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The Sopranos is still considered by fans to be one of the greatest dramas of all time. This is, in large part, due to the remarkable writing, complex characters, and their relationships with one another. The HBO series is full of flawed gangsters and tragic victims, all carrying their own trauma and driven by complicated motivations that are explored through deeply philosophical and psychological plotlines. While these characters are always interesting and often amusing, however, none are good people or truly likable. Tony Soprano and his crew are morally reprehensible, as are most of his friends and associates. Ironically, in a show full of murderers and heartless criminals, one of the characters that still receives the most hate from viewers is Tony's young son, Anthony Jr.

A.J. Soprano begins the series as a young boy and grows into a disturbed and struggling man over the course of six seasons.

Winter, often perceived as the bleakest season with its barren landscape, year-end melancholy, and unresolved struggles, has also been eulogized for its introspective beauty. Austrian poet Rilke, writing to a woman devastated by her husband’s desertion, described winter as a time to nurture one’s inner garden—tending to the mind and spirit after a period of endurance. Albert Camus echoed this sentiment: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Similarly, films like The Holiday depict this growth, framing heartbreak and recovery against the cozy charm of swapped holiday lodgings, emphasizing renewal and comfort over sorrow.

Here are ten films like “The Holiday” that somewhat capture the same spirit:

10. Serendipity (2001)

That winter, and by extension, Christmas, is supposed to be interspersed with miracles is retold through “Serendipity.” One element in particular echoes throughout the film: the appeal of fate and destiny.

In Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman’s farcical Dream Team, No (Esther Garrel) and Chase (Alex Zhang Hungtai), a pair of Interpol detectives as feckless as they are sexy, investigate a spate of surreal murders in Mexico. In this case, the murder weapon, if not the prime suspect, is a coral that emits a roseate, venomous gas. Disciples, apparently, of the Agent Cooper school of policework, these soft-boiled detectives try to solve the mystery through a combination of dream analysis, meditation, hitting the gym, getting seduced by their informants, and pondering the nature of consciousness. If all this sounds a little inane, that’s by design.

Where shows of the Peak TV era, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, tried to look and feel more cinematic, Dream Team is cinema taking its cue from TV—even if it’s theoretically in service of the cinematic avant-garde. The film is defined...

French pandemic drama “The Plague,” based on Albert Camus’ novel “La Peste,” has sold to multiple European territories, Variety has learned.

The show has sold to AMC Networks International Southern Europe where it will launch on SundanceTV in Spain and AMC in Portugal while Proximus has acquired the show for Belgium. It premiered in France on France 2 in March, immediately toping the ratings. It has also been selected at the French Drama Festival in Korea, where it will premiere on Sept. 9.

Helmed by “Call My Agent” director Antoine Garceau, the four-part series stars Frédéric Pierrot (“In Treatment”), Hugo Becker (“Gossip Girl”), Sofia Essaïdi (“Women at War”), Judith Chemla (“Of Money and Blood”) and Johan Heldenbergh (“Alabama Monroe”).

It follows a disparate group of people who find themselves grappling personally and professionally with a new virus threatening the planet. Among them is Dr Rieux (Pierrot), a rebel hero who risks his...

An ambitious police detective attempts to solve a series of murders from a disused cinema in director Wei Shujun’s crime drama

Wei Shujun’s new film, adapted from a novella by Yu Hua, is a deadpan existential riddle presenting as noir crime, set in provincial China and taking its cue from Albert Camus’s Caligula: “There’s no understanding fate, therefore I choose to play the part of fate …” It’s a movie that wryly questions the thriller genre’s assumptions about the essential knowability of motive and agency; the idea that people commit crimes for clear reasons and their means and opportunity are governed by the equally explicable conditions of the physical world. But in this drama, chaos and meaninglessness keep peeping through – I can imagine David Lynch directing an alternative version.

Zhu Yilong plays Captain Ma, a smart and ambitious young officer brought in to solve...

Exclusive: Ruaridh Mollica says he had a year to prepare for his “role of a lifetime — so far” in Finnish filmmaker Mikko Makela’s powerful new film Sebastian, which premieres at Sundance on Sunday.

The film follows a culture journalist who goes undercover and leads a double life as a sex worker to research a debut novel. The 24-year-old Mollica, born to a Scottish mother and an Italian father, gives a superlative performance in his first feature film lead role, as he assumes the split personalities of Max, a young wannabe literary sensation, and Sebastian, who hires himself out to desirous older male clients.

The intimate moments, though at times full-on, actually serve the narrative to reflect Max/Sebastian’s state of mind.

Between his initial self-tape, first audition and screen tests, Mollica had 12 months to enter into full character research mode before officially being handed the part, and the...

Madrid — Greater than fiction. Viewed by an estimated 5 billion, the most watched event in TV history, and the climax of the most popular sport on earth, no achievement compares in epic terms to Argentina’s victory in the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Yet soccer, as Atletico de Madrid manager Diego Simeone famously has it, is played match by match. It is won moment by moment. No doc feature to date perhaps captures the ever evolving drama of Argentina’s campaign – the flux and flow of psychological advantage, the huge emotional stakes, the roll call of protagonists, and the multiple narratives of universal resonance emerging moment by moment – than “Soccer Soul” (“Elijo Creer”), narrated by Ricardo Darín, star of Oscar-winning “The Secret in Their Eyes” and dropped by HBO Max on Jan. 11 in Argentina and the rest of Latin America.

It begins with the defining moment of the whole 2022 FIFA World Cup.

“A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time," writes Eugene Thacker in the third and final volume of his Horror of Philosophy series, Tentacles Longer Than Night. One certainly gets that feeling while reading John D'Agata's book About a Mountain, and watching L. Frances Henderson's new documentary adaptation of it, This Much We Know. We know a lot — scores of graphs, charts, statistics, experts, theories, and scenarios — but in the face of this excess, we confront the inevitable impasse of knowledge. We can't know the future, and we can't know why people do the things they do. We can't ever really know why he or she died by suicide.

The investigation into a suicide is a major component of This Much We Know. At the time,...

Helena Třeštíková’s film is a strange sequel to her 2008 portrait of a Czech career felon and his popular notoriety that she helped create

Shot over the course of 20 years, Helena Třeštíková’s 2008 film René followed the near continuous prison stints of her charismatic subject; these happened in parallel with the colossal political changes that took place in the Czech Republic towards the end of the 20th century. Conceived as a sequel to this milestone work, René: The Prisoner of Freedom is another long-term project which charts not just the dehumanising cycle of incarceration, but also the trappings of accidental fame.

Beginning with scenes showing the jam-packed premiere of the earlier documentary, which turned René into an unlikely celebrity for Czech audiences, Třeštíková’s new film observes how notoriety does not always translate into economic stability. Struggling to make ends meet, René took on various odd jobs, including as a...

Paris has been the backdrop to many a great romance, and in Heartstopper, that’s no different. A school trip to the French capital in season two is the site of an instant connection between boy…. and bookshop. When Isaac Henderson sees Shakespeare and Co. on the banks of the River Seine, it’s love at first sight. He’s punch-drunk in its aisles, wandering around with wide eyes, balancing an ever-growing stack of titles in his arms and basking in the literary sunshine.

It’s not as though Isaac didn’t come to Paris pre-stocked with books (it’s a good job the schools travelled by coach and not air – you could hardly ask this teen to load up a Kindle). The boy’s never seen without a paperback. Reading is part-obsession, part comfort-blanket to him. Books, as they are for a lot of us, are his shield against the world.

As tender, painful and intimate as an open caesarean scar, writer-director Mona Achache’s drama-documentary Little Girl Blue examines the fraught relationships between three generations of women within the director’s own family, starting with her literary grandmother Monique Lange, her mother Carole Achache and herself.

Although narrated by Achache, who “plays” herself throughout, the focus is above all on the troubled child of the midcentury Carole, who committed suicide in 2016 and left behind an enormous cache of letters, journals, publications, photographs and documents. Achieving a remarkable casting coup that will make all the difference for the film’s commercial prospects while richly enhancing its emotional texture, Achache persuades French superstar Marion Cotillard (La Vie en rose, Inception) to play Carole. The result is a fascinating psychodrama — with extra scoops of meta on top — that showcases the talents of all the story’s women, especially Cotillard and Achache. At the same time,...

Imagine the gleaming surfaces of Park Chan-wook’s terrific “Decision to Leave” stripped of romance, all scuzzed-up and grimy. Imagine drilling down through Diao Yinan’s Berlin-winning “Black Coal, Thin Ice” and finding unexpected seams of absurdist dark comedy. You are now somewhere in the seamy offbeat world of “Only the River Flows,” director Wei Shujun’s inventive riff on Asian-noir that gives the expanding subgenre something its Chinese contributions often lack: a pitch-black sense of humor.

Wei has been laying claim to the title of laid-back joker in China’s new-gen pack since debuting with affable slacker comedy “Striding into the Wind” in 2020 (a selection in 2020’s canceled Cannes festival) and following it up with autoreflexive filmmaking satire “Ripples of Life.” Now he brings his wry sensibilities to bear on this murdery mindbender, which he adapts, with a healthy disdain for boring stuff like “linear plotting” and “resolution,” alongside Kang Chunlei,...

And when we have almost all that we may want, but are still not content, what can be done?

One recourse for the latter would be to turn inward to religion or philosophy — but all of the first and a lot of the second are based on some variety of divine design and control over humans, maybe for their benefit — "the universe conspiring to help you attain something you want," as Paulo Coelho says in ‘The Alchemist’. But, we may also find that the universe could be hostile, or worse, absolutely indifferent.

At such a time, it may be useful to retrace the thought of a charismatic French philosopher with movie star looks (he bore an uncanny resemblance to Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart) — the man who identified the "absurd" existence we find ourselves in, or rather, told us clearly that our life is a meaningless struggle and what we can do about it.

“Dalíland” star Ben Kingsley felt the presence of the famous painter when making his latest film, directed by Mary Harron.

“Some days [Salvador Dalí] would come, saying: ‘I will just sit here for a while. Put your brush on the canvas and good luck.’ Later on, I really felt he allowed me to make an attempt at portraying him,” he told Variety during an online press conference at Zurich Film Festival.

“He was mercurial, deliberately tried to wrong-foot people and quite difficult to pin down apart from the voice, the moustache, the eyes. We actually looked at several versions of his famous moustache. One could think: ‘It’s just a moustache!’ But it was his vigor, his eccentricity. His signature.”

The film, which premiered at Toronto, also stars Barbara Sukowa and disgraced actor Ezra Miller. Bankside Films and CAA handle the sales.

Kingsley, chosen as the recipient of this year’s Golden Icon Award,...

A torrid encounter between a troubled youth and the wife of the village priest is at the center of Octav Chelaru’s “A Higher Law,” which bowed at the Thessaloniki Film Festival last fall and will have its domestic premiere in the main competition at the Transilvania Film Festival.

Inspired by true events, the film is a powerful exploration of religious dogma that raises larger questions about the nature of freedom and faith. The feature debut of Chelaru, a self-taught director whose previous short films, “Black Clothes” and “The Parallel State,” premiered in the Leopards of Tomorrow competition at the Locarno Film Festival, it’s produced by Radu Stancu of Bucharest-based deFilm Production, in co-production with 42film and Eed Productions.

“A Higher Law” stars Mălina Manovici as Ecaterina, a religion teacher at the local high school and the frustrated wife of the village priest (Alexandru Papadopol). Hemmed in by her...

Incaa vice-president Nicolas Battle temporarily assumes reins.

Argentina is expected to send a slimmed-down official presence to the Cannes Marché next month as uncertainty reigns in the wake of the sacking last week of Incaa (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts) president Luis Puenzo.

Screen understands a delegation of approximately four people will arrive on the Croisette as officials scramble to prepare a schedule and expect to field inquiries from attending local filmmakers and international partners about the country’s national film body. On top of the Puenzo siuation Incaa faces losing a significant portion of its annual funding...

Reims Polar, a new international festival set in Northern France and dedicated to police thrillers, has awarded Wen Shipei’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” Adikhan Yerzhanov’s “Assault” and Lado Kvataniya’s “The Execution.”

The selection of Reims Polar is curated by Bruno Barde, who is also the artistic director of the Deauville American Film Festival.

“Assault,” a dead-pan thriller set fictional village in rural Kazakhstan and revolving around a school hostage situation, won the festival’s Grand Prize Award. Yerzhanov, a prolific Kazakh director, previously directed “The Gentle Indifference of the World” which played at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2018.

The Reims Polar jury prize went to a pair of feature debuts, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” a Chinese film which world premiered out of competition at last year’s Cannes, and Russian filmmaker Lado Kvataniya’s “The Execution,” a thriller inspired by the case of an infamous Soviet-era serial killer.

Warning: This review will discuss the writings of dead European philosophers like Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche and Voltaire and Søren Kierkegaard, but the author assures you that these comparisons are apt

Would it be inappropriate to refer to Directed by Dan Kwan's and Daniel Scheinert's "Everything Everywhere All at Once" as a manifesto for a new generation? "Everything"'s ambitions are nothing short of confronting a decade of stale, withered hope and suggesting — while rocketing like a hamster, shot from a leaf-blower, straight through an exploding Wham-o Toys factory, and directly into the brain — that the only possible option is radical...

The post Everything Everywhere All At Once Spoiler Review: A Manifesto for a New Generation appeared first on /Film.

Exclusive: Producer and literary manager Ross Fineman has signed a new multi-year overall development and production deal with A+E Studios, where he executive produces two David E. Kelley series, last season’s breakout hit Big Sky, which is headed into Season 2 on ABC in the post-Grey’s Anatomy slot, and Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, based on Michael Connelly’s novels, which recently wrapped production on its first season in Los Angeles. Under the pact, Fineman will continue to develop and produce projects for A+E Studios aimed at linear networks and streaming platforms.

Fineman’s current development slate includes The Fall, a thriller inspired by the Albert Camus tale of the same name; Elsewhere, a drama series based on the book by bestselling author Dean Koontz; and Beautiful Strange, a character drama from writer Lara Radulovich.

“With his keen eye for talent, excellent relationships, and an unrivaled work ethic,...

Exclusive: HBO Max’s Julia Child drama Julia has found its publisher.

Judith Light will star as Blanche Knopf, co-founder of the Knopf publishing house. Knopf, who was married to publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf, is widely credited with bringing in Child’s hugely successful Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Knopf worked with a swath of top writers during her career including Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, John Updike and Raymond Chandler as well as Child.

HBO Max picked up to series Julia in January after ordering a pilot. The eight-episode series sees Happy Valley star Sarah Lancashire play Child with David Hyde Pierce as her husband Paul. The series is currently in production.

Julia, whose pilot was written by Daniel Goldfarb and directed by Charles McDougall, is inspired by Child’s extraordinary life and her long-running television series, The French Chef, which pioneered the popular cooking-show genre. Through Julia and her singular can-do spirit,...

In a pioneering alliance, Starzplay is partnering with Studiocanal, Europe’s leading film-tv production-distribution-sales company, on Starzplay’s first French co-production, the series “All Those Things We Never Said.”

Adapting the bestselling novel of the same title by Marc Levy, France’s most-read living author, the comedy-drama series is commissioned by Starzplay and Studiocanal parent, Vivendi’s Canal Plus Group — Europe’s second-biggest pay TV/SVOD operator.

Written by Levy, who will also showrun, the 10-part half-hour series has just initiated principal photography, starring Jean Reno and Alexandra Maria Lara. Studiocanal will handle international sales outside Starzplay and Cpg’s extensive distribution footprints.

Levy’s original novel was published in 2008. Described by Studiocanal, Starzplay and Cpg as “a bittersweet comedy with soul” and “wryly fun,” it taps into human relations — a reconnection with a father and a lost first love; a second chance at life — which carries new meaning as...

In a close-up shot at the start of the mini-series “Voltaire in Love,” a baby François Marie Arouet (also known as French philosopher Voltaire) is pushed out of his mother’s birth canal in a scene of intense labor.

A graphic reference to Gustave Courbet’s famous painting The Origin of the World that continues to stir debate, this shot foretells both the revolutionary calling of the boy who’s just been born, and the radical style of this period drama that takes inspiration from Sofia Coppola’s “Marie-Antoinette.”

“Voltaire in Love” is a Franco-Belgian mini-series of four episodes directed by Alain Tasma and produced and co-written by César nominee Georges-Marc Benamou, who is no stranger to adapting the lives of historical French figures to the screen, after previous projects on François Mitterrand and Albert Camus.

Produced by Siècle Productions, with France Télévisions, Umédia, Wallimage, Rtbf and Pictanovo co-producing, the...

The filmmaker has been researching subjects of siege and fear while locked down in home city of Berlin.

Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, whose film This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection is Lesotho’s Oscar submission this year, is developing a new feature around the theme of siege and fear after being grounded in his adopted home city of Berlin by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mosese teased the new project in the Big Talk programme of this week’s online International Film Festival Rotterdam. The filmmaker is also participating as a member of the jury.

“It’s been a...

Very few games have produced the amount of hype that Cyberpunk 2077 has earned over its 8-year development cycle. From its very first trailer back in 2013 – nearly a year before the PlayStation 4 even launched – to the long and winding 2020, fans have eagerly anticipated getting their hands on the title and seeing for themselves all of the wonders that its setting of Night City has to offer.

Now, after waiting through multiple delays, gamers have finally gotten their chance to jump in and find out if the hype has paid off. But in a rather unfortunate turn of events, it largely hasn’t, as Cyberpunk 2077‘s launch has been an absolute disaster by nearly every measure. Not only have some critics accused developer CD Projekt Red of transphobia for their handling of trans representation in the game, but the actual experience of playing the title has been wildly inconsistent, too.

Thus far,...

Turner networks TNT and TBS have put four projects in development led by a sequel to the 1985 film “D.A.R.Y.L.” that would star Tony Hale.

The TV sequel, like the movie, will come from Paramount, with Jody Lambert and Matt Oberg writing. Hale would star as an older version of Daryl (played by Barret Oliver in the film) a government-created robot with superhuman reflexes and mental abilities.

Additionally, TBS has the sci-fi comedy “Space” from Sony, and TNT has two dramas “The Fall” and “Liar’s Club.” The Hollywood Reporter first reported on the development slate.

Also Read: Thom Hinkle to Exit as Head of Originals for TNT, TBS and TruTV

Here’s the info on the new series courtesy of TNT and TBS.

TNT

The Fall

Logline: A captivating paranoid thriller about a woman whose dark secrets start to unravel her seemingly perfect life. Inspired by the Albert Camus tale of the same name.

This The 100 review contains spoilers

The 100 Season 7 Episode 2

“The Garden” flits back and forth through time to introduce us to the world beyond the Anomaly, and by extension, to properly reintroduce us to Hope and the Anomaly itself, now known as the bridge. Quite literally a world apart, it’s a magical hour of television that stands as one of the series’ best episodes.

Drawing on the longstanding, well-earned redemption arcs of Diyoza and Octavia and their extremely close bond, this episode asks the question “what makes a family?” and “what kind of life would be enough?” Like The Magicians’ highly celebrated “A Life in the Day” before it, the time dilation on Sky Ring allows Diyoza and Octavia to spend a decade raising a child together without losing more than a few days back in Sanctum. So much of the wonder of this episode belongs, truly, to Marie Avgeropoulos and Ivana Miličević,...

[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for Episodes 1-4 of “Dublin Murders” on Starz.]

And then, suddenly, everyone is living a lie.

At the end of this evening’s episode of “Dublin Murders” Det. Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene) returns to undercover work in the form of Lexie, her doppelgänger murder victim who was using the name of one of Cassie’s previous undercover identities.

Yes, this sounds totally batshit. But “Dublin Murders” is an adaptation of the first two novels in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series — “In the Woods” and “The Likeness” — and, like the books, it’s not just a typical cop procedural. It’s a look at how childhood trauma resonates and warps experiences, perceptions and constructs of reality.

It’s an explosive moment that sets up the back half of the series, marking the official transition away from “In the Woods” into the storyline of “The Likeness,” as Det. Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) and Cassie...

New award for co-production development introduced during Tallinn Black Nights.

Closer collaboration between the Italian and Baltic states’ film industries will be given an additional boost with the creation of the €30,000 Baltic-Italian Co-Development Award.

Four film institutes – Lithuanian Film Centre, National Film Centre of Latvia, Estonian Film Institute and Italy’s Direzione Generale Cinema (MiBAC) – announced at the end of this year’s Baltic Event at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival that a call will now be launched for projects being developed between producers from Italy and partners from the Baltic states.

The winner of the €30,000 award, which may be shared between two projects,...

Paul Schrader, whose scripts for iconic movies such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are synonymous with what many consider a golden era of Hollywood filmmaking, discussed why the 1970s was such a potent time for cinema, his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and his latest drama First Reformed at a BAFTA Screenwriters Series in London.

Schrader, who transitioned from writing scripts for the likes of Scorsese, Sydney Pollack and Brian De Palma, to directing his own screenplays, offered his view on why the 1970s proved such a fertile time for U.S. cinema and how audiences compare today.

“There are people who talk about the American cinema of the ‘70s as some halcyon period,” said the Hollywood veteran. “It was to a degree but not because there were any more talented filmmakers. There’s probably, in fact, more talented filmmakers today than there was in the ‘70s. What there was...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSStephen Chow and Tsui Hark.Stephen Chow is currently filming King of Comedy 2, the sequel to his 1999 hit King of Comedy (about the blunders and tribulations of an aspiring actor). It is set to be released early 2019, during Chinese New Year. In the same article, China Film Insider also reports that master filmmaker Tsui Hark is mounting an epic Wuxia trilogy entitled Return of The Condor Heroes, based off of the first Wuxia novel he ever read.Grasshopper Film has announced its first music release, a compilation of tracks from the films of Bertrand Bonello: Nocturama, Saint Laurent, and House of Intolerance. Only 500 copies of the vinyl record are available for order here. Recommended VIEWINGThe first arresting trailer for Claire Denis' High Life is here, and it does not disappoint. You can...

Amos Gitai, one of Israel’s most influential directors who has “A Tramway in Jerusalem” and “A Letter to a Friend in Gaza” playing at Venice Film Festival, is set to direct “Doña Gracia,” a sprawling period drama about Gracia Mendes Nasi.

Although her legacy is not well-known, Doña Gracia was a heroic figure who escaped persecution in 16th century Lisbon and became a prominent figure in the politics of the Ottoman Empire as well as one of the wealthiest Jewish women of Renaissance Europe. She used her wealth to save hundreds of converted Jews from the Inquisition.

Gitai has been developing the project for four years with Marie José Sanselme, his co-writer on “Rabin, the Last Day,” “Disengagement” and “Free Zone,” among other films.

“‘Doña Gracia’ was an incredibly fierce and visionary woman who led an exceptional life,” said Gitai. “Not only did she escape persecution, she faced off...

David Oelhoffen’s last film, which played in competition in Venice in 2014, was called “Far From Men,” but was characterized by a lean, craggy, proto-Western narrative that metaphorically lashed its two stars, Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb, close together for the duration. By contrast, his newest feature, which also landed a competition slot in Venice, has the English title “Close Enemies” but keeps its tussling main characters — again each on opposite sides of the law, and this time played by Kateb and Matthias Schoenaerts — far apart for most of the running time.

That’s an irony it would be easy to dismiss if it didn’t also speak to this film’s fatal flaw: While the frictive tension is palpable between Schoenaerts’ bulked-up, doggedly loyal drug runner and Kateb’s soulfully buttoned-down, conflicted cop in their few scenes together, for the most part, their destinies run in frustrating parallel, never...

Bac Films has scored a flurry of sales on David Oelhoffen’s “Close Enemies,” which is world premiering at Venice in competition on Saturday.

“Close Enemies,” produced by Marc du Pontavice at One World Films, is a Paris-set contemporary crime thriller starring Matthias Schoenaerts and Reda Kateb as two close friends in a suburb riddled by drug trafficking who end up taking opposite paths in life.

The film has been sold to Italy (Europictures), Spain (La Aventura), Turkey (Bir Film), Greece (Spentzos Film), China (Hishow Entertainment) and Benelux (O’Brothers).

Oelhoffen has a solid track record on the festival circuit. His last film, “Far From Men,” which was based on Albert Camus’ “The Guest” and starred Viggo Mortensen, also world premiered on the Lido, while his feature debut, “In Your Wake,” premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week. “With ‘Close Enemies,’ Oelhoffen confirms that he belongs to the rare breed of talented French...

French director David Oelhoffen, whose latest film, “Close Enemies,” is competing at the Venice Film Festival, is preparing two new politically minded, internationally driven films: “The Fourth Wall” (“Le quatrieme mur”) and “Les derniers hommes.”

“Les derniers hommes” is being developped by Galatée Films, the company co-founded by French actor-turned-producer Jacques Perrin, whose credits include “The Chorists.” The project is based on Alain Gandy’s autobiographical novel, “Légion étrangère Cavalerie,” which chronicles the hellish journey of foreign soldiers who fought on behalf of the French in March 1945 as they struggled to make their way out of the jungle after being defeated by the Japanese army.

Oelhoffen said the project was brought to him by Perrin, who bought rights to Gandy’s novel and is passionate about the subject, having starred in Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1965 film “The 317th Platoon,” which is set in Vietnam in 1954.

“It will be a survival drama...

A calm menace pervades Mairi Cameron’s unconventional debut feature where shady secrets hide in broad daylight

There’s a good reason thrillers tend to take place mostly at night, and it doesn’t take a PhD in cinema studies to guess what that could be: darkness is scarier than daylight. In that sense director Mairi Cameron’s steamy debut feature The Second – the first original film to be produced by Australian streaming platform Stan – is an unconventional spooky movie, eschewing shadows and gloom for a mostly sunny aesthetic. I regularly found myself asking: who turned the lights on?

Cinematographer Mark Wareham conjures bright and burnished images, while the story – about a bestselling author who, fending off writer’s block, draws inspiration from her own life – ventures to dark places. The film’s most interesting themes explore the nature of authorship in general and the “write what you know” dictum in particular,...

Two penniless villagers try their luck in the big city in the poetically titled “The Gentle Indifference of the World.” The latest from Kazakh indie helmer Adilkhan Yerzhanov (“The Owners”) once again indicts bureaucratic corruption and abuse of power in the post-Soviet wild East. Despite the titular tip of the hat to French philosopher and existentialist author Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” and references to Paris and Jean-Paul Belmondo, this whimsical, low-budget film is very much of a piece with the director’s previous work. The world premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard lineup should serve as a launch pad for further fest play.

Over the course of six features, Yerzhanov has crafted what one might call a distinctive cinema of poverty that’s serious in its themes and playful in its design. His slyly humorous, stylized minimalism, the miserablism of his characters and their laconic, poker-faced acting style all recall...

Sometimes it isn’t enough to simply portray the type of eternal love that Shakespeare wrote about in Romeo and Juliet. Watching two star-crossed lovers attempt to fight the injustices of this world to be together, only to sacrifice themselves, can still ring hollow because it hinges upon the naiveté of children not looking for another solution regardless of whether the result would be the same. To take the poison is to admit defeat against external forces that are too strong to fight. Love therefore becomes our sole reason to exist once everything else is shown to be false. Until then we still possess hope and the possibility of improving our circumstances so that our love may be fostered beyond a fleeting fantasy.

Love becomes the byproduct of futility, the single tangible concept we can hug when everything crumbles around us. Love doesn’t therefore kill; it sustains when the rest burns.

World, Hold On: Yerzhanov Conjures Camus with Doomed Love Story

Kazakhstani director Adilkhan Yerzhanov continues his fascination with Albert Camus in his latest feature, The Gentle Indifference of the World, quoting a passage from the singular 1942 novel The Stranger. What stands as Yerzhanov’s fifth film to date employs a similar method of extreme displacement for characters navigating the cruelties of a world beyond their control. Much like his most widely regarded feature to date, 2014’s The Owners, a juxtaposition of gendered punishments (wherein two brothers lose the rights to their beleaguered ancestral home while their sister and mother suffer…...

The weirdest thing about USA's limited series The Sinner that no one seems to be talking about is that it's the same premise as Albert Camus' existentialist novel The Stranger, which has been read by just about every American high school student, especially sad ones, but apparently no German ones

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Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) is playing June 2 - July 2, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom as part of the series The American Noir.Although mostly remembered now by the public for his 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray left behind him a legacy of over twenty feature films. A veritable cinematic explorer, Ray traversed genres ranging from noir, western (most notably his 1954 gender-bending cult Trucolor extravaganza Johnny Guitar), melodrama, epic and experimental film. He dared as few would to shoot in remote and forbidding locations such as the Arctic and Everglades National Park. What are Ray’s films about? As in his signature piece Rebel, despite Ray’s wide-ranging endeavors in genre and subject matter we are often met with anti-hero protagonists who struggle and rail against authority while lamenting their meaningless and circumscribed existences.

French actor talks playing Django Reinhardt, the future of nomadic cultures and why he’s not worried about an impending trip to the Us.

“I have the sort of look that allows me to pass from one character called Stéphane to another who is called Mohammed,” says Reda Kateb, star of this year’s Berlinale opener Django, capturing the legendary gypsy jazz guitarist’s escape from the Nazi in World War Two.

It’s not an idle boast. The 40-year-old actor, who was born to a French mother and Algerian actor father and grew up treading amateur theatre boards on the outskirts of Paris, has one of the most diverse filmographies of his generation.

Having got his big screen break in 2009 in the supporting role of Jordi The Gypsy alongside Tahar Rahim Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet, his 25-odd credits since have included a rifle champion in thriller Through The Air; Ngo worker Xavier Libert in [link...

Bob Dylan wasn’t present at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Sweden on Saturday to accept his award for literature, but the legendary musician was not forgotten.

In addition to Patti Smith honoring Dylan with a rendition of his “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” the 75-year-old folk singer penned a heartfelt speech, which was read inside the Stockholm Concert Hall.

In the statement, Dylan apologized for his absence and acknowledged his gratitude — and surprise — for being awarded the distinction.

“I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely...

This year's Warsaw Film Festival offered the chance to catch up on missed gems from other festivals and check out several world and European premieres. The highlight of the International Competition was Yeşim Ustaoğlu's challenging drama Clair Obscur, a visually stunning and deeply psychological exploration of female liberty and sexuality in modern Turkey. Polish cinema was represented by the world premiere of Adam Guziński's Memories of Summer and Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal's The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me; the former a perceptive examination of parental relationships seen from the eyes of a 12-year-old boy, the latter a transplant of Albert Camus' The Stranger to contemporary Poland in the context of the refugee crisis.

Annette Insdorf with Andrzej Wajda at his home in July, 2014 Photo: Hanna Hartowicz

Annette Insdorf , the author of Francois Truffaut; Indelible Shadows: Film and Holocaust, Philip Kaufman; and Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski recalls meeting Andrzej Wajda for the first time in 1974 when he was directing Elzbieta Czyzewska (star of Wajda's Everything For Sale) in Albert Camus’s adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel The Possessed at the Yale Repertory Theater with Meryl Streep and playwright Christopher Durang among the cast.

Andrzej Wajda's Afterimage is Poland's Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film

Annette, is also a Professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia’s School of the Arts and moderator of the Telluride Film Festival where Wajda was honored in 1983. She shares with us her personal encounters with this great artist who left his indelible mark on the world.

"Maybe it's because I...

Dispatching to Indiewire from Locarno, Ingrid Oliveira notes that Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal's The Sun, the Sun Blinded Me, screening in Locarno, centers on Rafal Mularz (Rafal Mackowiak), who "feels he has become a stranger in his own society. Living a routine sheltered from the outside world, he faces a turning point in life. An adaptation of Albert Camus's The Stranger, the film replaces the character of 'The Arab' with a black man Rafal encounters washed ashore at a beach, in a harrowing scene that has became all-too-common in Europe." We've got the trailer and we're collecting reviews. » - David Hudson...

Dispatching to Indiewire from Locarno, Ingrid Oliveira notes that Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal's The Sun, the Sun Blinded Me, screening in Locarno, centers on Rafal Mularz (Rafal Mackowiak), who "feels he has become a stranger in his own society. Living a routine sheltered from the outside world, he faces a turning point in life. An adaptation of Albert Camus's The Stranger, the film replaces the character of 'The Arab' with a black man Rafal encounters washed ashore at a beach, in a harrowing scene that has became all-too-common in Europe." We've got the trailer and we're collecting reviews. » - David Hudson...

This article was produced as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring journalists at the Locarno Film Festival, a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, IndieWire and the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the support of Film Comment and the Swiss Alliance of Film Journalists. The following interview, conducted by a member of the Critics Academy, focuses on a participant in the affiliated Filmmakers Academy program at the festival.

European identity has been facing a crisis, and now the films are catching up to it. People are angrier than ever, whether they’re driven by the recent terrorist attacks in Belgium, France or Germany, by the socio-political uncertainty following the Brexit vote — and the sharp increase in racist attacks that came as a consequence of it — or even by the lingering and closely-felt effects of a mounting debt crisis. Films — acting, as they must, as a mirror of society — follow suit.

In partnership with New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, Mubi will be hosting four films recently shown at Art of the Real, the Film Society's annual showcase for boundary-pushing nonfiction films. Poet on a Business Trip will be showing April 24 - May 23, 2016 on Mubi in the United States.Director Ju Anqi. Photo by Ma Liang“Poet on a Business Trip”: I do not know how this title reads in Chinese, but in English its matter-of-fact anomaly, a title suggestive of silent film actualities and Luc Moullet’s drollness, serves well this curiously blasé, marvelously unusual film by Ju Anqi.Poet on a Business Trip looks and feels like the time capsule it in fact is: the director took Shu, a young Chinese poet, on a road trip to the barren western (and Uygur) province of Xinjiang back in 2002, during which Shu composed poems. For reasons discussed below in an interview with the filmmaker,...

Spam

Written by Rafael Spregelburd and translated by Jean Graham-Jones

Directed by Samuel Buggeln

Presented by The Cherry Arts

Jack, Brooklyn, NYC

April 14-30, 2016

Making a performance look easy is very difficult, but the fantastic new production of Argentine playwright Rafael Spregelburd’s intricately-constructed Spam makes it look effortless. Spam, making its English-language première in a translation by the City University of New York’s Jean Graham-Jones, probes some of those boundaries and spaces between appearance and reality, especially where language is concerned. Mario Monti (Vin Knight) is a linguistics professor with an ethically questionable relationship to the work of one of his thesis students and a case of amnesia from a head wound. As the play unfolds, both he and we come to understand more about how he ended up living in a hotel room in Malta, trying to hawk Chinese-manufactured talking dolls on the beach for...

Studiocanal has expanded the role of its UK chief, Danny Perkins, and tapped Matthew Gledhill to join the Euro film player as Svp of international production. The moves come as the company looks to grow its already busy English-language slate under new head Didier Lupfer. Gledhill joins from One World Films, where he produced Viggo Mortensen-starrer Far From Men, adapted from an Albert Camus short story. Gledhill has worked with Lupfer before, serving as a supervising…...