Author: Hollyood rep

James McAvoy‘s directorial debut California Schemin‘ about a hip hop hoax has pre-sold to Studiocanal for the U.K. and Ireland and a range of other international markets. The movie is based on the true story of Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, two friends from Dundee, Scotland, who conned the music industry by using American accents and pretending to be a Californian rap duo called Silibil N’ Brains. The project is based on Bain’s autobiography of the same name, which was re-printed under the title Straight Outta Scotland. The duo’s story was previously told in the 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. McAvoy will not…

With Seeds, Canadian Mohawk actor Kaniehtiio Horn has embraced the indigenous horror-thriller genre — with some added comedy. “I didn’t want to make a trauma movie,” the Reservation Dogs actor tells The Hollywood Reporter about her directorial debut, a genre-bending home invasion film she wrote, stars in and produced. And she wants her world premiere audience at the Toronto Film Festival to laugh. Heartily. And in the right places. Horn says laughter abounds in indigenous culture and communities — however varied are the tribes and language groups. That’s especially laughing with, and not being laughed at: “Oh my God, we…

Venice has got its sexy back. Erotica of all varieties — gay, straight, kinky and theoretical — is on glorious display at this year’s Venice Film Festival, with plenty of sizzling action on screen and little of it gratuitous. Two of the, em, hottest festival titles this year — Halina Reijn’s Babygirl and the TV series Disclaimer from Alfonso Cuarón — open with orgasms. Babygirl also climaxes to a close, with star Nicole Kidman, playing a tech manager who discovers a taste for BDSM, in a state of near or total undress throughout much of the movie. Queer, an adaptation…

The joys, magic and business side of filmmaking, his take on independent and blockbuster movies, including Star Wars and Harry Potter, as well as his collaborations with directors Richard Linklater and Peter Weir, and his lack of work with many female filmmakers, were all part of a Venice Film Festival master class featuring actor-director Ethan Hawke in Venice on Monday. Early on in the session, which was live-streamed, the star recalled coming to Venice for Dead Poets Society. “It was my first film festival. I was 18 years old. We showed the movie down the street, and it was an…

The Venice Film Festival is buzzing over director Brady Corbet’s monumental historical drama The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce. The film won’t officially premiere until Sunday night, but the thunderous applause and rapt excitement that followed the film out of its first press screenings on the Lido has many festival-goers speculating that it’s the movie to beat for this year’s Golden Lion.  With a 3.5-hour runtime and a ten-minute intermission in the middle, the film has all the thematic heft and intellectual rigor befitting its subject: the historical trauma and artistic vision that gave rise to the great works…

Nicolas Winding Refn, is one of the few directors who deserves the enfant terrible label. The Danish filmmaker, best-known for his neon-drenched tales of sex, violence and revenge — Drive, Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon — is at the Venice Film Festival this year with two works that, he says, represents both his “classic past and the future”: A restored version of his 1996 debut Pusher and Beauty Is Not a Sin, a seven-minute commercial for Italian motorcycle company MV Agusta. “Whoever said a movie can’t be seven minutes long?” is its irreverent, Refn-esque tagline. In recent years, Refn…

Filmmaker Halina Reijn’s sex-positive erotic thriller Babygirl, starring Nichole Kidman in a characteristically bold performance, may have just changed the, errr… mood… at the Venice Film Festival.  Babygirl‘s first press screenings in Italy received rapturous applause Friday morning, and the movie’s many sexual moments and thematically subtle message could be overheard sparking animated discussions among festivalgoers up and down the Lido. The awards chatter around Kidman’s performance has officially begun, and the commercial winning streak for A24, which produced the film and is releasing it in the U.S. on Dec. 20, appears fully secure. Babygirl stars Kidman as a high-powered CEO…

Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, aged 101, remains forever google-able as “Hitler’s favorite director” for her daringly innovative documentaries The Triumph of the Will, about the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympia, about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Acclaimed and infamous in equal measures —was she a pioneering genius, a Nazi propagandist, or maybe both? — Riefenstahl remains a subject of fascination and debate over whether her talent can be separated from her political views. What exactly those views were, what Riefenstahl knew about Hitler and the Holocaust and when she knew it, is key to this…

The 81st Venice Film Festival has gotten off to a delightfully ghoulish start. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton‘s hotly anticipated horror comedy sequel, received its very first press screening to a packed house Wednesday morning as the glamourous Italian festival’s opening movie. Burton and his starry cast — featuring returning stars Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, along with Catherine O’Hara and newcomers Jenna Ortega, Willem Defoe, Justin Theroux and Monica Belluci — then swept into Venice’s press hall for their first group discussion of the making of the long-gestating project. “One of my favorite parts was getting to stare into your eyes…

The European Film Academy is honoring German filmmaker Wim Wenders with the European Lifetime Achievement Award. Wenders, who has been nominated for three Oscars and a Grammy, is known for works such as the Road Movie trilogy (1974-1976), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987). “With this award, we celebrate Wim Wenders’ outstanding body of work which keeps exploring and experimenting with a curious eye and an open mind,” said Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO and director of the European Film Academy. “As one of the founding members of the European Film Academy, its Chairman from 1990 until 1995 and…