The isolation, anxiety, and loneliness of extended human spaceflight, recently explored in films like Netflix's "Spaceman" and the Apple TV+ series "Constellation," can be a debilitating side effect, and it's one that's examined in disorienting detail in Swedish director Mikael Håfström's new sci-fi thriller "Slingshot."

Starring Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, and Tomer Capone, "Slingshot" opened in theaters on Aug. 30 from Bleecker Street. It revolves around three distinguished astronauts aboard the Odyssey 1 spacecraft en route to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. The long voyage requires a gravity-assist maneuver around Jupiter, and as the astronauts prepare for this dangerous move, one of them begins to have hallucinations caused by hypersleep drugs that make him question reality. These unsettling visions increase in intensity, threatening the mission's goals.

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"It's relative to '1408' in the way that it's a contained space and a psychological drama in an environment where you can't really get out from, because you're in the room or in the spaceship in complete isolation in space," Håfström told Space.com.

"I've always been drawn to that kind of story," he added. "There's something challenging making something in such a contained area. It's very interesting to work with actors in that sense. There's very little physical room to maneuver, so you need to work in a different way. I had the script for quite some time before we actually got the chance to make it. But I always carried it with me for all these reasons. It could be on a deserted island or anywhere, but now it happens to be in space. It's not 'Star Wars' or anything like that. When people see the film, they'll understand more about what I'm talking about. You need actors that can bring it home, and we were lucky."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17136439

Writer/Director Coralie Fargeat set the bar high for herself in 2017, with her debut feature Revenge delivering a visceral, feminine twist to the rape-revenge thriller that climaxed in an epic bloodbath. So much that it seemed nearly impossible to top. Yet the filmmaker does just that with sophomore effort The Substance, transforming a familiar concept into something so entertaining and grotesquely over the top that it keeps you firmly in its grip until an epic, grand guignol finish.

Writer/Director Coralie Fargeat set the bar high for herself in 2017, with her debut feature Revenge delivering a visceral, feminine twist to the rape-revenge thriller that climaxed in an epic bloodbath. So much that it seemed nearly impossible to top. Yet the filmmaker does just that with sophomore effort The Substance, transforming a familiar concept into something so entertaining and grotesquely over the top that it keeps you firmly in its grip until an epic, grand guignol finish.

The '80s were a special time for cinema, as moviemakers could easily get away with producing fantastical stories that were also nightmare fuel for kids. Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, did exactly that with The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. If you're interested in revisiting these weird but enchanting masterpieces, Walmart has opened preorders for exclusive limited-edition 4K Blu-ray versions for both films. The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth release November 19 and cost $29 each.

This isn't the first time that these films have been available as 4K Blu-ray editions, but Walmart is offering them with very cool steelbook covers. The Dark Crystal's steelbook cover features a gorgeous illustration of one of the key locations in the movie.

It is virtually unheard-of for top filmmakers and talent to get back to a journalist almost immediately without going through armies of publicists. Not so when it comes to talking about Neon founder and CEO Tom Quinn, the savvy and innovative indie executive whose company is enjoying its best year in history thanks to nurturing the under-35 cinephile crowd, as well as seeing yet another one of its films, Anora, win the prestigious 2024 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or for the fifth consecutive year, an unprecedented feat for a U.S. indie or studio distributor.

“Tom has something — a once highly valued human trait that, one might argue by looking around, apparently humans don’t need anymore — it’s called good taste, and Tom has it in surplus. I think he might put it in his laundry detergent, his toothpaste, his milkshakes,” Longlegs director Oz Perkins tells THR within several hours of receiving a request for comment.

Perkins, and Neon, are still reeling from the record-breaking performance of Longlegs, the summer box office sensation that has surpassed Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite to become Neon’s top-grossing title of all time domestically with north of $74 million, making it the most successful indie horror pic in a decade and the top indie film of the year so far (currently, it’s No. 12 on the summer chart in a neck-and-neck battle with Alien: Romulus and ranking ahead of Mad Max: Furiosa). Sydney Sweeney, who starred in and produced Immaculate for Neon earlier this year, also dispatched her own take almost instantly: “One thing that I’ve admired about Tom is that he’s honestly for the art. Neon often takes risks with unconventional storytelling and marketing strategies. They support independent films and filmmakers, creating engaging ways to bring audiences into worlds that some companies may overlook.”

The film executive’s three-decade career included stints at indie stalwarts Samuel Goldwyn, Magnolia and then Radius-TWC, a label of The Weinstein Co., before he founded Neon (the official moniker is NEON Unrated LLC) in 2017 with backing from 30West. Neon has released 115 films, both narrative features and documentaries, and garnered 32 Oscar nominations and six wins, including best picture and best director for Bong’s groundbreaking Parasite, the first non-English film to take home the statuette.

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Quinn, who grew up overseas, where his dad coached basketball — helping to explain his worldly perspective — recently spoke with THR about the state of the business, Neon’s rivalry with A24 and why he doesn’t let dust-ups with talent get him down.

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Neon and A24 rank Nos. 10 and 9, respectively, in 2024 domestic box office share, with less than $15 million separating the two of you. Do you cringe when seeing all the glowing headlines about A24? How do you view your rivalry?

It’s a great question. We are both New York-centric companies. That’s where we started. Most of us, if not all of us, have worked in New York. I spent 20 years there but now live in L.A. We’ve exchanged a lot of directors. We pick up movies that they walked away from, and vice versa, but we’re not the same. Here’s a stark difference: In their first seven years, they released three foreign-language films and three documentaries. We’ve released 64 — 32 foreign-language films and 32 documentaries. We are very different, but are very much on the same trajectory. They won best picture, and we won best picture. But I don’t understand their business and their valuations. I’m sure most of the industry doesn’t either, but more power to them.

What’s the one that got away in terms of a bidding war?

I was all over [2022’s] Talk to Me. We were the first offer, the highest offer and the only wide-release offer before anybody else woke up. And we narrowly lost that to A24, so credit to them.

Coming soon from ITN Studios is the slasher movie Piglet, the latest twisted take on a public domain character from the Pooh universe, and we’ve got the trailer for you this afternoon.

For clarity, this project is not part of the public domain universe known as the “Poohniverse,” which began with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Same idea, different team.

Watch the official Piglet trailer below and expect a release date soon.

Trailer

The Radiance Films Blu-ray imprint has just released the second volume in its World Noir series, which collects global noirs from Japan, France and Germany. “Noir is a thread that runs through cinema history in complex ways, and allows us to explore all sorts of topics,” says managing director Francesco Simeoni, “which is very exciting from a curatorial perspective.” For example, Volume 2 includes the Yakuza heist drama Cruel Gun Story (Takumi Furukawa, 1964), which transfers the plot twists of 1950s American gangster movies into the 1960s Tokyo underworld.

This week’s rerelease of The Third Man (1949) suggests a detour closer to home: a British film noir with American stars, set in postwar Vienna, which is divided into zones controlled by different international powers, and home to travellers from across Europe and the US. Here the accent of the all-important voiceover is American, courtesy of Joseph Cotten, as is the charismatic Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, but the story and direction are by Brits (Graham Greene and Carol Reed respectively) and its visual style, with those deep shadows and even deeper tilted angles (the cinematographer Robert Krasker was Australian), draws on Hollywood’s translation of German silent cinema. For Phullar, the significance of The Third Man is in the way that “you see and hear and feel those long journeys of film noir, perhaps more than other films of that era”. In this light, Harry Lime’s famous speech, elaborated by Welles, about how great art is produced only by countries riven by violence and turmoil, seems especially on the nose.

Film noir was first identified at a distance. In 1946, Italian-born French critic Nino Frank coined the term to describe a cycle of coolly cynical crime thrillers produced by Hollywood earlier in that decade, but only recently available in Paris. “These ‘dark’ films, these films noirs, no longer have anything in common with the ordinary run of detective movies,” wrote Frank of films including Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944). But the term still has legs, with films as recent, and as far removed from Hollywood, as the Chinese crime procedural Only the River Flows, which was released this summer, inspiring critics to reach for the word noir.

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Those inspired to travel further into homegrown noir should check out the new season beginning this week at BFI Southbank, Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of British Cinema, co-curated with Edgar Wright, which contains such gritty British classics as It Always Rains on Sunday (Robert Hamer, 1947), a noirish and sexy drama starring Googie Withers and John McCallum as an East End housewife and her fugitive ex-boyfriend. In a recent interview for Sight and Sound magazine, Scorsese talked about how the influence of gothic literature imbues the Brit noir with gloom and horror: “There’s a toughness in the British style that doesn’t have any room for compromise.”

The journey continues. Online, aficionados use the hashtag #Noirvember as an excuse to explore the world of noir. This November, the Film Noir Fest in Weston-super-Mare will screen noirs from around the world, not least London noirs and Mexican films of the 1950s, including El Bruto (1953), a rarely shown title directed by Luis Buñuel.

As for new films that take on the noir mantle, such as Only the River Flows, they simply create more flashbacks into film history, forging connections between film-makers and films united by a shared cinematic mood. One that lingers, dangerously.

Indie comics tell some of the best stories by the best creative teams in comics, and recent years have truly been a golden age for the genre. Unlike the big two publishers, Marvel and DC, which mainly publish stories about superheroes, indie comics from publishers like Image Comics or BOOM! Studios cross every genre imaginable, from high fantasy to the darkest horror.

Most indie comics are owned by their creators, meaning that the comic book industry’s best creators have a chance to tell the stories they truly want to share, as opposed to being constrained by the limits of a more controlling publisher. The result is unrivaled creativity and some of the most innovative and compelling stories available in comic books today. With this high level of quality, there has never been a better time to check out some new indie comics.

They are:

1. The Many Deaths of Laila Starr
2. The Good Asian
3. The Department of Truth
4. Love Everlasting
5. The Cull
6. W0rldtr33
7. Black Cloak
8. Damn Them All
9. Somna
10. Eight Billion Genies

Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train), Tom Hardy (Venom) and director Cary Fukunaga (No Time To Die) are teaming for Jo Nesbo crime-thriller adaptation, Blood On Snow, which will likely be the biggest pre-sales title at TIFF for WME Independent and Range.

Nesbø is scripting the project (with revisions by Ben Power), based on his own best-selling novel of the same name.

The buzzy story unfolds in 1970’s Oslo, where two rival gang leaders—Hoffman and the Fisherman (Hardy) —vie for control.

It marks a rare feature screenwriting outing for the acclaimed Norwegian novelist whose books have been adapted into multiple hit movies and TV series. Filming is due to take place later this year.

The synopsis reads: “Hoffman’s trusted hitman, Olav (Johnson), is a cold, efficient killer, perfect for the job. But beneath his ruthless exterior lies an unexpected intelligence and an unwavering moral code shaped by a complicated childhood…When Hoffman orders his own wife to be murdered, Olav’s principles clash with his loyalties. Instead of pulling the trigger, he hatches a scheme that makes him Hoffman’s next target and with nowhere safe to turn, Olav forms an uneasy alliance that places him at the heart of Oslo’s deadly gang war. Once a violent enforcer, Olav’s choice makes him an unlikely hero in a world where no good deed goes unpunished.”

Mlle Lara has trouble with men so for her birthday she plans something special in pursuit of a wonderful love.

IMDb

I mentioned this in the previous thread and thought I might as well share the short film. It's included on the Calvaire DVD but is out there in the wild.

Fabrice Du Welz began the century as a master of Belgian gothic, riding the wave of Euro-extreme cinema. Calvaire, or The Ordeal, from 2005, was a gruesome gripper. Since then, in a chequered career, he has more or less maintained his stride, and now he comes to Venice as director and co-writer of an initially promising true-crime horror procedural. It is loosely inspired by the serial killer and child rapist Marc Dutroux, whose case enraged the Belgian public when it became clear the country’s various quarrelling law-enforcement authorities, hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and turf-war disputes, had in effect allowed Dutroux to go free for years.

It’s an intriguing premise and this baggy, free-ranging movie presents a tonal range of sour acrimony, anxiety and occasional flourishes of nauseous black comedy. But it’s a long film which finally – and rather perfunctorily – voyages into the murky waters of deep-state conspiracy, and the drama doesn’t really have the rhetorical resources or the performances to make that case plausibly or interestingly.