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David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' careers have reached the highest of heights and the deepest depths since the premiere of their series, Game of Thrones, in 2011. Up until then, the two had somewhat checkered histories as writers, though Benioff had the better early career writing the films The 25th Hour and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Weiss had the better literary pedigree after attending the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, but none of his projects made it to the screen before Game of Thrones. It was together that these two scribes would find their greatest success after meeting in the '90s in Dublin while attending Trinity College. The two first collaborated on adapting the...

When 25th Hour was released in December 2002, it became more than the central story of its source material. Directed by Spike Lee and adapted by David Benioff from his own 2001 novel The 25th Hour, the story chronicled a man's last 24 hours of freedom as he prepares to head off to prison for seven years for dealing drugs. It's a gripping tale about regrets, responsibility, accountability, and redemption, but real-life events would make 25th Hour stand out even more.

The film became the first movie to be shot in New York City after the 9/11 terror attacks, and Lee's decision to shoot the city as it was in the wake of that tragic event not only gave the film an added layer of gravitas but also provided an unwavering snapshot of the horrible day and its aftermath without being so heavy-handed that it derailed the movie's primary story.

Nothing about 25th Hour...

As of 2022, Stephen King's novel "The Stand" — originally published in 1978, then expanded and reworked extensively in 1990 — remains the author's longest. If anything, King is prolific. The novel, a whopping 1,153 pages in length, is an apocalypse story about an eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil, with hundreds of members of humanity serving as their moral foot soldiers. The story follows a vast cast of characters as they respond to a potent virus that quickly wipes out the majority of humankind. The Earth's scant survivors eventually gather together into one of two camps, representing good or evil.

"The Stand" has been tinkered with multiple times since its initial publication. In addition to King's own expansion, the book was adapted for television in 1994 in an all-star, four-episode miniseries, as well as into a Marvel comic book in 2008. In 2020, Paramount+ mounted a remake miniseries, also with an all-star cast, this...

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Strand Releasing has picked up rights in North America for 99 Moons, an intense love story from Swiss director Jan Gassmann, which premiered in Cannes’ Acid sidebar.

Berlin-based sales group M-Appeal inked the deal with Strand, also closing deals for for the film with distributors in Israel (Shoval Film Production) and Hong Kong (Edko Films Ltd).

99 Moons tells the story of Bigna, a 28-year-old scientist, used to having everything under control, and Frank, a 33-year-old druggie who feeds on other people’s affection. Their different worlds collide, and they become obsessively entwined in a passionate and turbulent erotic love affair. The film stars first-time actors Valentina Di Pace and Dominik Fellmann.

With 99 Moons, Strand adds to its upcoming slate of European art house features. Recent acquisitions by the New York-based distributor include Francois Ozon’s Peter Von Kant and Ursula Meier’s The Line,...

Ten exhibitors to be featured as part of platform.

Cannes Docs, the documentary film platform running as part of the virtual Marché du Film, has unveiled its programme for the 2020 online edition.

Running from June 22-26, the platform will feature 10 virtual exhibitors from the international documentary community: Antidote, Antipode, Article Films, Cat&Docs, Cinephil, Dogwoof, Metfilm Sales, Rise and Shine World Sales, Ruth Films, and Sweet Spot Docs.

It has expanded its festival partners, adding Dmz Docs from South Korea and É Tudo Verdade from Brazil, to the European cohort of Cph:Dox, Dok Leipzig, Idfa, Ji.hlava Idff, and Visions du Réel.

French film executives Mathieu Robinet, former head of Bac Films, and Yohann Comte, co-founder of Charades, have joined forces to launch Drive-in Festival, a not-for-profit initiative that will take place in several cities across the country until theaters reopen.

The initiative was inspired by American drive-in cinemas and similar initiatives created in Germany, South Korea and even Lithuania, where the Vilnius International Film Festival converted airport space into a massive drive-in cinema, said Comte.

Robinet, who conceived the idea of the Drive-in Festival, enlisted Comte and other film executives and received the blessing of cities, individual exhibitors, distributors such as Le Pacte, The Jokers and Wild Bunch, and the National Film Board to put together a line-up of films that can be watched outdoors from people’s cars.

The first session kicked off May 16 in Bordeaux on the Place des Quinconces, which welcomed 200 cars for “Hippocrate,” Thomas Lilti’s film...

Brian Cox, star of HBO’s “Succession,” will play Lyndon B. Johnson in this fall’s Broadway production of Robert Schenkkan’s “The Great Society” — the follow-up to his Tony-winning play “All the Way” that secured Bryan Cranston a Tony of his own as the Texas political giant who became the 36th president of the United States.

Performances will begin a 12-week run on September 6 for a still-to-be-announced official opening at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. The show includes two dozen locations and 50 characters, including Richard J. Daley, Martin Luther King Jr. and Hubert Humphrey (Richard Thomas).

Actors playing Richard Nixon, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Coretta Scott King, Lady Bird Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Governor George Wallace and Robert McNamara are still to be cast.

Bill Rauch (“All the Way”) will direct the production, which depicts the tumultuous times that led to the conclusion of the Johnson presidency...

USA Network has given a series order to the anthology drama “Briarpatch” starring Rosario Dawson, Variety has learned.

The first season is based on the Ross Thomas book of the same name. It follows Allegra Dill (Dawson), a dogged investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered. What begins as a search for a killer turns into an all-consuming fight to bring her corrupt hometown to its knees. The series also stars Jay R. Ferguson, Brian Geraghty, and Edi Gathegi. The first season will shoot in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Andy Greenwald adapted “Briarpatch” for television and will executive produce along with “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail via Esmail Corp and Anonymous Content’s Chad Hamilton. Ana Lily Amirpour directed the pilot and also served as an executive producer. Dawson serves as producer in addition to starring. Universal Cable Productions and Paramount Television will produce.

“When we...

It isn’t much of a revelation to say that Paul Schrader is a wordsmith. The “First Reformed” writer-director, who also penned the screenplays to “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” got his start as a critic before becoming a filmmaker. Even so, his Words With Friends prowess is impressive: In a discussion with A24, Schrader reveals that he’s won more than 2,100 games of the Scrabble-esque time-killer.

This began “probably about four or five years ago,” according to Schrader. “Larry Karaszewski turned me onto it. You’re always waiting five or ten minutes for a meeting. Larry said, you know, ‘What do you do with those minutes? You should play Words With Friends, because that’s what I do.'”

He only partakes “whenever there are those dead times” and has made it a rule to “only play people I know. I play Robbie Doyle the Irish soccer player. What...

No new-openers in this week’s top five.

Today’s Gbp to Usd conversion rate - 1.29

Rank Film / Distributor Three-day gross (Aug 24-26) Running gross Week 1 Christopher Robin (Disney) £2.1m £7.9m 2 2 Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Universal) £1.7m £59.3m 6 3 The Meg (Warner Bros) £1.5m £12.2m 3 4 The Equalizer 2 (Sony Pictures) £1.3m £4.9m 2 5 Incredibles 2 (Disney) £1.3m £51.6m 7 Disney

Christopher Robin stayed top of the UK box office over a bank holiday weekend that saw no new openers trouble the top five.

The Disney film was down a very slim 12% in its second session, adding £2.1m for £7.9m to date.

Incredibles 2 also held particularly well,...

Further openers include The Spy Who Dumped Me, The Children’s Act and A Northern Soul.

New releases led by Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and a duo of family animations are hoping to light up the UK box office this weekend (Aug 24-26) after last weekend was dominated by holdovers.

Universal is opening BlacKkKlansman wide on over 300 screens. The film, which premiered in competition at Cannes earlier this year, stars John David Washington (son of Denzel) and Adam Driver and is based on the true story of a Southern black policeman who went undercover in the Ku Klux Klan in the late1970s.

Joseph Baxter John Saavedra Oct 7, 2019

Zombieland: Double Tap, a sequel a decade in the making, will reunite the original main cast for more insane undead action.

As it turns out, there are more than a few rules left to learn if you want to survive a zombie apocalypse. And why not? When the first Zombieland came out way back in 2009, The Walking Dead was still simply a comic book, and the ghoulish undead were far less hip than all those sexy vampires running around. As pop culture has become infested with the dreaded brain-eaters, Zombieland 2 (or Zombieland: Double Tap as it is now offically called,) has long seemed like a no-brainer. As it turned out, Sony agreed.

Hence, Sony Pictures is taking us back with a Zombieland sequel, with the four main actors from the original film: Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin reprising their roles as Wichita,...

Rosario Dawson has been cast in the lead role in the USA Network drama pilot “Briarpatch,” Variety has learned.

The series is based on the Ross Thomas novel of the same name. Dawson will play Allegra “Pick” Dill, a tenacious and highly-skilled investigator working in Washington, DC for a young, ambitious Senator. When her ten-years-younger sister, a homicide detective, is killed by a car bomb, Allegra returns to her corrupt Texas hometown. What begins as a search for the murderer becomes a fraught and dangerous excavation of the past Allegra has long sought to bury.

In addition to starring, Dawson will also serve as producer.

Should the project get picked up to series, it would mark Dawson’s first starring role on a network television series. She currently appears as Claire Temple in the Marvel-Netflix universe, having appeared in “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones,” “Luke Cage,” “Iron Fist,” and “The Defenders.

In this week’s edition of Canon Of Film, we take a look at one of Spike Lee‘s underrated masterpiece, ‘25th Hour‘. For the story behind the genesis of the Canon, you can click here.

’25th Hour‘ (2002)

Director: Spike Lee

Screenplay: David Benioff, based on his novel “The 25th Hour”

When Spike Lee’s ‘25th Hour,’ came out in 2002, it was ignored by most every award show, and made only a handful of top 10 lists. It was on my top ten list of that year, and I thought it was one of Lee’s absolute best; I’ve often called it his most underrated film. It’s a funny thing about movies, sometimes a film needs a certain amount of time to pass before people truly recognize its greatness, and time for those who were ahead of the curve to gloat a bit. Suddenly, at the end of the decade,...

Here’s a pairing that probably never occurred to you: Ang Lee and David Benioff. Variety reports that the two-time Best Director winner is in talks to direct the sci-fi-action film “Gemini Man,” which has been in one stage of development or another for a full 20 years. The most recent iteration would have seen “L.A. Confidential” director Curtis Hanson working with a script from Benioff, the co-creator and -showrunner of “Game of Thrones.”

Read More: ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’: How Ang Lee and Cinematographer John Toll Changed the Way We Look at Movies

Lee, who won the Academy Award for Best Director for both “Brokeback Mountain” and “Life of Pi,” most recently directed “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” “Gemini Man” follows an aging Nsa agent whose retirement plans aren’t received well — he ends up being targeted by an assassin who just so happens to...

A video essay examines our most private moments.

Strap on your thinking caps for this one, film fans, because it’s a doozy.

According to director Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don’t Look Now, The Witches), mirrors are cinema in all its glory and in fact the essence of the medium. See, mirrors are the only time we truly look at ourselves; photographs of us are from other perspectives, for other people or posterity, and as such we don’t show our real faces in them, we show projections of who we think we should be or how we think we should feel in a certain situation. But the mirror isn’t public, it’s private, it is us alone with ourselves and thus the way we look into mirrors, into ourselves, is different from every other face we show the world.

The mirror is an eye, Roeg...

Last week, Rosario Dawson (Daredevil, The 25th Hour, Kids) Tweeted that she'd be honored to assume the role of She-Hulk after a fan told her how great she'd be as Jennifer Walters, and now Boss Logic has put together an impressive piece of art which gives fans an inkling of how she could look as the character. Of course, even if Marvel ever get around to developing a She-Hulk movie, the chances of Dawson nabbing the role when she's already playing Claire Temple in all of the Netflix shows are very slim - but who's to say they couldn't make Claire She-Hulk instead of Walters? Okay, so that probably wouldn't go down too well with the majority of CBMers!

Anyone watching movies for the last 20-plus years knows the work of Edward Norton: Whether it’s his Oscar-nominated turns in “American History X” and “Birdman,” his iconic turn in “Fight Club,” or fan favorites “The Illusionist” and “The 25th Hour,” Norton’s ubiquity has made him a fixture in American cinema.

Needless to say, the actor has spent the last two decades building up one hell of a resume, which is exactly why he was honored for a career achievement award at this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival. Luckily for everyone at the festival, Norton made some time to talk with storied New York film critic David Edelstein to a crowd of 500 or so people, where he dug into some of his influences and brought up some academic criticisms of acting as an art form today.

Read More: Edward Norton Discusses the Collaborative Process in Highlights from...

One Thing I Love Today is a daily column dedicated to putting a spotlight on some pop culture item worth your attention. After all, there's enough snark out there. Why not start every day with one quick shotgun blast of positivity? When people say "What movie is missing from the conversation if you think the Oscars were too white?" this year, the answer to that question, first and foremost, is Spike Lee's Chi-raq. And I am just as guilty of missing the boat as every member of the Academy. One of the saddest images in any film in recent memory is Jennifer Hudson scrubbing the blood of her dead 7-year-old out of the pavement of a Chicago sidewalk, and it is not, by any means, the best or most powerful moment in Spike Lee's latest remarkable film. Chi-raq is stylistically bold, and it uses a heightened theatrical reality...