‘Girl Picture’ Film Review: Finnish Coming-of-Age Film Captures the Mood of Teenage Life

and knockabout laughs — are the trickiest to make breathe onscreen.But it moves with purpose from the get-go as composer Danny Elfman’s Coplandesque strains herald a new school year coming to life for Jack, a protective husband/father in a bustling family with kind, attentive fitness instructor Babette (a crispy-permed Greta Gerwig) and their hyperaware brood: contrarian know-it-all adolescent Heinrich (Sam Nivola); observant tweener and eating-health monitor Denise (Raffey Cassidy); and littler ones Steffie (May Nivola) and Wilder (Jodie Turner-Smith). At his college, Jack’s popular Hitler Studies class has a rock-worship tinge, and at the orderly supermarket gleaming with candy-colored name brands, shopping is the family’s regenerative power source (while news footage of calamities are their favorite home entertainment). In private, though, Jack and Babette can barely manage their palpable everyday dread — Lol Crawley’s textured suburbia cinematography turning one imaginatively directed bedroom nightmare of Jack’s into something out of an existentialist “Poltergeist.” And Babette’s private popping of a mysterious white pill hasn’t gone unnoticed by Jack or Denise.But when a semi crashes into a train carrying toxic chemicals, creating a black cloud and a mass evacuation to a crowded highway and a cramped scout camp, mortality comes front and center, bonding everyone in fear, conspiracies, and speculation.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter A24 has landed global rights to “Earth Mama,” a coming-of-age story from Olympian-turned-director Savanah Leaf. Written and directed by Leaf, “Earth Mama” follows a pregnant single mother who embraces her Bay Area community as she determines the fate of her family. The cast includes Bay Area musician Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander (“Living Single,” “Run the World”), rapper Doechii, Sharon Duncan Brewster (“Sex Education,” “Dune”), Dominic Fike (“Euphoria”) and Bokeem Woodbine (“The Inspection,” “Halo”). A24 will handle the global rollout of the film, which does not have a release date. It wrapped production this summer. Film4 developed “Earth Mama” alongside the filmmakers and will co-finance with A24.

There’s an air of positivity among Italian film professionals as they head to the Venice Film Festival this year, in spite of the country’s depressed theatrical box office in the wake of Covid and a looming cost of living crisis across Europe.

EXCLUSIVE: Hot off the success of its record-breaking Netflix film Purple Hearts, Alloy Entertainment has unveiled four new features in development, three of which are based on books that the company has developed in-house.

Manori Ravindran International EditorExplorer and TV personality Bear Grylls is telling his coming-of-age story in an animated movie produced with Bron Studios.“Endangered” will chart the story of how the former British soldier set out on a path to become an adventurer. It will follow an ordinary teenage boy who finds himself “plunged into a world of action, exploration and danger” as the newest recruit of a covert, kids-only emergency rescue organization: the Secret Ops Squad.In the film, an animated 14-year-old Grylls finding his feet among a five-strong team of intrepid teens.

Neringa Kažukauskaite Lithuanian director Ignas Miškinis is in production with his coming-of-age drama “Southern Chronicles” (Pietinia kronikas). The film is produced by Lukas Trimonis through In Script with support from the Lithuanian Film Center and the national broadcaster LRT, Film New Europe reports.“Southern Chronicles” is based on Rimantas Kmita’s novel of the same title.

Film Independent today unveiled the three short films directed by fellows selected to participate in its Global Media Makers Spring 2022 LA Residency. (Watch them here.)

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentSpain’s Solita Films, the Madrid-based outfit of director-producer brothers José Esteban and César Esteban Alenda, has boarded “Her Ocean,” (“El Mar la Mar”), an addition to the growing canon of LGBTQ dramas now in Latin America. Written and directed by Julián Amaru Estrada and produced by María Paz Barragán at Lima-based Final Abierto, “Her Ocean” is one of the most memorable titles among seven works at this week’s Sanfic Industria Productoras Lab, a novel pitching program and training facility for emerging, first or second-feature women producers in Latin America.“Her Ocean” is also selected for this year’s LabGuion in Colombia and Sapcine in Cali.Now co-developed by Solita Films, the feature project is a LGBTQ coming-of-age drama which builds to a magic realist climax. It turns on Ray, 15, gay, who helps local fishermen in his small town on the coast of Perú until, drunk at a bonfire party on the beach, he kisses his friend Jesús.  Repudiated by his family and the townsfolk, Ray escapes to vibrant jungle city Iquitos, and there finds friends and even competes in the Miss Amazonas trans beauty pageant.

Amazon Freevee has released the first trailer for High School, an eight-episode coming-of-age drama based on the New York Times best-selling memoir of the same name from Tegan and Sara Quin. The first four episodes of High School will premiere Oct. 14, with new episodes available every Friday on Amazon Freevee (formerly IMDb TV).

Writer/director/producer/actor Lena Dunham has had a couple of quiet years. Maybe that’s because she became Internet persona non grata from oversharing on social media and perhaps including a little bit too many TMI personal details in her books.

Rob Mitchell, chief financial officer of Bold Films who earlier worked at Beacon Pictures and Hyde Park Entertainment, died July 28 of a pulmonary embolism at his home in Thousand Oaks, CA. He was 55. Mitchell was the twin brother of Gregg Mitchell, the WGA West’s events manager.

Peacock has ordered the coming-of-age thriller “Hysteria!” straight-to-series, it announced Friday. The series explores Americans’ dark history of mass hysteria through a shocking story set within the Satanic Panic.

It may be Maša Marković’s first year as head of industry at the Sarajevo Film Festival, but for the long-time festival staffer, it’s business as usual.

Bullet trains seem great; why don’t we have them in the United States? Will I ever get to see Mount Fuji? I wonder what flavors of Kit Kats they sell on that train?These thoughts occurred because my brain refused to engage with this glib, terminally self-satisfied blood-and-bullets extravaganza, one that feels like it was plucked from what we might call the “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” period of American cinema, when Quentin Tarantino’s first two features emboldened far too many young filmmakers to think that they, too, could make a zippy comedy with excessive gunplay, explicit gore, pop-culture references, needle drops, and a briefcase full of cash.Having programmed a film festival from 1995 to 1999, I was subjected to more bad “Reservoir Dogs” wannabes than the average filmgoer, which might explain why this new film turned me off early and never won me back. “Bullet Train” pretty much leaves no cliché of this subgenre unturned, from swoopy, self-conscious camera moves to a shootout scored to an innocuous hit single of the past.

The parents of Archie Battersbee have filed an application to the Supreme Court in a bid to extend his life-sustaining treatment to allow time for a United Nations committee to consider the 12-year-old’s case.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaAndrew Keenan-Bolger will direct “Mikey’s Army,” a coming-of-age story that is described as “fierce and fabulous.”“Mikey’s Army” is produced by Jamie Forshaw, executive producer of Madison Wells Live and Evan Mayer, the company’s associate producer. They are joined by Kyle Beckley (“Submissions Only”), Mike Mosallam (“Breaking Fast”) and Thomas Laub (“Slave Play”).The short film boasts a script by Eric Ulloa (“The Nana Project” and Nickelodeon’s “Meet the Alphabeats”).