Author: Deadline

It’s Saturday night at TIFF and the cast of Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, are readying for their premiere. Among the group gathered at the Deadline TIFF studio, only Johnson knows what the finished product looks like, since his cast are yet to see the film. The atmosphere is one of both excited anticipation and a raucous family reunion. Daniel Craig, whose Southern gentleman gumshoe character Benoit Blanc is at the center of all three Knives Out films, told Deadline: “This one owes a lot to locked-door mysteries, which are impossible crimes that don’t really…

“F*ckin’ ell, it’s tickin’,” says a soldier in David Mackenzie’s new film. Indeed, it’s all about to go off in this exquisitely plotted piece of pulp, a high-energy action-thriller that, thanks to the vicissitudes of film distribution these days, follows hard on the theatrical release of Mackenzie’s last film Relay, which premiered in Toronto this last year. Relay, starring Riz Ahmed, was also a great genre movie, if a little on the long side. There is no fat, however, on the ensemble-driven Fuze, a much more commercial prospect and a surprisingly sophisticated exercise in misdirection, in which bombshell explodes after…

Fanny Herrero accepted Deadline’s French TV Disruptor Award this week at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous gathering in Normandy, France. It’s the biggest market of the year focused on French TV programming and it was fitting the creator of French hit series Call My Agent! was on hand to receive the award. Herrero’s credits also include Standing Up, A French Village and Kaboul Kitchen. In a sit-down with Deadline she talked about her TV work, the Call My Agent! movie and her Olympic moment. Check out her interview in full, below. There’s a movie coming and Call My Agent! is international hit,…

Dakota Johnson To Receive Zurich’s Golden Eye The Zurich Film Festival will fete Dakota Johnson with its Golden Eye award for career achievement. Johnson will accept the award live on opening night and present her 2025 feature Splitsville. In Splitsville, Johnson plays the character Julie. When her friend Ashley (Adria Arjona) tells her husband Carey (Kyle Marvin) that she wants a divorce, he seeks comfort from Julie and Paul (Michael Angelo Covino). The couple shares their secret to a happy marriage: an open relationship. Michael Angelo Covino directed Splitsville. Zurich runs from September 25 to October 5. Johnson could recently be seen in…

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can reveal an exclusive first look at Grace Van Dien (Stranger Things) in The Swallow, filmmakers Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s (Pet Sematary) backwoods horror. The movie has recently wrapped principal photography in Oregon, USA. Van Dien stars as Ziggy, who, along with her four friends, journeys out on a camping trip to a picturesque remote forest. But trespassing into an off-limits area, they awaken an uncanny terror in the woods… and a ravenous hunger from within the Earth. Soon, the ground itself is trying to swallow anything and anyone it touches and now the group have nowhere…

Former management consultant Cyril Aris broke into directing with the hit mini-series Beirut, I Love You which aired on the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation from 2011 to 2012. A joint collaboration with then architect student Mounia Akl, the series – in which they both co-starred – followed the lives of twentysomethings living in Beirut as they navigated work, love and life. Akl would go on to write and direct the 2021 feature Costa Brava, Lebanon, while Aris shot the making-of documentary Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano, capturing the crew’s determination to shoot the film in the aftermath of the devastating…

Paramount Australia‘s Daniel Monaghan Jumps To Foxtel Paramount Australia and New Zealand (ANZ)’s Daniel Monaghan is exiting for a senior role at DAZN’s pay-TV giant Foxtel. Currently Senior Vice-President, Content & Programming at Paramount, he is taking on a post as Executive Director – Entertainment Content, working across Foxtel and streamer Binge, per an internal note from Hilary Perchard, CEO of Foxtel, Binge and sports streamer Kayo. He has been at Paramount-owned Network 10 for two decades, spearheading work on shows such as The Masked Singer, Australian Survivor, Hunted, Have You Been Paying Attention?, The Cheap Seats, MasterChef, Taskmaster and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! and commissioning Fake, The…

In the opening moments of Edward Berger‘s new film, Ballad Of A Small Player, Colin Farrell, as a con man hiding from his past in Macau, groggily tries to climb out of bed, rubbing his eyes, and simply says, “Oh, f*ck!” It is a great beginning, even if it did remind me of myself after the alarm rudely awakened me at 7:30 a.m. for this 9:00 a.m. screening after being up until 2:15 a.m. writing my Hamnet review. Nevertheless, it got my attention and this wild ride of a movie, which had its World Premiere this weekend at the Telluride…

Movies about the relationship between a person and one of God’s creatures is becoming a virtual genre of its own. My Penguin Friend, Penguin Lessons, The Starling and Penguin Bloom are recent examples, the latter starring Naomi Watts who was also on hand in Telluride last year with another similar story, this time with a Great Dane in the sublime The Friend. This year, we have Claire Foy and the goshawk in H Is For Hawk, which world premiered Friday at the Telluride Film Festival and has much to offer, not just for bird lovers but for those suffering sudden…

EXCLUSIVE: Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee hit the Venice Film Festival this weekend in Kent Jones’ playful drama Late Fame, which world premieres in the Orizzonti sidebar. Dafoe leads the cast with a quietly authentic performance as protagonist Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York poet who works in the post office. With his life on the poetry circuit a distant memory, Saxberger is suddenly propelled out of his humdrum life, when he is ‘redisovered’ by a group of young admirers wallowing in nostalgia for the lost downtown New York of the late 1970s and early 80s. Past Lives star Greta…