Sundance Review: Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou’s Supernatural Horror ‘Talk To Me’

EXCLUSIVE: Prime Video is developing an action drama series from film and TV writer Joe Barton and director-producer Michael Bay. The project hails from A+E Studios, in association with Range Studios, and Amazon Studios.

Michael Beale made it a dozen games unbeaten as Rangers boss but it was anything but delightful as the nervy Ibrox men edged past Ross County.

In what appears to be a new wave of layoffs, several senior scripted executives have left the broadcast network, including Gaye Hirsch, EVP, Development, who is departing after more than 15 years, and fellow CW veteran and head of department, Michael Roberts, who had been at the network (and its predecessor the WB) for 21 years, sources tell deadline.

EXCLUSIVE: M88 has signed Nigerian American filmmaker Walé Oyéjidé, on the heels of his first narrative feature, Bravo, Burkina!‘s world premiere in the NEXT section of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

One of our most anticipated films of 2023 is, without a doubt, Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” biopic starring Adam Driver in the lead role. This is a film that is not only Mann’s first since 2015’s less-than-stellar “Blackhat,” but also features one of the very best actors working today.

One of the most delightfully warming and comically offbeat films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Babak Jalali’s “Fremont” tells the story of Donya, a former Afghan translator for the U.S. government who’s felt adrift in the titular California city since resettling there to evade the Taliban.  READ MORE: ‘Fremont’ Review: An Afghan Insomniac Tries To Find Purpose In A Refreshingly Unique & Jarmuschian-Esque Indie Dramedy [Sundance] Living in an apartment complex alongside other Afghan immigrants, working at a Chinese-American fortune cookie factory in San Francisco, and spending evenings alone at a local restaurant that plays Afghan soap operas, Donya — portrayed, in a captivating debut performance, by real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada —longs for companionship.

Greenwich Entertainment has picked up all rights excluding TV to the documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, directed and produced by Amanda Kim, which world premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. 

A few weeks after Zar Amir-Ebrahimi won the Best Actress Award in Cannes for her performance as journalist Arezoo Rahimi in crime thriller Holy Spider, the Iranian-French actor flew to Melbourne, Australia, to take part in what was set to be another urgent story from an Iranian filmmaker: Noora Niasari’s debut feature Shayda. 

There’s a certain type of dystopian sci-fi that turns up in Sundance every few years, a kind of ‘EPCOT on acid’ that causes a big ripple then rapidly fades away (see Escape From Tomorrow, a paranoid conspiracy thriller shot, guerrilla-style, in Disneyworld). Divinity, screening in the Next section, fits the bill exactly, a quirky mad scientist movie that, for all its attempts to be arty, darkly satirical and out-there, ends up as a kind of lo-fi companion piece to Don’t Worry Darling in its not-so-subtle skewering of American consumerism. Shot in grainy black and white, its chief draw is Stephen Dorff as you’ve never seen him before, and will likely never want to see him again.

Ira Sachs’ latest feature film, ‘Passages,’ has been acquired by MUBU for all distribution rights in the US, UK, Ireland and Latin America. “Passages” will be released theatrically in 2023. The picture, set in modern-day Paris, concerns a filmmaker who impulsively has an affair with a young school teacher.

For anyone wondering how a film called Crazy Rich Asians ever came to be the poster child for diversity and inclusion, Randall Park’s humorous rebuttal is, almost literally, that film’s poor distant relation. Adapted from a comic book rather than a novel and with a cast of character actors rather than stars, Shortcomings even seems to admit its modest production values in the title. But for adventurous audiences, this rough-edged indie is a refreshing antidote to the horrors of the factory-farmed studio romcom, featuring a caustic male thirtysomething Asian-American lead whose messy love life should ring bells right across the age, gender and culture divide.

“Shortcomings” begins with a magic trick of a scene: we see an emotional Asian American audience applaud when the end-credits of a film (modeled clearly on “Crazy Rich Asians”) start rolling at an Asian American film festival. Outside the screening, more Asian Americans celebrate the significance of the moment — an Asian American-led romantic comedy becoming a blockbuster hit.

EXCLUSIVE:  Dyllón Burnside, star of Ryan Murphy shows Pose, American Horror Story and Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, will make his London stage debut in Black Superhero, the debut play from British actor, activist and playwright Danny Lee Wynter.

In Montana’s Big Sky Country, a black cloud hangs over the state’s expansive horizon. It looms above the indigenous residents of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations and nearby towns in Big Horn County most of all.

The thorny, complicated history between the United States and Iran is infinitely more complex for those of the Persian diaspora living in America. It’s this nuanced tension trickling down to identity — between being too much this and not enough that in either homeland — that writer-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) explores in her third film, “The Persian Version,” a decades and generation-spanning dramedy.

It’s a backhanded compliment to Sundance to see such an emotionally-stunning film as Belgian director Veerle Baetens’ When It Melts, which premiered tonight in the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, and wonder, right away, why a film of this power won’t be debuting in the official selection at Cannes this year. This is in no way to suggest that the American indie showcase is a kind of second-best place for it, more an indictment of Europe’s biggest cinema event, which routinely takes such harrowing stories of tortured and troubled women — as long as they are directed by men.

Over the past few years, it’s thankfully become more common to find screenings with closed captioning at your local multiplex. Not just theaters that hand out closed captioning devices — which often require another layer of artifice between the audience and the movie — but actual onscreen captions.

Sundance U.S. dramatic competition jury members — including Marlee Matlin– chose to leave after the festival fell short of providing proper captioning for deaf and hearing impaired audience members during the Eccles Theatre premiere of Magazine Dreams last night.

That old time religion takes another hit in The Starling Girl, an effective if somewhat overdrawn account of an obedient 17-year-old girl in a fundamentalist society who is lured astray by a local former pastor. Everything about Laurel Parmet’s feature directorial debut has been fastidiously tended to in this well-carpentered drama that will appeal to young female audiences who will be both fascinated with and appalled by the rigid strictures and male-dominated activities that, according to the film, define the lives of the women in such fundamentalist communities.

So far nearly all the films I have been seeing for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival are based on true stories, from a teacher in Radical to a gay single father in San Francisco circa 70’s and 80’s to Michael J. Fox as himself, and now yet another iconic character gets his story told on the big screen. World Premiering at Sundance tonight is Cassandro, a wild story of the first openly gay wrestler in the ultra macho sport of Mexico’s Lucha Libre.