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Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda confronts an unknown terror in his new song, “Fine,” which will be featured in the upcoming Russian sci-fi thriller, The Blackout. The film’s U.S. premiere will take place November 9th at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, California.

“Fine” boasts a heavy drum stomp and an ominous mix of synths and piano, all of which grow louder and more urgent as the song progresses. Shinoda’s vocal performance carries a cool detachment that lends a haunting chill to the lyrics as he delivers lines like,...

U2 Share Live Video for New Song, "The Blackout"...

U2 is slowly readying their follow-up to 2014’s “Songs of Innocence”. The band released a new song on Wednesday called “The Blackout” and the group has a message this time around with their new album. With its thought-provoking lyrics, Bono and the rest of the band question how we would all react to the threat […]...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990) is playing June 16 - July 16, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom.“In striving to sin, to blaspheme, Ferrara’s heroes assert with Lucifer their moral autonomy, their sovereignty, their heroic identity, their glory, pitifully”—Tag Gallagher We’re introduced to Frank White (Christopher Walken) with one of director Abel Ferrara’s iconic roving pans, creeping left–right from the darkness of the prison wall to the harsh white of Frank’s cell. Frank is placed small in the frame, positioned slightly off-centre towards the bottom corner, his back to the camera as he prays silently. The prison bars dominate the composition, abstracted into silhouettes by Ferrara’s chiaroscuro lighting. A police baton enters the frame and knocks twice on the cell door, jarring Frank out of his concentration. The door is then...

Notes from Hollywoodland: Rose’s Heady, Meaningful Tolstoy Update

“It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up,” realizes the titular protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s famed novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Considered a masterpiece of Russian literature and published in 1886, director Bernard Rose takes the text and transposes it to the turn of the following century in Hollywood with his 2000 film Ivans xtc., an undertaking that sounds tedious but actually makes for quite an apt and inspired adaptation. One hardly needs to be readily familiar with Tolstoy’s novella to appreciate or understand what the film is ultimately up to, but doing so provides an alternative subtext in approaching what Rose is doing—specifically that one of humankind’s most enduring tragedies is to embrace the superficialities of existence instead of building a meaningful life, just as as Tolstoy’s character...

Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas opens with a series of disguises, image overlays revealing to us Fantomas’ various personas.Often used by silent filmmakers attempting to conjure the supernatural, they conjure the abstract instead:“It’s a visual medium”–John Ford“[Erich von] Stroheim asked me personally to take on the assignment (after the studio removed him from the film), and I did so without any protest on his part…”– Josef von Sternberg***We move from dissolves to hard cuts:Later in The Wedding March:Counterpoints:And beyond:We call for help, mere seconds later our cries our answered: “We’ve got a trial ahead of us.”Time is meaningless: there is no difference between past and present.Impressionism becomes Expressionism:But we keep being reborn:Love exists:Love unites us all, re-engages us with the world:We cease being individuals:And become a collective--We become a crowd:None of us are alone:*** Sources:Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913)India Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini,...

I used to believe, like Wenders or Godard, in the death of cinema. I accepted it as fact but never believed in it. The movies, that’s what I believed in—a dark room, shadows on a surface, a bunch of lonely people sitting down, looking up.

Like Leos Carax to Serge Daney, Abel Ferrara showed me there’d be cinema ‘til the end of the world.

***

At first I thought Abel Ferrara’s films were badly acted; I soon realized Ferrara would take bad acting with truth in it over a masterpiece of falsehoods. (Later I found out that Ferrara would, in Dangerous Game and New Rose Hotel, use one to create the other.)

I thought his films were too commercial. “Already captivated by cinema, I didn’t need to be seduced as well,” as Serge Daney put it. Hollywood in the 21st century is a highly sophisticated marketing ploy.

Update: Wild Bunch has clarified the film will not be about Dominique Strasse-Kahn specifically, but more generally about politicians. "Abel Ferrara is currently writing a script about politics, the weakness of today’s politician, who is at the same time all-powerful and lost, miserable in his personal life," Vincent Maraval said. Both Depardieu and Adjani are nowhere near to being locked. As you were. [THR] Controversial filmmaker Abel Ferrara (“Bad Lieutenant,” “4:44 Last Day On Earth”) is lining up a new project that sounds as intriguing as it does tentative. Ferrara is working with screenwriter Christ Zois (who previously co-wrote Ferrara’s 1997 film “The Blackout,” and not much else) on a script that will be somewhat inspired by the sexual assault scandal involving former Imf chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani have been linked to the project, which will be greatly...

Dennis Hopper’s long film career began with the 1955 teen angst classic Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, and he helped usher in Hollywood’s New Wave as director and star of the counterculture anthem Easy Rider in 1969. He later became a respected character actor, specializing in such off-beat villains as the drug-addicted, obscenity-spouting Frank Black in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), crazed bomber Howard Payne in the 1994 action-thriller Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and Deacon in Kevin Costner’s soggy post-apocalyptic saga Waterworld (1995).

Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas on May 17, 1936. He moved to San Diego, California with his family in the late 1940s, and began studying at the local Old Globe Theater while attending high school. He soon signed with Warner Brothers and was featured in a small role in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause. He was later featured as Jordan Benedict III, the...

Dennis Hopper, who personified Hollywood rebellion, both on screen and off, died Saturday at his home in Venice, Ca. after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 74.

Having made his big screen debut in 1955's iconic "Rebel Without a Cause," opposite his friend James Dean, Hopper biked to fame as director/co-writer and finger-flashing cyclist, along with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, in 1969's "Easy Rider." That movie, which was embraced by the burgeoning youth culture, signaled a generational change in Hollywood and also earned Hopper a best original screenplay Oscar nomination, which he shared with Hopper and Terry Southern.

He was also nominated for an Oscar for his performance as an alcoholic high school basketball coach in 1986's "Hoosiers."

Hopper, like many of the characters he played early in his career, was known for his sometimes anarchic off-screen moves and drug use in the first half of his life.

Super model Claudia Schiffer, wife of "Kiss-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn, recently posed for a European fashion editorial, emulating lurid pulp magazine covers.

Born in West Germany, Schiffer was 'discovered' at the age of 17 in a Düsseldorf nightclub by the Metropolitan Model Agency, before becoming one of the world's wealthiest print and catwalk 'super models'.

In feature films, she co-starred with Dennis Hopper and Matthew Modine and appeared in "The Blackout", "Black and White", "In Pursuit" and "Life Without Dick".

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek Claudia Schiffer...

Forest Whitaker and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson are set to star in a reimagining of the classic "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," written by Robert Louis Stevenson.Abel Ferrara will helm the film which tells of a doctor who concocts a potion which sets loose his violent alter ego.   Brett Walsh and Randall Emmett of Glasshouse Pictures and Cheetah Vision Films will produce. Luc Roeg, Michael Robinson and Andrew Orr are in as executive producers.  Ferrara's credits include "The Blackout" starring Matthew Modine an Claudia Schiffer and the upcoming documentary "Mulberry Street" among others.

Forest Whitaker and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson are set to star in a reimagining of the classic "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Abel Ferrara will helm the film which tells of a doctor who concocts a potion which sets loose his violent alter ego. Brett Walsh and Randall Emmett of Glasshouse Pictures and Cheetah Vision Films will produce. Luc Roeg, Michael Robinson and Andrew Orr are in as executive producers. Ferrara's credits include "The Blackout" starring Matthew Modine an Claudia Schiffer...

Forest Whitaker and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson are set to star in a reimagining of the classic "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Abel Ferrara will helm the film which tells of a doctor who concocts a potion which sets loose his violent alter ego. Brett Walsh and Randall Emmett of Glasshouse Pictures and Cheetah Vision Films will produce. Luc Roeg, Michael Robinson and Andrew Orr are in as executive producers. Ferrara's credits include "The Blackout" starring Matthew Modine an Claudia Schiffer...