News

When we say “cinema is dead”, we don’t quite mean what Harmony Korine has in mind. Literally. The Gummo, Spring Breakers and Baby Invasion director would like to see a world where movies literally put directly into the minds’ of viewers. Wait, are they even viewers at that point?

Sitting down with Interview, Harmony Korine wondered, “How can you be inside of a film? You know what I mean? At some point, I would love to be able to transport the movies into your mind directly. You could just drink something or stare at something, and then you just transport a full emotion, a full ride or a character, into your imagination with no screen.”

Harmony Korine is far from being short on unique ideas, using the film medium to innovate in ways that may ultimately distant most viewers but may show worth with certain audiences. Take, for instance,...

Filmmaker Harmony Korine (“Spring Breakers”) has been well-established as leaning toward material that is specifically designed to shock and disturb audiences going back to films such as “Kids” (a cautionary tale set in NYC he wrote for Larry Clark) alongside subsequent directorial efforts “Gummo” and “Trash Humpers.” Korine’s latest pic, “Baby Invasion,” is set to combine the world of violent first-person shooter video games with the unnerving assistance of artificial intelligence to make the film.

Continue reading ‘Baby Invasion’ Trailer: Harmony Korine Enlists The Help Of A.I. For Bonkers New First-Person Shooter Film Featuring Mercenary Babies at The Playlist.

Drink you milk little kittens, Harris Dickinson has stepped into the Criterion Closet.

Hot off his sexy turn in Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller “Babygirl,” Dickinson still wasn’t able to get co-star Nicole Kidman off his mind as he selected a few Blu-rays to take home. In taking Gus Van Sant’s 1995 satire “To Die For” off the shelf, Dickinson was reminded of a scene that may draw certain parallels to his “Father Figure” moment in “Babygirl.”

“My favorite scene in this is when she’s videoing Joaquin and the other actors, and she’s saying, ‘Move your hips. Now let’s dance. Oh yeah. Come on, guys.’ And she’s trying to get them to move,” Dickinson said of Kidman’s work in the film. “And Joaquin Phoenix’s character is just, like, doing this crazy, like, out-of-time jive. But yeah, Nicole’s incredible in this. I love this film.

The Werner Herzog Foundation revealed at a recent ceremony in Munich that Canadian filmmaker Harley Chamandy will receive the 2024 Werner Herzog Film Prize for his feature “Allen Sunshine.”

The annual award, presented in collaboration with the Munich Film Museum, comes with a 5,000 euro prize. Herzog, in a statement, praised Chamandy’s work: “The Werner Herzog Foundation Prize in 2024 will go to Harley Chamandy for his film ‘Allen Sunshine.’ One of the foundation’s tasks is to promote young talent, and it is remarkable that Harley Chamandy took part in my first workshop for young filmmakers in Cuba when he was just 17 years old. At the age of 21, he made his subtle film, which has been awarded here.”

Herzog added, “The criteria for the award from my foundation are always innovation, courage, and initiative, and Harley Chamandy has demonstrated all of these. He already possesses a unique voice. Congratulations to him.

Harmony Korine's filmography has been characterized by themes of found family, social alienation, and dysfunctional relationships. All three can be found in his 2007 film Mister Lonely, which follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who finds an antidote to his loneliness in a Scottish commune made up of fellow celebrity impersonators. The film is much less abrasive than some of Korine's most (in)famous films. It isn't the postmodern indictment of youthful hedonism that is Spring Breakers, nor is it as intentionally repulsive as Gummo or Trash Humpers. Instead, it focuses on what it's like to want to be someone else and not being comfortable in your own skin. The film also has a thread of exploring fate, as well as the ramifications of cults and of social conditioning. Many of the characters in Mister Lonely lack substantial development, but it's clear that this is intentional, as they are...

The holidays are upon us, so whether you’re looking for film-related gifts or simply want to get for yourself some of the finest this year had to offer, we have a gift guide for you. Including must-have books on filmmaking, the best from the Criterion Collection and other home-video lines, subscriptions, magazines, music, and more, dive in below.

4K & Blu-ray Box Sets

There’s no better gift than an epic film collection, and 2024 was an embarrassment of riches thanks to a number of box sets. The king of them all, especially if you’re looking for a gift for a burgeoning cinephile, is Criterion’s massive CC40, collecting 40 landmark films form their 40-year history. It’s not the only stellar set from the company, of course, as I adored the essential Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978, Éric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène,...

Harmony Korine met photographer Larry Clark while he was still a teenage skater bumming about Greenwich Village in New York. Clark and Korine began talking, and Clark revealed that he wanted a screenplay, written with an authentic point of view, all about modern, largely unsupervised teens and the way they wrestle with the AIDS crisis. Korine was happy to participate, and wrote the screenplay for the highly controversial "Kids," released in 1995. "Kids" was dark and edgy at the time, as it was incredibly frank about the sex lives of high school students. Even today, opinions on the film are mixed. 

Korine, however, instantly became a new Enfant Terrible in the indie cinema world, and made his directorial debut in 1997 with "Gummo," a stylized poverty drama about a random assortment of oversexed and undereducated Ohioans recovering from a recent tornado. He followed that film with "julien donkey-boy" in 1999, which he made...

Harmony Korine’s new experiential work, Baby Invasion, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2024. Korine has long pushed boundaries as a director, from iconic films like Kids and Gummo to more experimental projects through his production company Edglrd. With Baby Invasion, he seeks to further challenge notions of what a film can be.

The film explores blurred lines between the real and virtual, centering on a violent video game that leaked online. Called Baby Invasion, the game puts players in control of home invaders who rob mansions wearing digitally imposed baby faces. According to the story, some users became so immersed that they started carrying out real-world crimes, livestreaming their actions.

Baby Invasion shifts between gameplay footage and scenes seemingly depicting these real incidents. But it’s never made exactly clear what is real and what is part of the game. Through it all, the experience...

Physical media culture is alive and thriving thanks to the home video tastemakers hailing everywhere from The Criterion Collection to Kino Lorber and the Warner Archive Collection. Each month, IndieWire highlights the best recent and upcoming Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K releases for cinephiles to own now — and to bring ballast and permanence to your moviegoing at a time when streaming windows on classic movies close just as soon as they open.

Get started on putting together your very own Criterion Closet with these eight physical media recommendations each month, comprising recent releases as well as what’s coming in the given month. This month, we highlight Criterion restorations Masahiro Shinoda’s classic kabuki tale of horror “Demon Pond” as well as Harmony Korine‘s breakout slice of a broken-down Midwest “Gummo,” plus John Mackenzie’s crime classic “The Long Good Friday,” and a couple of newer soon-to-be-classics worth having in your library.

After stirring much controversy with his screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine doubled down on his unsparing view of down-and-out youth with his 1997 feature directorial debut, Gummo. Set in Xenia, Ohio, but shot in the derelict outskirts of Korine’s childhood hometown of Nashville, the film depicts the corners of America that go neglected to the point of ruin. Even the setting of Xenia is telling: Gummo takes place in the present, but the opening narration by Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) focuses on the massive 1974 tornado that devastated the town, and one gets the sense from images of dilapidated buildings and masses of junk littering yards and streets that the area never recovered.

Deliberately eschewing a linear narrative that might have brought a larger thematic structure to the film, Korine instead arranges Gummo as a series of vignettes that allows for perspective to switch between characters like a baton.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Bam

Films by Warren Beatty, Mike Judge, and more play in Facing the Future; the restoration of I Heard it Through the Grapevine screens.

Roxy Cinema

Gummo, Love Streams, and Dancer in the Dark play on 35mm, while Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro screens screens on Saturday and a 16mm puppet program shows Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive retrospective of Portuguese cinema begins, featuring films by Paulo Rocha and Manoel de Oliveira, among many others.

Museum of the Moving Image

A highlight of the 1969 Directors’ Fortnight includes prints of Oshima’s Death By Hanging and Garrel’s The Virgin’s Bed; a Frank Oz retrospective continues.

Anthology Film Archives

Dreyer’s Ordet plays in “Essential Cinema.”

IFC Center

The black-and-white restoration of Johnny Mnemonic plays, as does a 40th-anniversary restoration of Paris, Texas and Bennett Miller’s The Cruise; The Company of Wolves,...

Gummo, spine #1238, will release in the Criterion Collection on October 22, 2024.

Outside of Gummo and Spring Breakers I’ve not seen any of Harmony Korine’s filmography. Based on those two films I’d come to the conclusion that his vision and style of filmmaking didn’t align with the types of films I enjoy. Despite my negative first reaction to Gummo, which I watched in 2004 at the age of seventeen, I’ve never forgotten the movie and what a strange viewing experience it was. Now that I’m in my thirties and with the Criterion Collection releasing a brand new 4K transfer, it seemed like the perfect time to revisit it and see if my feelings had changed.

Gummo Plot Harmony Korine’s Gummo Related Criterion Collection Release: Teen Apocalypse Trilogy

A mix of children and adults exist in poverty and isolation in a rural town destroyed by nature. They...

If one had to guess which filmmaker a film journalist could catch themselves conducting an interview with at two in the morning, at a table inside a hotel bar overlooking the Venice canal, Harmony Korine would probably be the most likely choice.

Coming off the world premiere of his new project “Baby Invasion” at the Venice Film Festival, the innovative, enfant terrible filmmaker is still struck by the heat inside the Sala Grande (“it was like a sauna”), but he’s also been processing the joy it felt to receive one of those signature applauses that lasts so long, security had to shut it down — especially for a film like this.

“I never seen anything like that in a place like that,” said Korine, back at the festival one year after premiering “Aggro Dr1ft” there, the first film produced under his new Edglrd banner. An 80-minute film inspired by first-person shooter games,...

Harmony Korine is going to do whatever the hell he wants, and in the case of his disturbing and anti-audience movie “Baby Invasion,” he turns the trigger-junkie protagonist at the top of a video game into the eyes and ears of a motion picture. If that’s what you call this disquieting and sickeningly compelling new project, framed from the perspective of an assassin pillaging shiny happy McMansions in Florida, Korine’s haunting grounds of late from “Spring Breakers” to his disastrously boring “film” “Aggro Dr1ft” last year. Where that infrared twisted techno dance pivoted on desperate dancers and sex workers twerking into the void as a hired killer fired shots all around them, “Baby Invasion” has a clearer focus this time: It’s to make you, the viewer, feel bad, and often wanting to beg to the screen, “Please god let this end,” or perhaps more aptly, “end me.

Midnight screenings rarely come more fitting than “Baby Invasion,” Harmony Korine’s latest experimental, unconventional and video game-like assault on the senses, which had its world premiere on Saturday night in Venice to an 8.5-minute standing ovation.

The film served up a provocative array of unique visuals: We saw our heavily armed, baby-faced criminals torturing people, dancing to Burial’s thumping techno score, chopping up huge piles of coke and throwing up the middle finger while sitting on the toilet.

Whatever it is we witnessed, the crowd seemed to lap it up. Once the hour and 20 minute movie wrapped, cheers erupted from the audience as Korine danced to the beat that soundtracked the credits. And it didn’t stop there: fans erupted into a chant of “Harmony! Harmony! Harmony!” as the director waved his arms as if to say, “More! More! More!”

At one point in the film, one of...

Harmony Korine doubled down on his thoughts about the current state of the film industry at a Venice press conference on Saturday, saying that “we’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively” because it’s “so locked in on convention.”

As he puffed on a cigar, causing smoke to invade the conference room, Korine — seated next to his designer Joao Rosa and a neon green-masked Gaspar Noé — waxed lyrical about how the industry is misusing its youth.

“Hollywood needs to encourage — they don’t need to, but they would be smart to — encourage the youth, the kids. Why we’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively is because they’re losing a lot of the most creative minds to gaming and to streaming,” he said. “They’re so locked in on convention and then all those kids who are so creative are now just going to find other pathways and...

Heard about the boutique home video label Criterion Collection but never splurged on one of their releases? Then their new 40-film box set may be the perfect purchase for you. The company announced CC40, Criterion’s latest Blu-ray box set, curated with forty different titles from the Collection that includes special features, essays, and more.

Read More: Criterion’s October Selections Are Disturbing & Terrifying Including ‘Demon Pond,’ ‘Gummo’ & More

Where’d Criterion get the idea for the boxset?

Continue reading Criterion Collection To Release New Blu-Ray Box Set CC40 On November 19 at The Playlist.

In October, it looks like the Criterion Collection will have you taken care of if you’re looking for classic horror for Halloween. And if classic horror doesn’t tickle your fancy, there are plenty of other options as well.

Read More: Criterion Adds Two New Albert Brooks Films, Martha Coolidge’s ‘Not A Pretty Picture’ & More For August 2024

On the horror side of things, the October Criterion selections include “Demon Pond,” a Japanese folk horror classic from director Masahiro Shinoda.

Continue reading Criterion’s October Selections Are Disturbing & Terrifying Including ‘Demon Pond,’ ‘Gummo’ & More at The Playlist.

Likely that Gummo‘s most often been seen on a DVD passed among friends like cinematic contraband. Though I doubt that legacy will ever quite die (maybe now it’s Mkv files), that history makes all the more notable a 4K upgrade put into circulation by Criterion. They’ll be releasing Harmony Korine’s totemic feature debut in October alongside a Val Lewton double of I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim and Masahiro Shinoda’s Demon Pond. Per the traditional October viewing, one could say that all four are, in their own ways, horror.

Meanwhile, G. W. Pabst’s immortal Pandora’s Box, featuring the never-bested Louise Brooks, gets a Blu-ray upgrade.

See cover art below and more at Criterion:

The post The Criterion Collection’s October Lineup Includes Val Lewton and Harmony Korine on 4K first appeared on The Film Stage.

Former enfante terrible filmmaker Harmony Korine (“Gummo“) has said he’s bored with conventional moviemaking and thinks video games, A.I., and experiential films are the way of the future. And well, he’s really putting his money where his mouth is with “Argro Dr1ft,” his latest feature, an experimental assassin movie that debuted at the Venice Film Festival last year (read our review).

Today, Korine’s Miami-based multimedia company Edglrd (pronounced “edgelord”) announces the limited theatrical release of “Aggro Drf1t.” For one week only, this May 10-16, 2024, Korine’s new experimental action will screen at independent theaters across nearly 20 key locations nationwide: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York, Portland, Raleigh, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

Continue reading Harmony Korine’s Experimental ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ Coming To Theaters For One Week In May at The Playlist.

From Kids to Oscar-nominated roles, Chloë Sevigny's fearless acting choices have shaped her diverse career in indie and mainstream projects. Despite mainstream success, Sevigny continues to prioritize arthouse films and fashion, showcasing her unique style and artistic vision. Sevigny's unwavering fearlessness on screen has solidified her status as a sought-after talent in Hollywood, known for her unforgettable performances.

Chloë Sevigny was always more than a trendy, diaeresis-sporting, Manhattanite "it girl" — despite the fact that her presence on the New York City nightlife scene has been a near-constant since even before her acting career began. Regardless of her NYC association, Sevigny actually hails from nearby Darien, Connecticut — a tony enclave vastly different from the Downtown Manhattan she launched into as a teen model and actress in the '90s. After some spotwork in music videos for Sonic Youth and The Lemonheads, Sevigny was cast in the groundbreaking and controversial indie...

“The Sweet East” is on the road again, this time heading across the pond for a theatrical release via Utopia, which has acquired the drama’s U.K. rights.

Marking celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ feature debut, “The Sweet East” stars Talia Ryder, Ayo Edebiri, Jacob Elordi, Simon Rex and Jeremy O. Harris as they embark on a road trip across the U.S. Utopia purchased the North American rights to the film last year following its Director’s Fortnight premiere at Cannes Film Festival, and has since shepherded it around the continent to play in theaters in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Toronto, Montreal, Atlanta, D.C. and more.

In addition to acquiring the U.K. rights for the film, Utopia is teaming up with Gotham Photochemical to produce new 35mm prints for “The Sweet East’s” continued theatrical expansion in North America and the U.K. The first 35mm...

Who better to play a New York high society socialite than Chloë Sevigny, the former club kid turned fashionista who was profiled by Jay McInerney for The New Yorker at 19?

In 1995, one year after that infamous piece hit newsstands, Sevigny would star as a Manhattan teen who discovers she’s HIV positive in Kids, written by her pal Harmony Korine. The film was almost immediately cemented as a cult classic, sending her down an arthouse-cinema path that’s included Gummo, Boys Don’t Cry (earning her an Oscar nomination), American Psycho,...

Rapper Travis Scott stars in the first trailer for his and director Harmony Korine’s indie film “Aggro Dr1ft,” which was shot entirely in infrared.

The short trailer is bathed in the starkly contrasted colors of the infrared lens, and it follows an assassin on his journey. “Breaking away from the traditional parameters of cinema, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ explores the onslaught of digital ephemera and interrogates modern life through the vernacular of video games. Shot entirely through an infrared lens, the film follows a Miami Beach hitman as he embarks on the relentless pursuit of his next target,” reads the logline.

“As it is, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ is visually thrilling but somewhat tedious to sit through — better as wallpaper than the main attraction,” wrote Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge in his review. “Still, as with James Cameron’s ‘Avatar,’ there’s wisdom in the generic quality of his script. Cameron was...

For as long as Tekashi 6ix9ine has been in the public eye, he’s been embroiled in significant controversy and legal issues, including beef with an extensive list of rappers such as 50 Cent, Trippie Redd, Chief Keef and Ludacris, and an equally notable arrest record.

The trolling rapper took the internet by storm in the late 2010s as a major streaming act with platinum hits including breakout single “Gummo” and the Nicki Minaj collaborations “Fefe” and “Trollz,” but in recent years, controversies like his 2018 racketeering arrest – and subsequent...

Love it, hate it, or love to hate it, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn has left an impression on viewers. With its acerbic (and maybe muddled) allegory about social and economic class in the UK, the movie is a big twisty swing from the writer-director of Promising Young Woman. It also features star Barry Keoghan going there. In some scenes, there constitutes prancing around a luxurious manor in his birthday suit, galloping as free and liberated as a baby elephant charging a watering hole.

In others, there consists of the literal water (and other fluids therein) pooling around the hole of a bathtub. You know the scene: After Felix (Jacob Elordi), the wealthy patron and object of obsession for Keoghan’s Oliver Quick, is spied pleasuring himself in the bath, Ollie sneaks in afterward to slurp up the remainder that didn’t go down the drain. It’s disgusting, off-putting, and supposedly “titillating,...

Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” received a 10-minute standing ovation after its premiere at Venice Film Festival, despite a flurry of walkouts.

Though some audience members left as soon as the experimental action film finished (and at least 25 departed before that), Korine’s hardcore fans stuck around for a rousing 10-minute ovation at the midnight screening. As Korine greeted the crowd and did a happy dance, chants of “Harmony! Harmony! Harmony!” rang out.

Each time the applause started to died down, Korine waved his hands in the air like a conductor, and the cheers started up again.

Strippers twerking, demon-like crime lords chanting “dance bitch” and Travis Scott’s major-role debut are just a taste of what “Aggro Dr1ft” had to offer. When Scott first appeared on screen about halfway into the film, the crowd erupted in applause. However, the rapper was not in attendance at the premiere.

The “Spring Breakers...

Of the many directors to emerge during indie cinema’s heyday in the 90s, Harmony Korine probably remains the most iconoclastic. It’s not an understatement to say that his script for Larry Clark’s Kids, which he penned at age 18, is the most conventional thing in his whole filmography. Everything since — from his irreverent feature debut Gummo (which The New York Times deemed “the worst film of the year”) to the Dogme 95-certified Julien Donkey-Boy to his Jackass-like Trash Humpers to the tripped-out Florida-set heist flick Spring Breakers and bizarro Matthew McConaughey vehicle The Beach Bum — has been an experiment of one kind or another.

But the 80-minute assassin movie Aggro DR1FT (all caps, one digit) is something else entirely. In fact, it’s not really a movie at all, but more like a cross between a movie, a video game and a flow of hallucinatory images that could...

Harmony Korine has been openly bored with movies as we know them since the first time that he directed one. Real ’90s kids remember when he went on “Late Show with David Letterman” to promote “Gummo,” and insisted to the befuddled host that “things need to change. We can make films differently.” Korine may not have been wrong on either score back in 1997, but he’s a hell of a lot more right today. We live in a time when Hollywood offerings have become more stale than ever, and traditional cinema is beset on all sides by new technologies, novel coronaviruses, and — in Korine’s case — even some of the same artists who’ve helped to push the medium forward over the last several decades.

And, in theory, there’s nothing wrong with that. The movies wouldn’t exist if not for the 19th century visionaries who recognized that photography...

Harmony Korine has said he embraced AI technology for the making of his new experimental film Aggro Dr1ft which world premieres Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.

“I think it’s a tool… I don’t necessarily think it’s an existential crisis. I think if you’re looking at it as a creative tool, it’s very exciting,” he told the press conference.

“We really saw it almost like the frosting on the cake. It’s just another layer. It’s another paintbrush. It’s another colour. It’s another way to integrate imagery and sounds and to kind of play with the form.”

Set against the backdrop of Miami’s criminal underbelly and revolving around a veteran hitman, the multi-layered film has been shot entirely through a thermal lens and has been likened to a video game by Korine rather than a traditional movie.

“Everyone is kind of based in this film,” offered Harmony Korine. “They’re all just… based.”

The form-shattering filmmaker and visual artist behind works like Kids and Spring Breakers is at the Venice Film Festival — where his directorial debut Gummo premiered back in 1997 — to unveil Aggro Dr1ft, his experimental new feature, shot entirely in infrared, about a tormented assassin (Jordi Mollà, Korine’s Miami neighbor) on a trippy journey to kill a wicked crime lord. Rapper Travis Scott pops up as a fellow killer onboard a yacht.

Aggro Dr1ft...

Harmony Korine used to be a movie junkie, someone who’d watch anything and everything. These days, when people recommend a movie, “I’ll look at it and I feel nothing, like dead inside,” says the guy whose own films, from “Spring Breakers” to the controversial screenplay for Larry Clark’s “Kids,” are nothing if not disruptive.

“Watching a lot of this shit, you really feel the algorithms,” he says the day before receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Whereas, “I’ll see a clip on TikTok that is so inexplicable, so outside the realm of what I even imagine someone creating. Like, I can have an experience with a 30-second clip that goes so far beyond” what movies do for him.

TikTok. YouTube. Video games. Those are the influences operating on Korine’s latest feature-length provocation, “Aggro Dr1ft,” which is premiering at the Venice Film Festival.

Filmmaker Harmony Korine is focused on the future and how advancements in films and gaming technology can find a way to converge.

In a recent interview with GQ, published online Wednesday, the Spring Breakers director opened up about his co-founded creative collective and design studio Edglrd (pronounced “Edgelord”). The studio is currently working on films, video games and movies that are experienced like video games, which he called the “future of entertainment.”

“We’re trying to gamify movies,” Korine said. “What we’re trying to do is to build some mechanism that allows people to interface with the footage and basically remix, or make their own, films.”

The Gummo director also went so far as to say that gaming systems have advanced so much that “you could look at the Call of Duty trailer now, and it looks better than anything that [Steven] Spielberg’s ever done.”

Korine said his interest...

Harmony Korine has never made “normal” films. Even his most straightforward feature, probably 2019’s “The Beach Bum,” is pretty subversive by traditional standards. But then you look at things like “Gummo,” “Spring Breakers,” and “Trash Humpers,” and you realize Korine just clearly doesn’t have any interest in making anything the general public would embrace. So, it makes sense that his new film, “Aggro DR1FT,” is shot 100% in infrared and features all the subversion you would expect.

Continue reading Harmony Korine Says Terrence Malick Wrote A Script For Him To Direct at The Playlist.

Harmony Korine has finally pulled back the curtain on Edglrd (pronounced “Edgelord”), his Florida-based creative collective and design studio that makes, among other things, films, video games and films that are playable as video games.

In a lengthy interview with GQ, the “Gummo” and “Spring Breakers” director showed off Edglrd’s animation, imaging and AI technology, which he used to create his newest movie, “Aggro Dr1ft,” starring Travis Scott and Jordi Mollà.

In demonstrating a face-swapping AI technology, Korine told GQ, “This is the future of entertainment.” Then, he remarked that gaming engines have become so sophisticated “that it’s almost gone 360.”

“You could look at the Call of Duty trailer now, and it looks better than anything that Spielberg’s ever done,” Korine said.

Released as the first Edglrd project, “Aggro Dr1ft” has “the repetitive cadence of a video game cutscene, plenty of strippers and plenty of guns, and...

Harmony Korine shuts down the possibility of a Spring Breakers sequel, stating that he hopes it never happens. The filmmaker prefers to create original works and has never made a sequel to any of his movies. Despite the commercial success of Spring Breakers, it seems that Korine values the film's cult classic status and doesn't want it diluted with a sequel.

The possibility of a Spring Breakers sequel has been shut down by the original director. The 2012 movie, which was written and directed by cinema provocateur Harmony Korine, followed a group of college students who rob a diner to fund a spring break trip and fall in with wannabe rapper Alien (James Franco), kicking off a crime spree. The movie offered Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez early adult roles alongside Franco, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, and Gucci Mane.

Per Variety, Harmony Korine recently spoke at a masterclass in Locarno.

Harmony Korine teased upcoming Venice premiere “Aggro Dr1ft” in Locarno, where he picked up the Pardo d’onore Manor award for outstanding achievement in cinema.

“I am excited. I have never made anything like it. I was trying not to make a movie. I don’t know if it will be a scandal, but it will be its own statement,” he said.

“Aggro Dr1ft” stars Spain’s Jordi Molla and Travis Scott. Korine has already worked with Scott on “Circus Maximus” – as well as his friend Gaspar Noé, surprise guest at the fest, who ended up co-moderating his Saturday masterclass.

“It was pretty wild. It was crazy!,” said Korine about the “last-minute” collab with Scott, also opening up about his humble beginnings.

“I grew up in Nashville, I was born into a commune. My dad made strange documentaries about Southern moonshiners and circus people, and then he sold some weed.

Harmony Korine, the director of cult classics like “Spring Breakers” and “Gummo”, has teamed up with rapper Travis Scott for a new film that was shot entirely in infrared. The film, titled “Aggro Dr1ft”, is produced by A24 and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2023.

“Aggro Dr1ft” is described as an action-oriented film that stars Scott and Spanish actor Jordi Mollà, who has appeared in films like “Bad Boys II” and “Riddick”. The plot of the 80-minute film is still unknown, but the first production still released by Venice shows Scott and Mollà wearing masks, body armor, and guns in a dark and surreal setting.

Travis Scott and Harmony Korine

Scott signed a production deal with A24 in August 2021, and announced it by posting a photo of a coffee and blood stained script with the title redacted on Instagram. A year later, he posted two...

Festival reviews just love to hype a breakout performance, to the extent that one worries about becoming the little critic that cried breakout. But here goes: Talia Ryder, lead actor in “The Sweet East,” is a star. There’s something of Kristen Stewart about her, not merely in terms of physical resemblance, but more in her gift for not just acting but reacting. That’s fortunate, because her character is generally surrounded by extremely chatty blowhards, most of them interested only in the role she might play for them in their own lives. She lies constantly about her identity and where she’s from, and these lies go down easy because nobody is particularly invested in who she might actually be — they’re too keen to fit her into their own mythology.

In debuting director Sean Price Williams’ picaresque road trip along the United States’ east coast, the most horribly...

Independent film pioneer Harmony Korine will be honored at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival with the Pardo d’onore Manor, the Leopard of Honor award, for “outstanding achievement in cinema.”

Korine, who first broke into the scene with his script to Larry Clark’s groundbreaking Kids (1995), has cut a unique path in indie cinema, with a series of unconventional and experimental movies, including his 1997 directorial debut Gummo (1997), about two teen outcasts wandering around a tornado-ravaged town in Ohio; the 1999 feature Julien Donkey-Boy, starring Werner Herzog as the unhinged patriarch of a dysfunctional family; and 2007’s Mister Lonely, which stars Diago Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator and Samantha Morton as a Marilyn Monroe look-alike. Only recently, with his 2012’s trippy sun-soaked crime thriller Spring Breakers, starring Selena Gomez and James Franco, and 2019’s The Beach Bum, with Matthew McConaughey in the eponymous role, have Korine’s films received wider recognition and distribution.

U.S. director Harmony Korine will be heading to Switzerland this summer to receive an honorary award at the 76th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, running from August 2 to 12.

The director will be presented with the festival’s Honorary Leopard for outstanding achievement in cinema in a ceremony at its landmark Piazza Grande open-air venue on August 11.

The festival will screen Korine’s cult films Gummo (1997) and Spring Breakers (2012), while the director will also meet with the festival goers on 12 August in a panel conversation on his career.

“Harmony Korine is hard to pin down, difficult to categorize as a filmmaker, but he is an artist whose touch is unmistakable in whatever form,” said Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro.

“A rebellious anarchist – both dangerous and poetic in his amused, cultivated radicalism – Korine redefined the term “maverick” in U.S. cinema, without ever losing the smile on his face...

U.S. director and artist Harmony Korine, whose films include “Gummo,” “Spring Breakers” and “Beach Bum” – which stars Matthew McConaughey as a stoner poet named Moondog – is being honored by the Locarno Film Festival with its Pardo d’onore Manor lifetime achievement award.

Born in Bolinas, California, in 1974, Harmony Korine broke out in the filmmaking world in 1995 when he wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s controversial “Kids.” In 1997 he made his directorial debut with “Gummo,” a realistic look at youth alienation in America, for which he won awards at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and at the Rotterdam fest.

In 1998, he directed his first music video for the song “Sunday” by Sonic Youth, starring Macaulay Culkin. The same year Korine published his debut novel “A Crack-Up at the Race Riots.”

Korine’s second feature “Julien Donkey-Boy,” the experimentally told story of a schizophrenic, went to Venice in...

Inside a warehouse in an undisclosed location in Los Angeles’ South Bay, a shipment of clothes belonging to Chloë Sevigny recently arrived. They are being photographed, cataloged with barcodes and properly boxed and hung by The Wardrobe, a New York storage and preservation company that recently opened its first archive in the L.A. area.

“I’d just been holding onto everything for so long now and not storing things properly, from my first communion dress to my Oscar dress [a Ysl in 2000 for Boys Don’t Cry] and my Golden Globes dresses,” says Sevigny. “I have almost everything.”

Sevigny connected with The Wardrobe founder Julie Ann Clauss over Instagram. The two met up at the actress’ storage unit in Connecticut and began sorting through her trove of clothes. The items include spring 1996 Miu Miu designs (“I was in one of their first campaigns, and they gave me the entire collection,” she says); a...

Rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine was taken to the hospital on Tuesday evening after being assaulted at an LA Fitness gym in South Florida.

The 26-year-old rapper, whose real name is Daniel Hernandez, was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is currently investigating the incident. No arrests have been made, and police have asked for help from the public in identifying the perpetrators.

50 Best Celebrity Bikinis Slideshow!

Lance Lazzaro, Hernandez’s lawyer, said that the rapper “was attacked in a sauna at a gym by three or four thugs who beat him up (he tried fighting back).”

He suffered cuts to his face and bruises before employees heard the fight and the offenders fled.

Hernandez pleaded guilty to gang-related activity, including racketeering, drug trafficking and firearm charges, in 2019. He faced a minimum of 47 years but received a reduced sentence of two years after cooperating with investigators...

Movies That Made Me veteran guest and screenwriter Dan Waters discusses his favorite year of cinema (1989) with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

Love At First Bite (1979)

Hudson Hawk (1991)

Demolition Man (1993)

Heathers (1989)

Warlock (1989)

The Matrix (1999)

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Jaws (1975)

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Nashville (1975)

Born On The Fourth Of July (1989)

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

Field Of Dreams (1989)

My Left Foot (1989)

Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

Sex Lies And Videotape (1989)

Easy Rider (1969)

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

All That Jazz (1979)

Hair (1979)

Alien (1979)

Fight Club (1999)

Office Space (1999)

Magnolia (1999)

The Sixth Sense (1999)

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

American Pie (1999)

The Iron Giant (1999)

All About My Mother (1999)

Being John Malkovich (1999)

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Pretty In Pink (1986)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Say Anything… (1989)

Miracle Mile (1989)

True Love (1989)

Powwow Highway (1989)

Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)

Southside With You...

When Chloë Sevigny found herself walking the Oscars red carpet nominated for her work in 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” it was surprising, to say the least. Her brand of indie film anarchy, which she shared with her sometime boyfriend Harmony Korine, wasn’t really Oscar material. “I remember like the year before Harmony and I watching and being like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we could like nuke the Oscars and like just wipe away all the status quo?,'” she told IndieWire during a recent interview.

Sevigny’s 1990s in film started with her breakout role in Larry Clark’s ever-controversial 1995 “Kids” and ended with her at the Academy Awards, nominated for Best Supporting Actress, playing the girlfriend of Brandon Teena. It was a journey from the sensational fringes of the avant-garde to the biggest platform imaginable. “I told my publicist that the minute I’m in People magazine,...

The actor talks about being an indie icon, becoming a mother during lockdown and her joy at joining the second season of Russian Doll

Remarkably, given that Chloë Sevigny is still only in her 40s, her work has spanned 30 years. In typical self-deprecating style, she says with a laugh: “I was talking to my manager about my career and I’m just surprised I still have one.”

I am not sure anyone has a career quite like Sevigny’s. She has switched between indie films and sitcoms, taken risky roles and lived a parallel life as a style idol, which has given her a cult celebrity. She has skirted the mainstream for years, never quite becoming a household name. But to some – those who grew up reading the magazines that tracked her years as a 90s cool girl via films such as Kids and Gummo – she is a fashion and arthouse superstar.

When your films are as esoterically titled as "Gummo," "Julien Donkey-Boy" and "Trash Humpers," there's bound to be a messed-up filmmaking origin story lurking in your early adulthood. For transgressive auteur Harmony Korine, this certainly proves true. Before he would go on to helm the neon-soaked "Spring Breakers" or the slacker cinematic classic "The Beach Bum," Korine's first venture was a script which "honestly" (and crudely) portrays the delinquent and depraved behavior of NYC teens, a faction that the 19-year-old Korine was enmeshed in at the time. Directed by the oft-lascivious photographer Larry Clark and starring Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson in their first feature roles, the...

The post The Kids Controversy Explained: Contentious Child's Play appeared first on /Film.

I believe that I'm in the majority when I state that cults are never a good thing. Examples that would provide strength to my statement would include the Manson "family", Heaven's Gate, Aleph, and Jonestown that, when left unchecked, can be a danger to themselves and others. Many people would declare that we are still in a cult environment even though the leader is currently pent up in Palm Beach. Though many of these cults have dematerialized while others have the probability of fading away, it is difficult for a member to become "deprogrammed" from a cult mindset. No matter how long or far you try to escape from a sect, their teachings are never far behind.

Dementer, produced by Smithland Films and distributed by Dark Star Pictures, provides a pseudo-cinema verité, satanic psych-out hybrid style flick that consists of a woman trying to escape from a fiendish cult, but...

Exclusive: John Slattery is setting up his second feature as a director, Maggie Moore(s), with fellow Mad Men alum Jon Hamm and Tina Fey.

The black comedy reps the reteaming of Hamm and Fey, the former who has starred on two of her series: in seven episodes of 30 Rock playing the characters of Abner, Dr. Drew Baird and David Brinkley; and as cult leader Richard Wayne Gary Wayne in 13 episodes of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Maggie Moore(s) takes place in a dusty desert town where nothing ever happens, as a police chief is suddenly faced with the back-to-back murders of two women with the same name.

Endeavor Content is launching international sales at the European Film Market for Maggie Moore(s). Slattery’s feature directorial debut was the 2014 crime title God’s Pocket starring John Turturro, the late Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mad Men alum Christina Hendricks and Richard Jenkins.