Author: Hollyood rep

Japanese genre maven Kiyoshi Kurosawa is mostly known outside his homeland for eerie, visually inventive films like Cure, Pulse and Loft that brought the J-horror trend into the arthouse. But he’s also made psychological thrillers (Creepy), serial killer flicks (Serpent’s Path), science-fiction movies (Before We Vanish), a darkly comic anti-capitalist actioner (last year’s Cloud) and at least one great drama (Tokyo Sonata). The auteur can now cross another genre off his bucket list with The Samurai and the Prisoner (Kokurojo), a stately and rather stagy historical mystery set during the 16th century, at a time when warring clans fought and…

Mubi has made its first major buy of this year at the Cannes Film Festival, swooping in to acquire Lukas Dhont‘s Coward ahead of the awards ceremony Saturday night. The arthouse streaming picked up all rights to the film, a WWI drama about queer love in the midst of the horrors of war, for North America. Mubi already secured rights for Coward across most of its international footprint ahead of Cannes. It snatched up rights across the U.K./Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Latin America and Australia/New Zealand. The company released Dhont’s previous film, Close, which premiered in Cannes in…

Nearly two decades after winning the Palme d’Or with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), an abortion thriller set in Communist-era Romania, Cristian Mungiu is back in Cannes with another challenging, potentially hotly divisive film about the clash between progressive and conservative values and what it means to live in a free society. In Fjord, a Romanian Evangelical family, headed by father Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and mother Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), moves to Norway, only to be confronted by local welfare authorities, who view their traditional child-rearing methods — including occasional corporal punishment — as child abuse. The legal…

Imax and film financier Nocturnal Entertainment have boarded Frontier, a documentary about modern American west cowboys from Oscar-winning Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven and Believe Entertainment Group. Imax will finance and produce the documentary alongside Nocturnal as the film technologies company gives the directorial debut from veteran photographer and author Anouk Masson Krantz a late 2026 big screen run. Her original book of photography, Frontier, saw Krantz travel across the Americas, including the United States, to visually capture the North American cowboy, the Central American vaquero and the South American gaucho. Her documentary produced by longtime Imax collaborator Charles Roven and…

Nearly every day at this edition of the Cannes Film Festival, audiences have broken into loud boos when the logo of Canal+ appears before a movie. “It’s the right-wing media,” one French journalist explained. And artists have been speaking out, including Spanish directing legend Pedro Almodóvar, who, during Wednesday’s press conference for his latest film, Bitter Christmas, declared, “I don’t want to judge anyone, but I think artists have to speak out about the situation in which they live in contemporary society. It’s a moral duty,” when asked about the controversy. He concluded by declaring, “Europe must never be subjected…

Critics finally have their chance to weigh in on The Mandalorian and Grogu. The official review embargo was lifted Tuesday morning on Disney‘s first Star Wars film in seven years. The verdict? The first batch of reviews are decidedly split on the Jon Favreau film. Several reviewers praise the Disney+ show’s big-screen debut as a fun, stand-alone adventure that benefits from Pedro Pascal’s laconic delivery as the helmeted bounty hunter, the cuteness of Grogu, and a dynamic score by composer Ludwig Göransson. The film’s snowy opening sequence — which has been shown in advance for fans at special screenings —…

Oscar-nominated Iranian director Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident) is set to again face trial in Iran on charges of “propaganda against the regime.” Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran has ordered a retrial in his case, after he was sentenced in absentia, to one year in prison and a two-year ban from filmmaking. Panahi at the time was outside the country, promoting It Was Just An Accident, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar in the best international feature category, representing France. After the Oscar ceremony, Panahi returned to…

The world is about to see a lot more of Lars Eidinger. The German actor is a towering leading man in his own country, whether onstage, were he is a member of the ensemble of Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre, or screen, from playing an introverted husband in a toxic relationship in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009) to, in Matthias Glasner’s Dying (2024), the most turbulent conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic since Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár. And he has skirted around the outskirts of international scene. He was the boyfriend of Kristen Stewart’s celebrity employer in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016), played the main Nazi baddie in Netflix…

Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini look amazing. Collins is fresh from the Cannes red carpet, where the night before she had outshone starlets a third — a quarter — her age. At 92, the actress brought a blast of old Hollywood glamour to a festival that, this year especially, has often felt strangely drained of it. Her sculpted white orchid gown, a custom Stéphane Rolland Haute Couture number with a sweeping train, paired with dramatic black opera gloves, diamond jewelry and similarly encrusted needle-toe pumps, gave off unmistakable Alexis Carrington energy — a reminder of the 1980s, when Collins, as…

The writer and actor Jordan Firstman — known for viral web videos, for films like Rotting in the Sun, for the television series I Love LA — is an acquired taste. He often plays into a certain abrasive, ditzy stereotype about gay men who live in big cities: sex-crazed but loveless, self-conscious and self-aggrandizing at once, literate but dumb, politically aware and yet eager to transgress supposed civility. As a nascent star, he’s been pretty divisive, both embraced for being a gadfly who actually puts in the work and scorned for what is viewed as brash over-confidence.  Firstman’s debut directorial…