‘Emily’ Review: A Dazzling Debut from Actor-Turned-Director Frances O’Connor [TIFF]

Victoria Beckham has shared the sweet message her husband of over 20 years David Beckham sent her ahead of her Paris Fashion Week show.READ: Victoria Beckham's workout hack we should all be copyingThe designer will unveil her Spring/Summer 2023 line on Friday in the French capital and to celebrate David sent his wife a large bouquet of white roses. WATCH: Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz's wedding: Everything you need to knowThe handwritten note read: "Dear Victoria, can't wait to see all your hard work pay off. I know it will be amazing! So proud of you.

Christian Bale’s Burt Berenstein character says he “left his eye in France” in David O. Russell’s fanciful, murder-mystery/ larger-conspiracy comedic thriller, “Amsterdam,” a movie named for the city where the films lead trio spends their halcyon years, living, loving and laughing together.

EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off her feature directorial debut world premiere of Emily at TIFF, actress-turned-filmmaker Frances O’Connor has inked with WME.

that, not to go in there, and just generally not, for the love of god. Even a hardened horror fan can easily get swept up in the tension of “Smile.”“Smile” stars Sosie Bacon (“Mare of Easttown”) as Rose Cotter, a therapist working at a hospital that treats people in severe emotional distress.

problematic uncle in the industry family, certain to entertain and disturb in equal measure, depending on what one is willing to overlook when the sausage is being made (or even, considering some reports, when he’s away from the factory).That the Oscar-nominated writer-director is in the mix again with the period comedy-adventure “Amsterdam” after seven years away (since 2015’s lumpy “Joy”) indicates a willingness in Hollywood to endure the reminders of his behavioral issues and to bet on the recipe of star power, emotional smarts and provocative farce that forged “Flirting with Disaster,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle.”Only the first ingredient is in evidence with “Amsterdam,” however, and no amount of wattage from Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Zoe Saldana, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek or Robert De Niro — or even an A-list B-team of Taylor Swift, Chris Rock, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Mike Myers and Michael Shannon — can lift this flat, unfunny genre-fluid whatsit from its performative stumbling toward contemporary relevance.At first, when it’s 1933 New York, we sense an eccentric buddy-picture in the making, centered on themes of integration and the treatment of veterans. Bale’s character (and semi-narrator) is Burt Berendsen, a scraggly, half-Catholic/half-Jewish doctor focused on new medicines for wounded Great War soldiers like himself (he lost an eye) and estranged from his status-conscious Park Avenue wife (Riseborough).

Summer 2022’s dance music domination continues this week, as David Guetta and Bebe Rexha’s collaboration I’m Good (Blue) surges to the summit.

Studio&New reported that Jung had been cast as one of the leads in Tell Me That You Love Me (literal title), a K-drama based on the award-winning 1995 Japanese drama of the same name.According to a report by Korea JoongAng Daily, Jung will be playing Cha Jin-woo, a hearing-impaired artist who expresses his emotions through drawings. He will be joined by Shin Hyun-been (Hospital Playlist), who will be portraying Jung Mo-eun, Cha Jin-woo’s main love interest.Tell Me That You Love Me marks Jung’s return to acting in television series in over a decade.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic “Tough guy with heart of gold” is the cliché that provides the gist to “The Enforcer,” and nothing much turns up to refresh or complicate that hoary hook. This criminal-underworld thriller benefits from Antonio Banderas’ star charisma as a veteran mob strong-arm who turns against his own organization in order to rescue an imperiled teen. Richard Hughes’ feature directorial debut also elevates matters somewhat with a slick and stylish presentation. But the results remain too hogtied by original “Point Break” scribe W. Peter Iliff’s routine, elemental screenplay to rise above the level of disposable genre fodder.  Cuda (Banderas) is just out of prison, having dutifully taken the heat for deeds done in service to Miami syndicate boss Estelle (Kate Bosworth). He hopes to restore relations with his 15-year-old daughter, but she’s wary after his long absence, his ex-wife outright hostile. Perhaps as a regretful result, he takes a fatherly interest in Billie (Zolee Griggs), a foster-home runaway who’s also 15. He prevents her getting in trouble for shoplifting, securing a motel room so she’ll be off the streets he’s all too aware are unsafe. Yet Billie is soon abducted from that short-term haven, presumably by sex traffickers, and it doesn’t take Cuda long to figure out that the perps are very likely tied to his own employer. 

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian producer Andrea Iervolino (“Waiting for the Barbarians”) has acquired a controlling stake in central London’s Mercato Metropolitano food market and teamed with British music producer David Tickle’s Tickle Entertainment on a doc series set there about global food culture. Iervolino, whose Iervolino and Lady Bacardi Entertainment (ILBE) company produces feature films including Bobby Moresco’s upcoming “Lamborghini,” is also the founder of innovative digital entertainment platform TaTaTu, a social media platform that uses a form of rewards points called TTU Coins. TaTaTu recently acquired a controlling stake in London’s Mercato Metropolitano from its founder Andrea Rasca who in 2016 established this pioneering community market as a space for social exchange and environmental sustainability. The Mercato is now being used as the location for an upcoming docu-series chronicling the journey of four chefs who sought refuge in the United Kingdom respectively from Syria, Namibia, Nepal, and Uzbekistan.

“Until Branches Bend,” which plays in this year’s TIFF Spotlight section, is a promising but poorly executed debut from Canadian filmmaker Sophie Jarvis. While it tries to be a paean to peaches and sisterhood and sustainable living, and at times a cri de coeur against corporate greed, it is none of these things.

1999 was a strange year for pop culture. On the one hand, there was all this fear about Y2K and the possible end of the world.

Jessica Kiang There are no flirtations with the fourth wall in Frances O’Connor’s “Emily.” There is no synthpop on the soundtrack. No one ranks the relative attractiveness of the Brontë sisters on a scale out of 10, or attempts, bustle be damned, to twerk. Yet despite lacking all markers of the recent trend for girlbossified costume drama, the directorial debut from O’Connor — an actor who is no stranger to corsetry herself after “Mansfield Park” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” — gives us a strikingly current take on the Brontë behind “Wuthering Heights.” Unlike many a literary biopic, it feels anything but pagebound. If “Emily” were a book, however, it would be a fresh reissue of a Penguin Classic, with its timeless orange cover unobtrusively updated to be crisp and covetable all over again. 

TORONTO – There once was a noble King whose reputation was slandered following his death. His enemies made sure that his name was equated with the worst rulers of his land.

Few things are as important to comedy as the element of surprise, so the first really big laugh in Paul Weitz’s “Moving On” comes fairly early. Claire (Jane Fonda) is going out of town for the weekend, back to her old home for the funeral of a dear friend from college.

Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same name, Edward Berger’s take on “All Quiet On The Western Front” is a chilling piece of anti-war filmmaking with a star-making turn from Felix Kammerer in the lead role of young Paul Bäumer, who learns the hard way that war is hell. Although it’s hard not to compare and contrast this new version to Lewis Milestone’s Best Picture-winning 1930 film starring Lew Ayres, it’s equally wild that it took nearly 100 years for a German adaptation given it’s the novel’s country of origin.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Pathé, which operates France’s leading cinema circuit, is planning to enter the Paris stock exchange in 2024, Variety has confirmed. The company’s president, Jérôme Seydoux, revealed the group’s long-gestated listing project in an interview with the French publication Les Echos. Seydoux said the company suffered a loss of approximately €100 million during the financial years 2020 and 2021, mainly due to the fact that theaters in France were shut down for a total of 300 days during the pandemic. While it ruffled feathers by selling “Coda” to Apple at Sundance in 2021 in a splashy $25 million deal, the company was one of the rare French studios which maintained its release plans for major local productions during the health crisis, for instance Martin Bourboulon’s “Eiffel” with Romain Duris and Emma Mackey, and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Notre Dame on Fire.”

Sift through some of his best work, and you will find that Steven Spielberg has always been a filmmaker charged by notions of love and ache for families, both those we are born into and those we select for ourselves. Though his tender devotion to domestic, often suburban bonds and rhythms—a well-documented and endlessly discussed through-line in his filmography—has perhaps never been as evident as in the soul-baring “The Fabelmans.” It’s Spielberg’s most personal film, one that gorgeously revives the memories of his childhood and youth with a lavish sense of wistfulness and an aptly Hollywood-ized, fable-like touch.  That beautiful Hollywood sheen is fitting for the on-screen autobiography of an escapist filmmaker, one whose name we came to pronounce synonymously with the magic of movies.

Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are stepping out for the premiere of their new movie at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival!

Sidney Poitier wasn’t solely a pioneer or merely among his generation’s best actors; he was a complicated, flawed human, prone to mistakes and foibles. But you wouldn’t know the depth of those flaws or how lasting his mistakes were by watching the Apple TV+ documentary “Sidney.” This documentary should be better, richer, and more comprehensive.

Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion” kicks off with a giddily entertaining opening: It’s May 2020, the early days of covid, and several old friends receive, one after the other, a box. It comes from their friend Miles Braun, the eccentric tech billionaire, and it’s an elaborate puzzle box; they get each other on the phone (in a series of playful introductions and dizzily frame-slicing split-screens) and figure out how to solve the puzzle of each level, before landing on the box’s ultimate contents: an invitation to a long weekend on his private island off Greece.