Author: Hollyood rep

Sean Baker, director of Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner Anora, discussed the success of his latest movie at a San Sebastian Film Festival event Saturday, admitting that he won’t be using the momentum to take on big-budget studio films like Marvel’s. Baker spoke to a packed crowd about his film — now receiving Oscar buzz — which follows Anora (Mikey Madison), a young sex worker from Brooklyn, who gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). But the fairytale is threatened when her fiancé’s parents set out to get…

Scandar Copti doesn’t like polemics. In his Oscar-nominated debut Ajami (2009), Copti, a Palestinian director and Israeli citizen, avoided easy answers, and obvious finger-pointing, to tell a story of crime and corruption, family belonging, and political divisions set in his hometown of Jaffa, a mostly Arab city just south of Tel Aviv. Co-directed with Jewish Israeli filmmaker Yaron Shani, the movie paints a subtle picture of a society split along fissures religious, political, cultural, and economic, without ever chiding his characters or dipping into mawkish sentimentality. Copti’s solo follow-up, Happy Holidays, is a similar complex, non-judgemental, portrait of modern Israel.…

French production and sales outfit mk2 films has signed a multi-year financing deal with the Finnish private equity fund IPR.VC to bankroll a slate of new projects, the two companies unveiled on Thursday. The new capital will come in handy for mk2, which is looking to build on recent crossover success, including its co-productions The Worst Person in the World from director Joachim Trier, and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, as well as Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall and Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, both of which mk2 sold worldwide. In Cannes this…

Spain has picked Saturn Return, a 1990s-set biopic of Spanish indie rock band Los Planetas, to represent the country in the best international feature race for the 2025 Oscars. Directed by Isaki Lacuesta And Pol Rodríguez, Saturn Return premiered at the Malaga Film Festival, winning prizes for best director, best editing and best Spanish film. It has been making the festival rounds, screening at the Seattle Film Festival, the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema. The film focuses on the band’s origin story in the late 1990s in Granada when Los Planetas was facing a…

Iconic Canadian actress Pamela Anderson will be honored at the 20th Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) with the festival’s Golden Eye award in honor of her “versatile career.” Anderson will present her latest feature, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, at the 2024 Zurich Festival and will receive her award on Oct.4. In The Last Showgirl, which premiered in Toronto, Anderson plays Shelley, a 50-year-old showgirl facing the end of her long-running Las Vegas show. THR‘s review praised her performance, done “with an undiluted sense of heartbreak” “She completely immersed herself in her character, turned Shelley’s inner life inside out with her facial…

James, a quirky Canadian comedy about a stolen bike, has won the German Independence Award for Best Film at this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival. The black-and-white feature, from director Max Train, which our reviewer compared to the “early works of Jim Jarmusch” follows the down-on-his-luck title character (played by Dylan Beatch, who co-wrote the screenplay with Train) who finds a bike frame in the trash and assembles a racer, transforming his life in the process. When his bike gets stolen, James goes to extraordinary lengths to retrieve it, descending into Vancouver’s criminal underworld. James, which had its world premiere at…

Pitch Perfect actress Rebel Wilson directed, produced and starred in The Deb, an Australian musical comedy that had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday night. And Wilson, who was on hand for a post-screening Q&A at Roy Thomson Hall for TIFF’s closing night film, explained why her next directorial efforts will only be musicals. “When I was a teenager, it was a pretty dark time, and I got to see a musical at 14 years of age, because my dog auditioned for it,” she recalled. The dog didn’t get the gig, but Wilson got hooked on…

Baby Brother, set in Liverpool, is not easy viewing for a number of reasons. Firmly in the tradition of Britain’s kitchen-sink realism movement, the gritty drama features copious amounts of brutality of both the emotional and physical varieties. It is also demanding of the audience in its storytelling, depicting two separate days years apart and alternating between black-and-white for the past and color for the present. The results, not surprisingly, are at times disjointed. But Michael J. Long’s directorial debut showcases a stylistic audacity rare in a first-time filmmaker, and there’s no denying the raw power of this wrenching picture,…

Not since Bicycle Thieves has a film focused so determinedly on the theft of a bike as James, receiving its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival. Which isn’t to suggest Max Train’s eccentric new comedy has much in common with Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic, aside from similarly being shot in black and white. The sort of picture for which the term “quirky” could have been invented, it bears much more similarity to the early works of Jim Jarmusch, especially in its deadpan style. Probably best appreciated at a midnight screening after a few drinks, the Canadian indie…

Hala Matar is the first of her kind. The director tells The Hollywood Reporter she is the first female Bahraini director to make a feature film. After growing up in the Middle East and studying theater at school, Matar studied in America at the University of Virginia. By mistake, she enrolled in a cinematography class, but it ended up changing the course of her life. “I felt like it spoke to me more,” Matar says. “Because I feel like I communicate better visually. Theater concentrates on dialogue.” Now, her most recent project, Electra, will get its premiere on Thursday at…