Int’l Critics Line: Todd McCarthy On Venezuela’s Oscar Entry ‘Once Upon A Time In Venezuela’

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.

Tragedy is punctured by comedy from the start of The Father. At a funeral in rural Bulgaria, mourners prepare to say goodbye to Valentina as the priest delivers an elegy over her grave.

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

Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, the creators of the hit ABC series Once Upon a Time, are officially returning to the network with their new fairy tale anthology series Epic!

Joe Otterson TV ReporterABC has ordered two drama series to pilot in some of its first pilot pickups of the 2021 pilot season.The broadcaster has given out pilot orders to the one-hour shows “Queens” and “Epic.” Both will be produced by ABC Signature. They join the previously announced ABC drama pilot “Acts of Crime,” which hails from Sam Esmail.“Queens” is written and executive produced by Zahir McGhee and executive produced by Sabrina Wind.

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.

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.  

Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood has been confirmed.As part of a two-book deal with publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, the filmmaker will be releasing his first work of fiction from June 2021, with a deluxe hardcover edition to follow this autumn.“In the seventies movie novelizations were the first adult books I grew up reading,” Tarantino in a statement.

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.

Anna Marie de la Fuente It’s been a banner year for Latin American cinema where 18 countries, including newcomer Suriname, have submitted films to vie for the international feature Oscar. Half of this year’s crop are by women, many of them debuts.

“I’m sick of stories about frustrated couples who rip each other apart and explore their sexuality to escape boredom,” says Lisa (Nina Hoss) in My Little Sister. While there is plenty of frustration, and some sex, in Switzerland’s International Feature Film Oscar entry, this is not that story. It’s the tender tale of theatrical German twins brought closer by cancer.  


And Tomorrow The Entire World, the engaged latest film from writer-director Julia von Heinz, is something close to transfixing, as it zeroes in on the vital distinction between being a weekend radical and a truly committed game-changer. Germany’s Best International Feature Film Oscar entry made an impression at last year’s Venice Film Festival and should connect strongly with younger audiences in many parts of the world.

“Charlatan” seems too harshly definitive a term to apply to the fascinating protagonist of the new film with the self-same title, given that the Middle European physician titularly accused of medical deception successfully plied a busy career treating eager patients across more than three decades under three vastly different political regimes.

It immediately says something about the differences between Jean Cocteau’s brilliant 1928 dramatic monologue The Human Voice — as first put on screen in 1948 by Roberto Rossellini with the immortal Anna Magnani — and Pedro Almodovar’s new version of it starring Tilda Swinton, that the latter features six costume changes within the first six minutes, while the original was content with a single drab bit of wardrobe.

Mexico’s entry to the International Feature Film Oscar race, Fernando Frias’ I’m No Longer Here (Ya No Estoy Aqui), is an ultra-skillful, if sometimes dramatically undernourished account of an enterprising teenager’s attempt to move beyond a life on the streets.