Int’l Critics Line: Anna Smith On Bulgaria’s Oscar Entry ‘The Father’

Final exams have rarely taken a heavier toll than they do in Better Days, an arresting teen-oriented story that cranks Chinese scholastic competitiveness into the realm of murderous melodrama.

Clayton Davis As voting opens for the Directors Guild of America Awards, two top contenders include first-timers Darius Marder (Amazon Studios’ “Sound of Metal”) and Florian Zeller (Sony Pictures Classics’ “The Father”).

Yuval Yefet and Rotem Shamir, the creators of hit Israeli drama Line in the Sand, have secured their latest drama – a diamond dealing thriller for Netflix and Belgium’s VRT.

When documentary maker Alexander Nanau started filming a team of investigative journalists in the aftermath of a tragic fire, no one knew the staggering level of corruption they would uncover. The blaze at Bucharest’s Colectiv club in 2015 left 27 dead and 180 injured. When more burn victims began dying in hospitals from wounds that were not life-threatening, the Romanian newspaper Sports Gazette started probing into the health service.

Next time someone asks what’s good on Netflix, you might want to point them to this winner that’s been lurking there since January 2020. A victor at the Golden Horse Awards and now shortlisted for the International Feature Film Oscar, A Sun is a bold, involving tale of crime, punishment, tragedy and healing — all within a seemingly ordinary family of four in Taiwan.

A mother abducts her own children in Charter, a riveting watch from writer-director Amanda Kernell (Sami Blood). Norwegian actress Ane Dahl Torp puts in a powerhouse turn as Alice, the desperate, impetuous divorcée who decides to take her daughter and son to Tenerife amid a bitter custody battle.

The opening scene of Dara Of Jasenovac, Serbia’s submission to the International Feature Oscar race, gives a poignant hint of the horrors to come. The setting is rural Croatia in the 1940s.

In 1962, a group of striking factory workers was massacred in the industrial Russian town of Novocherkassk. The shocking event, and the ensuing cover-up, is explored in intimate and meticulous detail by veteran filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky in Dear Comrades!, this year’s submission from Russia to the International Feature Oscar race.

This year’s International Feature Oscar entry from Armenia, Songs Of Solomon, boasts Green Book Academy Award-winning co-writer/producer Nick Vallelonga as producer for the film debut of theater director Arman Nshanian. Songs Of Solomon is a relatively low-budget but emotive watch, contrasting the power of music and friendship with the horrors of genocide.


Having scored an Oscar for Spain with Belle Epoque in 1994, director Fernando Trueba returns to the International Feature Film race with a Colombian entry. Memories Of My Father (aka El Olvido Que Seremos) strikes a similarly nostalgic note to Belle Epoque, but focuses on familial love. Based on Héctor Abad Faciolince’s memoirs, it’s adapted by the director’s own brother, David Trueba: an apt familial collaboration.

Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired North American rights to Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s Gaza Mon Amour, Palestine’s official submission for Best International Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards. The film will be released later this year.

Dannielynn Birkhead is the spitting image of her late mom, Anna Nicole Smith. Audiences got to see a first-look at a new 20/20 episode that features the 14-year-old daughter of the famous TV personality and Larry Birkhead, 48, on a journey to piece together parts of Anna’s past roughly 14 years after her death. “She wanted to be a star; she wanted to be a mother; and Dannielynn is her legacy,” Larry’s voiceover can be heard saying in the preview.

When shooting wrapped last February on Poland’s Oscar entry Never Gonna Snow Again, its filmmakers and production team could never have predicted the bizarre physical and emotional journey that the indie title would undergo across the next 11 months as it was finished and then unveiled amidst a global pandemic.

Christos Nikou’s feature debut Apples was already a buzzed about title heading into its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, and ultimately emerged with a very notable champion in that edition’s jury president Cate Blanchett. Her company, Dirty Pictures, boarded the movie not long after as executive producers for what is Greece’s entry to the International Feature Film Oscar race. Cohen Media Group has North America distribution rights.

Ed Meza @edmezavarMandy Patinkin and Lena Dunham have joined German filmmaker Julia von Heinz’s next film, “Iron Box,” about a New York businesswoman who decides to take her aging father back to his native Poland, where she hopes to explore her Jewish roots.In an interview with Variety during last year’s Venice Film Festival following the premiere of her latest pic, “And Tomorrow the Entire World,” von Heinz said she planned to send Patinkin and Dunham the script and expressed hope that they

After an impressive start at India’s box office, the Tamil-language film Master has hit Amazon Prime Video across the globe, and looks set to maintain the star power of leading actor Vijay. Two years after playing a charismatic soccer coach in Bigil, Vijay dances into the role of a charismatic professor in Master.

Fernando Frias’ I’m No Longer Here (Ya No Estoy Aquí) had a long journey to the screen — conceived when Frias was a student at New York’s Columbia University, the project was selected by the Sundance Writers Lab in 2014, and went before cameras in 2017, ultimately hitting the festival circuit in 2019, and Netflix last year. Challenges in getting the acclaimed drama made included everything from financing hurdles to a lengthy hiatus and the lead actor being rejected for a U.S.

Set in 2025, Ukraine’s post-apocalyptic International Feature Film Oscar entry Atlantis imagines life — and death — in the country one year after the ongoing war with Russia has ended. Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk) and his friend Ivan (Vasyl Antoniak) both suffer from PTSD, and lead joyless lives shooting at targets and working in a steel factory. When the factory is closed down by its British owner, Sergiy ends up driving a water truck around the barren landscape.  

Also Read: Poland's Oscar Submission 'Never Gonna Snow Again' Acquired by Kino LorberAlthough her son brought Utgoff to Szumowska’s attention, he was also convinced she had no shot of coaxing the star of a successful TV series to play Zenia, an enigmatic masseur who travels from house to house in an affluent suburban housing estate in an Eastern European city, casting a mysterious spell over his troubled, desperately lonely clients and their families.“I said, ‘I don’t care, he’s going to be in

Artists of all stripes have openly grappled with the spectres of their own mortality, but few film directors have confronted their own looming deaths as bluntly, or with as much vitality, as did Hector Babenco by participating in this climactic work, the part-sober documentary/part-boisterous extravaganza Babenco: Tell Me When I Die.