distribution arm in 2021 and has since then released films from Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Something in the Dirt), Nic Cassavetes (God Is a Bullet) and Michelle Garza (Huesera: The Bone Woman).

Said the Partners at XYZ in a joint statement, “These are well deserved promotions and we couldn’t be happier for James and Alex. James has done a terrific job launching the division, with strong support from Alex, and we’re excited about our upcoming slate.”

Prior to his time at XYZ Films,...

Veteran German film and TV executive Dirk Schweitzer has left his position as CEO of producer/distributor Splendid Medien and has taken over as CEO of Mmc Group, the parent company of Cologne’s Mmc Studios.

Björn Siecken, former CFO at Splendid, will join Schweitzer as CFO of Mmc. Nico Roden will stay on as managing director of Mmc Studios, who run the Cologne backlot, and Bastie Griese will remain managing director of production division Mmc Movies, working together with Schweitzer to expand the company’s film and TV operations nationally and internationally.

Former Splendid boss Andreas Klein, son of company founder Albert E. Klein, has returned to run the company as CEO. Schweitzer took over operations at Splendid from Klein in 2020, with Klein continuing as an advisor to the company. Schweizer joined Splendid in 2013 from producer/distributor Tele-München Group, where he was managing director. Before that, he spent 10 years...

Cph:Forum, the financing and co-production event on the industry programme of Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, has selected new projects from the producers of Flee and Cow for its 2024 edition; and has refreshed its industry awards with six prizes.

Danish producer Signe Byrge Sorensen will participate with Freedom (working title), directed by Camilla Nielsson, who previously made Sundance 2021 title President about a challenger in Zimbabwe’s corrupt presidential elections.

Scroll down for the full list of Forum projects

Sorensen is CEO of Danish documentary production house Final Cut For Real, which has made films including The Killing Of A Journalist,...

Spoilers follow.

Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest" takes place mostly in a pristine, clean two-story home in the Polish countryside. It has a large, verdant lawn, an outsize greenhouse, and spacious bedrooms for the occupants' children. Its garden is well-maintained and regularly fertilized. They have a small pool, even, equipped with a waterslide. People come to visit the manse's occupants regularly, and everyone comments on how nice it is, and how proud they are of Rudolf (Christian Freidel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) for maintaining such a lovely estate. 

Sharing a wall with the estate is the Auschwitz concentration camp. It's the early 1940s and the smokestacks are billowing, belching out the ashes of hundreds upon hundreds of murdered Jews. During the day, Rudolf has meetings with other Nazi generals, discussing the logistics of how to use furnaces to dispose of human beings more efficiently. The Hades...

How do you embody pure evil? While the discussion swirls regarding precisely how much Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is meant to humanize the Nazis, by the film’s final moments, there’s no mistaking the director’s point in showing the physical distress on one’s body enacting daily atrocities. Christian Friedel, who plays commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp Rudolph Höss, was up for the difficult task of portraying this seething wickedness while attempting to keep control of his relationship with his wife (Sandra Hüller) and family connection intact.

With the Cannes winner expanding in theaters, I spoke with Friedel about why Glazer didn’t want him to read the Martin Amis novel in preparation, looking to The Act of Killing as inspiration, the physicality of his performance, and what he’s gleaned from multiple viewings of the film.

The Film Stage: I know you worked...