News

Yorgos Lanthimos has completed shooting his juicy period drama “The Favourite,” starring Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, Academy Award winner Emma Stone, and Golden Globe winner Olivia Colman (“The Lobster”). New plot details for the period drama reveal that Weisz and Stone’s characters vie for power and influence in Queen Anne’s court by any means necessary — including seduction.

Read More: Yorgos Lanthimos and Colin Farrell Re-Teaming for Third Time in Amazon Television Series About Iran-Contra Affair

Described as a “bawdy, acerbic tale of royal intrigue, passion, envy, and betrayal,” the film is set in 18th century England during the court of Queen Anne (Colman). Weisz plays Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and confidante, advisor, and secret lover to the Queen. The power shifts when the Duchess’s younger cousin (Stone) arrives to court, and the two women battle for influence and the Queen’s affections.

The tawdry period...

2017-05-10T08:13:50-07:00What Killed Mary Tsoni?

Greek actress Mary Tsoni, who starred in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-nominated “Dogtooth,” died on Monday, according to reports in Greek outlets. She was 30.

According to Greek newspaper Espresso, the actress was found dead in her apartment after calling the police. A cause of death has not yet been reported.

Tsoni broke out in Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” which was nominated in 2011 for the best foreign-language Oscar and debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. It went on to also screen at the Toronto and Maryland Film Festivals. Tsoni won the best actress prize for the role at the Sarajevo Film Festival, along with her co-star Angeliki Papoulia.

Read the rest of this article at Variety.

Mary Tsoni also appeared in Evil: In the Time of Heroes.

Greek actress Mary Tsoni, one of the stars of Yorgos Lanthimos' Oscar-nominated title Dogtooth, died on Monday according to reports in Greece. She was 30 years-old. Tsoni was found dead at her Athens apartment on Monday after calling the police, according to Greek newspaper Espresso. Her cause of death has not yet been confirmed. Tsoni played the younger daughter in Lanthimos' cinematic black comedy Dogtooth, which examined the bizarre brainwashing rituals of a family and…...

Christopher “Big Black” Boykin, who costarred on MTV’s “Rob & Big,” died on Tuesday. He was 45. The entertainer and musician’s management confirmed the news to The Wrap. A cause of death has not been reported. Boykin was known for appearing with skateboarder Rob Dyrdek on the MTV unscripted series that launched in November 2006 and aired for three seasons. He was Dyrdek’s bodyguard and lived with him, and the show focused on the pair’s outlandish antics and unlikely friendship. Also Read: Mary Tsoni, Star of 'Dogtooth,' Dies at 30 (Report) Boykin later appeared with Dyrdek on “Rob Dyrdek...

Mary Tsoni, the Greek musician who starred as one of the unnamed siblings in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ acclaimed breakthrough film, Dogtooth, has died. The tabloid Espresso reports that Tsoni was found unconscious on Monday in her apartment in downtown Athens after calling for an ambulance. The cause of death remains undetermined. Tsoni was 30.

Born in Athens, Tsoni studied dance in London before pursuing a career in music as one half of a duo called Mary And The Boy. Though the surreal Dogtooth—one of The A.V. Club’s favorite movies of the past decade—wasn’t her first film role, it brought her to international attention. Tsoni played the youngest daughter of a factory owner who has raised his children to adulthood with no knowledge of the outside world, and she ended up sharing the Best Actress award at the Sarajevo Film Festival with Angeliki Papoulia, who played ...

Thirty-year-old actress found dead in her apartment according to reports.

Greek actress Mary Tsoni, best known for her role in the Oscar-nominated film Dogtooth, has died according to The Greek Reporter.

They report that Tsoni, 30, was found dead in her flat in Athens on Monday. Her cause of death is not known.

According to reports she suffered from severe depression.

The actress was found by her close friend and fellow actress, Lewsha Camille Simboura, who wrote a post on social media detailing how she discovered Tsoni.

“Can’t believe I just found Mary Tsoni dead on the 5th floor. Rip. Sorry I didn’t come sooner. Maybe we could have saved you. I felt guilty, as I watched James perform CPR. I should have tried to help you with your sickness.”

Apart from playing the younger daughter in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 film Dogtooth, Tsoni also starred in Evil and The Northern Street. Her final acting...

Mary Tsoni, famed Greek actress, has died at age 30, according to the Greek Reporter. Tsoni was best known for her performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 2011. In the film, she plays one of two women whose parents have kept them confined in their house for their entire lives, promising them they will be ready to leave the house once they lose a dogtooth. Tsoni received the Best Actress Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival for her performance as the unnamed daughter. Also Read: Stanley Weston, Creator of 'GI Joe,...

Greek actress Mary Tsoni was found dead at her apartment in Athens on Monday, according to Greek Reporter. She was 30 years old. Tsoni was best known in the film world for playing the younger daughter in writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 film “Dogtooth.”

Tsoni’s cause of death has not yet been disclosed, but she reportedly suffered from severe depression. She was found by her close friend Lewsha Camille Simboura, also an actress, who wrote a social media post about finding Tsoni. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner. Maybe we could have saved you,” Simboura wrote in the post. “I felt guilty, as I watched James perform CPR. I should have tried to help you with your sickness.”

In addition to “Dogtooth,” which was nominated for the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year,...

Part of our continuing partnership with the online film journal, cléo. Every month, cléo will be presenting a great film to watch on our video on demand platform. In conjunction, we'll be hosting an exclusive article by one of their contributors. This month Julia Cooper writes on Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, which is available to watch starting today in the Us and Canada.

Dogtooth starts with a game, as many forms of manipulation do. “I say we play a game of endurance,” suggests the youngest of three teenaged siblings. They will each place a finger under the hot water of the tap, and the one who lasts longest wins. Sitting in their underwear in a white tiled bathroom, the teens hear the click of their tape player: the cassette dictating their vocabulary lessons for the day has just finished. As the sisters and their brother iron out the rules of engagement,...

Chicago – When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their 2011 nominees, one of the more surprising choices was the Greek entry for Best Foreign Language Film, the subversive black comedy “Dogtooth.” It’s not the choice was undeserving, but it’s certainly one of the weirdest, darkest, and most disturbing films ever nominated by a group that usually goes heartwarming in this category. There’s nothing heartwarming about “Dogtooth” outside of those who take comfort in hearing from a fascinating new international voice in cinema.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.5/5.0

Fans of Michael Haneke (“Cache”) and Gaspar Noe (“Enter the Void”) should definitely sign up for this twisted trip as it plays off themes that have long been of interest to both filmmakers in its dissection of suburban psychodrama. What would happen if a family completely walled off their children from all possible interaction? How would they develop? And what if...

Quickcard Review

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

Directed by: Giorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis

Running Time: 1 hr 30 min

Rating: Unrated

Release Date: March 14, 2011

Plot: Parents keep their adult children cloistered in their compound in the middle of nowhere. The kids have never been outside of the house and backyard. They only interact with their parents, one another, and one outsider.

Who’S It For? Fans of unusual and perverse foreign films reminiscent of Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke.

Overall

Dogtooth mines the creepy territory that I usually associate with Appalachia. This Greek film (which was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year) tells the story of three twentysomethings, a man and two women, who live cloistered in their parents house. They’ve never left it in all their lives and get all their knowledge of the world from their parents. The parents are sadists though, they...

Here’s an interesting psycho-drama. Husband and wife who keep their children imprisoned within their house and pretend that this is normal – mark that as a big ‘D’ for drama, or simply – Dogtooth!

Dogtooth (2009) is the second feature film of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, and one of the movies that will probably compete for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar!

The movie is on the nine movie shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film, but only five Oscar nominated will be announced on Tuesday, January 25, 2011.

To Lanthimos, that was just one of the film’s challenges:

“The film is on a very fine line between humor and tragedy. The story’s about a very serious issue, but we deal with it also with humor, and there are many funny scenes. To me, it was important that the violence make the point. It was like punctuation for me, contradicting the ridiculousness and...

The characters in Dogtooth believe that flowers are called zombies, cats eat people, aeroplanes are toys and Frank Sinatra is their uncle. Welcome to the lives of three young adults living in a seemingly Utopian compound safe-guarded by their parents/gaolers.

Yorgos Lanthimos‘ film is easily one of the best of the year. It isn’t an easy watch – by no means – and its forays into incest and violence could make one very queasy, but at heart it is a devious black comedy.

Quite why the mother and father have raised their children in this way is never clearly explained. Is it some mad perversion or an ideological standpoint based on what they see as the corrupting power of society and culture?

The performances – especially Mary Tsoni and Aggeliki Papoulia as the daughters – are magnificent and wholeheartedly committed. It’s no cold, clinical distanced movie either. You’ll find yourself...

Dogtooth Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos Written by: Efthymis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos Starring: Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Hristos Passalis Dogtooth is a film I had read little about; the snippets of description and words I’d heard bandied around included that it was this year’s Antichrist, that it was brutal, extreme, disgusting, involved violence, rape and incest and that it was Greek. Combined with one view of the trailer and the knowledge of a prize at Cannes I had a completely blurred idea of what this viewing experience was going to be. Having fully prepared myself for nastiness in one form or another I just prayed that at the least, I was not about to see a cat being decapitated by a pair of garden shears. In a secluded house, a mother, her son and two daughters live in complete isolation. Their father leaves...

“We accept the reality of the world which we are presented,” says Ed Harris’ reality-tv puppetmaster in The Truman Show. And just as his star comes to accept the narrow parameters of his surroundings, so too do the three grown children of Giorgos Lanthimos’ brilliant isolationist parable Dogtooth. Cooped up in a remote country estate, unable to see beyond the tall wooden fence around their lawn, these three unnamed young adults (Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, and Hristos Passalis) have had their knowledge of the world dictated entirely by their parents, who feed them false information and find ways to instill ...

Bright and attractive, ceaselessly curious about their world and about the words, emotions and sensations connecting them to it, the three unnamed siblings in Greek director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos' remarkable new film "Dogtooth" would be the picture of healthy development -- were they on the threshold of puberty.

But the oldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), the son (Christos Passalis) and the younger daughter (Mary Tsoni) are all full-grown adult subjects of an unexplained sinister psychological experiment cum lifelong guerrilla theater piece orchestrated by their father (Christos Stergioglou) and mother (Michele Valley).

From oldest to youngest, the offspring believe they're confined behind the hedged wall of their home for their own protection from an outside world whose farcical and totally fictional rules they have been spoon-fed from infancy by their parents.

Intentionally or not, Dad and Mom have succeeded in creating an environment in which the infantile ideas, associations and assumptions...

Just yesterday we told you about Yorgos Lanthimos' new Greek horror flick Dogtooth, and today we have the official one-sheet for your mass consumption.

The flick will be enjoying its New York premiere at various venues on June 25th. It stars Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, and Anna Kalaitzidou.

Synopsis

"A hyper-stylized mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy, Dogtooth is a darkly funny look at three teenagers confined to their parents' isolated country estate and kept under strict rule and regimen — an inscrutable scenario that suggests a warped experiment in social conditioning and control. Terrorized into submission by their father, the children spend their days devising their own games and learning an invented vocabulary (a salt shaker is a "telephone," an armchair is "the sea") — until a trusted outsider, brought in to satisfy the son's libidinal urges, plants the seeds of rebellion by trading VHS tapes for sexual favors.

In the market for a little Greek horror/comedy/tragedy? Then Yorgos Lanthimos' new film Dogtooth may just be exactly what you're looking for!

The flick will be enjoying its New York premiere at various venues on June 25th. It stars Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, and Anna Kalaitzidou.

Check out the plot crunch and the trailer below.

Synopsis

"A hyper-stylized mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy, Dogtooth is a darkly funny look at three teenagers confined to their parents' isolated country estate and kept under strict rule and regimen — an inscrutable scenario that suggests a warped experiment in social conditioning and control. Terrorized into submission by their father, the children spend their days devising their own games and learning an invented vocabulary (a salt shaker is a "telephone," an armchair is "the sea") — until a trusted outsider, brought in to satisfy the son's libidinal urges,...

The new domestic trailer for Cannes 2009 Un Certain Regard winner Dogtooth is fantastic. Being released by Kino International later this month, the dramatic satire is directed by Giorgos Lanthimos and stars Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis and Anna Kalaitzidou. Check it out below.

Plot: A hyper-stylized mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy, Dogtooth is a darkly funny look at three teenagers confined to their parents’ isolated country estate and kept under strict rule and regimen — an inscrutable scenario that suggests a warped experiment in social conditioning and control. Terrorized into submission by their father, the children spend their days devising their own games and learning an invented vocabulary (a salt shaker is a “telephone,” an armchair is “the sea”) — until a trusted outsider, brought in to satisfy the son’s libidinal urges, plans the seeds of rebellion by trading VHS tapes for sexual favors.

Life During Wartime (15)

(Todd Solondz, 2009, Us) Shirley Henderson, Paul Reubens, Ciarán Hinds. 98 mins.

It doesn't matter if you don't remember too much about Solondz's 1998 hit Happiness beyond taboo subjects and squirmingly dark comedy, since the characters are played by completely different actors. It sort of fits, as they've all relocated to Florida, seeking a new start, but they shouldn't get their hopes up. The treatment is similarly unforgiving and uncomfortable, often captivatingly so, and happiness is as distant a prospect as ever.

Dogtooth (18)

(Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009, Gre) Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni. 97 mins.

Front-runner for oddest film of the year: a warped slice of domestic surrealism in which a family wall in their teenage kids and creatively misinform them about the outside world. It's so wrong, you've got to laugh.

Date Night (15)

(Shawn Levy, 2010, Us) Tina Fey, Steve Carell. 88 mins.

Michael Scott and Liz Lemon – a match made in small-screen heaven keeps...

Rating: 8/10

Writers: Giorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou

Director: Giorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis

Anyone who follows the film blogging world should be well-acquainted with a few names of online critics that could eloquently be referred to as “luminaries” and affectionately known as “big papas.” Two of these guiding daddies of our world played a big part in my viewing of Greece’s Dogtooth. James Rocchi recommended Dogtooth to Scott Weinberg. Rocchi recommended it to me. Both loved it. These are recommendations you cannot ignore. The film won the Un Certain Regard Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival (which recognizes emerging and special talent at the festival). That’s another recommendation you can’t ignore. Which is all very appropriate – because Dogtooth is a film you cannot ignore.

Read more on SXSW 2010 Review: Dogtooth (Kynodontas)…...

Less than a week worth of recovering from the Sundance Film Festival, and we are already looking forward to our next, big film fest coverage. That would be the South by Southwest Film Festival held annually in Austin, Texas. Last year, Scott and I brought you all kinds of coverage from the Lone Star State, and this year doesn’t look to be much different.

With that, the announcement came last night of the feature films that will be playing at the SXSW Film Festival. Previous announcement were already made about films like Cold Weather, Electra Luxx, Hubble 3D, Lemmy, Saturday Night, and The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights making their debut. Kick-ass was recently announced as the opening night film, as well.

Among the other films being presented this year are some Sundance darlings, a few, highly anticipated premieres, and MacGruber.

Check out the full list...

Late yesterday the SXSW Fim Festival, which runs from March 12-20 in Austin, TX, announced the full lineup of films that will be screening at this year’s event. And baby, it’s quite a list. Mixing big name films with intimate indie gems, the sheer number of films and the vast array of talented filmmakers is sure to be a hit with attendees and critics alike.

This lineup includes premieres of studio films such as Universal’s MacGruber, Lionsgate’s teen superhero actioneer Kick-Ass and smaller films like Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart and Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine. With so many films to watch, it will be very difficult to find time to seem them all during the events nine days. But hell, we’re going to try.

For more on...

The 2010 SXSW Film Festival and Conference has announced its initial slate of titles. The list is rife with hot world premieres (Kick-Ass), films fresh from Sundance (The Runaways, Cyrus), hot titles from the 2009 editions of Tiff and Cannes that haven't had much U.S. play (Enter the Void, Dogtooth, Trash Humpers), interesting documentaries (Lemmy, The People v. George Lucas) and much, much more. Simon Rumley's Red, White & Blue, which has received much praise on Twitch based on its Iffr screenings, will have its North American premiere.

Midnight programming courtesy of Fantastic Fest is also back with titles like Higanjima, Monsters, Serbian Film, Outcast, and a yet to be announced special film. Keep eye out for SXSW coverage at Twitch, but for now, pursue the massive list below (descriptions courtesy of SXSW).

Headliners

Big names, big talent:  Headliners bring star power to SXSW, featuring red carpet premieres and gala film...

Since when did precursor season begin in October? Every year it seems to push backwards, earlier into the year, despite Oscar pushing forward, delaying itself until March this year. We've already heard from the Gotham Awards and Bifa and this past week more festival prizes came all the way from Rome and Chicago. None of this is unusual I suppose... I guess I'm just not quite ready for it for 2009. Ready for it emotionally, not physically. That's too much to go over right here (especially considering what's coming in about one months time. Nbr etcetera...)

Since The Film Experience's famously favorite category is Best Actress, it's worth noting the year's wins in that regard thus far. I'm sure I'm missing foreign wins but I'm on tight deadlines. (Help me fill it out in the comments - previous error fixed. I type too fast. 75 wpm, bitches)

Sundance Festival Mo'Nique, Precious (Like Cannes,...

Sarajevo - Films from Serbia and Greece swept the major awards Thursday night at the close of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which has grown from an act of defiance to a leading movie industry event in a decade and a half. Serbian director Vladimir Perisic's Common People was recognized as the best film of the Sarajevo Film Festival on its final night Thursday. Relja Popovic, won the best actor award for his part in the film. Greece's Aggelika Papoulia and Mary Tsoni split the best actress award for their roles in the film Dogtooth, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Dogtooth also won the jury's special award. Ten features from Croatia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Turkey, Greece, Hungary and Slovenia...