‘Fire Island’ Film Review: Emma Meets Mr. Darcy, Only They’re All Dudes in Speedos

Andrew Ahn has the fall of Quibi to thank for being the director of “Fire Island.”

Bowen Yang perform a cover of Britney Spears’ “Sometimes” in the Hulu film . In true romcom fashion, the actor gets to bear all his emotions during a pivotal musical moment.While speaking to ET, writer and star Joel Kim Booster and director Andrew Ahn break down the epic moment. “It’s my favorite scene in the movie, for sure,” Booster says.As Howie, Yang takes the stage three quarters of the way through Booster’s queer, modern adaptation of to sing an unexpected version of the 1999 hit song while his friends, Luke (Matt Rogers) and Keegan (Tomás Matos), provide backup and add a little choreography to the scene. The scene comes near the end of their trip to the gay mecca as the limits of Howie and Noah’s (Booster) friendship have been tested by their unexpected and complicated romantic feelings for Charlie (James Scully) and Will (Conrad Ricamora), respectively.  When it comes to the song selection, “it was Bowen’s choice,” Booster says, explaining that the scene itself “was always written into this script [and] that Bowen would sing karaoke in that moment.” He adds, “I asked Bowen for a list of songs he’d be comfortable singing and ‘Sometimes’ was sort of the top choice.

, a queer, modern adaptation of, was first announced, it marked the first time a major film was being written and directed by as well as starring openly gay Asian people. In this case, that’s director Andrew Ahn, writer and star Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang. Later, the Hulu movie made news again when it revealed that it had filled out all the supporting roles with LGBTQ actors, including Margaret Cho, Matt Rogers and Conrad Ricamora. “Joel and I felt very committed to casting queer actors for this,” Ahn tells ET.

“Bright Young Things.”The name-dropping does get a bit fast and furious for those not up on their literary-society figures of Britain between the wars — there’s a somewhat awkward introduction of T.E. Lawrence at one point — but Sassoon led the kind of life that brought him into constant contact with the glitterati of the moment.

Michael Appler On Wednesday evening in New York City — about 60 miles and a ferry ride away from its subject— “Fire Island,” Joel Kim Booster’s romantic comedy about a weekend spent in New York’s chosen queer haven, held its premiere at the SVA Theatre.On 23rd Street in Chelsea, guests including Alok Viad-Menon, Jackie Cox, Peppermint and John Cameron Mitchell, as well as stars Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Conrad Ricamora and James Scully assembled to celebrate the film as part of New York’s NewFest Pride. You could have lifted the premiere’s guest list from any summer weekend spent at the Pines, something to be celebrated for a new film distributed by a gatekeeper studio like Searchlight Pictures.

modernizes Jane Austen’s 1813 oft-adapted novel, relocates it to the thumping New York beach vacation spot and makes nearly every character a 30-something gay guy. Elizabeth, Mr.

Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers is having a much-deserved breakout moment onscreen, thanks to back-to-back roles in and  -- two projects that let the comedian shine as very funny, very different characters.“I’m really proud of the fact that I was able to show versatility,” he tells ET about playing an ambitious employee at a home shopping channel named Darcy on the Showtime comedy and the messy, drunk friend Luke in the Hulu film. In the former, co-created by and starring Vanessa Bayer, Rogers loves being able to subvert the archetype of the “gay assistant.” “I love that the character and the script we’re aware of the trope and how it’s played out,” he says, explaining that Darcy “comes in, wearing designer garments and is very concerned with the fact that you call him the senior associate and not the assistant. And I thought, ‘OK, we’re already off to a very self-aware start with the character.'«While Darcy, who very much keeps SVN in working order for CEO Patricia Cochran (an Emmy-worthy Jenifer Lewis), brings the laughs, he’s not just there to be the butt of some laugh-out-loud moment.

A year into the COVID pandemic, out director Andrew Ahn received the script for Joel Kim Booster’s “Fire Island” and knew almost immediately he needed to make it.

Kelly Reichardt has been making minimal Americana since the early 1990s, mostly around the state of Oregon where she lives and mostly about her favored awkward squad: quiet square pegs who don’t quite fit the round holes society provides. In this ongoing quest she has found many collaborators, but none more attuned to her recessive brand of naturalism than Michelle Williams.

The exquisite and sublime journeys of Oregon-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt are arguably, more or less, incidental or oblique political statements about survival in America, often focusing on two or more friends, usually outsiders, and their struggle to endure. “Wendy And Lucy,” about a destitute woman and her soulmate canine companion, was overt about human inequity and hardship; “Meek’s Cutoff” depicted the unbearable burden of living off a hostile, unforgiving land; and “First Cow” presented the warm, but sad futility of two friends trying to sustain themselves under the grueling rigors of nascent American capitalism.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticLizzy Carr (Michelle Williams), the central character of Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” is a sculptor who is finishing up a series of ceramic figures she’ll be presenting in a gallery show. We see her working, throughout the movie, on the small clay statues — all women, each one about a foot tall, some mounted on rods, all with an intentionally rough, patchy surface that may look awkward and unpolished if you’re close up to it, but when you stand back a bit you see the aesthetic elegance of her style. (Giacometti would understand.) She’s making sculptures of female characters who look a bit ghostly in their lack of perfect line, but that’s part of their design (they all appear a little tormented), and that quality is balanced by the delicate surprise colors they’re painted with, which express their inner life.

How do you write a queer romantic comedy? That is, not one where you merely gender flip a lead (“rom-com, but make it gay!”) but actually create a story that interrogates the very foundational tropes of the genre? If you’re Joel Kim Booster, you do so by adapting one of the most beloved Jane Austen novels of all time, the one whose recent big-screen adaptations have earned the likes of Keira Knightley and Renée Zellweger Oscar nominations.

Drake has some very high praise for Haim.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director (the only other Italian language film, “The Eight Mountains,” comes courtesy of two Belgians), Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.Taking a thin amount of plot and stretching it as far and wide as it can go, the film itself is far from perfect, but it does benefit from “The Traitor” star Pierfrancesco Favino’s terrific lead performance as a man who learns the hard way that there’s no going home again.After forty years abroad, Felice (Favino, of course) returns to his native Naples a stranger in a familiar land.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt’s a gross oversimplification of Jane Austen’s gift to suggest that her novels reduce to heteronormative matchmaking exercises, though all six end with their heroines getting hitched. (Austen herself never wed.

Throughout her career, Mia Hansen-Løve has returned to a familiar milieu — the daily lives of women, drawing out a poignant beauty and humanist sense of drama in the quotidian rhythms of mothers as they go about their work, as well as their caretaking of children, parents and their own inner worlds. There’s something fascinating, and indeed feminist, about simply watching these women, played by some of Europe’s most talented actresses (Isabelle Huppert in “Things to Come,” Vicky Krieps in “Bergman Island”), simply exist in the world, maintaining the delicate balance of day-to-day harmony despite the larger ups and downs that threaten to upend everything.In “One Fine Morning,” Hansen-Løve’s latest, the woman in question is Sandra, played by Léa Seydoux, hair cropped into a pixie cut, clad in the jeans, sweatshirt and backpack befitting a young widowed mother caring for her daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins), on her own in Paris.

exercice de style as the French would put it, “EO” has plenty on its mind and nothing much to say, idling through a series of vignettes than more often not end with a punch-line of a forbidden kiss or a sudden act of violence, capturing them all with a flashy and urgent style of a music video or Super Bowl car commercial. One need not look far to see in this tale of a lonely beast of burden traipsing across the countryside a condemnation of modern Polish society, especially in sequences when the titular donkey first witnesses and then succumbs to a bout of skinhead hooligan violence, or when it clops across a forest bed we soon learn was once a Jewish burial site. At the same time, Skolimowski – who shot this project over a two-year period – seems more interested in simply making his camera swoop and soar and generally perform its series of stupid pet tricks. In many ways, this rather silly (if quite entertaining) trifle makes for a fitting entry for Cannes’ 75th edition. Skolimowski approaches the material with the hunger and zeal of a young film student, lifting a framework from Robert Bresson and filtering through references to recent festival provocateurs like Lars von Trier, Refn, and Michael Haneke.