Author: Hollyood rep

Curry Barker was deceived.  Last week, the 26-year-old writer-director of Obsession was told he was going to a routine meeting at the Focus Features offices in Universal City. Instead, he arrived at the production company to find himself facing 250 employees — all holding glasses of champagne. Barker thought — for perhaps the hundredth time in recent weeks: Holy shit. Focus Chairman Peter Kujawski declared, “Congratulations on the biggest movie Focus has ever had!” The employees burst into applause and toasted Barker’s success. Then Kujawski held out a box. “In the music business, they hand out gold records,” Kujawski said.…

It’s tempting to describe English novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s fine-grained gay love story On the Sea as another version of God’s Own Country, switching out Yorkshire farmland for coastal waters in North Wales. But that would be unfairly reductive. Like Francis Lee’s smoldering 2017 debut feature, this is a rugged, elemental drama whose slow-burn potency plays out against a landscape as bleak as it is beautiful, where taciturn men are locked into restrictive codes of masculinity set in stone generations ago.  A palpable sense of place, of milieu and of working-class lives in which pleasure, passion and desire have been dulled courses through this…

Aaron Sorkin is revealing the reason why Jesse Eisenberg declined to reprise his role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning. During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Sorkin — who penned the 2010 Oscar-winning film The Social Network and wrote and directed the upcoming sequel — shared that he spent three days trying to convince Eisenberg to return for the follow-up pic. “I felt like it belonged to him, and he was certainly battle-tested,” he said. The A Real Pain actor-director earned an Oscar nomination for best lead actor for his portrayal of the Facebook founder in The Social…

Dawson’s Creek fans will enjoy a real nostalgia fest with the latest film written, directed by and starring Katie Holmes. With her former castmate Joshua Jackson as her co-star, Happy Hours proves that the two performers still have undeniable chemistry and make middle-age look damn good. Unfortunately, this romantic drama receiving its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival is one of those movies in which the characters and situations feel so contrived and inauthentic that you find yourself shaking your head in befuddlement. The first tip-off for this film about former high-school sweethearts reuniting decades later is the onscreen quote…

‘Dreams of Violets’ premieres at the festival, as an industry watches nervously.

If your one true wish after seeing Curry Barker’s Obsession was to get your hands on a One Wish Willow, you might need to resort to some magic — or come up with wads of cash. Focus Features’ surprise horror smash has created such a fan frenzy for the novelty item featured in the film that inventory sold out in 12 hours when batches hit the distributor’s dedicated online store. Buyers were limited to purchasing three at a time at $6.99 each, and Focus stocked the site on two separate occasions, first on April 15 and again on May 12. Though…

The 2026 Locarno Film Festival will honor a trailblazing Iceland-born, U.S.-based film, music video and TV producer who has been behind some of the most popular and renowned movies and series of the past decades: Sigurjón “Joni” Sighvatsson. He will be celebrated with the Raimondo Rezzonico Award in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on the evening of Aug. 6, with the official program screening two key films from his career: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s soccer icon documentary Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait (2006). “Whether as co-founder of Propaganda Films in 1986 –…

Lilly Wachowski shared the words she would tell herself 30 years ago, before her gender transition, when she was co-writing and directing the 1996 neo-noir classic Bound, which helped launch The Matrix filmmaker’s career. “Well, start taking that estrogen. What are you doing? Come out of the closet!” Wachowski told moderator Julie Klausner and a captivated crowd at the Tribeca Festival. Wachowski was on stage at the Tribeca Festival in Manhattan with the cast of her and sister Lana Wachowski’s sapphic, career-kickstarting feature film debut, including Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano and Christopher Meloni. The festival screened the film…

Oscar-nominated director Jafar Panahi (It Was Just An Accident) is facing another prison sentence and a travel ban after an Iranian court upheld its verdict finding him guilty of “propaganda against the regime.” The court upheld an earlier ruling, made in-absentia when Panahi was traveling outside Iran to support the awards campaign of It Was Just an Accident, sentencing the director to a year in prison and a two-year travel ban. Panahi is also prohibted from joining political and social groups and associations. Panahi’s lawyer, Mostafa Nili, announced on Sunday that the Tehran Revolutionary Court has rejected his objections to…

Ivy Bettencourt (Emilia Clarke), the heroine of writer-director Drake Doremus‘ latest romantic navel-gazer, is a little bit of a mess. We know this because the first time we see her, she’s oversleeping her alarm by so much that she barely makes her train — at which point she promptly spills coffee all over a handsome stranger, Edgar Ramírez’s Diego. We also know this because one of the next times we see her, she’s getting smashed at her goddaughter’s christening, having just reconnected with Noah (Jack Farthing), the ex-boyfriend and ex-boss who’d so recently broken her heart. Next Life The Bottom…