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Starring Levan Gelbakhiani (“And Then We Danced”) and Karidja Touré (“Girlhood”), “Don’t Let the Sun (Catch You Crying),” the fiction feature debut of multi-prized Swiss documentarian Jacqueline Zünd has won the Marché du Film’s first Goes to Cannes Award.

The prize, a €10,000 minimum guarantee for international sales, is sponsored by Sideral, a Spain-based studio dedicated to production, distribution and international sales launched by Elamedia at Berlin last year.

After three introspective doc features, portraying the unspoken thoughts of insomniacs, ageing men and children after their parents’ separation, in “Don’t Let the Sun (Catch You Crying),” Zünd creates an alternative universe where Jonah is employed by an agency that offers human relationships. When he’s hired to work as Nika’s father, he begins to lose control of his tightly disciplined life.

“The film portrays a world that is only a small step away from our reality, not...

Unspooling May 18 as part of an overall Swiss Focus at the Marché du Film, Solothurn Film Festival Goes to Cannes marks the first collaboration between the long-standing Swiss festival and the Cannes market, but also a first for many of the talents and producers carefully picked for the event.

Two of Switzerland’s top documentary filmmakers Jacqueline Zünd, winner of a 2019 Crystal Bear nominated for “Where We Belong,” and Nicholas Steiner, director of “Above & Below”, ranked among Variety reviewer Peter Debruge’s Top 10 films of 2015, are set to attract buyers, sales agents and programmers’ attention with their star-stubbed fiction debuts.

In “Do You Believe in Angels, Mr Drowak,” Steiner has hired Karl Markovics, star of the 2008 Oscar winner “The Counterfeiters”, rising acting talent Lune Wedler, Lars Eidinger and Dominique Pinon.

“After two cinematic documentaries that ran worldwide and an original Netflix series [“Dig Deeper-The Disappearance of Birgit Meier”], I was excited to create this technically demanding,...

Oh, Canada debuting this week on the Croisette is high time to see lesser-seen Schrader on the Criterion Channel, who’ll debut an 11-title series including the likes of Touch, The Canyons, and Patty Hearst, while Old Boyfriends (written with his brother Leonard) and his own “Adventures in Moviegoing” are also programmed. Five films by Jean Grémillon, a rather underappreciated figure of French cinema, will be showing

Series-wise, there’s an appreciation of the synth soundtrack stretching all the way back to 1956’s Forbidden Planet while, naturally, finding its glut of titles in the ’70s and ’80s––Argento and Carpenter, obviously, but also Tarkovsky and Peter Weir. A Prince and restorations of films by Bob Odenkirk, Obayashi, John Greyson, and Jacques Rivette (whose Duelle is a masterpiece of the highest order) make streaming debuts. I Am Cuba, Girlfight, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Dazed and Confused are June’s Criterion Editions.

StudioCanal said today that it has set plans to launch a new film and TV genre label led by Jed Benedict, who will rejoin the company to lead the brand.

Benedict will be based in the UK and report to EVP, of Global Production Ron Halpern. The company said he will be responsible for “ensuring StudioCanal’s editorial line in genre content as Head of StudioCanal new genre label.” He will also work with the StudioCanal French production team.

The company has said the new label will “encompass film and TV series development, production, and distribution.”

“I am so delighted to return to StudioCanal, who have fully embraced the opportunity to create a destination for talented artists – established and new – with bold and daring visionary ambition,” Benedict said.

Benedict added that the new genre label will have the “freedom of working in the shadows where we believe the genre film...

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” was Céline Sciamma’s big breakout moment, but the French director was clearly a major talent in the making from the very start of her career.

In 2007, the then 29-year-old filmmaker premiered her first feature at Cannes Film Festival, after writing the movie’s script during her final year at the prestigious film school La Fémis. The story of three teen girls awakening to their sexualities during a single summer, “Water Lillies” featured Sciamma’s future romantic partner and collaborator Adèle Haenel, and established the type of female-focused and queer stories she would spend her entire career bringing to the screen.

Following the positive reception of “Water Lillies,” Sciamma chased it with 2011’s “Tomboy,” a sharply observed coming-of-age about a 10-year-old exploring their gender identity. 2014’s “Girlhood,” about four Black teen girls living in Paris, brought Sciamma further attention, thanks to a much talked...

The French drama explores the close relationship between a six-year-old girl and her nanny

BFI Distribution has picked up Marie Amachoukeli’s Cannes Critics’ Week opener Ama Gloria for the UK and Ireland. The French drama was acquired from Pyramide International.

The film, which is set to be released in 2024, explores the close relationship between a six-year-old girl and her nanny as they spend their last summer together in Cape Verde.

Pyramide has also sold the film to Transformer in Japan, Hugoeast in China, Cinéart in Benelux, Alambique in Portugal, Ama Films in Greece, Surtsey in Spain, and I Wonder in Italy.

Lucas Bernard’s romantic comedy ’In The Sub For Love’ is another new acquisition for French studio.

French studio Gaumont has unveiled a hefty genre-hopping Cannes slate complete with all new acquisitions Gilles de Maistre’s family adventure Moon The Panda, Stéphane Brizé’s romance drama Out Of Season and Lucas Bernard’s romantic comedy In The Sub For Love in addition to a slew of market premieres and official selection festival titles.

New acquisitions

Moon The Panda is the latest film from the master of the human-animal adventure tale Gilles de Maistre following Mia And The White Lion and The Wolf And The Lion.

Christophe Honoré's Winter Boy is now showing exclusively on Mubi starting April 28, 2023, in many countries in the series Luminaries.When Antoine Doinel first dons his checkered jacket and roams the streets of Paris in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), the city air is so cold that his breath clouds the frame. Truffaut’s wintry film is a tale of isolation and frustration in the life of the young Doinel, a misbehaving schoolboy bored by la dictée and the stifling teachings of his professor. Out in the frostbitten night, he sleeps in a printing press and steals a typewriter, evoking his search for his own liberation and words to live by. To everyone else, he appears a troubled youth in need of institutionalization. To Truffaut, he is his younger self looking for his identity and the means to express it, a memory committed to film. When a filmmaker sets...

An adrenaline junkie crosses tracks with a motorbike stunt ring, and the rest is a bloodied history.

Director Lola Quivoron’s feature debut “Rodeo” centers on a gearhead (Julie Ledru) who gets deeper with a con artist crew of motorcyclists. The film, produced by Charles Gillibert, debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Coup de Cœur du Jury special prize.

Per the film’s official synopsis, “hot-tempered and fiercely independent, Julia (Ledru) is a gearhead who thrives in hostile environments and turns every situation to her advantage. She has a talent for scamming condescending men who think it’s cute that she shows interest in their used motorbikes and can’t fathom her riding away with gleeful abandon. Her obsession with the high-octane world of urban Rodeos, illicit gatherings where riders show off their bikes and latest daring stunts, sparks a chance meeting with a volatile clique.

At long last, after years of development, Abderrahmane Sissako is set to embark on his first feature since 2014’s Timbuktu. The Mauritanian-born Malian director’s next work is The Perfumed Hill, which will begin shooting this month.

As reported by Variety, the romantic drama, scripted by the director and Kessen Tall, will star Nina Melo (Girlhood), Han Chang (Little Big Women), and Ke-Xi Wu (Nina Wu) in an ambitious story set “between China’s tea hills, the Ivory Coast, and Cape Verde.” Picked up for a U.S. release by Cohen Media Group and Gaumont in France, the project has come to TIFF for buyers, and thus an expanded synopsis has arrived:

The movie follows the journey of Joice, who leaves the Ivory Coast to start a new life in Guangzhou, China, after saying “no” on her wedding day. She finds a job at a tea boutique owned by Cai,...

Eight years after delivering his Oscar-nominated film “Timbuktu,” Abderrahmane Sissako is set to make his anticipated directorial comeback with “The Perfumed Hill.” Gaumont is representing in international markets and will introduce it to buyers at at Toronto. The French studio will also distribute the film in France, while Cohen Media Group will release it in the U.S.

Re-teaming Sissako with his “Timbuktu” co-writer Kessen Tall, “The Perfumed Hill” is a romance drama set between China’s tea hills, the Ivory Coast and Cape Verde. It stars Nina Melo (“Girlhood”), Han Chang (“Little Big Women”) and Ke-Xi Wu (“Nina Wu”).

The movie follows the journey of Joice, who leaves the Ivory Coast to start a new life in Guangzhou, China, after saying “no” on her wedding day. She finds a job at a tea boutique owned by Cai, a Chinese man, in the vibrant region of Guangzhou, known as the “Chocolate City.

Céline Sciamma makes small films that contain multitudes, tender and vivid portraits of sisterhood and self-becoming.

Imagining spaces out of places where women can discover themselves and each other freely, the French filmmaker first earned acclaim for a trio of social-realist coming-of-age dramas: 2007’s “Water Lilies,” 2011’s “Tomboy,” and 2014’s “Girlhood.” Though connected in their study of adolescence, gender, and sexuality, as well as their close and empathetic attention to outsiders navigating rites of passage, these films — especially “Girlhood” — also revealed Sciamma’s burgeoning interest in modes of female-gaze storytelling beyond the naturalistic.

Read More: ‘Petite Maman’:Céline Sciamma Delivers An Intimate Tale Of Grief And Parenthood [Berlin Review]

And so it felt like a creative breakthrough as much as a commercial one when 2019’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” which won the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at Cannes, catapulted the screenwriter-director to international recognition.

Continue reading Céline Sciamma On ‘Petite Maman,...

There is what you might call a “spoiler” in the title of Céline Sciamma’s new movie, a key to unlocking her look at childhood that’s hiding in plain sight. The French filmmaker’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire begins not with love, but with death: An eight-year-old named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) has just lost her elderly grandmother. Her mom (Nina Meurisse) is packing up everything in the house she grew up in, located on the edge of a forest. Dad (Stéphane Varupenne) is helping out the best he can.

This review of “Paris, 13th District” was first published on July 14, 2021, after the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Paris, 13th District” starts with cool black-and-white drone shots of a concrete estate in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, and it comes from the hand of Palme d’Or winning director Jacques Audiard. So one could be forgiven for anticipating a tough, urban movie in the ground-breaking mold of Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 drama “La Haine.”

However, the opening montage of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” is closer in spirit to this film, which opens in U.S. theaters Friday. The unrest and turbulence in “Paris, 13th District” is all of the heart.

Audiard’s film is a network of interconnected stories about various young, multi-cultural Parisians living in the tower blocks, based on three stories by American illustrator Adrian Tomine, taken from his 2015 collection “Killing and Dying” and transposed to this Parisian quartier.

Netflix and Arte’s musical show “Le Monde de Demain” (“The World of Tomorrow”) took the top prize in the International Competition of television festival Series Mania at the event’s awards ceremony Friday.

The series, created by Katell Quillévéré, Hélier Cisterne – both also directing – Vincent Poymiro and David Elkaïm, takes a look at the birth of the French hip-hop movement in the 1980s. Made with the collaboration of Laurent Rigoulet and the participation of Kool Shen, JoeyStarr and DJ Détonateur S, it was described by the organizers as “a personal chronicle about a Parisian suburban youth reaching adulthood, claiming its own space in a new France, a country to reinvent.”

In the acting categories, Michelle De Swarte was noticed for her role in the U.K.’s “The Baby,” produced by Sky, HBO and Ocs, while Israeli actor Yehuda Levi impressed the jurors with his performance in “Fire Dance,...

Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman is showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries starting February 18, 2022 in the series Luminaries. Her films are also showing as part of the series Young Hearts Run Free: Céline Sciamma.Petite MamanOur actions define us. In the second scene of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), the film’s protagonist, the painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is traveling on a boat rowed by a dozen oarsmen, when a wooden crate containing her easel is jolted into the sea. Marianne considers the situation for a few seconds, then kicks off her shoes, jumps into the cold, choppy waters in her gown and traveling coat, and swims towards her prize possession. We immediately pick up her resilience, romanticism, and independence of spirit. This scene, and another shortly afterwards where a naked Marianne smokes a pipe as she warms herself up from her efforts before a fire,...

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‘The American Dream and...

Scout Productions announced the appointment of documentarian Amy Goodman Kass as the company’s new senior vice president of documentary.

In the role, Goodman Kass will oversee Scout’s current slate of documentary projects, including the upcoming Peacock series about Barney the Dinosaur. She will report to Joel Chiodi, head of documentaries.

Most recently, Goodman Kass served as the executive producer and showrunner of “Love Fraud,” the 2020 Showtime docuseries about serial romance scammer Richard Scott Smith, which became the first-ever episodic series to premiere on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. She has also overseen documentary projects for HBO, A&e, National Geographic, PBS, Travel Channel and History Channel, including the series “Undercover High,” “I Am Rebel” and “America Revealed.”

On the film side, Goodman Kass’ credits include History Channel’s “Rebuilding the World Trade Center,” HBO’s “Alive Day Memories” with James Gandolfini and TLC and Wellspring’s “Girlhood.

Also opening: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’.

Sony goes up against Warner Bros this weekend at the UK-Ireland box office, as the studios look to continue a strong period for wide releases.

Sony is releasing Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 670 locations. It is directed by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters films and is a producer here. In the latest entry, when a single mother and her two children arrive in a small town, they discover a connection to the original Ghostbusters and the secret legacy the kids’ grandfather left behind.

The original Ghostbusters film...

From Girlhood to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the film-maker’s intimate human dramas have ​brought her acclaim. She talks about her latest, Petite Maman​, and the trouble with the French film industry​

Céline Sciamma makes small films about stolen moments, secret selves and outsiders who have crafted a vital life in the shadows. Her subjects are the overlooked and the unrecognised, whether that’s a band of black schoolgirls from the Paris banlieue or windswept gay lovers in 18th-century Brittany. One way or another, these people are in search of sanctuary and empowerment. Her fanbase, I’m guessing, have already found both in her work.

“In all my films, it’s always the same,” she says. “It’s always about a few days out of the world, where we can meet each lover, love each other. Also it’s always about female characters because they can be themselves...

As 2021 mercifully winds down, the Criterion Channel have a (November) lineup that marks one of their most diverse selections in some time—films by the new masters Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Garrett Bradley, Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen (one of 2020’s best films) couched in a fantastic retrospective, and Criterion editions of old favorites.

Fourteen is featured in “Between Us Girls: Bonds Between Women,” which also includes Céline and Julie, The Virgin Suicides, and Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege. Of equal note are Criterion editions for Ghost World, Night of the Hunter, and (just in time for del Toro’s spin) Nightmare Alley—all stacked releases in their own right.

See the full list of October titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.

300 Nassau, Marina Lameiro, 2015

5 Card Stud, Henry Hathaway, 1968

Alone, Garrett Bradley, 2017

Álvaro, Daniel Wilson, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandra Lazarowich, and Chloe Zimmerman, 2015

America, Garrett Bradley, 2019

Angel Face, Otto Preminger, 1953

Angels Wear White,...

Directors Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kaufmann put their background in documentary to go use in this verite style character study which closely observes both the physical and psychological changes of its child protagonist Jamila (Khadija Jaafari) over the course of the five years during which the film was shot. As with Celine Sciamma's Girlhood, we can feel her sense of identity bend and flex as the youngster makes her way in an often indifferent world.

Jaafari is remarkably natural in the central role, a testimony no doubt to the work the directors put in with her before making the film. The youngster, making her fiction debut here, came into the filmmakers' orbit when they were shooting boxing doc Butterfly and she is first glimpsed at age nine as she dreams of a boxing career, the initial portion of the film recalling last year's documentary Lift Like A Girl in its celebration of young.

The eclectic veteran French director Jacques Audiard shifts gears yet again with Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades), an adaptation of stories by the American comic book writer and artist Adrian Tomine. It’s an oddly segmented affair that involves a great deal of sex — quite a bit of it thwarted or in other ways less than satisfactory, at least where the women are concerned — is shot predominantly in black-and-white and seems more like tasty samplings from a smorgasbord rather than a full meal.

It’s hard to think of another film that has this much sex in it but so often leaves the participants in a grumpy mood. It happens at the outset with Emilie (Lucie Zhang) and Camille (Makia Samba), the latter a Black high school teacher who rents an apartment from the young Taiwanese woman and almost immediately...

American cartoonist Adrian Tomine uses the graphic novel to do what that other form of literature — the standard gray-words-on-white-paper short story — simply hasn’t been able to achieve. Like any writer, he can go inside his characters’ heads, taking the X-ray of their most private insecurities and rendering it visible to the reader. “Is there a term for being paranoid about being paranoid?” asks the young woman in “Amber Sweet,” who is not the internet porn star of the story’s title but realizes that others see a resemblance and starts to worry that it’s ruining her life.

Not limited by words, Tomine can also show people’s faces, examining the way their expressions and body language change across a sequence of frames — revealing and concealing what they’re really feeling. These latter tools bring the medium far closer to cinema than the written word and may explain why...

Juliette Binoche gets her hands dirty in the French drama Between Two Worlds (Ouistreham), the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight opener from Emmanuel Carrère. Adapted from Florence Aubenas’ bestseller Le Quai De Ouistreham, it centers on Marianne Winckler, an author who goes undercover as a cleaner in order to write a book about her experiences.

Posing as a cash-strapped divorcée who needs work in the city of Caen, she’s sent from the job center to cleaning school, where she learns just enough to be hired at the port of Outistreham. And so this well-heeled journalist rolls up her sleeves and scrubs toilets on ferries, forming a tight bond with her co-workers while secretly taking notes on them. The stage is set for a tense reveal, but the main focus of Between Two Worlds is on friendship, character and sociopolitical comment.

Striking an inquisitive and relatable note, Binoche is ideal in the lead role.

Image Source: Bloomsbury

Most girls hold a specific kind of memory: the memory of a moment they realized their body, as Melissa Febos writes in her memoir-in-essays Girlhood, had made a "violent turn." For me, it happened one summer, somewhere at the border of elementary school and middle school, when I was rollerblading around my cul-de-sac in a pair of denim shorts. A carful of boys or men - I couldn't see well enough to tell - whistled and hooted as they drove by, lighting me up with a blend of shame and fear and confusion that made my cheeks hot. For Febos, there was a pool party in the fourth grade, where other girls opined about the kinds of swimsuits they'd wear when they had boobs; the very kind of swimsuit Febos, who already had breasts, was wearing under her oversize T-shirt. When she was finally pressured into joining...

Celine Sciamma’s Berlinale competition title “Petite Maman” has been sold by MK2 Films around the world with some bidding wars in multiple territories.

The critically acclaimed film, which marks Sciamma’s follow-up to “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” has been sold to Alamode (Germany), Culture (Japan), Challan (South Korea) Sun (Latin America), Avalon (Spain), Madman (Australia/New Zealand), Red Cape (Israel), Cinéart (Benelux), Cineworx (Switzerland), Angel (Denmark), Folkets Bio (Sweden), Arthaus (Norway), Swallow Wings (Taiwan), Russian World Vision (Cis), New Horizons (Poland), Weirdwave (Greece), Midas (Portugal) and Demiurg (Ex-Yugoslavia).

“Petite Maman” was bought by Neon for North America and Mubi for the U.K. and Turkey during the virtual Berlin Film Festival. MK2 Films is currently negotiating further sales.

Described as a chamber piece, a ghost story and a fairy tale, “Petite Maman” follows Nelly, an 8-year-old girl who has just lost her beloved grandmother and is helping...

A little over a year ago, Céline Sciamma was coming off a hectic year. Her fourth feature, the acclaimed romance “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” became a breakout hit after its 2019 Cannes debut. Though the movie wasn’t selected by France as its Oscar submission, “Portrait” scored nine nominations from the César Awards. Sciamma joined her star (and ex-partner) Adele Haenel in a highly-publicized decision to walk out of the ceremony after the filmmaker lost Best Director to Roman Polanski.

It was late February 2020 and Sciamma, who has long pushed back on the sexist, patriarchal state of the French film industry, wanted to make a big statement. These days, as she gets on the phone from Paris to discuss her new movie, it’s the last thing she wants to talk about.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’ve been far away from that for...

‘Forest – I See You Everywhere’ and ‘What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?’ also land.

Petite Maman, the latest film from Girlhood and Portrait Of A Lady On Fire director Céline Sciamma, has scored consistent marks on the Screen jury grid for an average of 2.6.

Petite Maman received no scores lower than a two (average), although that was its modal score with four critics making that choice.

It did receive one four (excellent) from The Morning Star’s Rita Di Santo; and currently sits in fifth place with three of the 15 films still to score.

Sciamma’s film centres on eight-year-old Nelly,...

Neon has scooped up North American rights to Céline Sciamma’s sixth feature directorial Petite Maman, bringing the Oscar-winning film studio back in business with the French filmmaker behind 2019’s award-winning pic Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Already there is great word of mouth brewing from critics on Sciamma’s new title out of its world premiere at the Berlinale.

The drama stars sisters Joséphine Sanz and Gabrielle Sanz, with Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne and Margot Abascal. In Pete Maman, 8-year-old Nelly has just lost her beloved grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother’s childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods where her mom, Marion, used to play and built the treehouse she’s heard so much about. One day her mother abruptly leaves. That’s when Nelly meets a girl her own age in the woods building a treehouse. Her name is Marion.

Eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) sits in the backseat of her mother’s car outside of the nursing home where her beloved grandmother has just died, and watches through the window as her young parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) share a tender embrace. The half-quizzical look on Nelly’s face suggests that she hasn’t seen them hug in a while — that perhaps this moment is doubly charged. She wonders what they mean to each other, and what it feels like to lose someone forever, and whether her mother ever sat alone in a car on a gray fall afternoon and watched as her mother was consoled over her mother’s death. Nelly understands that her mom didn’t become 31 without being eight along the way, but why is that so hard to imagine? It’s like looking at a bird and trying to picture when it was a dinosaur.

“Give me a child until he is 7, and I will show you the man,” proposed Aristotle, to which fiercely feminist French director Céline Sciamma might add, “Give me a woman, and I will show you the free, unbroken spirit she still was at age 8.”

Sciamma, who went from being a queer cult favorite (for such bracingly free indies as “Tomboy” and “Water Lilies”) to an internationally respected auteur with 2019’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” follows up that barrier-breaking achievement with the slight but hardly insignificant “Petite Maman.” Made during fall 2020 while the pandemic still severely limited film production, this 72-minute sketch looks at the connection between an 8-year-old girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), and her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), through a simple leap of imagination — one that necessitates a basic spoiler to meaningfully discuss, so be warned if you’d rather save that surprise for the screen.

Nelly is...

Both films scored a mixture of threes and fours.

Hong Sangsoo’s Introduction and Maria Speth’s Mr Bachmann And His Class share the lead on the latest Screen jury grid, as a further five titles take their spots.

Prolific Korean director Hong’s Introduction was the most consistent scorer to date, receiving five marks of three (good) plus two fours (excellent) from Sight & Sound’s Nick James and Mathieu Macheret of Le Monde/ Cahiers Du Cinéma. It has a 3.3 score with one mark still to come.

Hong’s fifth Berlinale Competition entry is told in three parts, showing a young man visiting his father,...

One of the best surprises of the Berlinale 2021 lineup is that the newest film from Céline Sciamma––marking her fifth feature and first since her widely acclaimed Portrait of a Lady on Fire––is completed after shooting only a few months ago. Details have been sparse when it came to Petite Maman, but now the festival has unveiled a full synopsis, while also revealing a runtime of only 72 minutes.

Starring Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne, and Margot Abascal, the film will find Sciamma returning to themes of adolescence, which she explored in different facets in Water Lillies, Tomboy, and Girlhood. Check out the synopsis below via Berlinale’s official site.

Eight-year-old Nelly has just lost her beloved grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother’s childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods where her mum, Marion, used to play and where...

Los Angeles will have a new drive-in option this weekend.

Women Under the Influence (Wuti) and Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Prods. are teaming on the Wuti Drive-In, headquartered at Exposition Park, 500 Exposition Park Drive. The first weekend — Feb. 19-21 — is being billed as a celebration of Black love and sisterhood with such titles as Waiting to Exhale, Cinderella, Sylvie’s Love, Girlhood and The Watermelon Woman. Waithe is expected to attend on opening weekend and introduce the Forest Whitaker-directed Exhale.

The second weekend — Feb. 26-28 — will focus on unique visions of the Black experience in America with ...

Los Angeles will have a new drive-in option this weekend.

Women Under the Influence (Wuti) and Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Prods. are teaming on the Wuti Drive-In, headquartered at Exposition Park, 500 Exposition Park Drive. The first weekend — Feb. 19-21 — is being billed as a celebration of Black love and sisterhood with such titles as Waiting to Exhale, Cinderella, Sylvie’s Love, Girlhood and The Watermelon Woman. Waithe is expected to attend on opening weekend and introduce the Forest Whitaker-directed Exhale.

The second weekend — Feb. 26-28 — will focus on unique visions of the Black experience in America with ...

It’s been 25 years since “La Haine” made the banlieue a staple of French cinema. On the back of Mathieu Kassovitz’s cinematic Molotov cocktail, movies such as “Girlhood,” “Divines,” “Cuties” and “Les Miserables” have made the concrete jungles on the outskirts of Paris a haven for cineastes. But none of them are quite like Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s remarkable “Gagarine,” which mixes French social realism with Latin American magical realism before adding a dose of stardust from space movie classics, “Solaris,” “2001” and “Star Wars.”

“Gagarine” was a Cannes Official Selection label, unveiling at the Marché du Film Online, where it was a buzz title for Totem Films, selling out around the planet. The Haut et Court production is currently playing in competition at the Cairo Film Festival.

The film is a skillful blend of reality and fiction, making use of archive material and an exciting young French...

New to the lineup are Petite maman by Céline Sciamma, Costa Brava, Lebanon by Mounia Akl, Silver Star by Ruben Amar and The Good Boss by Fernando León de Aranoa. In action at the American Film Market (online from 9 to 13 November), the international sales team of mk2 Films, lead by Fionnuala Jamison, has added four new titles to its lineup. On display stands out Petite maman by Céline Sciamma, shooting in the Paris region until 4 December. This 5th feature from the director after Water Lilies (Un Certain Regard in Cannes 2007), Tomboy (Panorama of the 2011 Berlinale), Girlhood (Directors’ Fortnight 2014) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (best screenplay award at Cannes 2019), its main characters are two 8 year old children (in a plot still kept secret) and can count on Claire Mathon as its director of photography. Produced by Bénédicte Couvreur for Lilies Films,...

A few days before “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” was set to premiere on HBO, the six-part docuseries based on Michelle McNamara’s book of the same name about the hunt for, survivors of and eventual arrest of the Golden State Killer still wasn’t finished.

“If there is some finality in terms of his journey through the criminal justice system, then we want to be able to share that with our audience,” executive producer and co-director Liz Garbus tells Variety.

Garbus and her directing team that also includes Elizabeth Wolff, Josh Koury and Myles Kane weaved a detailed tale half set in the world of Joseph James DeAngelo, the former police officer who was arrested in 2018 for crimes committed decades earlier, and half set in the world of McNamara’s investigation into who the perpetrator could be. McNamara’s part of the story has a definitive end: The...

While the country is beginning the first steps of emerging from quarantine––for now, at least––the summer season should still mean lots of reading time. Some selections in our latest roundup of books related to film and pop culture can be called escapist fare, while a few tread into darker realms. Let’s start with a trip to Arrakis––David Lynch’s Arrakis, not Denis Villeneuve’s.

Dune: The David Lynch Files Volume 2 by Kenneth George Godwin (BearManor Media)

Any opportunity to read a behind-the-scenes account of the making of a film by David Lynch is welcome. That is especially true when it comes to Dune, his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic, which the filmmaker has repeatedly expressed his frustrations with. Lynch, of course, did not have final cut and has famously disowned the film, but it remains a strange, fascinating curio. For all of these reasons,...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

To fill the void left by the absence of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, for the next two weeks, this column will be dedicated to films that premiered at the festival over the course of seven decades.

The Cannes Film Festival has always had a bit of a woman problem. Over the course of its 73-year history, the lauded annual event has only awarded its top honor, the Palme d’Or, to a single female filmmaker: Jane Campion, for her 1993 gem “The Piano.” While each festival comes with a brand-new jury tasked with picking the best films from its stacked competition section (some of them even led by women), the very structure of the festival’s selection has long kept women at a distance.

Guillermo del Toro has been unusually quiet on social media during his quarantine, but that all has changed with the publication of a giant Twitter thread revealing the many books he’s been reading and films he’s been watching while on break from filming his new movie, “Nightmare Alley.” The “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Shape of Water” Oscar winner encouraged his fellow filmmakers to weigh in with their own watch lists, and the result is an incredible thread featuring the likes of Darren Aronofsky, Ari Aster, Ava DuVernay, Sarah Polley, Edgar Wright, Rian Johnson, Brad Bird, Scott Derickson, James Mangold, and a lot more. Click here to begin the Twitter thread.

It should not be too surprising to hear del Toro has been streaming a lot of titles on The Criterion Channel, including Gustaf Molander’s “A Woman’s Face,” Ermanno Olmi’s “Il Posto,” and Celine Sciamma’s “Girlhood” and “Tomboy.

Pixar animation ‘Onward’ led a tough week at the UK box office.

Rank Film (Distributor) Three-day gross (Mar 13-15) Total gross to date Week 1 Onward (Disney) £1.3m £5.3m 2 2 The Invisible Man (Universal) £827,368 £6.6m 3 3 Military Wives (Lionsgate) £404,696 £2.4m 2 4 Sonic The Hedgehog (Paramount) £400,000 £19m 4 5 The Hunt (Universal) £399,559 £542,311 1

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.31

Concerns over the spread of coronavirus saw the UK box office take a hit over the weekend, with leading titles down at least 50% on the previous weekend.

While the films in the top five largely remain the same, the total box office taken this week for those titles is £3.31m...

Netflix feels like the right home for this compelling but low-key feature about the Long Island Serial Killer which wisely opts to focus on the families of the victims rather than the unsolved case itself. Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) is sympathetic as Mari Gilbert, a hard-working and harassed single mother whose somewhat estranged eldest daughter Shannan goes missing after making a panicked 911 call from a gated community near Ocean Parkway, NY in the early hours of the morning. But the police take almost an hour to respond to the call, fail to request CCTV footage which might have shown Shannan’s movements, and don’t adequately question witnesses or even search the area sufficiently. It’s only a dogged Mari who keeps the case alive by tracking her daughter’s final movements, nagging police and stapling “missing” posters all over the small town where Shannan was last seen.

It...

Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s entrancing historical romance about a young painter and her subject is a perceptive, erotic exploration of power

What a thrillingly versatile film-maker Céline Sciamma has proved to be. Having made an arthouse splash with the Euro-hits Water Lilies and Tomboy, she wrote and directed Girlhood (Bande de filles), a breathtaking portrait of modern “banlieue life” that completed her “accidental trilogy of youth”. Her impressive screenplay credits include Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette, a tenderly empathetic, French-Swiss stop-motion masterpiece that earned an Oscar nomination for its vividly resilient depiction of children in care. In each of these very different projects, Sciamma has struck an accessible chord by focusing tightly on specifics, finding the key to universal appeal in the unique, tiny details of each story and character.

For her fourth feature as writer-director, Sciamma ventures to a new world of the late 18th century.

‘True History Of The Kelly Gang’, ‘Downhill’ among other new openers.

Universal’s Blumhouse Productions horror The Invisible Man faces off against Curzon Artificial Eye’s Cannes title Portrait Of A Lady On Fire this weekend at the UK box office.

Directed by Saw writer Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man stars Elisabeth Moss as a lady who believes her ex’s recent suicide was a hoax, and that she is being hunted by a being no-one else can see.

It marks an incredible 99th film production for Blumhouse, the company established by former Miramax executive Jason Blum in 2000.

43 of the...

Before “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” a breathless, wind-swept lesbian romance about a painter and her subject, French director Céline Sciamma was best known for her tales of adolescent fluidity: “Water Lillies,” “Tomboy,” and “Girlhood.” In these films, female protagonists are as likely to be reviled by society as they are to be embraced by it.

Continue reading Noémie Merlant Discusses The Feminist Utopia In ‘Portrait Of A Lady On Fire’ [Interview] at The Playlist.

A perfect illustration of growing up today, French director Maïmouna Doucouré’s spirited debut “Cuties” assesses the transition from childhood to adolescence by pointing its lens at an 11-year-old girl at the crossroads of tradition and personal discovery. It’s the type of first feature that heralds an indelible directorial voice.

Echoes of Céline Sciamma’s “Girlhood,” Mati Diop’s “Atlantics,” or Nijla Mumin’s “Jinn” are strident, but the age gap separating the teens in those efforts and the young lead here strongly distinguishes this new film from its forebears. Although not breaking untraveled ground, “Cuties” is a necessary new entry among these idiosyncratic narratives centered on black girlhood going against the grain of the status quo, and no less noteworthy for that.

Exposed to loads of instantly reachable information, both detrimental and advantageous, kids raised on online gratification inevitably mature at a faster rate, or so at first...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Before we get to our weekly streaming picks, check out our annual feature: Where to Stream the Best Films of 2019.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Mads Brügger)

In 1961, Secretary-General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in Africa under mysterious circumstances. Beginning as an investigation into his still-unsolved death, the trail that Mads Brügger follows in Cold Case Hammarskjöld is one that expands to implicate some of the world’s most powerful governments in unfathomably heinous crimes. Without revealing the specifics of the jaw-dropping revelations in this thoroughly engrossing documentary, if there’s any justice, what is brought to light will cause global...

If the best films of 2019 have anything in common, it’s that they each feel somehow emblematic of the decade that they closed. Following on the heels of “Silence” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese delivered another morally ambiguous period epic about the weight of our sins. Less than three years after looking for “The Lost City of Z,” James Gray shot the moon with “Ad Astra,” his greatest movie about the search for a mythic place to make us whole.

After establishing her extraordinary talents with the likes of “Tomboy” and “Girlhood,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” auteur Céline Sciamma rocked Cannes with her most shattering tale of love and loss and self-discovery, and capped off a remarkable decade of gay screen romances in the process. Bong Joon Ho, never capitalism’s biggest cheerleader, weaponized his usual proclivities in a way that saw him become a genre unto himself.