‘Fallen Leaves’ Review: Aki Kaurismäki’s Romantic Tragicomedy Finds Love In A Hopeless Place [Karlovy Vary]

Zayn Malik has dropped his first single in two years with ‘Love Like This’. Check out the music video below.The Bradford-born singer and former One Direction member hasn’t released music since 2021 with his third studio album ‘Nobody Is Listening’.

The lessons learned in this pitch-black German-Bulgarian co-production are very grim indeed, a social-realist drama that takes an unexpectedly shocking turn at its harrowing climax. The film’s recent win at Karlovy Vary, where it took the Grand Prix in the Crystal Globe Competition, should give it a welcome boost on the arthouse circuit, but the unwary are warned that Stephan Komandarev’s latest feature packs a punch not seen since Lars Von Trier or Michael Haneke in their provocative prime.

Lorenzo Lazo experienced the profound loss of his beloved partner, Edith González, who had been his wife and companion for nearly a decade. Despite the immense sorrow that befell him, the Mexican economist didn’t closed his heart completely, and as time passed, he gradually embraced the possibility of new romantic connections.

Follow OK! on Threads here: https://www.threads.net/@ok_mag Barbara Windsor’s husband Scott Mitchell has found love again - this time with another star from EastEnders.The widower of the late Peggy Mitchell actress is said to have fallen for Tanya Franks, 55, who previously played Rainie Cross on the soap. According to a source, Scott is believed to be "truly happy" despite previously fearing he might "never find another." Scott’s wife Dame Barbara Windsor passed away in December 2020, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014.

The widow of Dame Barbara Windsor has confirmed that he's found love with another actress three years of the EastEnders star's death. Scott Mitchell is said to have gone official with Tanya Franks, who also starred in the BBC One soap, on holiday this month in Greece.

Three years after her death, Barbara Windsor's husband Scott Mitchell has found love again. The 60-year-old widower is believed to have fallen for fellow EastEnders star Tanya Franks, 55, who played Rainie Cross in the BBC show, reports the Mirror.

Universal’s romantic comedy “The List” teases Halston Sage and Christian Navarro finding love in a hopeless place – Los Angeles. Abby (Sage) wasn’t expecting to add Jake (Navarro) to her dating itinerary, but after a rough breakup leads to her building a list of celebrity “free passes” and traveling to Los Angeles to court the rich and famous, his ambition and charm catches her off guard and flips her expectations of love on their head.The romcom charts Abby’s personal reinvention when her fiancé cheats on her and sleeps with a celebrity on his “free pass” list.

For years, we’ve heard that the rom-com is dead, and no one is paying to see those movies—generally mid-sized budget films—in theaters. And that could be true, but the success metrics on streaming sites are obviously different, and the romantic comedy has been thriving on streaming, arguably very specifically on Netflix, which has given a home to this genre in recent years.

Crystal Globe CompetitionJury members:Dora Bouchoucha, TunisiaPatricia Clarkson, USAJohn Nein, USAOlmo Omerzu, Czech Republic / SloveniaBarry Ward, IrelandGRAND PRIX – CRYSTAL GLOBE (25 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Blaga’s Lessons” (“Urotcite na Blaga”)Directed by: Stephan KomandarevBulgaria, Germany, 2023SPECIAL JURY PRIZE (15 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Empty Nets” (“Toorhaye khali”)Directed by: Behrooz KaramizadeGermany, Iran, 2023BEST DIRECTOR AWARDBabak Jalali for the film “Fremont”USA, 2023BEST ACTRESS AWARDEli Skorcheva for her role in the film “Blaga’s Lessons” (“Urotcite na Blaga”)Bulgaria, Germany, 2023BEST ACTOR AWARDHerbert Nordrum for his role in the film “The Hypnosis” (“Hypnosen”)Sweden, Norway, France, 2023SPECIAL JURY MENTION“Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano”Directed by: Cyril ArisGermany, Lebanon, 2023PRÁVO AUDIENCE AWARD“The Edge of the Blade” (“Une affaire d’honneur”Directed by: Vincent PerezFrance, 2023Proxima CompetitionJury Members:Dana Linssen, NetherlandsMarija Razgutė, LithuaniaŠimon Šafránek, Czech RepublicBarbara Wurm, AustriaMeng Xie, People’s Republic of ChinaPROXIMA GRAND PRIX (15 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Birth”Directed by: Yoo Ji-youngSouth Korea, 2022PROXIMA SPECIAL JURY PRIZE (10 000 USD)The financial award is shared equally by the director and producer of the award-winningfilm.“Guras”Directed by: Saurav RaiIndia, Nepal, 2023SPECIAL JURY MENTION“Brutal Heat” (“Brutální vedro”Directed by: Albert HospodářskýCzech Republic, Slovak Republic, 2023CRYSTAL GLOBE FOR OUTSTANDING

Will Tizard Contributor In Karlovy Vary Film Festival competition entry “We Have Never Been Modern,” Czech director Matej Chlupacek takes on both the dangers of Utopian bubbles and the power of unbending faith in traditional gender concepts. The story, set in a Slovak company town built by a visionary industrialist, takes place on the eve of World War II, as a murder mystery threatens to upset the idealized community. The factory director’s wife Helena, played by Eliska Krenkova, is an aspiring doctor who is soon to give birth. But her rosy future is suddenly darkened by the discovery of the body of a newborn intersex baby in the factory’s courtyard.

Norwegian cinema has been enjoying a moment lately, what with Joachim Trier’s crowdpleasing The Worst Person in the World pulling up to Drive My Car in the Oscar race and Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Me carving out a rep on the festival circuit. The Hypnosis, Ernst de Geer’s feature debut, sits somewhere between the two of them, fashioning a fitfully funny relationship drama that tilts at some very modern windmills (coaches, gurus, new-tech start-ups, workshops that involve blue-sky thinking) within a framework similar to Kristian Levring’s 2008 Danish drama Fear Me Not, in which a man’s personality changes after he becomes addicted to an experimental drug. The Hypnosis doesn’t quite follow that film’s melodramatic course, but there are similar thoughts raised about the human mind.

Jessica Kiang At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 27 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.  It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year, you could feel it happen in real time during the screenings of Masumura’s  “A Cheerful Girl” (1957), “Hoodlum Soldier” (1965), “Spider Tattoo” (1966) and so on.  

The 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 30 – July 8) came to a close this evening with an awards ceremony that bestowed two key prizes to contemporary Bulgarian drama Blaga’s Lessons (Urotcite Na Blaga) by director Stephan Komandarev.

Katie Cassidy and Stephen Huszar are bringing their real life romance to the small screen in Hallmark Channel‘s A Royal Christmas Crush.

In the past decade or so, the country of Georgia has produced many raw and powerful films from women directors examining the country’s modern women as they seek their newfound independence. Director and co-writer Elene Naveriani’s romantic drama “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry” is a striking new entry to this film movement, anchored by a fierce and sensual performance from star Eka Chavleishvili.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.  READ MORE: ‘You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder’ Review: A Vulnerable Ewan McGregor Can’t Save This Father-Daughter Addiction Drama [Karlovy Vary] An impressive tracking shot moves from a nighttime soccer game through a lively street in Saigon before settling on friends having send-off drinks for a member of the group who is forsaking the city for a simple life in the mountains.

There’s a fine line between stylized direction and direction that is so fussy that it gets in the way of a film’s actors. Unfortunately for Emma Westenberg’s directorial debut, “You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder,” that’s a line she does not navigate successfully.

The unseen and the obscene are the subject of Pascal Plante’s disturbingly brilliant psychological horror, which takes an overused genre — the serial killer movie — and an often-misused technique — dark Lynchian surrealism — and somehow alchemizes the two into something new and original. It’s strong meat for sure (the courtroom-drama framing is deceptive, since this is not really a film about justice), but word-of-mouth cult status beckons, and a healthy nightlife on the genre circuit is assured.

EXCLUSIVE: Christine Vachon offered her outlook on some of the industry’s most pressing issues at a keynote masterclass session this afternoon at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Will Tizard Contributor In Robert Hloz’s sci-fi feature debut “Restore Point,” second chances are big business. In the year 2041, anyone who has an unnatural death has the right to be brought back to life, provided they’ve dutifully created a backup of their personality called a “restore point.” Naturally, some object to the notion of artificially extending life ad infinitum, wherein the story begins to get complicated. “I wanted to make a sci-fi film since I was a little kid,” Hloz says, “but I would never guess that it will happen to be my debut. I thought maybe third, fourth film.”