Author: Hollyood rep

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…

Paul Anka performed “My Way,” the signature song made famous in 1969 by Frank Sinatra, on stage at a post-premiere dinner for Paul Anka: His Way, a documentary about the Canadian singer-songwriting legend that had a world bow at the Toronto Film Festival. The celebratory dinner at Union Station in Toronto had Anka, now 83 years of age, recounting a career over decades and genres. He recalled at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami being told by Sinatra at a dinner that he was about to quit show business. “I’ve had enough,” Anka said he was told, but not before Sinatra…

This is not your father’s Traumnovelle. Florian Frerichs’ new adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s famed erotic novella — the work that inspired Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut — promises to be a much more explicit version of the story. The trailer for the film, which opens this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival on Sept. 11, is heavy on the hot and heavy (see below). Nikolai Kinski (Barbarians) and Laurine Price (Phoenix) star a respectable upper-middle-class couple living in Berlin who get drawn into a secret and dangerous world of erotic fantasy. Detlev Buck, Bruno Eyron, and Nora Islei co-star with cameos from Sharon Brauner and Sharon…

A woman (Salma Hayek Pinault) walks into a plaza sparsely occupied by patrons enjoying an afternoon coffee and a magazine and lottery ticket kiosk. She approaches the booth and fingers a stack of newspapers before asking the attendant (Demián Bichir), an older man with rounded shoulders and reading glasses perched on his nose, a question. Her delivery is studied, as if a more natural cadence battles against an inherent severity. She begs the man to close up the shop and have a drink with her. Her mannered sweetness becomes more urgent with his refusal. This is a command, not a…