‘A Compassionate Spy’ Review: Steve James’ Doc Is A Compelling Defense Of Treason & A Portrait Of Absolute Love [Venice]

Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras will be guest of honor at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 9 to 20.

Mayan Lopez, star of “Lopez vs. Lopez” and daughter to comedian George Lopez, has opened up about following in her father’s showbiz footsteps. Speaking at NBC’s virtual summer press tour panel at the Television Critics Association, she said that growing up behind the scenes of “The George Lopez Show” is where she first “fell in love” with acting and creating – but she’s still had to pay her dues and put in the work.“People always think that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, like no….

A trip to Italy sends Zoe Saldana‘s life in unexpected directions thanks to love in the trailer for Netflix’s new limited series From Scratch.

Does love have the power to transcend family and cultural differences? According to Tembi Locke, it totally does, and “From Scratch,” a new limited series from Netflix, is out to prove that point. READ MORE: Netflix Fall Film Calendar: ‘White Noise,’ ‘Bardo,’ & ‘Pale Blue Eye’ With Christian Bale Dated For December Based on Locke’s memoir of the same name, the eight-episode mini-series stars Zoe Saldaña as an American student abroad in Italy who falls hard for a Sicilian chef.

Naman Ramachandran For Shoba Narayan, the Indian American lead of Aditya Chopra’s “Come Fall In Love – The DDLJ Musical,” the Broadway-bound production is a dream come true. Chopra’s U.S. stage musical reimagining of his immensely popular 1995 Bollywood film “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” commonly abbreviated to DDLJ, addresses the need for cultural unification in a divided world. Narayan plays Simran, a young Indian-American woman whose future is set via an arranged marriage back in India to a family friend. But when she convinces her strict father that she should spend a summer of freedom and fun in Europe, she falls for the charming Rog (Austin Colby), and her plans go out the window.

Richard Kuipers Romantic comedies have never gone away, but mainstream examples with A-list stars have been pretty thin on the ground since the glory days of the ’90s and early 2000s, when “Pretty Woman,” “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” ruled at the box office. Bucking the trend is “Ticket to Paradise,” a glossy piece of fluff starring Hollywood royalty Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a divorced couple whose passion reignites in Bali during their hare-brained attempt to prevent their daughter from marrying a guy she’s only just met. While far from a classic of its kind, this is likely to be just the “Ticket” for general viewers relishing the chance to watch Roberts and Clooney trade poisonous barbs, before being struck by Cupid’s arrow all over again.  

The Ukrainian cast and crew of Luxembourg, Luxembourg — premiering in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival — today used their Lido photo call as a powerful call for support of Ukraine’s families.

Naman Ramachandran A first trailer has been unveiled for Toronto selection “Salt Lake,” Kasia Rosłaniec’s exploration of late-life desire and emancipation. In the film, 64-year-old Helena announces her intention to pursue sexual experiences with other men – much to the shock of her husband of 40 years. The cast includes Katarzyna Butowtt, Krzysztof Stelmaszyk, Adam Ferency, Dorota Kolak, Dagmara Krasowska, Judyta Paradzińska and Jacek Poniedziałek. The film will screen at Toronto as part of Industry Selects – 10 titles chosen by festival programmers for their sales potential. It is produced by Warsaw-based Mañana in co-production with Common Ground Pictures from Gothenburg, Sweden, the partners behind “United States of Love,” which won a Silver Bear at Berlin in 2016. The project was presented at the Berlinale coproduction market 2020, received a Creative Europe – MEDIA development grant and Polish Film Institute production support. “Salt Lake” will be released in Poland in spring 2023.

Steve Lacy's Bad Habit has officially become the Official Number 1 Trending Song in the UK. 

As the 49th Annual Telluride Film Festival comes to a close on this Labor Day holiday, it once again could be a fest that ignites the Oscar chances of a number of films that have either had their World Premieres or North American Premieres this weekend. As part of the so-called Fall Festival Trifecta of Venice/Telluride/Toronto (the latter beginning this Thursday), this is where the six month+ awards season officially starts, even if the even longer Emmy season doesn’t conclude until a week from today.

Love Island 2022 favourite Indiyah Polack has welcomed a new addition to her fanclub in the form of US rap star Nicki Minaj.The dating show finalist, 23 - who came in third place place alongside new beau Dami Hope, 26 - yesterday recorded an Instagram Live video of herself rapping Nicki's new track 'Super Freaky Girl' alongside fellow Love Island alum Yewande Biala on a night out. Indiyah's impressive performance soon caught the attention of her fans online, one of whom reposted the video on Twitter, captioning it, "Love Island UK IT girl @1ndiyah rapping to Nicki Minaj via Ig stories".

Clayton Davis At 8:45 PM mountain time, the Werner Herzog theater looked about halfway full with patrons sitting down for the North American premiere of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s latest film “Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)” at the Telluride Film Festival. Maybe it was the 174-minute runtime after a long day of screenings that kept viewers at bay. Nevertheless, just shy of midnight, there was a round of applause as the credits rolled. Though, it’s unclear what exactly what everyone was clapping for. Perhaps themselves for having survived this rambling opus of cinematic over-indulgence.   After debuting in Venice, where the Oscar hopeful was pummeled by critics, the Netflix awards pony was looking for a comeback stateside to at the very least lift its Rotten Tomatoes score, which currently sits in the low 50s. Those numbers are likely to remain depressed. To be frank,  Iñárritu probably doesn’t need to clear out his calendar this awards season. It would be hard to imagine “Bardo” having the chops to even represent Mexico for the international feature category, let alone make the shortlist. But it’s not clear what else the country would even choose.

To love is to want to consume someone whole, to pick their skin and sinews out of the gaps between your teeth, to swallow their pancreas and wash it all down with gulps of throat-fizzing stomach acid. Take the age-old question that dominates the Grindr lexicon: do you want to be someone, be with them, or be inside them? “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s typically sumptuous, deeply romantic American parable — about a pair of teen cannibals, coming of age against the backdrop of ‘80s Reaganism — literalizes this allure, as any great anthropophagist love story should.

Given the fragile state of world peace at the moment, it seems like a good time for the latest film from Hoop Dreams director Steve James, a piece of little-known history from the cold war that could potentially have devastating consequences today. Sadly, James’ Venice Film Festival out of competition title A Compassionate Spy just doesn’t deliver the drama and tension you might expect from the high-stakes story of a mild-mannered American scientist who passed sensitive nuclear secrets to the Russians out of a mixture of idealism and naivety.

Manori Ravindran International Editor High-profile espionage cases in the post-war period often invoke the grisly fate of the Rosenbergs, the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed by electric chair for sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union in peace time. But in the new documentary “A Compassionate Spy,” filmmaker Steve James tells the incredible story of Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, who shared classified nuclear secrets with Russia — and got away with it. The Participant and Kartemquin Films-produced documentary, which has its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 2, is one of a number of films at this year’s festival that tackle the topic of nuclear disaster: Projects from Noah Baumbach’s feature adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” through to Oliver Stone’s on-the-nose documentary “Nuclear” all contemplate some aspect of our nuclear past and future.

Man, the 20th century really thought it was something, didn’t it? Thankfully, in the middle of the 1980s, just when Western (read: American) culture was fully losing the run of itself in a frenzy of gum-snapping consumerism and prescription narcotics, Don DeLillo‘s “White Noise” appeared — you might almost say manifested — as a mischievous, mindbending 326-page reminder to the century that it wasn’t, in fact, all that.

Leaving paradise behind. After Tigerlily Cooley’s brief stint on Love Island USA, she has opened up about her mysterious departure.

Naman Ramachandran Director Aditya Chopra has revealed a grand vision for “Come Fall in Love,” the stage adaptation of his immensely popular 1995 film Bollywood film “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” commonly abbreviated to DDLJ. Producer Yash Raj Films has also shared an exclusive image of the production’s rehearsal with Variety. Chopra said: “I first conceived the story of DDLJ (even before it was called DDLJ) as a Hollywood love story of a white American man and an Indian woman. My main motivation at that time was to present Indian culture and values to a global audience. Years later, as I reimagine the story as a Broadway musical, my mainstay is still the same, showcasing Indian culture to a world audience. And the most powerful way to depict a country’s culture and values is to see it from the perspective of someone who does not belong to the same culture. That is the starting point of ‘Come Fall In Love,’ the story of Indian Simran, her culture and heritage, through the eyes of American Roger.”