Soviet Union Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Steve Coogan has been confirmed to play the lead role in a new stage adaptation of Dr. Strangelove.The actor is teaming up once again with The Thick Of It and Alan Partridge creator Armando Iannucci for the adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film.The legendary movie – officially titled Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb – was first released in 1964.Like Peter Sellers did in the 1964 movie, Coogan will portray multiple roles in the play.It is the first time the satirical film, which follows an Air Force general who orders a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, has been adapted for the stage.Can’t wait to get started.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is shining a spotlight on one of the most revered filmmakers in cinema history.

For All Mankind, Apple TV+’s smash-hit space drama, has been renewed for a fifth season at the streaming service.

Lise Pedersen In her first media interview published ahead of the world premiere of her debut feature “Fragments of Ice” at Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel, Ukrainian director Maria Stoianova tells Variety how her film’s intention shifted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Based entirely on archival footage shot on a camcorder by her father, a figure skater in former Soviet Ukraine, the film is voiced by the director, who was born in 1986 and takes the viewer back to the mid 80s and early 90s through her family’s story, as they experience the dissolution of the Soviet Union and of their dreams of a Western paradise.

Alison Herman TV Critic The titular gentleman of “A Gentleman in Moscow” is Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat played with sprightly joie de vivre by an enthusiastic Ewan McGregor. An aesthete with impassioned opinions about wine pairings, Rostov was born to live the life of leisure handed down to him by his landowning ancestors.

EXCLUSIVE: Director Sean McNamara‘s Reagan, the first full-length feature on the 40th U.S. President, starring Dennis Quaid, has been picked up for North American distribution by ShowBiz Direct.

Murtada Elfadl In “The Black Garden,” Armenian French first time filmmaker Alexis Pazoumian manages to portray his ancestral homeland with such sensitivity you’d think incorrectly that he lived there most of his life. Using the framework of three years in the life of three generations of Armenian men, Pazoumian sensitively captures the political conflicts, the social milieu and the geographical terrain of a small village on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The village is Talish, located in the Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh and over the years its inhabitants have seen a lot of strife.

Apple TV+’s hidden gem For All Mankind recently returned for its fourth season, but what songs are featured on the soundtrack? First launched in 2019, the drama depicts an alternative history in which the Soviet Union were successful in landing humans on the Moon in 1969 before the United States. Created by Ronald D.

Even though he was third in line to the throne when he was born on 10 March, 1964, the Duke of Edinburgh never faced any realistic prospect of becoming King in the UK - but he almost did abroad! This surprising revelation comes from an odd request made to Prince Edward back in 1994.The Line of Succession is something that can't be changed based on personal preference, but it seems one foreign country didn't quite understand this. In 1994, during a time of big changes in their country, Estonia asked Prince Edward to become their head of state. Buckingham Palace kindly turned down this "charming" offer.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Netflix is getting into the business of Broadway. The streaming behemoth is producing the upcoming play “Patriots,” from “The Crown” creator Peter Morgan. The show, set in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, is about Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire who helped orchestrate the ruthless rise of Vladimir Putin.

Netflix is about to make its Broadway producing debut, joining the team of Peter Morgan‘s upcoming play Patriots.

At their nearest point, Taiwan and mainland China are less than a hundred miles apart. But historically and politically – for over 70 years – a broad gulf has separated them. In the case of the Kinmen Islands, part of Taiwan, the paradox between geography and history is even more stark: the islands sit but a few miles from the mainland city of Xiamen, in the increasingly fraught waters of the Taiwan Strait.

Marta Balaga Beta Film has picked up international distribution rights to Latvia’s “Soviet Jeans.” Presented at Berlinale Series Market Selects, the show will premiere at Series Mania in March. Set in Riga in the late 1970s and based on multiple true stories, it zooms in onto young rock fan Renars (Karlis Arnolds Avots), sent to a mental asylum for political reasons. Undeterred, he starts illegal production of counterfeit U.S.

Gen X has gotten. No world wars, thankfully, though we did grow up imagining thermonuclear Armageddon as a genuine possibility, if merely accidental.But the Cold War ended. We were evolving!Some credit Ronald Reagan for ending that chapter.

EXCLUSIVE: Star Trek icon Jonathan Frakes is to direct a ten-part series based on novel and audio book Deathlands.

Alanis Morissette has discovered that her great-uncles died in the Holocaust while appearing as a guest on Finding Your Roots. A synopsis for the PBS show, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., reads: “In each episode, celebrities are presented with a “book of life” that is compiled with information researched by professional genealogists that allows them to view their ancestral histories, learn about familial connections and discover secrets about their lineage.”Morissette was one of the guests on the first episode of the show’s 10th season which aired on Tuesday (January 2).

Norma Barzman, a prominent screenwriter who was blacklisted due to her involvement with the American Communist Party, died Sunday at her Beverly Hills home, according to a social media post from her daughter Suzo Barzman. She was 103.

There’s a lot to take in and even more to process in American-Armenian director Michael Goorjian’s ambitious period piece: What he’s tilting at here is not beyond the realms of comedy, as Armando Iannucci proved with his 2017 jet-black satire The Death of Stalin. But tone is crucial, and Amerikatsi has a waywardness that too often undermines its intent — there’s a lot that works here and so much that doesn’t. There are moments that are sensitive, thoughtful, and really quite moving — in an elegant, silent-movie way — but the framing is so dark in its humor that many viewers may never make it to them.

Christopher Vourlias Three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, an emerging generation of filmmakers born and raised in the independent countries of Central Asia is giving an exhilarating charge to the region’s cinema and helping to put their unheralded industries on the map. Leading Kazakh film critic Gulnara Abikeyeva says these “children of independence” are bringing a “new attitude” to the screen and giving a jolt of energy to emerging industries that for decades were under Moscow’s thumb.

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national security advisor under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and advisor to George W. Bush, has died, according to a release from his Kissinger Associates. He was TK.

hit the market with a whopping price tag of $49 million.But at a preview of his new retrospective exhibit “Billy Joel: My Life — A Piano Man’s Journey” at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, Joel hedged about movin’ out from his lavish Oyster Bay property — which is reportedly now off the market — or the LI stomping grounds where he grew up in Hicksville.“I know [you’ve heard] there’s a house for sale and on the market — that doesn’t mean I’m leaving Long Island,” Joel, 74, told the private audience on Tuesday night before the exhibit’s public opening on Friday.“This is my home; it will always be my home. We will always have this as our home — and we’ll come and visit this place a lot.”Certainly, the LIMEHOF — which opened its museum in Stony Brook last year — will feel like home for Joel until next August.

Eurovision Song Contest onto its wanted list.Jamala – real name Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova – was listed as being sought for violating a criminal law in the Interior Ministry database (via AP News). She was allegedly charged for spreading false information about the Russian military and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine after a law banning such was adopted last year.The singer won the 2016 singing contest with her song ‘1944’, which was named after the year that the Soviet Union deported Crimean Tatars, an annexation largely regarded as illegitimate by other countries who still viewed Crimea as a Ukrainian territory – nearly two years after Russia annexed Crimea, according to Pitchfork.A post shared by Jamala (@jamalajaaa)‘1944’ depicted the suffering endured by her ancestors during deportations under the regime of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, which caused further tension with Russia.According to AP News, Russia protested against the song from being allowed in the competition, saying it violated rules against political speech in Eurovision.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic War onscreen, whether fictive or documentary, is often a sort of highlight reel: the excitement and terror of battle, cities in flames, the devastated aftermath. It’s infrequent that a film dedicate itself to the disorientation of civilian survival in a long-term war zone, when everyday life goes on to an extent despite a surreal atmosphere of constant threat, and the uncertainty of any future at all. That largely interior state is what director Olga Chernykh seeks to capture in “A Picture to Remember,” which opened the 2023 International Documentary Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: Tech entrepreneur and producer Oleg Shardin, best known as the co-founder of digital whiteboard company Miro, and actor-producer Alex Lane have partnered to create multimedia production company Puma In A Tank.

For All Mankind season 4 is coming!

How do you deal with a world where finger-pointing, bureaucracy, mob actions and a lack of initiative stall progress? That was the running theme of Friday’s Real Time on HBO, as a downbeat Bill Maher took on a world that was clearly vexing him greatly.

Erroll Morris reveals that John le Carré had a life as intriguing as his acclaimed spy novels. The film, which premieres today on Apple TV+ and captures the English-born le Carré, who died in December 2020 at the age of 89, reflecting on his personal and professional life.

The race to Mars evolves into a gold rush in For All Mankind season 4!

Naman Ramachandran British actor and comedian Steve Coogan is all set to channel his inner Peter Sellers. The “Alan Partridge” star will play multiple roles as the lead in the London stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 political satire film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” being adapted by “Veep” creator Armando Iannucci.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In my opinion, the two greatest directors to emerge from the nexus of international cinema in the 1990s were both Scandinavian. One of them, Lars von Trier, became quite famous, for reasons both good and bad.

Edward Hume, a prolific TV writer who created or developed such 1970s episodic crime classics as The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon and Barnaby Jones, and was Emmy-nominated for the startlingly realistic, much-watched 1983 nuclear holocaust drama The Day After, has died. He was 87.

Let’s run this again for the uninitiated: Apple TV+’s acclaimed, hit space drama “For All Mankind” is a historical “what if” about the 1960s space race and spotlights the high-stakes lives of astronauts and their families. The series dramatizes an alternate history depicting “what would have happened if the global space race had never ended” after the Soviet Union succeeded in the first crewed Moon landing ahead of the United States.

McKinley Franklin editor Edward Hume, the Emmy-nominated writer of “The Day After” and creator of “The Streets of San Francisco,” has died, his rep confirmed to Variety. He was 87. Hume was known for his work on the critically acclaimed, 1983 sci-fi TV movie “The Day After,” which was nominated for a total of 10 Emmys and won two.

Gene Maddaus Senior Media Writer Chris Keyser, a tuxedoed 23-year-old, stood at a lectern at the Oxford Union to defend the moral superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union. It was 1984. Keyser, now a leader of the Writers Guild of America strike, was then a Harvard Law student.

Legendary stage and screen actor John Cairney has died aged 93.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In out-there Estonian comedy “The Invisible Fight,” a clueless Russian border guard somehow escapes a surprise attack by three formidable Chinese action figures — gravity-defying kung fu warriors who swoop in out of nowhere, blasting Black Sabbath on their bright red boombox — so he does what anyone in his position would do: He resolves to become an Orthodox monk. Huh? “I guess God has other plans for you,” a less-fortunate comrade wheezes with his dying breath, setting up one of the oddest plots audiences are likely to find on the art-house circuit this year.