Notizie

Stars: Ravi Patel, Henry Haggard, Rashad Rayford, Laura Holloway, Quinnlan Ashe, Allison Shrum, Ted Welch, Schyler Tillett, Phillip Cordell | Written by Danny Dones, Phillip Cordell | Directed by Danny Dones

Welcome to the future, a future in which techbro Robert Nefari and his company, NefariCorp, control nearly every aspect of society, most notably the crucial sectors of cloning and law enforcement. If the film’s title hasn’t already made it clear, these two forces have become deeply intertwined. The man responsible for that is “One Tank” Frank and he’s just hired a new assistant Freddy.

Of course, every dystopian society needs an opposing force, and in this case, resistance comes in the form of a gang of outlaws fighting back against corporate dominance. This ragtag group consists of Porter, their leader Fera, the group’s firecracker, Cipher, a hacker with a mysterious past, Brick, a bruiser with a love of destruction,...

The stormy clouds outside the Palais might have dampened some spirits as the credits rolled on the opening night film of the 77th Cannes Film Festival. Or maybe it was the movie itself.

“The Second Act,” Quentin Dupieux’s talky French comedy about the making of the first movie directed by AI, mustered a lukewarm 3.5-minute standing ovation on Tuesday night in Cannes.

Dupieux attedned the premiere along with his French cast of Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon and Raphaël Quenard. The four actors all politely stood as a camera quickly passed by through the tepid applause.

In the meta film, these French stars play actors making a romantic comedy they know is pointless, as it’s the first movie written and directed by AI. In the opening scenes, we learn that Florence (Seydoux) wants to take things to the next level with David (Garrel), but he is no...

In France, the concept of irony is referred to as “deuxième degré” (second degree), where the “premier degré” is the literal or surface meaning, which can be twisted as audiences read an entirely different, often contrary meaning into the material. But the game doesn’t necessarily stop there. There is also “troisième degré,” “quatrième degré” and so on, as deep as you want to go.

For absurdist trickster Quentin Dupieux (whose films “Deerskin” and “Rubber” have found a cult following), “The Second Act” presents a frivolous fun-house mirror, in which actors Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon and Raphaël Quenard play actors playing actors in a pointless romantic comedy. They all know they’re making a bad movie, and one by one, they keep interrupting the shoot to air their personal grievances. But that’s only the beginning in a slender meta-textual doodle selected to kick off the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Two of France’s fastest-rising young stars, Lyna Khoudri and Rio Vega, will lead the French voice cast of animated feature “In Waves,” an unconditional first love story, and tale of loss and memories adapting American illustrator Aj Dungo’s same-titled multi-prized graphic novel.

An anticipated banner prestige animation title from Paris-based Silex Films, “In Waves” lead producer, the feature also marks the first animated co-production of both Anonymous Content and Charades, behind sales of Jeremy Clapin’s “I Lost My Body” and Mamoru Hosoda’s “Mirai,” both Oscar nominated titles.

In Waves is directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen, a former student of French animation schools Gobelins and La Poudrière who helmed episodes of the Silex-produced animated series “Brazen” and was Oscar-shortlisted for her short “My Home,” “In Waves” has just been announced as one of five titles at the Annecy Animation Showcase, part of Cannes’ Animation Day on May...

The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will kick off with Quentin Dupieux’s “The Second Act,” a star-studded surreal French comedy headlined by Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, Variety has learned.

The anticipated movie is produced by Hugo Selignac at Chi-Fou-Mi, a Mediawan company, and is represented in international markets by Kinology. The film will play out of competition on May 14 and will be released on the same day in French theaters.

Laced with absurdist humor, the meta movie follows actors starring in a doomed film production. Dupieux is one of France’s most popular and prolific filmmakers. He delivered two films in 2023: “Daaaaaalí,” which played out-of-competition at Venice, and “Yannick,” a French box office hit that sold around the world.

In confirming the film’s selection at Cannes, the festival described Quentin as a “filmmaker who embraces freedom – in tone, form and...

Over the past six years Quentin Dupieux has been working at Hong Sangsoo’s speed, churning out a film every few months. The streak kicked off in 2018 with the deranged police procedural Keep an Eye Out; since then the Frenchman’s trained his camera on a leather jacket with homicidal urges (2019’s Deerskin), an oversized fly-turned-bankable-pet (2020’s Mandibles), a married couple rewinding time through a tunnel in their new house (2022’s Incredible But True), and a team of leather-clad avengers ridding the world of monsters with the power of tobacco’s lethal substances (2022’s Smoking Causes Coughing). Tying these disparate projects isn’t just their director’s proclivity for the gonzo, but also a certain narrative economy. Dupieux––who’s written, directed, shot, and edited all his films since the 2010 breakthrough Rubber (in which a tire rolled through the U.S. on a killing spree)––likes to traffic in short,...

Exclusive: Greenwich Entertainment has acquired U.S. distribution rights to Pianoforte directed by Jakub Piatek (Prime Time).

The Telemark documentary premiered to good reviews at Sundance and Greenwich is planning to release on December 1.

Pianoforte follows an eclectic group of young musicians from around the world who have spent years preparing for the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland. In the coming-of-age portrait, director Piatek goes backstage to look at the highs and lows the musicians face.

Pic was produced by Maciej Kubicki (Kubrick by Kubrick). Greenwich’s Andy Bohn negotiated the acquisition with Submarine’s Matt Burke and Ben Schwartz on behalf of the filmmakers.

“We are excited to be working with Greenwich to bring this beautiful music and talented young artists to cinemas across the US,” said director Jakub Piatek.

Greenwich’s previous releases have included Oscar winner Free Solo, music doc Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)

Wes Anderson has done it all: India by train, Rhode Island by foot, the Mediterranean by sub, France by bike, faux-Germany by hotel, apple-orchard America by fox, animated Japan by dog, motel Texas by friends, New York City by family. But––despite the feeling that this couldn’t possibly be true––he’s never told a story in western America. In setting he hasn’t gone further west than Houston. Until Asteroid City: Arizona desert by quarantine. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: Peacock

Beatrix (Lilith Kraxner & Milena Czernovsky)

One of the best films in recent years––still without U.S. distribution––is streaming for free the next two weeks on Le Cinéma Club. It...

Sony starting latest ‘Insidious’ film, Picturehouse has ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ for independents.

Elemental, the latest Disney-Pixar animation collaboration, is the widest opening title at this weekend’s UK-Ireland box office, which sees reduced location numbers due to the immediate closure of six sites in the Empire Cinemas chain.

The chain, which has 14 cinemas and 129 screens, is entering administration, with venues at Bishop’s Stortford, Catterick Garrison, Sunderland, Swindon, Walthamstow and Wigan all closing today.

Elemental will therefore start in 625 venues, down slightly from its anticipated number. Directed by Peter Sohn, Elemental is set in a city where fire, water, land...

Quentin Dupieux’s chaotic, bizarre film about a monster-fighting squad controlled by a rat named Didier will greatly annoy some, which is one of its strengths

Only a pedant and a bore would complain that the last word of that title should be “cancer”. The phrase’s childlike naivety and irrelevance, apparently taken from an obsolete era when smoking was considered bad in the sense that eating cream cakes was bad, is a hint of what you’re in for: a fantastically silly and magnificently inconsequential comedy from French film-maker and former DJ Quentin Dupieux. For the life of me, I can’t think of another director right now who wants (or is allowed) to do just straight comedy for theatrical release, without having to buy the right to do so by also being unfunnily dark and disturbing.

Dupieux has put together something chaotic, disparate, entirely negligible yet oddly gripping and also funny.

‘Yannick’ stars Pio Marmaï alongside Raphael Quenard, Blanche Gardin, Sébastien Chassagne and Agnès Hurstel.

France’s Quentin Dupieux has revealed that his upcoming film Yannick will be released in France on August 2, the latest in a marathon of titles from the prolific absurdist filmmaker.

Daaaaaal! producers Atelier de Production teamed with Smoking Causes Coughing co-producer Hugo Selignac’s Mediawan-owned Chi-Fou-Mi Productions and Dupieux for Yannick, which stars Pio Marmaï alongside Raphael Quenard, Blanche Gardin, Sébastien Chassagne and Agnès Hurstel.

Dupieux confirmed the release via Twitter on Wednesday (June 28). According to distributor Diaphana, the film is set “In the middle of...

Exclusive: Paris-based WTFilms has acquired international sales rights for thriller Hood Witch, the debut film of rising French director Saïd Belktibia, starring Golshifteh Farahani and Denis Lavant.

Iranian-French actress and activist Farahani (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No) plays a woman who makes a living smuggling exotic animals and illicit products.

She branches out with the creation of a mobile App that connects clients with mystical marabout healers, but when a user’s consultation takes a tragic turn she finds her facing a violent backlash that could cost her and her son their lives.

The thriller is produced by Iconoclast and Les Misérables director Lady Ly’s Lyly Films.

Iconoclast’s recent credits include Romain Gavras’s Netflix original Athena, which debuted in Venice last year. The company is in Cannes this year as a producer on the Midnight Screening title The King Of Algiers.

“Saïd Belktibia is...

Editor’s note: Last year at Berlinale, Rory O’Connor caught up with Quentin Dupieux who was there to premiere Incredible But True, which would go on to be the first of two features of 2022, the latter of which was the Cannes premiere Smoking Causes Coughing. With both films now available stateside, we’re sharing the conversation.

It’s early afternoon in Berlin, crisp and cold, the kind of February day you always seem to get around the Berlinale. The festival cautiously returned in 2022 to a live, in-person event after going online, like so many others, in 2021, and had reopened its doors earlier with Peter Von Kant, the latest from François Ozon, a reimagining of the Fassbinder classic that had itself premiered at the same festival almost exactly a half-century before.

The director we’d come to talk to is not so fond of reimagining. Premiering in the Berlinale Special, Incredible...

Exclusive: Specialized police units are coming under increased scrutiny after the death in Memphis of Tyre Nichols, who was allegedly beaten to death by five officers of that city’s Scorpion street crime outfit.

Baltimore and its scandal-plagued Gun Trace Task Force comes into focus in the documentary I Got A Monster, the feature directorial debut of Kevin Abrams. Greenwich Entertainment has just secured North American distribution rights for the film, with plans to release it in theaters and on home video on March 10. The documentary from Alpine Labs is based on the acclaimed book I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad written by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg.

Abrams’ film “retells in highly dramatic fashion one of the nation’s biggest police corruption scandals,” Greenwich Entertainment said in a release. “In 2017, Baltimore was rocked by the federal indictment of Wayne Jenkins,...

Independent film distributor Greenwich Entertainment has acquired North American distribution rights to documentary feature “Hockeyland.”

Directed by Tommy Haines (“Saving Brinton”), the film follows rival high school hockey teams in Minnesota’s North Country, one of the breeding grounds for hockey greats who go onto to collegiate and professional play, including the National Hockey League (NHL). Fast on-ice action is paired with an observational approach to examine two communities and their teen heroes through debilitating injuries, off-ice troubles, family health concerns, and the expectations of being a future star in the NHL.

“Hockeyland” is produced by Tommy Haines, Andrew Sherburne, and J.T. Haines, executive produced by Carson Kipfer and is a production of Northland Films, a Midwest-based nonfiction film company. The film has played leading documentary film festivals including Doc NYC, Big Sky, Seattle, Milwaukee and RiverRun.

Greenwich co-president Ed Arentz said: “Tommy and Andrew are Minnesota natives and as...

Quentin Dupieux’s film debuted out of Competition.

Picturehouse Entertainment has made Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing its latest Cannes 2022 acquisition, buying UK-Ireland rights for the out of Competition title.

Smoking Causes Coughing debuted as a Midnight screening on the Croisette; it is sold by France’s Gaumont.

The film follows a team of five avengers known as the Tobacco Force. After a devastating battle against a diabolical turtle, they are sent on a retreat to strengthen their cohesion, which goes well until Lezardin, Emperor of Evil, decides to annihilate planet Earth.

Gilles Lelouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anais Demoustier, Jean-Pascal Zadi and Oulaya Amamra star.

The films of French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux are at their best when they combine his penchant for ludicrous but simple what-if scenarios, with his perceptive eye for humor in everyday life and banal interactions. He would probably hate his cinema to be pinned down in this way: though he has proven that he can subscribe to straightforward storytelling with “Deerskin” (which premieres at Cannes in 2019) and “Incredible But True” (Berlinale 2022), the French director and absurdist also enjoys leaving the demands of logical plot developments behind in favor of a freer style.

Continue reading ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ Review: Quentin Dupieux Returns With A Zany Horror Anthology [Cannes] at The Playlist.

It’s no mere coincidence that Adèle Haenel hasn’t made a movie since 2019’s trio of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Deerskin, and Heroes Don’t Die. While the French actor was attached to star in Bruno Dumont’s forthcoming sci-fi feature, she’s now opened up about why she quit the project and her reasons for stepping back from making movies altogether.

“I don’t make films anymore,” said Haenel in a new interview with the German magazine Faq. When asked why, she added, “Because of political reasons. Because the film industry is absolutely reactionary, racist, and patriarchal. We are mistaken if we say that the powerful are of goodwill, that the world is indeed moving in the right direction under their good and sometimes unskillful management. Not at all. The only thing that moves society structurally is social struggle. And it seems to me that in my case,...

Handling writing, directing, editing, and cinematography duties on all his films — all while maintaining a parallel career in the music business — Quentin Dupieux has become the arthouse’s most reliable purveyor of artisanally-produced, small-batch surrealism, showing up at one of the major festivals nearly every year for another bit of deadpan fun.

From 2010’s “Rubber,” which followed a killer tire, to 2019’s “Deerskin,” which followed a killer jacket, to 2020’s “Mandibles,” which followed a more-benevolent-but-unsettlingly-giant fly, Dupieux’s modus operandi has never really changed, with each new film enacting the same experiment to see just how far a single absurdist premise can travel. And if “Incredible but True” (running time: 74 minutes) fits neatly within that overall filmography, it also builds on the uncommon tenderness that made “Mandibles” stand out to rather delightful effect.

Mind you, sweetness is something of a new flavor for Dupieux, who launched his career with 2001’s...

Beauty Secrets: Dupieux Latest a Strangely Tragic Fable on Human Foibles

The films of Quentin Dupieux, a prolific Belgian director who has spent most of the last decade using absurdity to poke at social mores and play with convention, are often so silly they are (sometimes mistakenly) brilliant. But even at his most frivolous (such as 2019’s Deerskin – read review), there’s something always innately charming about his notable ensembles, with actors seeming to relish playing straight-faced kooks. His latest in a rash of increasingly prolific output is Incroyable Mais Vrai (Incredible But True), a mere wisp of a film at seventy-four minutes, and yet, perhaps Dupieux’s most level headed and cohesive narrative to date.…...

Everyone knows that rule No. 1 in movies — especially, but not exclusively, horror movies — is that nobody should ever go down to a basement. Not long into Quentin Dupieux’s snappy little entertainment Incredible But True, premiering as a Berlinale Special Gala at the Berlin Film Festival, a couple inspecting a house for sale is invited to descend to what the ferrety agent promises is the jewel of the property. “Oh no,” says Marie (Léa Drucker), “we’re not basement people.”

And that’s the last sensible thing she’ll say — because, of course, she and her dependable husband Alain (Alain Chabat) do what the agent tells them. Down to the basement they go. There is a trapdoor, a ladder underneath it disappears into darkness. Down again. They could never have predicted that what they discover at the bottom of that ladder will obsess Marie to the point of madness.

Alain,...

It has probably come to your attention that time has gone all squirrelly recently. Every day we wake, 40 years older than yesterday, yet also in a state of suspended animation, all development arrested. An instant can last an eon, and yet in the time it takes for a tap to drip, our page-a-day calendars have somehow riffled whole months away into the wind. It certainly hasn’t escaped Quentin Dupieux’s notice, and somehow, in between the dripping taps and toppling civilizations of this pandemic, he’s made a whole film about it.

Admittedly, at 74 minutes, with the limited cast and locations now typical of corona-restricted shoots, the charmingly eccentric “Incredible but True” at first seems even more of a doodle than 2020’s eccentrically charming “Mandibles” or 2019’s “Deerskin,” which was quite the charmer in its eccentricity. But Dupieux has always created mini-universes in which his deadpan-doofus characters can pinball...

Giddy comedy about middle-aged house hunters who find more in a bargain buy than anyone but director Quentin Dupieux could have dreamed

Those who have seen Quentin Dupieux’s strange comedy Deerskin, with Jean Dujardin as a murderous would-be cinéaste obsessed with the sartorial superiority of his fringed deerskin jacket, or any of the film-maker’s other wacky adventures, will have an idea what to expect of this latest romp. They may also be justifiably unsure whether to find his movies irresistible or insufferable. I am still undecided in some ways. Incredible But True has a wacky premise that Dupieux very possibly had no idea how to develop. And yet I found myself laughing quite a lot of the time. The sheer silliness and zen pointlessness is entertaining. It’s a film with something of Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze or early Woody Allen, mixed with a French version of the Carry Ons.

In Being John Malkovich, an entire half-hour passes by before John Cusack’s hangdog puppeteer peaks behind his filing cabinet and finds a tunnel to another man’s brain. Incredible But True––another film about a tunnel and likely oblivion––is directed by Quentin Dupieux, a French filmmaker whose absurdist tendencies would rival even Charlie Kaufman’s. He is also better-known for his brevity. Dupieux’s two most recent films (Deerskin and Mandibles), both clocked in at less than 80 minutes. (They were also his best.) Realité, his most indulgent, asks only for 95.

Dupieux’s popularity on the festival circuit can be tied to that succinctness as much as his auteur credentials and uncanny sense of humor. His latest, another rough absurdist gem, goes one further in offering a playful, compelling twist on an enduring sc-fi trope. There is also some uneasy gender stereotyping. There is also what one medical practitioner refers to as an “iPenis.

It is Dupieux’s tenth feature after comedy Mandibles, which had a buzzy premiere at Venice in 2020.

Screen can reveal the first trailer for French director Quentin Dupieux’s new film Incredible But True ahead of its world premiere at the Berlinale as a special gala screening on Friday (Feb 11).

The comedy reunites Dupieux with French star Alain Chabat, who previously appeared in the director’s 2014 film Réalité. He co-stars opposite Léa Drucker as a couple who move to a quiet suburb and then find a mysterious tunnel in the cellar of their new home that turns their lives upside down.

Keep track of when films are coming out in the territory.

Cinemas in the UK and Ireland are set to reopen this spring, following months of closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Screen is listing the release dates for films in the territory in the calendar below. For distributors who wish to add/amend a date on the calendar, please get in touch with Screen here.

Indoor cinemas in England and Scotland will be allowed to reopen from May 17; with dates yet to be confirmed for Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Screen is also tracking reopening dates of cinemas in...

Takings for the top five titles down 25 percent despite three new openers.

Rank Film (Distributor) Three-day gross (July 16-18) Total gross to date Week 1 Black Widow (Disney) £1.8m £11.2m 2 2 Space Jam: A New Legacy (Warner Bros) £1.4m £1.4m 1 3 The Forever Purge (Universal) £702,000 £720,000 1 4 The Croods 2: A New Age (Universal) £696,000 £696,000 1 5 Fast & Furious 9 (Universal) £446,000 £14.2m 4

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.37

Marvel’s latest superhero blockbuster Black Widow held top spot at the UK-Ireland box office for a second successive session, on a weekend when hot weather across much of the territory limited box office takings.

Black Widow fell 61% on its opening session for distributor Disney,...

There's a playful confidence to Quentin Dupieux's Deerskin, which is perhaps no surprise given that the French writer/director and sometime electro musician has previously got decent mileage from a killer tyre (Rubber) and would continue in similar vein with outsize bug flick Mandibles. The director proves a master of the tragicomic as he observes one man's slip from midlife crisis to madness by way of obsession.

In this case, the object that holds the narrative focus is what Georges (Jean Dujardin) considers to be a jacket with "killer style" - a phrase that will, like so many pieces of cursed clothing from Hans Christian Andersen's red shoes to the red dress in Peter Strickland's In Fabric, take on the full double meaning during the course of this film. The jacket is a distinctive, if outdated, fringed, suede affair, made from Bambi's relative, of course, that could have moseyed on in from.

Sequels hold sway at this weekend’s box office.

Animation-live action hybrid Space Jam: A New Legacy leads the new titles at the UK-Ireland box office this weekend, released by Warner Bros.

The film is a sequel to Space Jam, released in 1997 in the territory; this edition stars basketball star LeBron James as a fictionalised version of himself, as he teams up with the Looney Tunes to win a match against digitised champions, to rescue his son from a rogue AI program.

The first film opened to £1.5m from 366 locations, going on to gross £11.7m – a strong result for a mid-90s release.

The cult director talks about his first UK release – about a man’s obsession with a cowboy jacket – surreal dreams, and why he won’t kill off Flat Eric, the yellow puppet that launched his career

The name “Quentin” clearly operates as a lucky charm if you’re an idiosyncratic film-maker, especially if you deal with sudden death, craziness and Z-movie Americana. But only one Quentin – the French one, the weirder one – can these days genuinely be called a cult director. Quentin Dupieux’s films are admired, even loved, in France; puzzled over in the US; and as yet, largely unknown in the UK. That may change with the arrival of Deerskin (2019), his first theatrical release in Britain. It’s about that most universal of themes: a man’s morbidly, even murderously obsessive passion for a cowboy jacket.

Starring French box-office fixture Jean Dujardin (The Artist) and respected art-house regular...

If you’re a fan of absurd, offbeat filmmaking, you definitely should already know about the work of French filmmaker, Quentin Dupieux. The writer-director has spent his entire career taking strange concepts and ludicrous characters and making it all work in features such as “Rubber,” “Wrong,” “Reality,” and the recent “Deerskin.” But “Mandibles” takes his trademark surrealism and adds slightly new layers.

Continue reading ‘Mandibles’ Trailer: Quentin Dupieux Shows His More Playful Side In Yet Another Absurd, Offbeat Film at The Playlist.

Quentin Dupieux, also known in some circles by his musical stage name of Mr. Oizo, has a cult following for his deadpan, dry-as-a-bone comedies about oddball corners of humanity. They’ve so far included films like “Rubber,” “Reality,” and most recently “Deerskin.” Now he’s back with “Mandibles,” a droll lowlife comedy about two simple-minded friends who discover a giant fly in the trunk of a car and decide to domesticate it to earn money. Watch the trailer for the film below.

The cast includes Gregoire Ludig, David Marsais, Adele Exarchopoulos (in a reportedly scene-stealing role as a brain-damaged woman who can only speak at screaming volume), India Hair, Romeo Elvis, Coralie Russier, and Bruno Lochet. Dupieux also wrote the film in addition to directing it.

“Mandibles” first premiered at the Venice Film Festival back in September of 2020. This was followed by runs at Sitges Catalonia, Busan, Thessaloniki, and Rotterdam.

"I need more action. I need more blood." The very last country to debut this film years after its premiere. Picturehouse Entertainment has debuted one final UK trailer for the wacky, weird, killer film from French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux titled Deerskin. This originally premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 in Directors' Fortnight, and already opened last year in the US. The film stars Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin as a man who loves his new deerskin jacket. Maybe a bit too much. His obsession with this special jacket causes him to blow his life savings and turn to crime. And snuff films? The cast includes Adèle Haenel, Albert Delpy, Coralie Russier, Laurent Nicolas, and Pierre Gommé. Even though we've seen plenty of trailers, this poster for the film might just be the best one yet. View below. Here's the official UK trailer (+ quad UK poster) for Quentin Dupieux's Deerskin, direct from...

In the pantheon of love-them-or-hate-them auteurs, Quentin Dupieux resides somewhere in the middle — neither as provocative as a Gaspar Noé nor as clever in his absurdity as a Yorgos Lanthimos. His latest, “Keep an Eye Out,” isn’t actually his latest: Distributed abroad three years ago, its stateside release follows those of 2019’s “Deerskin” and last year’s “Mandibles.” Devotees of the French filmmaker (who also goes by Mr. Oizo) may find “Keep an Eye Out” worth the wait, but anyone not already on board with Dupieux’s brand of offbeat humor and forays into the surreal can safely ignore the title’s advice.

The film begins with a speedo-clad man conducting an open-air orchestra and continues at the same bizarre pace for all 73 minutes of its scant runtime, which is for the best — even those with an affinity for this kind of outré offering would concede that a little goes a long way.

Comedy co-stars Sara Forestier and Laetitia Dosch.

Paris-based sales company Playtime will launch sales on the French graphic novelist and illustrator Nine Antico’s feature debut comedy Playlist at this year’s Unifrance Rendez-vous with Cinema, which officially kicks off online on Wednesday and runs until January 15.

Sara Forestier plays a talented graphic artist whose life begins to unravel when she falls pregnant just as she lands a job at a prestigious Parisian publisher.

When she breaks the news to her boyfriend, everything explodes, and they break-up. The turn of events results in her returning to her old job of...

Now in post-production, this Ciné@ film distributed by Universal sees Jean Dujardin and Grégory Gadebois step into lead roles as Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. The only former presidents of the French Republic who are still alive today, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande will find themselves re-incarnated on the big screen in Présidents, Anne Fontaine’s 18th feature film, on which filming wrapped towards the end of November. Jean Dujardin is stepping into the shoes of Nicolas Sarkozy, while Grégory Gadebois (nominated for the 2014 Best Actor César via One of a Kind, as...

It’s funny to think that streaming services like Netflix didn’t bother creating posters for their original work a few years back knowing they’d never have to contend with competition at the local multiplex. Slowly but surely they began doing a few here or there before steadily growing to the point where it seemed they enjoyed being able to embrace out-of-the-box designs for the same reasons they avoided the process altogether.

Now we’re at the end of a calendar to forget that saw a majority of theaters shuttered for nine straight months to make it so streamers became king. Big studios pushed titles out of 2020 altogether, small studios went virtual, and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, et al. watched subscriptions soar. Suddenly their digital multiplex formed the playground for cinematic competition and the continued creativity of poster design found itself working at the top of its game just like always.

Sean Durkin’s drama stars Jude Law and Carrie Coon.

Picturehouse Entertainment has secured UK distribution rights to Sean Durkin’s The Nest from US outfit FilmNation Entertainment, strengthening its slate of upcoming awards buzz titles.

The romantic drama, starring Jude Law and Carrie Coon, debuted at Sundance and went on to pick up a hat-trick of awards at the Deauville Film Festival. Picturehouse plans to release in 2021 but has yet to set a date.

Durkin’s second feature, after Martha Marcy May Marlene in 2011, explores how life for an entrepreneur and his American family begins to take a twisted...

Last weekend, the 2020 Nightstream Film Festival offered genre fans a ton of amazing online offerings to enjoy throughout its four-day festivities. Here’s a look at two of the films I had the opportunity to check out during Nightstream: Mandibles from Quentin Dupieux and Mickey Reece’s Climate of the Hunter.

Mandibles: While I haven’t had the opportunity to check out Deerskin just yet (which also began making the festival rounds), as a big fan of his work on the blissfully absurd Rubber, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was going to enjoy Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles immensely, and it did not disappoint. Made in the same spirit of all those slapstick ’80s comedies of errors that so many of us grew up loving, Mandibles is a delightfully offbeat tale of two friends who come across a giant oversized fly and set out to domesticate it in...

Get ready for spooky season with HBO Max. The streamer launched "Halloween is Here," a spotlight page bringing together all your favorite spooky, scary, chilling and thrilling Halloween films and series for easy streaming. The "Halloween is Here" page will be available on HBO Max for the entire month of October, featuring a rotating roster of movies, series and Halloween-themed TV episodes, hand-picked by HBO Max's dedicated editorial team and grouped in themes like Terrifying TV, Scares for All Ages, Foreign Frights and Creepy Cult Classics. HBO Max will boast over 140 curated movies and episodes, coming to over 300 hours of Halloween related programming on any given day to keep you entertained all month long.

Hit horror movies you won't want to stream alone like The Invisible Man, Us, It: Chapter 2, and Doctor Sleep, creepy cult classics Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead and Scanners, and psychological thrillers like The Haunting,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

12 Hour Shift (Brea Grant)

Any professional dealing with routine levels of stress and trauma is bound to develop a morbid sense of humor–and the funny horror-comedy 12 Hour Shift might become a cult classic amongst nurses. Written and directed by Brea Grant and set in a small rural hospital in Arkansas in 1999, the film finds cynical ER nurse Mandy (Angela Bettis) about to start what she thinks is a routine twelve-hour shift. Her definition of routine involves a scheme to poison patients with bleach while shift supervisor Karen (Nikea Gamby-Turner) harvests their organs for a local black market dealer. Things don’t go as planned when Mandy’s cousin by marriage,...

HBO Max is out with its list of everything new coming to the streaming service in October and everything leaving at the end of the month.

The list includes HBO Originals like the limited series “The Undoing” starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, out Oct. 25, and David Byrne’s “American Utopia” special event about Byrne’s Broadway show that electrified audiences, out Oct. 17.

There is also Nathan Fielder’s comedic docuseries “How To With John Wilson,” out Oct. 23, and the first season finale of “Lovecraft Country” on Oct. 18.

Among the things leaving at the end of the month are “Amelie,” “Ocean’s 11,” “V For Vendetta,” “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”

Read the full list here:

Oct. 1

A World of Calm, Documentary Series Premiere

Akeelah And The Bee, 2006 (HBO)

All-Star Superman, 2011

American Dynasties: The Kennedys, 2018

American Reunion, 2012 (HBO)

Analyze That,...

The film co-stars French comedy duo Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais.

Paris-based Wild Bunch International (Wbi) and WTFilms have tied up a raft of deals on French director Quentin Dupieux’s surreal comedy road movie Mandibles, following its buzzy out of competition world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The film has sold to UK (Altitude), Germany (Koch Films), Italy (I Wonder Pictures) Switzerland (Praesens Film), Spain (Karma), Belgium (O’Brother Distribution), Norway (As Fidalgo), the Netherlands (Gusto Entertainment) and Brazil (Imovision).

As previously announced by Screen, Magnolia Pictures has snapped up US rights. The company previously released Dupieux’s 2010 feature...

Up next from Rubber, Keep an Eye Out and Deerskin director Quentin Dupieux is the bizarro comedy Mandibles, and today we’ve learned it’ll be released in 2021 via Magnolia Pictures. The company acquired domestic rights to the film. Used for comedic purposes rather than scary movie purposes, the film centers on a massive fly, described as a “wild and surreal […]...

It is generally not good critical form to lift a film’s publicity materials when writing about it, but the official logline for Quentin Dupieux’s “Mandibles” is such a masterpiece of the form that it merits quoting, and admiring, in full: “When simple-minded friends Jean-Gab and Manu find a giant fly trapped in the boot of a car, they decide to train it in the hope of making a ton of cash.” As well as a crisp precis of what the film is about — and let it be stressed that this 77-minute prank of a film about no more than that — it’s an ideal litmus test for its potential audience. If you merely think that sounds like the dumbest thing ever, walk on by. If you think that sounds like the dumbest thing ever and you absolutely have to see it, you won’t be remotely disappointed: “Mandibles...

What do two idiots, one giant fly, and Adèle Exarchopoulos have in common? Absolutely nothing! Except for a desire to eat good food and enjoy themselves in the summer sun. Mandibules is the latest creation from wacky French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux and it's an amusing, lighthearted, unquestionably enjoyable film about uh, two idiots, one giant fly, and Adèle Exarchopoulos. It's super weird, super French, buddy comedy ridiculousness. But that's the magic of Quentin Dupieux - he makes entirely original and entirely entertaining films. And this one clocks in at only 77 minutes, which is both just long enough, and also not long enough. You'll see what I mean once you watch it, because just as it's getting real good, it's over. Then again, better to not ruin it when everything else is pretty much perfect. Written & directed by Quentin Dupieux (formerly known as "Mr. Oizo"), Mandibules introduces us to two bozos: Jean-Gab and Manu,...

It’s a truly daft idea, but Quentin Dupieux’s film about a pair of robbers who try to train a giant insect doesn’t quite go the distance

In the wild old days of the film festival circuit, directors, writers and hangers-on liked to end each day with drunken discussions about the movies they’d seen. They’d say what they’d liked and what they hadn’t, and the things they’d have done better if it was their story to tell. Occasionally, around the time the third bottle was brought out, they’d brainstorm daft ideas: the sort of idiotic, joke conceit that sounds great at 1am and less good the next morning when the hangover has kicked in. That culture is conspicuously absent from this year’s masked, distanced Venice. But incredibly, it appears that one of those wild notions has now fled the bar, taken shape and grown legs.

Between the tail end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, moviegoers had a high tolerance for pairs of male friends with more breezy optimism than brains. These dopey man-children included Wayne and Garth in “Wayne’s World”, Lloyd and Harry in “Dumb and Dumber”, and two happy-go-lucky doofuses called Bill and Ted, Jules and Vincent in “Pulp Fiction” (a more dangerous species of this genus), and “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” as the female alternative. The idiots played by Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott in “Dude, Where’s My Car?” killed off the trend in 2000 — temporarily, at least.

Now two such dumb chums return in a meandering and often hilarious lowlife comedy written, directed, shot, and edited by Quentin Dupieux, who made last year’s “Deerskin” with Jean Dujardin. . It lasts just 77 minutes, as “Deerskin” did, and one of its central characters is a horsefly the size of a Yorkshire Terrier.

Whacky road movie stars comedy duo Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais with Adèle Exarchopoulos in a supporting role.

Screen can reveal a first international trailer for French director Quentin Dupieux’s surreal comedy road movie Mandibles ahead of its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday (Sept 5).

French comedy duo Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais co-star as two goofy friends who find a giant fly trapped in their car boot and decide to train it as moneymaking venture. Adèle Exarchopoulos, Coralie Russier and India Hair as well as Belgian rapper and hip hop artist Romeo...

When Quentin Dupieux’s “Mandibles,” a buddy comedy about two bumbling dolts and a giant CGI bug, premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 5, the screening could mark a mainstream breakout moment for the idiosyncratic director, and reaffirm French genre filmmaking as a market draw.

Beginning with 2010’s “Rubber,” Dupieux’s absurdist, genre-tinged features have launched out of sidebars in Venice and Cannes, and have played the main slates in Sundance and Toronto; his last film, “Deerskin,” opened the Directors’ Fortnight last year. But his off-kilter style, marked by pitch-black humor and surreal shifts, has thus far limited his commercial footprint, keeping him a cult act both at home and on the international stage.

In France, the filmmaker has burnished and expanded his reputation by touring smaller, regional genre festivals with each new work, returning often to niche events in Sitges, Neuchâtel and Strasbourg. Those events,...