Noticias

Spain’s Atresplayer Premium unveiled a slate of new and returning programs on Monday evening in a live presentation streamed from Madrid’s famed Gran Via, hosted by the streamer and featuring some of the most recognizable faces behind its impressive lineup of original local programming.

2021 was a banner year for Atresplayer, which closed agreements with major broadcasting and streaming partners including Movistar, Vodafone, Google and Apple. Due to its global reach, the service has also become a lifeline to Spaniards living abroad, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers worldwide who tune in to keep up on Spanish news and culture.

Below, highlights from the first Atresplayer Premium Day:

“Vestidas de azul” A continuation of the service’s award-winning global hit series “Veneno,” picked as one of Variety’s best international series in 2020 which sold to HBO Max in the U.S. Series creators Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi are back to produce,...

Eddie Izzard in ‘The Flip Side.’

Five Australian films have been invited to the 73rd edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs from June 19–30.

Wayne Blair’s Top End Wedding, Thomas M Wright’s Acute Misfortune, Marion Pilowsky’s The Flip Side and Miranda Nation’s Undertow will screen in the World Perspectives strand.

Tony D’Aquino’s debut feature The Furies, a female-driven survival thriller, will be showcased in the Night Moves strand.

The festival describes D’Aquino’s film, which stars Airlie Dodds, Danielle Horvat, Linda Ngo and Taylor Ferguson, as a “gripping modern take on the 1980s slasher film, full of gore.”

Acute Misfortune is a “striking, brilliant and unconventional portrait” of one of Australia’s most acclaimed and idiosyncratic painters Adam Cullen; The Flip Side is a breezy rom-com about a budding chef and a British actor; Undertow is a tense and moving female-led...

The Cannes’ Film Market – in co-operation with the Fantasia International Film Festival will, for the third year, present the Frontières Platform for genre film projects and works in progress, running May 18-19.

Over the two days, Cannes Film Market will host two platforms for the 14 selected productions: Proof of Concept presentations for those still in financing stages, and a Buyers Showcase for films in post-production or recently completed.

Six features will participate in this year’s Buyer’s Showcase, where representatives will screen footage to sales agents, distributors and festival programmers. Meanwhile, eight projects which participated in the Frontières Finance & Packaging Forum in Helsinki this past February will offer up teasers at the Proof of Concept Presentations.

This year the event will also give out two new awards, the Frontières Warner Music Supervision Award and the Frontières Post Control VFX Boost Award.

“We can’t wait to introduce this year...

Sophie Harper.

Former Screen Australia and Australian Film Commission executive Sophie Harper has joined Screen Canberra as senior manager, overseeing the $5 million Cbr Screen Fund.

Launched last year, the fund has given conditional approval to five projects with $610,000 in combined funding.

The first three were writer-director Tony D’Aquino’s debut feature The Furies, Kim Beamish’s feature documentary Family and the Blackfella Films/ABC drama series Black B*tch.

The latest beneficiaries are WildBear Entertainment’s Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks, a feature doc which profiles the filmmaker Shaw Brothers who paved the way for the boom of the Kung fu film movement; and Scarlet Five Films’ One Eight Zero.

The latter is a female-driven drama/romance/thriller from rookie writer-director Denai Gracie, which centres on an elite show jump rider whose world is upended when her leg is amputated after a car accident.

The plot follows the...

‘Maybe Tomorrow’.

A comedy drama that depicts the juggle of filmmaking and parenthood, Maybe Tomorrow, took home the prize for best independent film at the Gold Coast Film Festival yesterday evening.

Judged by members of the Australian Film Critics Association, the Blackmagic Design Best Australian Independent Film Award gifts Melbourne directors Caitlin Farrugia and Michael Jones $10,000 worth of Blackmagic equipment and software.

Other films nominated in the category, which recognises features made without significant screen agency funding, were Heath Davis’ Locusts, Tony D’Aquino’s The Furies and Imogen Thomas’ Emu Runner.

Maybe Tomorrow, which stars Tegan Crowley and Vateresio Tuikaba as new parents making a self-funded feature film, makes its world premiere at Gold Coast Film Festival this evening.

Farrugia and Jones were presented the award at the Gcff’s inaugural Screen Industry Gala Awards, held at Movie World.

The night also saw actress Sigrid Thornton presented the Chauvel Award,...

Tagline: "Stay Alive or Die Trying." The Furies is the debut feature from director Tony D'Aquino. Previously titled Killer Instinct, this title hopes to reinvigorate the '80s style of slasher films. In the story, seven girls are forced to take part in a game, with seven masked killers. Alone and confused, Kayla (Airlie Dodds) must find a way out of this twisted deathmatch. This title also stars: Linda Ngo (Top of the Lake), Taylor Ferguson (Strangerland) and Ebony Vagulans. As well, The Furies will have its World Premiere at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in early April. The Australian premiere, in which the film was shot, takes place in mid-April - at the Horror in the Hinterland Film Festival. All of the available details on The Furies are hosted here. A trailer has not been released for the film. However, a number of images have shown some of...

Guadalajara, Mexico — Chile came into this year’s Guadalajara Intl. Film Festival (Ficg) as the guest country of honor. Once here, Luis Alejandro Pérez García’s “Piola” stomped around the Guadalajara Construye Works in Progress section like it owned the place, snatching up six of a possible 13 prizes.

After the success of Juan Caceres’ “Perro Bomba” in the same competition last year – the film scored four awards – perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that another Chilean feature would perform so well this time around.

“Piola” turns on the chance interaction between three young people in moments that would be recognizable to teenagers the world around. Martin’s family is moving and he can’t be bothered to involve himself. Sol is searching for her lost dog and dealing with an unrequited romance. And Charly can’t handle his miserable job and the stresses of teenage fatherhood.

The impressive...

Cult favorite Samuel Fuller explodes the mid-range Hollywood oater with elements we can all appreciate: a ritualistic fetishizing of the gunslinger ethos, and a reliance on kinky role reversals and provocative tease dialogue. It’s as radical as a western can be without becoming a satire. Playing it all perfectly crooked-straight is the still formidable Barbara Stanwyck. Her black-clad ‘woman with a whip’ keeps a full forty gunmen to enforce her will on a one-lady town.

Forty Guns

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 954

1957 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 80 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 11, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger, John Ericson, Gene Barry, Eve Brent, Robert Dix, Jidge Carroll, Paul Dubov, Gerald Milton, Ziva Rodann, Hank Worden, Neyle Morrow, Chuck Roberson, Chuck Hayward.

Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc

Film Editor: Gene Fowler Jr.

Original Music: Harry Sukman

Produced, Written and Directed by Samuel Fuller

Was there ever a...

In today’s film news roundup, the “Toy Story 4” writer signs for abortion movie “This Is Jane,” Viggo Mortensen-Masershala Ali’s “Green Book” is honored in Denver and the WGA West names its feature access honorees.

Writing Deal

Amazon Studios is moving ahead with its Michelle Williams underground abortion movie “This Is Jane,” and has signed “Toy Story 4” screenwriter Stephany Folsom to write the script, Variety has learned exclusively.

Williams came on board to star in May. “Boys Don’t Cry” director Kimberly Peirce is helming “This Is Jane,” which is backed by John Lesher’s Le Grisbi Productions. Lesher and Peter Heller are producing.

The project is based on Laura Kaplan’s book “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” which follows women who provided abortion services in the years before 1973’s Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. Kaplan, who...

Two minorities, one woman and three writers age 60 and older are this year’s honorees for the WGA West’s Feature Writer Access Project, the guild’s screenwriting program for women, minority, disabled, older and Lgbtq+ writers.

Now in its sixth year, the program seeks to identify outstanding historically underrepresented writers and make their scripts available to entertainment industry decision-makers — including producers, studio executives, agents and managers — to help raise their profiles and generate potential employment opportunities.

This year’s honorees and their screenplays are:

Tara Atashgah – Under the Olive Tree

Bob Bridges – Khuska the Humble

Willie J. Hagan – The Furies

Joanna Philbin – Go Your Own Way

Peter Silverman – Herta Mansbacher

Garret Williams – Lost Dog

As part of the program, the guild hosts a series of workshops covering industry topics such as how to pitch themselves and an evening with screenwriter Michael Golamco (Please Stand By), as well as meet-and-greet mixers with development executives,...

From the producer of the Sundance hit Killing Ground, Odin’s Eye is bringing The Furies to the forthcoming Afm in Santa Monica. Bloody Disgusting has the updated sales art to go along with a look at some guests attending the market: Pigface, Skincrow and Rotface. The Furies is described as “a gripping female-driven horror film that burrows into universal themes of […]...

‘Wheely.’

Odin’s Eye Animation is launching Wheely, a computer-animated action comedy produced by South-East Asia’s Kartun Studios in Australian cinemas next month, kicking off a plan to release three to four titles each year.

The initiative by the sister company of Odin’s Eye Entertainment is counter-cyclical while most indie distributors are trimming their release slates.

“We’ve found there is room in the marketplace for a strategy such as ours,” says Martin Gallery, Odin’s Eye Entertainment head of international sales and distribution.

“We’re focusing on super-commercial, studio quality animated features. The only way audiences would notice they’re indie films would be the lack of a major studio’s logo at the start. No one cares how the film was financed as long as it’s polished, accessible and tells a good, fast-paced story. We do our research and only acquire titles that are as close as possible to a no-brainer.

Tony D’Aquino and Garry Richards. (Photo credit: James Foulds)

Writer-director Tony D’Aquino’s debut feature The Furies, feature documentary Family from director Kim Beamish and a presently untitled six-part drama from Blackfella Films/the ABC are the first three projects to be supported by Screen Canberra’s Cbr Screen Fund.

First announced in June, the $5 million fund is aimed at boosting the local sector in the Act, as well as attracting projects that lift Canberra’s international profile. It is the first dedicated fund Screen Canberra has had for three years, and the funding can go towards late stage development (with market attachment); equity, debt and structured funding; P&A funding or enterprise funding.

Both The Furies, which shot earlier this year, and Family are from Act-based practitioners. The Furies was developed through Screen Canberra’s Accelerator Pod initiative, a collaboration with The Film Distillery and sales agent Odin’s Eye Entertainment.

Jason from Mnpp here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" for you people to vote yourselves silly with -- did you know that today would have been the 51st birthday of the great Philip Seymour Hoffman? He's been gone over four years now and I ache to think of all the performances we've missed out on. No I wouldn't have given him that Oscar over Heath Ledger either, but he wasn't even nominated for the greatest film of the past two decades (that would be Synecdoche New York) so the injustices, they pile up.

But we're here to talk about another film, one I have come hard around on since its release - I was cool to Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in 2012 but my affection for it has grown with time; I'm pretty keen on it now, with its medicinal greens and hard elbows. It's only right, it...

Ya know, “It’s a Big Country!” Westerns and pacifism are like oil and water, but William Wyler, Jessamyn West and three other top writers found a way for Gregory Peck to surmount eight showdowns and never fire a pistol in anger. Jean Simmons and Charlton Heston win top acting honors, while Burl Ives earns his Oscar, Carroll Baker gets the thankless role and composer Jerome Moross makes western music history. MGM’s remastering job fixes the problems of an earlier Blu-ray, and even brings the title sequence up to tip top condition. Plus several hours of special extras.

The Big Country

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 166 min. / Street Date June 5, 2018 / 60th Anniversary Edition / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives, Charles Bickford, Alfonso Bedoya, Chuck Connors, Chuck Hayward, Dorothy Adams, Chuck Roberson.

Cinematography: Franz F. Planer

Film Editor: Robert Swink...

If, within art cinema, there comes the instant gravitation to less the film than the name — the all-powerful auteur that supposedly doesn’t have to bow down to corporate masters — then even with a film as immediately striking as 1976’s Insiang, we begin with its author, Lino Brocka. Even in a life cut tragically short, he left enough of a mark to still be considered the Philippines’ greatest filmmaker, amongst his laurels being the nation’s first director to play in competition at Cannes. A particular association made with him was an outspoken criticism of the Philippines’ dictator-in-chief, Ferdinand Marcos.

But carrying that expectation over to Insiang, even without one mention of Marcos’ name throughout the film, the presence of both a fundamentally rotten authority and people left to fend for themselves in poverty leans a viewer, even the uninformed, towards assuming a greater institutional critique. Yet to quickly sum...

Director Edward Dmytryk, one of the infamous Hollywood Ten blacklisted by McCarthy and his goons in 1947 Hollywood, debuted the most famous title in his filmography seven years later with war drama The Caine Mutiny. That very same year, in fact, only about a month later, he would premiere another title, a robust 1880s set Western starring Spencer Tracy, a title which would also win Oscar glory. Overshadowed by the popularity of Caine, however, the film seems to have disappeared from contemporary discussions of Dmytryk’s work (never able to divorce himself from his eventual testimony in front of Huac), a shame considering it’s a gripping, framed familial saga of intergenerational misunderstandings, racial hang-ups, and eventually even a court-room drama.

Young Joe Devereaux (Robert Wagner) is released from serving a three year prison sentence and immediately returns to his abandoned familial homestead to wreak vengeance on those who wronged him.

Edward Dmytryk's big-scale cattle empire saga sees paterfamilias Spencer Tracy drive away his sons and bull his way into a modern civil dispute that can't be resolved with force. Robert Wagner is the loyal son and Richard Widmark the resentful son impatient for Dad to cash in his chips. Fox's early CinemaScope and stereophonic sound western is a transposition of a film noir mystery thriller. Broken Lance Blu-ray Twilight Time Limited Edition 1954 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 96 min. / Ship Date November 10, 2015 / available through Twilight Time Movies / 29.95 Starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richard Widmark, Katy Jurado, Hugh O'Brian, Eduard Franz, Earl Holliman, E.G. Marshall, Carl Benton Reid, Philip Ober. Cinematography Joseph MacDonald Film Editor Dorothy Spencer Original Music Leigh Harline Written by Richard Murphy, Philip Yordan Produced by Sol C. Siegel Directed by Edward Dmytryk Reviewed by Glenn EricksonSome of the early 'big' westerns that aspire to epic status are...

Teresa Wright and Matt Damon in 'The Rainmaker' Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright vs. Samuel Goldwyn: Nasty Falling Out.") "I'd rather have luck than brains!" Teresa Wright was quoted as saying in the early 1950s. That's understandable, considering her post-Samuel Goldwyn choice of movie roles, some of which may have seemed promising on paper.[1] Wright was Marlon Brando's first Hollywood leading lady, but that didn't help her to bounce back following the very public spat with her former boss. After all, The Men was released before Elia Kazan's film version of A Streetcar Named Desire turned Brando into a major international star. Chances are that good film offers were scarce. After Wright's brief 1950 comeback, for the third time in less than a decade she would be gone from the big screen for more than a year.

Teresa Wright movies: Actress made Oscar history Teresa Wright, best remembered for her Oscar-winning performance in the World War II melodrama Mrs. Miniver and for her deceptively fragile, small-town heroine in Alfred Hitchcock's mystery-drama Shadow of a Doubt, died at age 86 ten years ago – on March 6, 2005. Throughout her nearly six-decade show business career, Wright was featured in nearly 30 films, dozens of television series and made-for-tv movies, and a whole array of stage productions. On the big screen, she played opposite some of the most important stars of the '40s and '50s. It's a long list, including Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Gary Cooper, Myrna Loy, Ray Milland, Fredric March, Jean Simmons, Marlon Brando, Dana Andrews, Lew Ayres, Cornel Wilde, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, Joseph Cotten, and David Niven. Also of note, Teresa Wright made Oscar history in the early '40s, when she was nominated for each of her first three movie roles.

Anthony Mann

As much as any other filmmaker who found a niche in a given genre, in the 10 Westerns Anthony Mann directed from 1950 to 1958 he carved out a place in film history as one who not only reveled in the conventions of that particular form, but also as one who imbued in it a distinct aesthetic and narrative approach. In doing so, Mann created Westerns that were simultaneously about the making of the West as a historical phenomenon, as well as about the making of its own developing cinematic genus. At the same time, he also established the traits that would define his auteur status, formal devices that lend his work the qualities of a director who enjoyed, understood, and readily exploited and manipulated a type of film's essential features.

Though he made several fine pictures outside the Western, Mann as an American auteur is most notably recognized for his work in this field,...

Dry-Eyed Narrative: Jared Moshe’s Western Exercise An Intriguing Effort

Producer Jared Moshe’s directorial debut, Dead Man’s Burden, is a mostly winsome procedure as an homage to the bare bones Western efforts of yore. While drawing easy comparisons to the output of John Ford, there’s definitely a touch of Anthony Mann in Moshe’s work, employing a slim film noir framework with a femme fatale that proves hell hath no fury like a dusty, blue-eyed lady whose lamps are fixated on greener pastures.

Set in 1870 New Mexico, immediately after the end of the Civil War, a young woman named Martha (Claire Bowen) blasts a man in the face with a rifle, who had been in the midst of fleeing on horseback. We come to learn that this man was her father when her prodigal brother, Wade (Barlow Jacobs), returns home, leery of facing the parent that vowed...

At the end of the 1950 film The Furies, the character T.C.—played by Walter Huston, one of the most popular and respected movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s—lays dying. With his final words—which also proved to be the last words that Huston himself would ever offer on the screen—T.C. tells his daughter, “And don’t you go naming my grandson T.C. It’s too big a bag for him to carry. He’ll have too much to live up to, ’cause there’ll never be another like me!” Like T.C.’s decscendants, Huston’s offspring also inherited a high

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"Dan Callahan's Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman is a serious book about a serious woman, less a biography of an actress than a biography of her career," writes Scott Eyman in the Wall Street Journal. "Mr Callahan follows her choices of roles and tries to capture what she was saying about herself through her acting. It was an astonishing career, whose impressive outlines only became clear in retrospect. Most actors want to be loved — it's the Achilles' heel of the profession — but Stanwyck seems to have been after something else: respect."

Introducing his interview with Dan Callahan at the L, Mark Asch notes that "Dan concludes that Stanwyck was the most open, raw, unshowy and affectless of the Golden Age movie queens, in both her performances and offscreen attitudes; he builds a compelling personal narrative out of her contradictions: her bootstrapping tough-broad self-sufficiency (this slum kid was a...

Filmmaker Curtis Harrington: 1926-2007.

Our Friend Curtis Harrington

by Jon Zelazny

Curtis Harrington was born in Los Angeles in 1926. He made short films as a teenager, graduated from USC, and began his Hollywood career in the 1950’s. By the end of the decade, he was directing: independent films, studio pictures, made-for-tv movies, and episodic TV. He completed his last short film in 2002, and died in 2007 at the age of 80.

I knew Curtis well in his final years, as did writer-producer Dennis Bartok, the former head programmer of L.A.’s famed American Cinematheque.

Dennis Bartok: I think the most interesting aspect of Curtis’s career is that he was really the only filmmaker to successfully transition from the avant-garde scene of the late 1940’s to directing Hollywood feature films. And when you see how distinctive his movies are, you wish he could’ve made more… but when you...

Anthony Mann spent much of the 1940s directing tough noirs and most of the 1950s directing psychologically complex Westerns. Set on and around a sprawling Arizona ranch, The Furies appears to fall squarely into the latter camp, but it's an untraditional Western even by Mann's tradition-pushing standards. One of four Mann movies released in 1950—three of them Westerns—it's less concerned with gunfighters and the settling of the frontier than with the persistence of wildness even after civilization has set in. Lorded over by T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston, in a memorable swan song), the eponymous cattle ranch dominates the land around it. Huston even has the power to issue his own currency—he calls his IOUs "TCs"—but some recall the less-than-friendly ways Huston conquered the land. Others, particularly a group of Hispanic squatters led by Gilbert Roland, suggest he never truly conquered the land at all. He's certainly never conquered his.