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‘Megalopolis’ Teaser: Adam Driver Leads Francis Ford Coppola’s Epic
Adam Driver is on the edge in the first official teaser for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” “Megalopolis,” which will premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, has been a project years in the making for the director, who first began work on the screenplay in the 1980s. The legendary filmmaker behind “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” has invested $120 million of his own money into the film. When asked by GQ about the potential repercussions of self-funding such a massive endeavor, the director responded, “I couldn’t care less about the financial impact whatsoever. It means nothing to me.” Popular on Variety “Megalopolis” sports an all-star cast, with Driver leading…
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Making a short film – The Triangle
A few weeks ago, I went home and directed a short film that I’d written. I’d say it was the first one I shot, but it wasn’t. It was, however, the first one I completed. Geez Louise, remembering all the times I’ve attempted in the past: so many happened before I’d received any meaningful training in writing, the ball of anxiety I was in high school trying to direct — something I knew nothing about — the chunky blocks of chicken scratch I called dialogue, my friend Matt coming in from Long Island to shoot the train wreck. Matt was usually the one on the camera and sound; I knew…
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Oblique journeys in film (and) criticism – Tone Madison
This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter. I told myself (and our writing team back in 2022) that I wasn’t going to monopolize the Tone Madison film channels in covering Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, but here I am once again, doing just that. I’ve become our publication’s resident voice on the emergent auteur, who broke out abroad a couple years ago with Drive My Car (2021). I suppose I’ve grown comfortable with that, because Hamaguchi’s high-minded, distinctly literate work speaks to me in its themes about our…
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2024 Italian Film Award Winners
The Oscar-nominated refugee drama took best film at the 2024 David Di Donatello Awards, Italy’s top film honor. Matteo Garrone’s refugee drama Io Capitano, an Oscar nominee this year for Italy in the best international feature category, was the big winner of this year’s 2024 David Di Donatello Awards, Italy’s equivalent to the Oscars, winning best film and director for Garrone. Io Capitano also picked up prizes for best cinematography, editing, sound, and visual effects. Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow, a black-and-white feminist dramedy that became the top-grossing film in Italy last year, won Cortellesi the Donatello honors for best actress, directorial debut, and original script for the screenplay she co-wrote with Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda. Related…
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Box Office: Ryan Gosling’s ‘The Fall Guy’ Earns Soft Opening Day
The summer box office isn’t exactly starting with a bang. Universal’s action-romance “The Fall Guy,” starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman courting a rising director played by Emily Blunt, earned $10.4 million from 4,002 locations on its opening day, a figure that includes $3 million and change from preview screenings. The feature is now projecting a three-day opening of $28 million, which would leave it short of industry projections that had forecast a debut in the low-to-mid 30’s. It’s not a great result for Universal, which hasn’t succeeded in getting much traction out of Gosling’s red-hot post-“Barbie” media presence and a bunch of rave reviews for the action film…
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Nostalgia horror I Saw the TV Glow speaks to 90s trans teens like me | Film | The Guardian
The buzzy coming-of-age film, about teens obsessed with a schlocky TV show in the 90s, makes for a haunting allegory As a trans teen in the 1990s, I well remember the flickering glow of the TV screen. Late nights, once everyone else in the house had gone to sleep and I could have a measure of privacy, were the main time in which I could access something even remotely resembling my true self. Watching the trans film-maker Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, I Saw the TV Glow, took me right back to this period of my life. As the title would indicate, Schoenbrun’s movie is all about the small screen and…
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The Moviegoer: Film logs, benshi, and Pedro Costa – Chicago Reader
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. For the past several years, my moviegoing log has been a Google Sheet; only somewhat more recently have I again taken to Letterboxd to log titles (having joined and then abandoned it during the pandemic, preferring then to keep my record less online), sometimes with a smattering of words about what I’ve watched. Since my editor approached me with the idea of doing a column about my viewing habits for the Reader, I’ve thought about how it might materialize in comparison to those other methods. Ultimately…
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The Guide #137: A genre-by-genre rundown of the ideal film length | Culture | The Guardian
In this week’s newsletter: A poll of US cinemagoers states that 92 minutes is the ideal movie duration. But isn’t it more complicated than that? Don’t get the Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up to get the full article here Here we go again, with another round of long/short culture discourse. Just after we had got through double album April (thanks Beyoncé, Taylor and Cindy Lee), May brings us the latest skirmish in the movie length wars, with a poll of US cinemagoers establishing that the ideal movie running time is a sprightly 92 minutes. That number is unsurprising. An hour and a half has long been fetishised as…
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Ethan Hawke On His Flannery O’Connor Biopic ‘Wildcat’ & Indie Film
Wildcat, directed and co-written by Ethan Hawke and starring Maya Hawke (Stranger Things, Little Women) as Flannery O’Connor, opens this weekend in New York and LA. One of nation’s most evocative, brilliant and ambitious writers, O’Connor was diagnosed with Lupus at 24 and reluctantly settled in with her mother, played by Laura Linney, at a dairy farm in Georgia, continuing to write until she died in 1964 at age 39. Raised in the Jim Crow south, where her work is set, she chronicled cruelty and hypocrisy in luminous prose. The film premiered at Telluride and debuts theatrically this weekend in New York and LA via Oscilloscope. Four-time Oscar nominee Hawke…
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‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Director Jane Schoenbrun on A24 Film’s Trans Meaning
“I’d direct an Agent Smith origin story,” Jane Schoenbrun tossed out on X, formerly known as Twitter, on the morning of April 3. The shout-out to the AI antagonist of “The Matrix” was posted in the hours after Warner Bros. announced a fifth film in the science-fiction franchise, with writer-director Drew Goddard taking the reins from series creators Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who both came out as trans after the release of the original trilogy. “I was always kind of like, ‘Oh, they would probably let me do a “Matrix” movie, if I asked.’ Because trans,” jokes Schoenbrun, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. The director keeps a…