Hanna Gray Organschi is moving ahead with her feature debut - Grace Van Patten will topline Rubber Hut for a summer shoot. 2027 Sundance Film Festival in totally in the cards. Willa's Elizabeth Woodward and Stone Fruit Productions' Tara Sheffer are producing.
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🇪🇸 Spanish filmmaker Àlex Lora has his sophomore feature L'escletxa (aka THE FISSURE) in post production. Inicia Films' Valérie Delpierre and Scope Pictures' Geneviève Lemal produced the film which looks at the 2017 Barcelona attacks.
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Welcome to our new regular Saturday feature. Pack your bags, get your boarding pass ready ..... here is Everything We Know So Far... for Benjamín Naishtat's GLAXO 🇦🇷 - could this be headed to Venice? Featuring Lali Espósito
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1-2 Special Launches Enyedi's 'Silent Friend' This May + trailer which we are quoted on!!!
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Charlotte Rampling Joins Bertrand Bonello's 'Santo Subito!' Production began last week. We wonder if this will compete for the Palme d'Or or Golden Lion next year.
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Our Venice ★★★½ review of Pompei: Below the Clouds (out Friday via @mubi) "like Rosi’s body of work, it's the way cinema operates, preserving moments of time in celluloid, our shifting version of amber, these digital fossils."
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Welcome to our regular Saturday feature. With DREAMS out yesterday, we ask that you pack your bags, get your boarding pass ready ..... here is Everything We Know So Far... for 🇲🇽 Michel Franco's CIRCLES 🇮🇱 produced by Franco, Eyal Shiray and Alexander Rodnyansky.
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Alice Rohrwacher Lands Josh O’Connor, Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan & Jessie Buckley for Three Incestuous Sisters - production begins in April. This will easily secure a Cannes 2027 Palme d'Or comp slot.
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2026 César Awards: The Venice Film Fest Orizzonti sidebar programmed Carine Tardieu's 'The Ties That Binds Us' Won Best Film beating out four Palme d'Or competition films.
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"Metaphorically, this operates on several levels, both as the character being a potential cypher for Sang-soo himself, but also commentary on how Donghwa is a young man who’s willfully adrift, blissfully ignorant about what being an adult requires." ★★★★
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Our Nicholas Bell's review: ""DREAMS takes pains to assert these increasingly desperate attempts for control of a relationship they’ve already allowed to be defined by everyone else are specific acts of viciousness."
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Our Nicholas Bell reviews 🇯🇵 A NEW DAWN by Yoshitoshi Shinomiya - “An impressive mix of textures and frameworks suggest Shinomiya is definitely an artist with something to say, but his debut is all about climax. In short, as a film, it's too adolescent with its foreplay.”
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Oscar reviews 🇵🇰 LALI “Sarmad Sultan Khoosat’s fourth feature is an at times confusing but vividly authentic vision of the types of matriarchal, patriarchal and domineering forces that consume traditional South Asian relationships and values.”
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Our Nicholas Bell reviewed the entire BERLINALE comp -here he takes on Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) “there’s something a bit too personal, a bit too detached, like we’re eavesdropping on a stranger’s home videos during an unexpected stretch of free time in a captive vacuum.” ★★½
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Our Nicholas Bell reviews 🇹🇩 SOUMSOUM, the NIGHT of the STARS “A lusciously photographed narrative slog, it’s a surprising misfire from the director following 2021’s Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, especially as he once again returns to a mystical, femme-centered fable.”
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🇮🇷 Mahnaz Mohammadi - “A puzzle-like portrait, ROYA is most devastating as a portrait of prison as psychological -- constructed from isolation, coercion and the slow dismantling of identity itself. You can't get more political and more timely than with this text.” ★★★
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WE ARE ALL STRANGERS 🇸🇬 “with some significant trimming, there is the suggestion of a potentially powerful character study lurking in here, courtesy of Yeo Yann Yann, though she’s martyred here in service of a narrative which tends to use her for levity.”
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🇦🇹 THE LONELIEST MAN in TOWN “Covi and Frimmel’s works are often quiet, methodical studies, all which find their own inviting, specific rhythm. Through their observational lens, a vibrant portrait of a melancholic but complex man emerges.” ★★★½
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Our review of 🇲🇰 Kosara Mitić's directorial debut 17 “...while this suffocating, bleak Euro drama tends to feel contained and repetitive narratively, what it does best is present a rare form of female solidarity through violence.” #Berlinale
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🇩🇪 HOME STORIES “for such a large cast of characters, collectively they don't generate any ‘home stories,’ but instead clot together into a bland, coagulating stew, the kind of bourgeois shadows ripe for a Michael Haneke style dissection.”
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Oscar Aitchison reviews LIGHT PILLAR 寒夜灯柱 🇨🇳 “For his debut animated feature, Xu Zao (also known as Xu Jingwei) has crafted a sometimes baffling, visually daring dreamscape grounded in reality with genuinely unique formal decisions.” ★★★★
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🇲🇽 Fernando Eimbcke's FLIES “the real momentum of the film belongs to Bastian Escobar, who is, in essence, just being a child who misses his mother. The lesson learned here is old as human existence - you catch more flies with honey.” ★★★½
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Our Nicholas Bell reviews 🇦🇺 Warwick Thornton’s latest: “WOLFRAM utilizes old school parameters while also recuperating erased perspectives, and builds a strong emotional investment with its protagonists that often assist in overlooking these slights.” #Berlinale
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Nicholas Bell reviews Angela Schanelec's MY WIFE CRIES “Lately, as with her previous, even more experimental feature Music (2023), dialogue has been used more forcibly as a didactic mechanism, which brings with it a tediousness suffocating the experience.”
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Our Nicholas Bell reviews Lance Hammer's long awaited sophomore feature 🇺🇸 QUEEN at SEA “Spliced with intergenerational conflicts within this specific familial unit, Hammer explores the importance of context and boundaries even within the most private of institutions.” ★★★½
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“THE BLOOD COUNTESS is a throwback to a fading society of an elitist subculture similarly preying on the vulnerable. There might not be a lot of belly laughs, but there are moments of wicked amusement courtesy of its little love bites.”
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Live from the Berlinale! Our Nicholas Bell reviews 🇨🇦 “Nina Roza is a quiet film about interior emotional shifts, and utilizes subtlety, sometimes to its detriment. There are some striking similarities with another Montreal set Berlinale title, Memory Box...”
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Live from the Berlinale! Our Nicholas Bell reviews 🇭🇺 Kornél Mundruczó “finds itself mired with aggravating cliches about unhappy childhoods and escapist fantasies at the seashore, tying everything up together a bit too resolutely (and more unfortunately, predictably).” ★★½
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Live from the Berlinale! Our Nicholas Bell reviews DUST by Anke Blondé 🇧🇪 “Committed lead performances from noted Belgian thesps Arieh Worthalter and Jan Hammenecker aside, a lengthy running time seems to stretch indefinitely with a narrative void of any real peaks or valleys.”
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Our Nicholas Bell reviews ROSE “If there’s a trough line (beyond the eponymous titles) of 🇦🇹 director @markusschleinzer films, it’s a connective theme of humans who try to restore equanimity in their personal lives by defying cultural constraints placed upon them....” ★★★★
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