London Film Festival Lineup: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kitty Green & Christos Nikou To Play In Competition

Amy Nicholson “The Royal Hotel,” the setting of Kitty Green’s ulcer-inducing thriller, is a sun-baked bar in a rural Australian mining town surrounded by terrain so monotone that Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) can’t keep their eyes open on the way in. The two young women arrive at their barmaid jobs with a sense palpable disorientation. They’ve quite literally woken up in Oz, and they don’t know the people, the customs, the nicknames for the local ales, or the way out.

Organizers of the Camden International Film Festival in coastal Maine are moving ahead with regular programming today, as Hurricane Lee – downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone – aims further north towards Nova Scotia.

Day Of The Fight, the directorial debut of actor Jack Huston, has been set as the opening film of the 31st edition of the Raindance Film Festival, running October 25 — November 4.

In 2019, Australian documentary filmmaker Kitty Green made her first narrative movie, a piercing almost cinéma vérité-style movie focused on an office assistant in a Tribeca film company run by a not-so-thinly disguised Harvey Weinstein. The male culture there and the sexual acts of the boss made it almost a modern horror story at the height of the #MeToo movement. For Green’s second narrative film she has changed up the filmmaking style considerably, but with The Royal Hotel which premiered last week at Telluride and now premieres tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, she is taking an even deeper look at the dark side of men as seen through the female gaze in a broken down hotel bar in a desolate part of the Australian Outback.

The Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion has been given to a winner!

French filmmaker Claire Denis has been announced as the jury president for the Official Section of the 71st San Sebastian Film Festival, running from September 22-30.

“The Royal Hotel” just had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival (our review coming soon), and it’s definitely one to watch for several reasons. For one, it’s filmmaker Kitty Green’s follow-up drama to her excellent narrative debut film, “The Assistant,” which tracked the Harvey Weinstein story from a lowly assistant POV.

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore‘s new movie May December is set to introduce the 2023 New York Film Festival later this month!

Total admissions to theatres at this year’s Venice Film Festival have hit 114,851, up 18% on last year, according to figures published by the Biennale this week, as the film event passes the midway point. 

It’s officially September. Summer is winding down, school is starting, and the Fall film festival circuit has kicked off.

When Venice head Alberto Barbera announced his competition lineup in July, he confessed that he and his selection team were surprised to see one submission in their database: a feature project by Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. 

In principle, using the rainy-day, kitchen-sink post-rock of Manchester band The Smiths so prominently in a film like The Killer seems incredibly perverse, given that it’s an exotic, globe-trotting thriller about an American assassin. But in reality, it’s actually very sound choice indeed: legend has it that the band’s singer, Morrissey, had two reasons for naming his band so, the first being that “Smith” is one of the most common and thus unremarkable surnames in the world. The second, and much more subversive theory, suggests that it’s also a reference to David and Maureen Smith, brother-in-law and sister of ’60s serial killer Myra Hindley, the snappily dressed couple whose testimony blew open the Moors Murderers case and whose beatnik likenesses adorn the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo”.

Five years after his triumphant A Star is Born world premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Bradley Cooper is back on the Lido with Maestro. Except, the director and star is only here in spirit owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

The haves and have-nots of Great Britain have always served as ripe subject matter for writers of every stripe and the tradition continues in Saltburn, a vibrant if rather familiar take on the class system circa 2006. Emerald Fennell, following up on her Oscar-winning script for Promising Young Woman, reveals a strong hand behind the camera, even if the trajectory of the story feels rather overwrought and familiar. Nonetheless, the writing is alive and often amusing, giving the fine cast a lot to play with.

As the Venice Film Festival kicks off this week, so too does it begin the Fall film festival circuit.  Telluride also starts this weekend, then onto TIFF, NYFF, and the BFI London Film Festival. And Variety has the scoop on the full line-up for London this October, which features several major films that premiered at Cannes and other fests earlier this year.

Jeymes Samuel’s sophomore feature The Book of Clarence, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki are among the titles that have been announced within the full lineup of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) 67th London Film Festival. Scroll down for the full list.

Naman Ramachandran The 67th BFI London Film Festival has unveiled its full lineup, which includes galas and special presentations of films by contemporary masters. As previously announced, Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” will open the festival and Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya’s “The Kitchen” will close it.

The Telluride Film Festival, a key part of the fall festival circuit launching awards season and perhaps some major Academy Award contenders, announced the wide-ranging lineup of films for its landmark 50th edition. The fest kicks off Thursday and runs through Labor Day and will feature world premieres of Oscar winners Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (Focus Features), Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (Amazon) and Free Solo filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s narrative feature Nyad (Netflix).

Naman Ramachandran The 67th BFI London Film Festival has unveiled the titles that will compete in its official, first feature, documentary and short film competitions. Festival director Kristy Matheson said: “The films represented in each of these competitive strands offer audiences an exciting array of U.K. and global filmmaking voices and cinematic forms.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Evil Does Not Exist,” the new film by the Oscar-winning auteur Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, has sold to several additional territories. The film will world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, will have its North America premiere as a special presentation at Toronto, and will go on to screen at New York and San Sebastian. Hamaguchi received Oscar nominations last year for directing and adapted screenplay, shared with Takamasa Ôe, for “Drive My Car.” The film was also nominated in the best picture category and won the international feature film Oscar.