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Rumours.Rumours (2024), codirected by Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, follows the world leaders at a G7 summit as they draft a provisional statement concerning an unspecified global crisis. The film finds Maddin operating in a different vein of artifice than the chaotic pastiches of early filmic techniques that characterize much of his previous work. In Rumours, high-key lighting blasts an antiseptic aura, and the babbly performances are urbane to the point of uncanniness (Charles Dance plays the US president with an unexplained British accent). However, the heads of state soon wander into more familiar Maddin territory. Stumbling through the woods, they encounter surreal and fleshy aberrations: self-pleasuring bog mummies, a gargantuan brain, et cetera. In a classic The Exterminating Angel (1962) conundrum, the figureheads drift through an inescapable liminal space, forced to abandon their mannered etiquettes and self-interrogate. Picture Raúl Ruiz’s The Territory (1981), if transposed into the sphere of international politics.

Guy Maddin didn’t know he was even on Cate Blanchett‘s radar until he saw her pick his film “My Winnipeg” out of the Criterion Closet back in 2022.

“It was a manipulative move. It was a cry for help!” Blanchett joked to IndieWire (and her peers) on the rooftop of the Jw Marriott on the Cannes Croisette back in May when their debut collaboration, “Rumours,” first premiered. She was joined on that day by Maddin and his co-directors, Evan and Galen Johnson, who’ve been chugging away with the singularly absurdist Canadian auteur on short films since 2015 and the feature “The Forbidden Room” in 2016. Their latest, “Rumours,” is a satirical slice of weirdness about seven nimwit world leaders who gather at a fictional G7 conference to draft a vaguely reassuring statement about an unnamed international crisis. Blanchett plays Hilda Orlmann, the Chancellor of Germany, channeling Angela Merkel in a blond bob and European faux-steeliness.

A specter is haunting the rules-based liberal world order: The specter of shambling, moaning, masturbating bog zombies, rising from the German countryside to terrorize the leaders of the world’s foremost democracies. There’s a giant brain in the forest, the Italian prime minister keeps pulling deli meat out of his pockets,...

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s buzzy satirical film “Rumours” is one step closer to theaters.

Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, and Charles Dance star in the ensemble political film that centers on seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies at the annual G7 summit, where they attempt to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis.

The official synopsis reads: “These so-called leaders become spectacles of incompetence, contending with increasingly surreal obstacles in the misty woods as night falls and they realize they are suddenly alone.”

Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson co-write and direct. The trio reunite after helming “The Forbidden Room” in 2015, with “Rumours” being billed as a combination of “comedy, apocalyptic horror, and swooning soap opera” per the logline.

Roy Dupuis, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Takehiro Hira, Denis Ménochet, Rolando Ravello, and Zlatko Buric also star.

“Rumours” premiered at Cannes and will go on to screen at TIFF and NYFF.

The strangest thing about Guy Maddin’s Rumours, co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, might just be how relatively ordinary it feels. Eschewing the primitive style for which the Winnipeg filmmaker developed a following, as well as the nesting-doll structure of The Forbidden Room, his latest stages its genre-inflected political satire—one that’s equal parts Luis Buñuel and John Carpenter—in a surprisingly straightforward fashion. Maybe that’s because, despite still featuring a host of odd sights like a giant glowing brain in the woods, the film’s timely subject matter and heightened and portentous atmosphere reflects reality in an all too down-to-earth manner.

Rumours is set at a G7 summit, that oft-protested gathering of leaders of some of the world’s wealthiest democracies, during which they put on a show of global unity, if nothing else, given the summit’s lack of verifiable, concrete, real-life outcomes.

Cate Blanchett may only now be playing a world leader, but this international icon is already ruling 2024.

The actress leads “Rumours,” which premiered at Cannes and will go on to screen at TIFF and NYFF. The feature is the latest collaboration between Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson after “The Forbidden Room” in 2015. The trio co-wrote and directed the political satire film that is billed as being a combination of “comedy, apocalyptic horror, and swooning soap opera” per the logline.

“Rumours” follows the seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies at the annual G7 summit, which is hosted by Blanchett’s character, the Chancellor of Germany. The international politicians are tasked with drafting a provisional statement regarding a global crisis while at the summit; of course, things go awry.

The official synopsis teases: “These so-called leaders become spectacles of incompetence, contending with increasingly surreal obstacles in the...

Stars: Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Vassili Scheider, Grégoire Colin, Claire Duburcq, Gabriel Pavie | Written by Adrien Beau, Hadrien Bouvier | Directed by Adrien Beau

The Vourdalak, or if you prefer, Le Vourdalak, is the most recent adaptation of Alexei Tolstoy’s novella The Family of the Vourdalak. Written in 1839 and first published in 1850, it has already been filmed several times, most famously as the final segment of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, the Italians returned to the story in 1972 with Giogio Ferroni’s The Night of the Devils and most recently as A Taste of Blood by Argentinian director Santiago Fernández Calvete.

This time it’s French filmmakers, director Adrien Beau and co-writer Hadrien Bouvier who are adapting it. They begin the film with Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe looking for shelter after an attack that wiped out his entire entourage. The owner of the first house he stops at refuses to help,...

When we say a filmmaker is in another league, we typically mean it in a good way––they’re a cut above the rest. But when we say it about Guy Maddin, it doesn’t imply quality one way or the other. There is simply no one doing what Guy Maddin is doing, whether you love it, hate it, or don’t care about it at all. Maddin’s work is so pioneer, so beguiling, so unrecognizable, so un-distributable that if you’re not doing your own film-history research you likely haven’t come across it. Look up a single image from any of his films and you’ll understand. Maddin films make Eraserhead look like Forrest Gump.

That said: he wants for nothing in reputation, an absolute legend in the avant-garde, experimental, and adjacent cinema scenes. Maddin is the Spielberg of pure art film, the wizard of 19th-century techniques...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Bleecker Street will release the film on Friday, October 18.

A giant brain the size of a Volkswagen! Ancient bog people who explode when they masturbate! Self-effacing jokes about Canada’s place in the world! “Rumours” might abandon the silent film aesthetic that has come to define Guy Maddin’s singular brand of absurdism, but not even the complete absence of exclamatory title cards is enough to suggest that this ridiculous comedy of manners could have — or would have — been made by anybody else.

Reuniting with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson for their first proper feature since “The Forbidden Room” in 2015, the pride of Winnipeg returns to the big screen with a movie that shakes up his style without sacrificing any of its silliness, a feat made all the more impressive by the caliber of the actors that Maddin and co.

World leaders at a G7 conference politely bicker, copulate in the bushes and work on wafty, content-free speeches while a worldwide apocalypse commences — politicians, they’re just like us! — in collaborating Canadian directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s frequently hilarious latest feature.

Although they’ve kept busy with a steady stream of shorts, the trio haven’t made a feature with actors since the fantastical The Forbidden Room from 2015. With a proper beginning, middle and end, and barely any tributes to silent cinema or interactive tricksiness, Rumours may arguably be Maddin’s most conventional film ever, or at least since The Saddest Music in the World (2003). That is, if you can call a film conventional that’s got furiously masturbating bog zombies, a giant brain the size of a hatchback, and an AI chatbot that catfishes pedophiles. All the same, it’s a hoot, even if the energy flags in the middle.

The Cannes Film Festival launches auteur filmmakers, and the best among them have known scenes of triumph at the iconic French seaside festival.

But not Guy Maddin, who for all his accolades as an original and idiosyncratic auteur prized for titles like The Forbidden Room and The Saddest Music in the World, has never — until now, that is — brought a film to the Croisette.

It took Maddin and co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson casting Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander and getting the backing of executive producer Ari Aster to get their absurdist political satire Rumours to the Cannes red carpet.

“Once we got some legitimate Oscar-winning movie stars, and other movie stars that are amazing, all of a sudden Cannes cleaned its glasses off for a closer look,” Maddin tells The Hollywood Reporter of the stars aligning ahead of a May 19 world premiere at the Lumière theater. Rumours...

Guy Maddin’s 1988 feature directorial debut, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, finds the Canadian auteur’s delightfully perverse sensibilities already fully formed. Given the film’s mix of surreal black-and-white imagery, subversive sexuality, and offbeat comedy, as well as its success on the midnight movie circuit, the comparisons to David Lynch’s Eraserhead were inevitable. And yet, anyone who’s seen even a single one of Maddin’s later work can instantly tell that this film couldn’t have sprung from the subconscious of any other filmmaker.

Maddin’s obsession with obscure Canadian folklore is evident right from the get-go, with a title card informing the audience about the 1865 eruption of Askja, a quiescent volcano, that caused many Icelanders to immigrate to Gimli, a small town in Manitoba, Canada. What follows is, like many of the directors other films, a deliriously playful fusion of fact and fiction, with each “historical...

The Park: "XYZ Films is proud to announce that they will be releasing Shal Ngo's dystopian thriller The Park on North American VOD March 2nd. A tale of apocalyptic adventure and survival set within a long-abandoned amusement park, the thriller, which occurs in a world without adults, stars an amazing ensemble of young talent.

Filmmaker Shal Ngo's feature debut is a thrilling, dark journey through a dystopian world where children rule - and life is fleeting.

When a mysterious virus starts killing all adults, society is left to be governed by children living on borrowed time. After the adult population is wiped out, rival kids battle for control of an abandoned theme park. Danger lurks around every corner, and they must do whatever it takes to survive their hellish Neverland.

James Emanuel Shapiro, XYZ Films' Executive Vice President of U.S. Distribution, notes, "The Park is one of the...

Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.Stars at Noon.Dear Leo and Danny,Danny, I’m glad you brought up Three Thousand Years of Longing, a film whose conceptual explorations of myth and storytelling sustained my interest for quite some time. The fundamental question it raises—and which is studied by narratologists and students of comparative religion the world over—is whether there is a finite number of narrative patterns and character archetypes, whether there is a theoretically enumerable list of story structures which we simply repeat again and again. In Three Thousand Years, the basic idea, voiced by Tilda Swinton's academic, is whether it is possible to tell a story about wish-granting that is not a cautionary tale? In its exploration of this, the film played, for a time, a bit like...

Andreas Fontana’s haunting Azor, co-written with Mariano Llinas, stars Fabrizio Rongione and Stéphanie Cléau: “The cinematography was done by Gabriel Sandru and we were talking a lot about that.”

Andreas Fontana’s Azor, co-written with Mariano Llinas, shot by Gabriel Sandru with costumes by Simona Martínez, stars Fabrizio Rongione and Stéphanie Cléau.

Andreas Fontana with Anne-Katrin Titze on Jorge Luis Borges: “Borges of course in terms of literary inspiration is very important.”

In my discussion with the director we touch on the influence of Howard Hawks and Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Didion’s codes and games, casting director Alexandre Nazarian, the cinematography, costumes, and filming in Argentina with non-professional actors, “men who are very impressive”.

Boredom is seen as “divine punishment,” old money...

Kino Lorber And Giant Pictures Melt Minds With New Free Streaming AVOD Channel “Kino Cult” Bringing The Midnight Movie Experience Home: "Kino Lorber is excited to announce that they have partnered with Giant Pictures to launch Kino Cult, the new free ad-supported streaming destination for genre lovers of horror and cult films. Featuring hundreds of hours of curated, theatrically released films all in High Definition, with new titles added monthly, Kino Cult launches widely in the U.S. and Canada on October 1, 2021 across web, mobile devices and connected TVs, with VOD apps on all major devices such as Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Google TV, iOS, Android, and more. From the art house to the haunted house, the channel will dive deep into unapologetically weird genre cinema, blending recent art house discoveries fresh from cinemas with high quality restorations of notorious grindhouse gems.

Kino Lorber brings 40 years of experience as...

Kino Lorber, the New York-based independent film distributor, is launching a free streaming channel dedicated to all things horror.

The platform, titled Kino Cult, will be ad-supported and will featured hundreds of hours of curated films, with new titles added monthly. It bows in the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 1, right in time for spooky season.

The channel will be available on web, mobile devices and connected TVs that have access to Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV and other video-on-demand apps. Kino Cult is being developed in partnership with Giant Pictures, which is responsible for the device apps, channel distribution and ad-tech in the new venture.

From arthouse fare to haunted horror films, Kino Cult is offering a mix of recent releases and classic gems, including Ana Lily Amirpour’s black-and-white vampire film “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the Yorgos Lanthimos absurdist comedy “Dogtooth” (pictured above), South...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

17 Films by Anand Patwardhan

One of the greatest chroniclers of Indian history over the past half-century, Anand Patwardhan has caused controversy in his native country for his searing, in-depth political documentaries . Now, his complete filmography is available to view, from his first film Waves of Revolution made in 1974 through his most recent film Reason completed in 2018.

Where to Stream: Ovid.tv

Ammonite (Francis Lee)

Calling a Kate Winslet performance career-best is no easy statement, but her turn as 19th-century English paleontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite is certainly in consideration. Few writer-directors trust their actors to do so much with so little dialogue as Francis Lee. Like Josh O’Connor’s Johnny in Lee’s debut,...

After unveiling the discs that will be arriving in April, including Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder, Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep, and more, Criterion has now announced what will be coming to their streaming channel next month.

Highlights include retrospectives dedicated to Guy Maddin, Ruby Dee, Lana Turner, and Gordon Parks, plus selections from Marlene Dietrich & Josef von Sternberg’s stellar box set. They will also present the exclusive streaming premieres of Bill Duke’s The Killing Floor, William Greaves’s Nationtime, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Park Lanes, and more.

Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which recently arrived on the collection, will be landing on the channel as well, along with a special “Lovers on the Run” series including film noir (They Live by Night) to New Hollywood (Badlands) to the French New Wave (Pierrot le fou) to Blaxploitation (Thomasine & Bushrod) and beyond. Also...

Following his Oscar win for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro returns to the director's chair in Nightmare Alley, (an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name), which just wrapped filming and is slated for a release in December of 2021 from Searchlight Pictures.

You can watch del Toro himself announce the wrapping of principal photography and the film's expected release date in the video below (via Twitter), and for more details on Nightmare Alley, check out the previous press release:

"The film stars Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper, Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett, Academy Award nominee Toni Collette, Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe, Academy Award nominee Richard Jenkins, Academy Award nominee Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, and Academy Award nominee David Strathairn.

Academy Award winner Guillermo del Toro directs and co-writes with Kim Morgan (The Forbidden Room). The film is being produced by del Toro and...

After being involved as a writer and producer on several projects following his Oscar win for Best Director with The Shape of Water back in 2017, Guillermo del Toro is returning to the director’s chair for Nightmare Alley (an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name), which began filming today and features a star-studded cast that includes Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, and David Strathairn:

Press Release: Los Angeles, CA, January 30, 2020 –Searchlight Pictures announced that principal photography on Nightmare Alley began this week on location in Toronto, Canada. The film stars Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born, American Sniper), Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Elizabeth), Academy Award nominee Toni Collette (Knives Out, “Unbelievable”), Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse, At Eternity’S Gate), Academy Award nominee Richard Jenkins (The Shape Of Water,...

After making her acting debut at the beginning of the previous decade with Tsangari’s Attenberg, Ariane Labed has carved out an impressive career. The Greek-born French actress has made an impression in Alps, The Lobster, Before Midnight, The Forbidden Room, and more. She recently embarked on her directing debut with the short film Olla. Following a woman’s peculiar journey after answering an online dating request, the film explores relationships, sexuality, and society’s projection on women in visually distinct ways.

Following its Cannes premiere, Labed is now headed to Sundance with the film and we caught up with her discuss what she’s learned about directing while acting, how she interprets the film, what the reactions around the world have been, what it was like learning from Joanna Hogg on The Souvenir films, and a recent festival favorite she’s loved.

The Film Stage: You’ve worked with...

At least once a decade since, I don't know, the 1960s, someone has declared the End of Cinema, sometimes with an air of triumph, occasionally a sense of relief, but usually a general tone of defeat. As we should have learned by now, cinema is resilient, not unlike the flu. It mutates, but it doesn't ever really go away. And as a specific subset of Cinema writ large, experimental film (and video? Do we still need to stipulate that?) has had its basic DNA rewritten dozens of times since the supposed heyday of the genre, the sixties-into-seventies sweet spot where autobiographical expressionism evolved into formalist rigor. The avant-garde, with its battered but still pulsating community ethos, and its inherent since of opposition (be it latent / aesthetic or blatant / political), has managed to keep on keeping on, even through the dim years of 1985–1993. Someone's always cooking up something good.Reviewing a...

Two-time Academy Award-winning Aussie icon Cate Blanchett is currently in talks to join Guillermo del Toro’s next project as director, “Nightmare Alley,” Variety reports. The follow-up to “The Shape of Water,” which earned the Mexican auteur Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, will also star Bradley Cooper. As previously reported, Cooper replaced Leonardo DiCaprio earlier this summer.

Del Toro is developing “Nightmare Alley” at Fox Searchlight, the studio that took “The Shape of Water” all the way at the 2018 Academy Awards. Del Toro is working with screenwriter Kim Morgan to adapt William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 true crime pulp novel of the same name.

The novel was previously adapted by director Edmund Goulding in 1947, but sources close to del Toro’s film say this iteration of “Nightmare Alley” is not a remake of that film, but rather, a faithful interpretation of Gresham’s text.

The novel plunges us into the...

Iconoclastic filmmaker Guy Maddin, known for his inspired weirdness in films like The Forbidden Room and The Saddest Music in the World, insists his Berlin Forum entry The Green Fog is perhaps his most commercial movie to date.

It’s a bold statement considering the film’s backstory: Maddin and co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson set themselves the challenge of using Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to create a montage-like tribute to the iconic city where the auteur’s masterpiece takes place, after being commissioned by Stanford Live and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

There was just one catch: “We weren’t allowed to...

A zombie film set on the battleground of World War I? That sounds like the kind of movie I'd enjoy! Today we have a trailer for a film called Trench 11 that centers around that setting and it actually looks a lot better than I was expecting and I'm excited to watch it. Trench 11 could end up being a really fun flick! Here's the synopsis:

In the final days of Wwi a shell-shocked tunneller must lead an Allied team into a hidden German base...100 hundred feet below the trenches. The Germans have lost control of a highly contagious biological weapon that turns its victims into deranged killers. The Allies find themselves trapped underground with hordes of the infected, a rapidly spreading disease and a team of German Stormtroopers dispatched to clean up the mess.The only thing more terrifying than the Western Front... is what lies beneath it.

Trench 11...

Tagline: "Violence is Contagious." Trench 11 has been a passion project, for director Leo Scherman, since 2011. Since then, the film has begun shooting in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The film centrally stars: Rossif Sutherland (Hyena Road, 2015), Karine Vanasse (The Forbidden Room, 2015), Charlie Carrick, Shaun Benson and Ted Atherton. In the film, a Ww 1 Allied tunneler must reach a German base, a 100 feet below frontline trenches. A contagious biological weapon is being used, by the Germans, to counter the Allied operation. And now, an official movie poster is available, for Trench 11. The official synopsis also talks of the "infected." A rapidly spreading disease is effecting German soldiers and a squad of Stormtroopers are sent to stop the spread of infection. So, Trench 11 may be a much-loved zombie film. More story details will arrive soon. As well, Raven Banner Entertainment is the sales agent for Trench 11. Raven Banner will also release the film in Canada,...

Celebrate National Canadian Film Day with six essential Canadian filmsCelebrate National Canadian Film Day with six essential Canadian filmsAdriana Floridia4/19/2017 11:42:00 Am

Today is National Canadian Film Day and there's no better way to celebrate than by watching Canadian movies!

Canadian films are largely underrated, but there are tons of filmmakers, both new and old, that are resurrecting the Canadian film scene. While Quebec has always had a strong presence in the film-making world, with directors like Xavier Dolan, Denis Villeneuve and Jean Marc Vallee constantly doing us proud, there's also a lot of great efforts from the English-speaking Canadian film realm, that we often forget about. Legends like David Cronenberg, Deepa Mehta and Guy Maddin have always made distinct, challenging work, and there's a new emerging scene--from the more established filmmakers like Jason Reitman and Sarah Polley, to a new crop of directors like Matt Johnson and Andrew Cividino.

Celebrate National Canadian Film Day with six essential Canadian filmsCelebrate National Canadian Film Day with six essential Canadian filmsAdriana Floridia4/19/2017 11:42:00 Am

Today is National Canadian Film Day and there's no better way to celebrate than by watching Canadian movies!

Canadian films are largely underrated, but there are tons of filmmakers, both new and old, that are resurrecting the Canadian film scene. While Quebec has always had a strong presence in the film-making world, with directors like Xavier Dolan, Denis Villeneuve and Jean Marc Vallee constantly doing us proud, there's also a lot of great efforts from the English-speaking Canadian film realm, that we often forget about. Legends like David Cronenberg, Deepa Mehta and Guy Maddin have always made distinct, challenging work, and there's a new emerging scene--from the more established filmmakers like Jason Reitman and Sarah Polley, to a new crop of directors like Matt Johnson and Andrew Cividino.

No stranger to the independent circuit, Roxy Shih is a Taiwanese-American filmmaker who has screened her work at acclaimed festivals such as the La Asian Pacific Film Festival, SXSW, Toronto Independent, and Dances with Films.

“The Tribe,” her debut feature film, earned her various awards, including Best Director at Other Worlds Austin. Having just recently wrapped production on the first season of the new sci-fi anthology series “Dark / Web,” Shih has now been tapped to take on her second feature: the genre-twisting thriller “Painkillers.” The film is written by Giles Daoust, best known for his screenwriting work on genre pictures like “The Room” (no, not that “The Room” and “Artifacts”).

Read More: SXSW Exclusive: Dreams Require Sacrifice In Illustrated Poster For Horror ‘Starry Eyes’

Luke Barnett and Vincent Masciale will produce under their Lone Suspect banner, alongside Daoust and Catherine Dumonceaux on behalf of Title Media. Mike Macari and Alain Berliner are executive producing.

The French star on playing a Gp with a conscience in The Unknown Girl, the state of emergency in Paris and why coming out was ‘no big deal’

French actor Adèle Haenel stars in The Unknown Girl, the latest film by Belgian duo the Dardenne brothers. She plays a doctor facing up to her feeling of responsibility after the death of a young African woman near her surgery. Her other films include Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies, Katell Quillévéré’s Suzanne, Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room and survivalist comedy Les Combattants, which won her a César award for best female performance in 2015.

There’s a sense of political defeat right now, not just in France but across Europe

Continue reading...

Though historical drama fans in the United States might have to wait a bit, their UK counterparts will be excited for the next big period drama to take over their TV. The upcoming eight-part miniseries “Victoria” follows the early life of Queen Victoria (Jenna Coleman), from her ascension to the throne at the tender age of 18 through her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert (Tom Hughes). The series also features Rufus Sewell (“The Illusionist”) as Lord Melbourne, Peter Firth (“Equus”) as the Duke of Cumberland, Paul Rhys (“Vincent and Theo”) as Sir John Conroy, and many more.

Read More: ‘Doctor Who’s’ Jenna Coleman Embodies the Vivacious and Very Short Queen ‘Victoria’

The series is created by Daisy Goodwin, who previously produced on such British programs as the UK version of “The Apprentice,” the reality show “How Clean Is Your House?” the five-part documentary “Jamie’s Kitchen,” and Sharon Horgan’s comedy series “Pulling.

Watching Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest work Seances feels both familiar and utterly strange. Born from the knowledge that over 80% of silent movies have been lost, Maddin and his collaborators at the Nfb wanted to resurrect as many titles — both real and invented — as possible: first in 2012 in production sessions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal that were open to the public, then last year in the feature film The Forbidden Room, and now in an interactive version called Seances that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes event and is […]...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSOf course, the biggest news in the film world over the last week has been the repeated announcements of the films included in the various festivals in Cannes this May, from the Official Selection (films by Almodóvar, Maren Ade, the Dardennes, Paul Verhoeven, and Sean Penn) and the Directors' Fortnight (Paul Schrader, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Marco Bellocchio), to Critics' Week (Oliver Laxe and Chloë Sevigny) and the increasingly higher profile Acid (including Damien Manivel's follow-up to A Young Poet, which is currently playing exclusively on Mubi in the Us).Speaking of festivals, many South Korean filmmakers will be boycotting the major Asian festival of Busan, due to interference with the organization from the city government.On a lighter note, the Loch Ness Monster has been found! Actually, no: that's no monster,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes)

In lauding Miguel Gomes‘ three-part, six-and-a-half hour behemoth, it’s perhaps important to consider his background as a critic. Not just in terms of the trilogy’s cinephilic engagement with Rossellini, Alonso, Oliveira, etc.; also in its defiant nature. While it’s easy to assign the trilogy certain humanist and satirical labels from the get-go and just praise these films for following through on them,...

As unusual as it may seem, filmmaker Guy Maddin made a documentary about the making of a mid-budget Canadian war film called Hyena Road with his creative partners Evan and Galen Johnson. Titled Bring Me The Head of Tim Horton, Maddin and company take a tongue-in-cheek look behind the scenes, offering some truly twisted and intentionally warped imagery in the style of their recent gem, The Forbidden Room. It’s a hilariously strange short film, and a perfect Hyena Road companion piece, one which Maddin playfully compared to Hearts of Darkness, the essential documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. Tim Horton‘s parent film, Hyena Road, is less essential, but nonetheless a well-crafted piece of technical filmmaking.

Set in and around Kandahar, Afghanistan, the film follows ground-level soldiers overseeing the construction of a road built for military use — one called (you guessed it!) Hyena Road. Unlike Michael Bay’s...

In this special episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for Tuesday, March 8th 2016.

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Follow-Up Chronicles Episode 1 Brian’s Zatoichi set News Disney: Star Wars: The Force Awakens Blu-ray Announced Criterion UK Kino Lorber: Taking of Pelham 123, Deadline USA, Buster Keaton Short Films Warner Archive: Hitchcock’s Suspicion (Warner Archive) Masters of Cinema: The Last Command (Masters of Cinema) Arrow Video: June titles: Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Suture, Ray Harryhausen, Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Volume 2 -also Too late For Tears and Woman on the Run. Olive Films: May titles Goodbye Gemini, Puppet on a Chain on Screen Archives (Scorpion Releasing) Kingdom of the Spiders (Code Red) Links to Amazon Batteries Not Included The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas Coming Home The Forbidden Room Howard the Duck Hogan’s Heroes: The Complete...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson)

Dense and lacking the playful quality of his more straightforward work, this represents a new multi-narrative direction for Maddin, and a kind of rabbit hole. Working within the art world verses the film world, Maddin’s work, style and influences have a tremendous amount of power applicable to cinema within the space of a gallery installation. Night Mayor, his first collaboration with the Nfb, fictionalized the tension between the Nfb’s mission and government controls,...

It’s been such a good year at the movies that I’m a little bit surprised by the degree to which I’m approaching tomorrow night’s Academy Awards ceremony with something resembling… disinterest. And again, it’s not necessarily the movies. It’s hard to remember a year when there wasn’t at least one obvious howler among the five, or now five-to-10 nominees—just by turning to random pages in Robert Osborne’s 70 Years of Oscar—The Official History of the Academy Awards I am reminded that The Turning Point, Midnight Express, Fatal Attraction and Mississippi Burning were all lauded by the Academy with Best Picture nominations. This year all eight movies nominated are, in my eyes, worthy of some measure of honor, including Room, my choice for the movie of the year. Yet I can’t remember the last time—could it have been 1991?—when I...

Tomorrow night, the Northwest Film Center kicks off their 39th annual Portland International Film Festival. They’ll be screening Klaus Härö’s The Fencer as the opening night film (unfortunately the screenings are sold out, but there will be an additional showing on Sunday the 14th). Over the course of the next sixteen days there will be over 90 feature films shown around town at various theaters.

This is one of my favorite festivals that I’ve had the privilege of attending, and I cannot wait to see a some of the films that they have programmed.

As usual, we here at the site will be covering a number of the films throughout the festival, but I wanted to make sure that any local Criterion Collection fans were alerted to some of the treats that we have in store. While there are many films at the festival that will align with...

Exclusive: The Canada-based distribution outfit has agreed a first-look deal with The Forbidden Room producers.

Toronto-based Raven Banner Entertainment, at the Efm kicking off sales on Owen Egerton’s horror-thriller Follow, has moved to bulk up its pipeline with a first-look financing and distribution deal with The Forbidden Room producers Buffalo Gal Pictures.

Buffalo Gal’s Insidious Pictures, a genre label behind such titles as Silent Night, The Lazarus Project, and The Haunting In Connecticut, will generate the projects.

The arrangement with Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal is aimed at modestly budgeted, auteur-driven, elevated genre films for global audiences from renowned genre filmmakers and emerging Canadian talent.

Buffalo Gal president Phyllis Laing said: “Buffalo Gal is excited to bring its curatorial excellence to join the Raven Banner brand in cultivating genre films by talented emerging and established filmmakers.”

Michael Paszt and Andrew Hunt of Raven Banner added: “Buffalo Gals has a fantastic track record in production, and a deep...

Guy Maddin with Kim Morgan in photo booth in Yves Montmayeur's The 1000 Eyes Of Dr Maddin

The director of Michael H - Profession: Director, the documentary about Michael Haneke which features Jean-Louis Trintignant, Susanne Lothar, Josef Bierbichler, Béatrice Dalle, Juliette Binoche, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert, is off to Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo. Yves Montmayeur has his sights on Shu Qi (Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin), Michelle Yeoh and Cheng Pei-Pei (Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Zhao Wei (Ma Jingle and Dong Wei's Mulan: Rise Of A Warrior) and Eihi Shiina (Audition, Tokyo Gore Police) for his "new documentary film on 'Amazons in the Asian Pop Culture'! Or how Asian warrior women are dealing with martial arts and feminism."

The 1000 Eyes Of Dr Maddin director Yves Montmayeur Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

His latest film, The 1000 Eyes Of Dr Maddin, which stars Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier, Kenneth Anger, John Waters,...

A24's "Room," fresh off three Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) and a solid arthouse expansion, received another flurry of nominations Tuesday for the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television's 2016 Screen Awards: 11, to be exact, including Best Picture, Best Director Lenny Abrahamson, Best Adapted Screenplay Emma Donoghue, Best Actress Brie Larson, Best Actor Jacob Tremblay, and Best Supporting Actress Joan Allen. Read More: "10 Ways the Golden Globe-Nominated 'Room' Filmmakers Wrote Their Own Script (Exclusive)" "Room" will be joined in the Best Picture category at the CSAs by fellow Oscar contender "Brooklyn," which also received Csa nominations for Best Cinematography ( Yves Bélanger) and Best Original Score (Michael Brook). Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's fascinating "The Forbidden Room"—rather too outré for the Oscars—also made an impressive showing, with three Csa nominations, including Best...

Canadian film shines at the Canadian Screen Awards, the prestigious awards ceremony that honours Canadian produced feature film and television. This morning the nominees were announced for the CSAs, by Canadian television actors Lyriq Bent ("Book of Negroes") and Aislinn Paul ("Degrassi").

Academy Award contenders Room and Brooklyn were recognized amongst films from Quebecois filmmakers and other prominent Canadian directors. Namely, Atom Egoyan’s Remember, Paul Gross’ Hyena Road, and Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room have all been nominated in various categories.

Many titles that were included at the Canada’s Top 10 Film Festival, an honour awarded by a panel of judges who select the top 10 films produced in Canada, made by a Canadian director, and that were released either commercially or at a major film festival in Canada. Les Demons, Sleeping Giant, The Forbidden Room, Our Loved Ones, and My Internship in Canada all were honoured by the Tiff this year,...

British actors, directors and films won most of the main awards.Scroll down for full list of winners

Mad Max: Fury Road took film of the year and best director for George Miller at the 36th London Critics’ Circle Film Awards ceremony at the May Fair Hotel on Sunday night.

45 Years took the Attenborough Award for best British/Irish film. Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay were also honoured as actress and actor of the year for their performances in Andrew Haigh’s film.

While Mad Max won in the top two categories, British actors, directors and films won nearly all of the other main awards. Alongside Rampling and Courtenay’s awards, Tom Hardy was named British/Irish actor of the year for his roles in several films, including Fury Road, The Revenant and Legend, while Saoirse Ronan took the British/Irish actress award for Brooklyn.

Kate Winslet won supporting actress for Steve Jobs, Mark Rylance supporting...

This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the movies for anyone who liked something other than what they saw and liked. And ‘tis the season, or at least ‘thas (?) been in the recent past, for that most beloved of academic parlor games, bemoaning the death of cinema, which, if the sackcloth-and-ashes-clad among us are to be believed, is an increasingly detached and irrelevant art form in the process of being smothered under the wet, steaming blanket of American blockbuster-it is. And it’s going all malnourished from the siphoning off of all the talent back to TV, which, as everyone knows,...

Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson will share the C$100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award following the critics group’s gala dinner on January 5.

The Toronto Film Critics Association presented C$5,000 runner-up prizes from Rogers Communications to Philippe Falardeau’s My Internship In Canada and Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant.

This marks Maddin’s second win of the Toronto Film Critics Association’s top Canadian prize after he won for My Winnipeg in 2008.

“At its best, Canadian cinema is notorious for stunning the world with outlandish originality,” said Tfca president Brian D Johnson. “And that’s what Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson have done with The Forbidden Room.

“Their film is a tour de force. The stellar casting, the visual wit, the narrative gymnastics — this is a cinematic cirque that leaves us amazed that it could even exist.”

“Guy Maddin won our inaugural Rogers Best Canadian Film Award with My Winnipeg,” said Phil Lind...

★★★★☆ Do you believe in the power of pure befuddlement? If you do then prepare for some festive deranging because Guy Maddin's latest film is entering theatres as a non-populist antidote to slightly sweeter seasonal fare. The Forbidden Room (2015) is a comic, mystical melodrama that will puzzle your socks off and then return them to you freshly laundered before they were even removed; a loose collection of partially-intersecting stories and vignettes shot in the style of early silent cinema, but glazed with a psychedelic glow.

David Hudson recommends Girish Shambu's book, The New Cinephilia, looks back on the night at SXSW when Richard Linklater and Jonathan Demme recalled the bourgeoning independent film scene in Austin in the early 80s, and writes up his top ten of 2015: Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin, Todd Haynes's Carol, Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, Jafar Panahi's Taxi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour, George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence, Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, Sebastian Schipper's Victoria and Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room. » - David Hudson...

David Hudson recommends Girish Shambu's book, The New Cinephilia, looks back on the night at SXSW when Richard Linklater and Jonathan Demme recalled the bourgeoning independent film scene in Austin in the early 80s, and writes up his top ten of 2015: Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin, Todd Haynes's Carol, Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, Jafar Panahi's Taxi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour, George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence, Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, Sebastian Schipper's Victoria and Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room. » - David Hudson...