“There Are Rarely Queer Characters In These Films”: How Directors Behind Berlin-Bound Thriller ‘Femme’ Wanted To Challenge Genre Stereotypes

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights for German director Christian Petzold’s new film Afire, following its award-winning world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

Bill Murray and star Jeannie Berlin set foot on the red carpet of the 2023 SAG Awards holding hands.Murray and Berlin appeared quite close when they arrived together for Sunday's soiree at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The star wore a black tuxedo with a colorful bow tie, while Berlin sported an all-black suit and shades.Berlin, who portrayed Hadassah Fabelman in the Steven Spielberg film, was there for the film's nomination in the Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture category.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to the Berlin-premiering family drama “Tótem,” written and directed by “The Chambermaid” helmer Lila Avilés. Winner of the festival’s Ecumenical Jury Prize, the film follows seven-year-old Sol, who spends the day at her grandfather’s home, helping her aunts Nuri and Alejandra with the preparations for a surprise party they’re throwing for her father, Tonatiuh, who is terminally ill. However, as night descends, a strange and chaotic atmosphere takes over, shattering the bonds that hold the family together, and Sol will come to understand that her world will change dramatically.

Gina Carano’s fate is being revealed.

Way back in 2016, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive,” “Only God Forgives”) revealed he was working with James Bond in-house writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (“Casino Royale,” “Quantum Of Solace,” “Skyfall,” “No Time to Die “). Refn always played coy about what the project was, but when asked if the film was the Asia-set action thriller called “The Avenging Silence,” he responded, “Well, I think it may very well be.

The Last Of Us viewers have shared their praise for the show’s latest episode, which depicts the friendship and love story between Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Riley Abel (Storm Reid).In last night’s (February 26) episode ‘Left Behind’, viewers are shown a flashback to Ellie before she met Joel as a student at FEDRA’s military boarding school in the Boston Quarantine Zone.While there, her best friend Riley joins the Fireflies, which angers Ellie. Riley takes her to an abandoned mall, where they have fun together, though Riley admits that she is being taken to the Atlanta Quarantine Zone, with the surprise trip to the mall her goodbye.Ellie pleads with her to stay, which Riley agrees to, and they share a kiss.

A.D. Amorosi Throughout the currently-running first season of Peacock’s “Poker Face,” guests to actor-writer-co-creator Natasha Lyonne’s murder mystery party have found themselves transformed almost beyond recognition. While this has included Chloë Sevigny as a metalhead, and Judith Light and S.

Those familiar with stand-up comedy know Bert Kreischer as a hard-partying, tall tale-telling, and often shirtless comic who’s good friends with Bill Burr and Tom Segura. He’s loud, rowdy, and otherwise known as “The Machine,” a nickname which may be Kreischer’s most infamous bit.

Naman Ramachandran Berlin’s just concluded European Film Market (EFM), which had a physical edition this year after two online editions in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, has reported “record results” according to the organizers. There were 230 stands and 612 companies from 78 countries and more than 11,500 market participants from 132 countries. Some 773 films were shown in 1,533 screenings, including 647 online screenings and 599 market premieres. The total number of buyers also rose to 1,302. 629 film projects were presented on the new Producers & Project Pages. “After the past two irregular years, we’re pleased to return to the physical in full force, and with a vibrant, bustling and strong market. The exhibition areas at Gropius Bau and the Marriott Hotel were sold out, and the exhibitors reported strong sales and good business. The decision to group all the market happenings together with the Berlinale Series Market and the market screenings at Potsdamer Platz, and to provide the industry with an efficient infrastructure, was extremely well-received by our market participants,” said EFM director Dennis Ruh.

Hunter Ingram Directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason were never short on angles through which to investigate the crimes, casualties and collusions of the powerful Murdaugh family of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The most obvious one would have been to tell the story through Alex Murdaugh, a former solicitor who’s currently on trial for the 2021 murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul. Thanks to dozens of live feeds on YouTube, the ongoing courtroom drama has emerged as the trial of the year. But once they were on the ground in the Lowcountry, the directors behind Netflix’s new docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” were told there was only one place to start –– the 2019 boat crash that had killed Mallory Beach.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On stage, drag artist Aphrodite Banks is a femme fatale: Caked in war paint, with a waterfall of braids whipping around her waist, she’s possessed of the white-hot glare and forthright confidence to match her Amazonian height and bearing. Off stage, as Jules, he’s simply femme: that term for gay men who present or express themselves in a more feminine way, too often used as a slur or a dismissal even by their community brethren. (Open up a cruising app like Grindr and see how frequently “no fems” comes up as a requirement.) The former identity connotes swaggering strength; the latter, to many, delicate weakness. How those associations and stigmas battle each other in one man’s body is the driving conflict in “Femme,” a tense, sometimes startling revenge drama from British freshmen Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.

Milo Ventimiglia is reflecting on several roles he has had.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.

EXCLUSIVE: Neon is in pole position to win North American rights to Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe horror-thriller Longlegs in the first sizeable domestic deal of this year’s EFM.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Luc Besson’s ”Dogman,” starring Caleb Landry Jones, wowed buyers at the Berlin’s European Film Market, where it was screened for select buyers. “We hosted only one private screening of the completed film and buyers were stunned, they all came out saying that it was Luc Besson’s best film to date, his most mature movie and some even called it a masterpiece,” said Gregoire Melin, founder of Kinology, which is handling sales on the film. On the heels of the screening, Kinology closed deals with some of the biggest distributors in key international territories, including Italy (Lucky Red), Germany and Austria (Capelight Pictures), Spain and Latin America (Sun Distribution Group), Scandinavia (Svensk Filmindustri), Benelux (Belga Films), Switzerland (Elite Film), Middle East (Front Row), Poland (Monolith), Portugal (Nos Lusomundo Audiovisuais), Czech Republic and Slovakia (AQS) and former Yugoslavia (Blitz).

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International George MacKay is virtually unrecognizable in the erotic revenge thriller “Femme,” directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. With slicked-back hair and a heavy-handed neck tattoo, the dashing, soft-spoken British actor, well known for his period roles, is transformed into the kind of East London gangster you’d go out of your way to avoid. Part of what makes MacKay’s character, Preston, so menacing is the fact that he’s deeply closeted. When one night he’s teased in front of his friends by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s drag artist Jules — dressed up as Aphrodite Banks — he responds with violence so severe that it shatters Jules’ confidence to ever perform in drag again. The attack emboldens Jules to ensnare an unwitting Preston in an intense sexual relationship with the intention of outing him on the Internet.

Naman Ramachandran Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is ready for his close-up. After making a mark with TV’s “Misfits” and “Utopia” and in the film “Candyman,” the British actor is set to explode upon the world stage with “Femme,” world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama strand. Stewart-Jarrett plays Jules, whose alter-ego is Aphrodite, a celebrated drag queen in a gay club in London whose life is destroyed by a homophobic attack. After he spots one of the perpetrators (George MacKay) in a gay sauna, Jules plots revenge.  “Femme” is based on the BAFTA-nominated short of the same name by directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. Stewart-Jarrett had played a former drag queen in the Tony- and Olivier Award-winning theater production of “Angels in America” and built on that during the “Femme” preparation.

Based on the synopsis alone, one would think John Trengove’s “Manodrome” to have two feet in satire: Jesse Eisenberg is Ralphie, a father-to-be lulled into a libertarian masculinity cult led by Adrien Brody. It is odd, then, to see the South African director mindlessly bypass the clever beats of parody in favor of a dreary mishmash of classics such as Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and David Fincher’s “The Fight Club.” With a kid on the way, losing his job was not on Ralphie’s plans.

Can you believe it? We’re already halfway through February in 2023 and we do not yet know who will be taking over the role of James Bond in future films. What is taking so long, Barbara Broccoli? Kidding aside, the seemingly never-ending discussion about who will be the next 007 seems to have been focused on Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as of late, as it was reported that he met with producers about the role.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Films Boutique has closed a flurry of deals on “Subtraction,” Mani Haghighi’s Iranian noir thriller which world premiered at Toronto in the competition Platform section. The Berlin-based company has closed deals in France (Diaphana in association with Kinovista), Russia and CIS (A One), Canada (Films We Like), Ex-Yugoslavia (MCF Megacom), Middle East (Fron Row), Poland (Mayfly), Taiwan (Proview Ent.), Australia and New Zealand (Vendetta), Switzerland (Trigon) and Benelux (September Films). The movie is headlined by Taraneh Alidoosti, the Iranian star of “The Salesman” and “Leila’s Brothers” and Navid Mohammadzadeh (“Leila’s Brothers”). Both Haghighi and Alidoosti have recently been targeted by Iranian authorities. Alidoosti was temporarily arrested, while Haghighi had his passport confiscated as he was about to board a flight to attend the BFI London Film Festival.