Ioncinema

In conjunction with her new narrative feature No Address, which will be released in 2025, director Julia Verdin and co-director Stephen Wollwerth embarked on a simultaneous documentary project about homelessness across the country with Americans with No Address. Her crew took a bus to twenty cities over three weeks, conducting over one-hundred and seventy-five interviews as a means to research common issues and various solutions utilized to combat a complex crisis. We sat with director Julia Verdin plus actors Xander Berkley and William Baldwin, who appeared in both the narrative and documentary feature, as they relay their thoughts and experiences.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Production is officially underway on Alice Winocour‘s fifth feature film, Coutures aka Stitches, and the casting announcements keep getting bigger. Joining yesterday’s reveal of Angelina Jolie are Louis Garrel and Ella Rumpf who reteams with her Raw co-star Garance Marillier, model Anyier Anei and Finnegan Oldfield who round out the ensemble. Variety reports that filming is currently underway in Paris. Other behind the line players involved include cinematographer Andre Chemetoff (he just completed Shaden Safieddine Tazi’s Un jour tout va disparaitre), costume designer Pascaline Chavanne, and production designer Florian Sanson. Producers include CG Cinéma’s Charles Gillibert and Closer Media’s Zhang Xin and William Horberg.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

We sat with director Soi Cheang to talk about his latest film, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, which premiered in the Midnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and selected as Hong Kong’s official submission for consideration in the category of Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. Cheang clarifies some misconceptions on the project’s origins previously reported in the Western media while also touching on the significant set design of the film in reconstructing a specific portion of 1980s Hong Kong, Kowloon City. Cheang talks about working with the legendary Sammo Hung, as well as how the film’s significant box office success has generated plans for a franchise.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Back in September we reported that French filmmaker Alice Winocour had begun pre-production on her fifth feature film and a major casting announcement has just landed. Variety reports that Angelina Jolie has been cast (one of three central women characters in the film) in Coutures aka “Stitches.”

Following in the fashion walkways portraits of fellow French filmmakers Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) and Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent), this French and English language film is set in the world of high fashion and unfolds in Paris. Jolie stars in the movie as a filmmaker and is one of three women whose lives will collide during Fashion Week.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

It’s awards season in France as well with today belonging to the Prix Louis Delluc awards. It’s only a two category event, but it nonetheless puts the focus on some of the best titles in French cinema with the majority of the films coming from the various sections of the past Cannes Film Festival. Among the favorites in the field of nine noms we find with the likes of Miséricorde, L’histoire de Souleymane and Le roman de Jim measuring up against Golden Bear winner by Mati Diop, while the first films category is completely dominated by Cannes offerings from the Critic’s Week, Directors’ Fortnight and Un Certain Regard sections.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

We sat with director Tia Kouvo to talk about her directorial debut, Family Time, which premiered in the Encounters program of the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival and selected as Finland’s official submission for consideration in the category of Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. Touching on the short film project which provided the initial impetus to expand it into a feature, Kouvo talks about shooting in her grandparents’ home alongside her returning DP Jesse Jalonen to craft the film’s intimate mise en scene. Kouvo also explains specific soundtrack selections and cinematic influences for her first film, which she describes as a more realistic film about familial Christmas traditions, but overall, a hopeful one.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

The Big City: Kapadia Designs Lovely Portrait of Friendship and Free Will

Mumbai is a city of illusions, a character remarks in Payal Kapadia’s debut narrative feature, All We Imagine as Light. To survive, one has to buy into the illusion. Opening upon a bus moving through the city, a variety of offscreen characters share their thoughts on the difficulties of living there, a place of impermanence, a city which robs one’s time. We focus on a quiet, withdrawn woman who works as a senior nurse at a specialty hospital, and slowly begin to learn about her life, which includes a new roommate, a much younger nurse who’s just embarked on a clandestine romance.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Eternity and a Day: Scott Rehashes the Dying Embers of an Empire

“The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line,” wrote Pauline Kale in her 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” The endlessly quotable, controversial prose of Kael might as well be an underwhelming way to describe Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to his celebrated Best Picture winner Gladiator (2000), a film which resuscitated the auteur’s lengthy slump through the 1990s and set him on a perennial course of (mostly) highly anticipated projects for the past twenty-four years.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Agnes of God: Franz & Fiala’s Bleak Portrait of Women & Madness

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” wrote Ray Bradbury in one of his stories from Long After Midnight (1976), as succinct a phrase as any to convey the cultural facets which historically plagued troubled or troubling women, almost always to forge their doom. The Devil’s Bath, the third feature from Austrian directing duo Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala, is not a film about witches, per se. However, their first period piece, set in 1750 Upper Austria, is most assuredly a horror story, taken from historical court records.… Read the rest

Continue reading…