David Byrne, Steve McQueen, Miranda July, Francis Lee and more join London Film Festival’s 2020 programme

HBO is teaming up with Rock the Vote— and enlisting talent including Spike Lee, Samantha Bee and Jay Ellis— to encourage Americans to share why they're voting in the 2020 fall elections.

Naman Ramachandran Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut “The Human Voice” and British artist Steve McQueen’s “Lovers Rock” have been added to the British Film Institute London Film Festival.Almodovar’s short, loosely based on Jean Cocteau’s play, presents a woman on the edge portrayed by Tilda Swinton, who is waiting for her lover to call. It will play in the festival’s shorts program, and screen at BFI Southbank on Oct.

Lovers Rock, one of the five films in Steve McQueen's Small Axe anthology drama series for the BBC/Amazon about London's West Indian Community, has been added to this year's BFI London Film Festival. The film —starring newcomer Amarah-Jae St Aubyn and BAFTA Rising Star winner Micheal Ward (Blue Story) —will be one of the few films given a physical-only screening at the BFI Southbank, which much of the festival moved online due to the ongoing pandemic.

The movie that opened the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month just got a new trailer.

Tom Grater International Film ReporterEXCLUSIVE: Universal Pictures Content Group is set to land international rights to Spike Lee’s David Byrne’s American Utopia following the film playing opening night at this year’s TIFF.HBO has domestic rights to the project, which is a filmed version of the acclaimed Broadway show, and is set to release stateside on October 17.Universal PCG is now tying up a deal for all international rights and is eyeing a roll out from November.

The world needs something to lift its spirits. 2020 has been rough, to say the least, with a global pandemic leaving so many people tragically dead, political turmoil in governments around the world, and civil unrest as systemic racism becomes headline news.

columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Daily News, a guest on NPR and Charlie Rose’s show, a jazz drummer, a founder of what became Jazz at Lincoln Center and mentor to Wynton Marsalis and many younger writers and musicians, an aficionado of baseball and American folklore and scourge of Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Amira Baraka among others.At home, he read, wrote and listened to music.

Despite the countless technological innovations in the 36 years since the release of Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, that iconoclastic time capsule of a 1983 Talking Heads show is still considered by many to be the greatest rock concert film ever made.

Spike Lee and David Byrne aren’t an obvious pairing. While the former’s oeuvre, for the most part, features unflinching stories about Black life in America, the latter became a hero to white college-educated teens everywhere.

just really has no part in any discussion of the work of Byrne or of director Spike Lee, who turned the former Talking Heads front man’s Broadway show into a film that premiered at the slimmed-down TIFF on Thursday, and will come to HBO in October.

If there ever was a year for the Toronto Film Festival to open with a musical pep talk for Americans, surely 2020 is it. American Utopia, the concert film of David Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, directed by Spike Lee, provides a spark of optimism in the era of COVID-19 and civil unrest.

While the world only seems to be moderately better now than it was months ago when the pandemic began to wreak havoc across the globe, we are now officially in Fall Film Festival Season. And though the festival schedule is different and some events have either gone fully digital or a combination of digital and in-person, there is a sense that the industry is returning to some sort of normalcy.

Tom Grater International Film ReporterThis year’s BFI London Film Festival, taking place as a hybrid of online and physical activities due to ongoing pandemic disruption, has unveiled a program of 58 titles.A selection of screenings will take place at cinemas and others will take place in a virtual form for audiences across the UK. The films come from 40 countries.

Naman Ramachandran The 64th edition of the British Film Institute London Film Festival (LFF) revealed its full program Tuesday, containing a robust line-up of 58 features from around the world, as well as a range of extended reality (XR) projects and shorts.As previously announced, Steve MacQueen’s “Mangrove” will open the festival and Francis Lee’s “Ammonite” will close it.Highlights of the program include Harry Macqueen’s mature love story “Supernova,” starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci;

Greg Evans Associate Editor/Broadway CriticIn a 1984 promotional video for the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, David Byrne appeared as both himself and a variety of interviewers, including men of color.

Former US president Barack Obama is among those to have paid tribute to “blessed” actor Chadwick Boseman, who has died aged 43 after a battle with cancer.

Andreas Wiseman International EditorEXCLUSIVE: LA-based indie production and sales company Clear Horizon is expanding into domestic distribution with the acquisition of civil rights drama Son Of The South.The film, which debuts tonight at the American Black Film Festival, is written and directed by Oscar-nominated editor Barry Alexander Brown (BlacKkKlansman), well known for his long-running collaboration with Spike Lee.Brown has edited Spike Lee movies including Oscar-winner BlacKkKlansman,

Ammonite, the buzzy LGBT period romance starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, is set to close the 2020 BFI London Film Festival. The film — from Brit director Francis Lee (God's Own Country) which will have its world premiere in Toronto in September — will bow in the U.K.

Tom Grater International Film ReporterThe BFI London Film Festival has set Francis Lee’s Ammonite as its closing film.Starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, the film is set in the 1840s, following palaeontologist Mary Anning when she encounters a young woman recuperating from a personal tragedy,It is world premiering at Toronto and also took part in the 2020 Cannes Label selection at the cancelled French festival.The London screening will take place on October 17 at cinemas across the UK,