‘A Couple’ Review: Frederick Wiseman Turns to Narrative Filmmaking — Kind Of — In This Short, Literate Curio

Choir boys singing at the Queen’s funeral are causing quite the social media stir.

The Choir of Westminster Abbey had quite a moment in the spotlight during Monday’s state funeral service for Queen Elizabeth II, with one choir boy in particular capturing hearts across social media.

Queen Elizabeth II, with one choir boy in particular capturing hearts across social media. As the ensemble sang hymns and songs throughout the duration of the ceremony, viewers took note of a young singer with curly red hair who delivered a star-worthy performance filled with passion, movement and expression. Dubbed by some as the «MVP» of the funeral, the boy was praised for his earnest emotion — and Twitter just couldn't get enough. I know it’s all about the queen but the star of this funeral so far has been the overly dramatic redheaded choirboy who apparently has never brushed his hair

tête-à-tête in a public bathroom. It’s just the punctuation the film needed.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras sharply criticized the Toronto and Venice film festivals today for programming documentaries connected with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting the decision bordered on a “whitewashing” of history.

Red carpet date night! While the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards aims to celebrate the best of television, many stars are feeling the romance.  

EXCLUSIVE: Briarcliff Entertainment has acquired North American distribution rights to the gripping historical drama Kent State from writer, director Karen Slade. The film will star Dermot Mulroney, Clancy Brown, Aksel Hennie, Christopher Backus, Christopher Ammanuel, Andrew Ortenberg and Jacqueline Emerson.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.  Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is written less like a recognizable human exchange than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and played out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, “The Listener” plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting to enter that headspace now.

The latest episode of Grand Designs featured a 'relatable' couple whose touching story unleashed tears on Wednesday night.

Solidarity. Randall Emmett’s exes Lala Kent and Ambyr Childers may have had tension in the past, but they’re now on good terms.

The CW has found its Jonathan Kent. Australian actor Michael Bishop has been tapped to play the role in the upcoming third season of the CW’s Superman & Lois in a recasting. He replaces Jordan Elsass, who played Jonathan in the first two seasons and revealed he would not be returning for Season 3. Jonathan Kent is the son of Clark/Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois’ (Elizabeth Tulloch).

Ellise Shafer There’s a new Jonathan Kent in the world of “Superman & Lois.” Warner Bros. announced on Wednesday morning that Michael Bishop, an actor who recently made his American film debut in Disney Channel’s “Spin,” will take over the role of Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s son in the CW drama’s upcoming third season. In August, it was announced that Jordan Elsass, who originated the role of Jonathan, would not be returning. “Jordan Elsass has notified the Studio that he will not be returning to ‘Superman & Lois’ for Season 3 due to personal reasons,” the studio said in a statement at the time. “The role of Jonathan Kent will be recast.”

After a lifetime spent creating outrage and offence, both on and off screen, Korean master Kim Ki-duk has left the world with this final film, finished by his friends after his death. The story of a passionate affair that curdles almost immediately into jealousy and hate – but ends on a lyrically wistful note – is a startlingly appropriate rogue’s epitaph.

Clayton Davis Roughly a year ago, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” launched out of Telluride, and there was something about that film’s emotional expansiveness and the irresistible pull of its unapologetic nostalgia that made it clear it was going to be a force to be reckoned with at the Oscars. I got the same sense watching Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” at its Telluride premiere this past weekend. It has a similar open heartedness even if the setting for the movie is an English seaside town and not the war-torn streets of Northern Ireland. Cinema seeps through “Empire of Light.” Mendes’ latest doesn’t just swoon for the images that flicker across screens; it also pays tribute to the physical buildings that house our most cherished artform and the sense of escapism that gets triggered every time you sit down in one of those palaces. If you are a movie lover, it’s hard to resist “Empire of Light’s” charm and stylized beauty.

I never start a review commenting on whatever the so-called Film Twitter Mafia have to say about it, sight unseen. Starting back at CinemaCon in April when its directo/co-star Olivia Wilde was served legal papers onstage regarding her custody hearings with ex Jason Sudeikis, there has been non-stop gossip about her movie Don’t Worry Darling. There has been so much of it, right up to today’s Venice Film Festival press conference (covered by my colleague Nancy Tartaglione) that you almost have to address the elephant in the room. Others can do that, but let us not forget there is also a movie here, one I was able to preview as just that a few weeks ago in Burbank. As a reviewer, to quote Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, “I like to watch,” and that means only what is on the screen.

Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.

Ethan Shanfeld Barack Obama is officially three-fourths of the way to an EGOT, as the former president of the United States nabbed his first Emmy for outstanding narrator. Obama lent his voice to the Netflix docuseries “Our Great National Parks,” narrating its five episodes that span from Patagonia, Chile, to Tsavo, Kenya. Netflix submitted the first episode, “A World of Wonder,” for Emmy consideration. In 2020, both Barack and Michelle Obama took home Oscars for the documentary “American Factory,” which they produced under their banner, Higher Ground. The doc tells the story of what happens when a Chinese company opens an automotive glass plant at a former General Motors location in Ohio, facing intense community skepticism and cultural differences.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Frederick Wiseman, a voracious reader, doesn’t watch television. In fact, he’d never really gotten through a whole series until recently, when he watched HBO’s “The Wire.” “I don’t know why, but it was interesting,” he tells Variety drily. Every couple of years, the 92-year-old master documentarian behind such seminal films as “Titicut Follies” and “Juvenile Court” has churned out a sprawling documentary fixated on a microcosm of society or some sort of social issue, but when the pandemic paused those efforts for two and a half years, it’s Wiseman’s literary proclivities that drew him to Sofia Tolstoy’s writing for his new fiction film “Un Couple,” which premiered Friday in Venice’s Competition section.

While watching Frederick Wiseman’s “Un Couple” — the legendary documentarian’s first fictional drama— a different literary giant comes to mind besides the ones whose mercurial marriage is depicted on screen. The film’s fickle love recalls a verse from Latin poet Catullus, undoubtedly familiar to anyone who studied the language in school: “what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.” The woman in question in “Un Couple” is Sophia Tolstoy, wife of legendary Russian novelist Leo, as embodied in the film by French actress Nathalie Boutefeu.

For a certain type of cinephile versed in the avant-garde, the name Jonas Mekas brings to mind a particular type of autobiographical filmmaking — one that prioritized the immediacy of a given moment over context or sometimes even narrative coherence. He was an Immensely prolific filmmaker, critic, archivist, and poet who, in his own words, immigrated to the US in the late ’40s “hungry, thirsty for art,” taking in everything he could.  While not exactly forgotten, Mekas’ work as the “Film Culture” founder, Village Voice critic, historian, and champion of such directors as Kenneth Anger and Ken Jacobs, has often overshadowed his prolific film work.