‘Lakewood’: Noami Watts Works Overtime In This Ill-Conceived School Shooting Drama [TIFF Review]

In the film, Watts plays Amy Carr, a woman racing against time to save her child Noah (Colton Gobbo) as authorities place her small town on lockdown due to an active shooter incident. Noyce directed the film from a script by Chris Sparling, who produced with David Bois, Andrew Corkin, Alex Lalonde, Chris Parker, Zack Schiller and Dylan Sellers.

In the film, Watts plays Amy Carr, a woman racing against time to save her child Noah (Colton Gobbo) as authorities place her small town on lockdown due to an active shooter incident. Noyce directed the film from a script by Chris Sparling, who also produced with David Bois, Andrew Corkin, Alex Lalonde, Chris Parker, Zack Schiller, and Dylan Sellers.

EXCLUSIVE:  One of the few titles up for sale at TIFF this year was Phillip Noyce’s thriller Lakewood starring Naomi Watts, and Vertical Entertainment and Roadside Attractions have landed North American rights to the the female-driven thriller.

Fife who has been missing for nine days. Denis Findlay, who is from the Dunfermline area, was last seen at Edinburgh Waverley train station around 5pm on Tuesday, September 14.

During my first year of film school, my teacher would assign a great task to all her students during a post-production and sound course. The assignment was a unique redubbing exercise, stripping the audio and initial sound mix from pre-existing film scenes.

The revival of 1987 cult classic vampire feature The Lost Boys continues. After the CW opted that Rob Thomas’ pilot was a no-go, Warner Bros. is prepping a new take with screenwriter Randy McKinnon and Jonathan Entwistle directing, Deadline has confirmed.

Mounia Akl’s feature debut, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” comfortably occupies a space between “Beasts of the Southern Wild” from “Honeyland”: Each movie deals with environmental dilemmas, ranging from climate change to the loss of biodiversity, but in their own ways and their own approaches. “Honeyland” takes the narrative nonfiction tack, chronicling the travails of a Macedonian beekeeper; “Beasts of the Southern Wild” grieves Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath with magical realism.

Guns, gold bars, drug lords, military coups, folk heroes, tall tales, and ghost stories. Is there a 2021 film that gives more bang for the buck than Jean Luc Herbulot’s superb “Saloum”? This is not a case of “too much” movie, where the director and screenwriter thoughtlessly stuff as many ingredients into the pot as they can and hope the concoction doesn’t boil over.

We casually throw the word “icon” around with such abandon these days that it almost feels like we need a new, more potent idiom to describe those who actually fit the bill. But until we get that term, let’s say that Sigourney Weaver is an absolute icon and leave it at that — a brilliant actor equally adept at drama, action, and comedy, a three-time Academy Award nominee (two of them in the same year), the kind of screen presence who lifts just about anything she’s in.

Shot in rural northern Ontario during the pandemic, “Lakewood” follows Watts as a mother who risks her life to save her child after her small town is placed on lockdown over a school shooting. Much of the film shows Watts running through forest roads to get to the school, which Noyce says became very physically grueling for her.

Comfortable in his newly found friendship, Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrete), a teenager from Mexico City who traveled to Chihuahua’s northern state to reclaim his father’s remains, pretends to be upset and explains he’s decided to return home. He laughs several seconds later, tricking Mario (Hernán Mendoza), his boss and impromptu life mentor.

Justine Bateman is on a quest to explore the fears and to openly address the toxic, self-destructive voices in our heads that tell us we’re no good and unworthy of love and success. The actor’s directorial debut and new drama, “Violet,” debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, highlights the ideas she’s thought about and faced head-on in her own life: self-made insecurity, fear, and crippling self-doubt.

Naomi Watts is opening up about her next project with Ryan Murphy.

Ryan Murphy, exec producer of TV hits ranging from “Glee” to “American Horror Story” to “Pose”, has a new show in the works that promises to bring fresh frights to the small screen.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaIt was an acting challenge that Naomi Watts couldn’t pass up.In “Lakewood,” the Oscar-nominated star of such grueling exercises in cinematic heroics as “The Impossible” and “King Kong,” spends the bulk of the movie running through the forest, struggling with spotty cellphone reception while trying to make her way to her teenage son’s school, which is under lockdown with an active shooter.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn “Lakewood,” Naomi Watts plays Amy Carr, who starts out in the late afternoon jogging through an upscale wooded suburb, mourning her husband’s death in a car crash the year before. The film tells the story of a woman and her partner, her significant other, the second self she can’t live without.

For generations, women who pushed against their expected roles in life were written off as mad, and in extreme cases, locked away. For equally as long, these women were fodder for art that depicted their madness as evil.

Everyone knows someone like Rebeca Huntt. A born-and-bred New Yorker, she came of age in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, her family’s pride and joy.

The global pandemic has provided filmmakers opportunities to get creative in order to make films in unusual circumstances. Already at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival  we have seen The Guilty with Jake Gyllenhaal in what is essentially a one man show connected to outside world simply by a phone in an emergency operations 911 call center.