'John and the Hole': Film Review | Sundance 2021

EastEnders' Zoe Slater had one of the most explosive range of storylines on the hit BBC soap during her time. If it wasn’t finding out Kat Slater was her real mother, it was falling pregnant with Dirty Den’s baby in a ploy to keep boyfriend Dennis Rickman around.

Being pressured to read a friend's extensive text conversation with their vexatious significant other is one of the scourges of modern life. As it happens, that comprises much of what's asked of the audience by R#J, the un-Googleable desktop film that adapts Romeo and Juliet for the Instagram age.

When Molly, the troubled but dogged protagonist of Knocking, moves into her new apartment, she notices the word "Help" scrawled high on the elevator wall. Whether this is a random bit of graffiti or a sign of a particular hyperawareness on Molly's part — a sensitivity to cries of anguish — goes to the heart of this smart, disquieting film.

Tim Richard, the founder and CEO of European cinema giant Vue, has been named chair of the British Film Institute. Richards —who was appointed by U.K.

Naman Ramachandran WarnerMedia’s streamer HBO Max is set to launch across 39 Latin American and Caribbean territories in June.Following this launch, the existing HBO-branded streaming services in Europe — the Nordics, Spain, Central Europe and Portugal — are scheduled to be upgraded to HBO Max later this year.The service will be available via a new HBO Max app.

More than 20 years ago, the Kosovo war with Serbia and Montenegro left 12,000 dead and more than 3,000 missing, mainly Kosovar Albanians. In Hive (Zgjoi), her first feature, writer-director Blerta Basholli is inspired by the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a single mother who, many years after her husband goes missing, is forced by economic necessity to face his loss.

The enormity of nature hits you like a freight train in the early scenes of James Ashcroft's taut and sinewy first feature, Coming Home in the Dark. The majestic rural landscape of Greater Wellington, on the southernmost tip of New Zealand's north island, changes in an instant from a place of enveloping tranquility to one of terrifying, helpless isolation as a family's encounter with a pair of murderous drifters uncovers past trauma.

Multidisciplinary artist Amalia Ulman makes an appealingly idiosyncratic first foray into features with El Planeta, a captivating throwback to the shaggy aesthetic of micro-budget '90s New York indies that plays like Grey Gardens with a hint of early Almodóvar. Ulman and her real-life mother Ale play a reduced family unit in the Spanish seaside town of Gijón, living beyond their dwindling means in willful denial as the foundations crumble beneath them.

Emilio Mayorga Boutique German sales agent Patra Spanou Film has pounced on “Destello Bravío,” acquiring international sales rights to the feature debut of Spain’s Ainhoa Rodríguez’s film, which screened this week in main competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival.“Destello Bravío” is produced by Rodríguez’s Tentación Cabiria, based out of Extremadura in southwest Spain, in co-production with Eddie Saeta, the Barcelona-based company of Luis Miñarro, one of Spain’s most internationally renowned

Love Island 2021 could be filmed in the UK as bosses fear the coronavirus restrictions could stop them from heading to Spain, it bas been claimed.The popular ITV dating show is rumoured to be returning the summer, with the big wigs allocating a bigger budget than ever to ensure it can go ahead. And now producers are said to be looking at domestic locations and working on how the islanders can still flaunt their goods in swimsuits.

The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet is very much its own creature. In ways that can pull you in and also keep you at a distance, it has no use for movie conventions of plot and characterization as it traces turning points in its 30-something protagonist's life — a life shaped by ordinary strife and joy and, for a while, a strange planetary phenomenon.

"If anyone's taking that gay horse, it's me," declares ruthless ex-military cryptid poacher Nicholas, while Lauren Gray, the heroic protector of mythological creatures in Cryptozoo, prepares to take off on a snowy white Pegasus with a mane and wings in pastel rainbow shades. That kind of droll humor was a constant in graphic novelist Dash Shaw's 2016 feature debut, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea.

CNCO, “Déjà Vu" (Sony Music Latin)Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and a covers album is the most earnest form of vocal flexing.

Within just a few years, Theo Anthony has proven himself a master of the cine-essay. He doesn't neatly connect the dots for us, instead creating dynamic, synapse-sparking terrains, with particular focus on city life and social justice.

El Planeta is as goofy one-off, a singularly eccentric sort of imaginative home movie in which writer-director Amalia Ulman co-stars with her non-pro mother Ale Ulman as women reduced to penury in a tiny apartment in Gijon, Spain, where they run little scams but otherwise do nothing to prevent their slide into dire homelessness and poverty. And it’s a comedy, one that will appeal to downtown-style hipsters globally, even if the conceit behind the film has its definite limits.

Emiliano De Pablos Spain’s Bendita Film Sales has picked up worldwide sales rights to coming-of-age drama “The Saint of the Impossible,” the feature debut of Swiss director Marc Wilkins.

Exquisite performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga provide the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to Passing, Rebecca Hall's assured move behind the camera, adapted with great sensitivity from the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen. "We're all of us passing for something or other, aren't we?" muses Thompson's melancholy character Irene Redfield.

Director Álex de la Iglesia is re-teaming with producers Telecinco Cinema and Pokeepsie Films after their smash hit 2017 pic Perfect Strangers (remade from the Italian film of the same name) on El Cuarto Pasajero (The Fourth Passenger), a road movie in the rom-com vein.