As true-crime followers know, Jeffrey Dahmer was gay, but what may come as a surprise is how his family learned of his sexuality and what their reaction was based on their conservative values.
04.09.2022 - 18:09 / variety.com
Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.
Continuing in the relaxed, character-centered vein of 2019’s lovely “An Easy Girl” — the right direction to take after the starry disappointment of 2016’s ambitious fantasy “Planetarium” — this is the most assured, mature work of Zlotowski’s career: It feels right that “Other People’s Children” marks her ascent to the A-league of the festival circuit, bowing as it does in competition at Venice. With the ubiquitous, reliably sympathetic Virginie Efira headlining proceedings, healthy business in France is a given, but with further festival exposure and discerning distribution, this universally recognisable story could well resonate with international arthouse audiences. “Life is both short and long,” sighs Rachel (Efira) to her gynaecologist Dr. Wiseman (a gentle, wily cameo from, well, Frederick Wiseman), as he tactfully cautions her that she may not have much time left
As true-crime followers know, Jeffrey Dahmer was gay, but what may come as a surprise is how his family learned of his sexuality and what their reaction was based on their conservative values.
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Music Box Filmshas acquired U.S. distribution rights to Alice Winocour’s heartfelt drama “Paris Memories” which world premiered at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and had a gala screening at Toronto. It’s one of the five finalists for France’s official submission to the 95th Academy Awards. The critically acclaimed film stars Virginie Efira as Mia, a survivor of the terrorist attack that hit Paris venues, including the Bataclan concert hall and several bistros, in November 2015. Three months after the tragedy, Mia still feels unable to pick her life back up so she sets off to investigate her memories to find a way back to happiness.
Caroline Framke Chief TV Critic It takes six episodes for “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” (yes, that is indeed the show’s full name) to meaningfully expand beyond the scope of either the serial killer or Evan Peters’ portrayal of him. In that episode, “Silenced,” directed by Paris Barclay and written by Janet Mock and David McMillan, the story of Dahmer victim Tony Anthony Hughes comes to the forefront. Tony (played with warm charm by “Deaf U” alum Rodney Burford) was a gregarious aspiring model with a big heart. He was Deaf, Black, gay, a great dancer. His friends and mother (a moving Karen Malina White) loved him very much. With every moment Burford gets to give Tony new life, the inevitable end of “Silenced” becomes all the more harrowing, and the cops’ inaction to find the truth all the more infuriating. But as the show’s nonsensical maze of a title suggests, this episode is an exception rather than the rule. Otherwise, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s new Netflix series is a grim, sepia-toned slog that rarely justifies its own existence.
Smooky MarGielaa, the 22-year-old rapper born Toumani Diabaté who rose to prominence thanks to songs with the A$AP Mob, has been arrested and charged with numerous offenses including second-degree attempted murder. The New York Police Department confirmed the news in a statement to The FADER.
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The story of Alexis Haines’ entanglement with a circle of Los Angeles-area home invaders has been told multiple times over: In the reporting of Nancy Jo Sales, who profiled her for Vanity Fair in 2010; on her own reality show, “Pretty Wild,” which aired on E! in 2010; and in Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring,” based on Sales’ work. Now, Haines (formerly Alexis Neiers), along with former associate Nick Norgo (formerly Nick Prugo), attempts to set the record straight in the Netflix documentary series “The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist.” The three-episode series sheds little light, and bulks out its running time with idle musings on fame that feel warmed over from the early 2010s. It’s not that Haines’ and Norgo’s stories, told with both respective parties’ permission in this doc, don’t have inherent interest: Both of them became entranced by the concept of celebrity and, as part of the “bling ring” cabal, stole cash and belongings from the homes of famous people, including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom. (One of their victims, “The Hills” personality Audrina Patridge, speaks to the camera for “The Real Bling Ring.”)
Evan Peters has played many characters on American Horror Story. From a ghost in a murder house to a murderous spirit in a hotel to a frat boy zombie, he has had his fair share of scary and disturbing characters. But his latest project ,Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, may provide his scariest role yet.
EXCLUSIVE: Foundation Media Partners has secured exclusive book, film and documentary rights to the life story of Terry Watanabe, the notorious gambling addict who made history as Las Vegas’ biggest ever whale, losing over $200 million in a single year after gambling an unprecedented $825 million.
Richard Kuipers Romantic comedies have never gone away, but mainstream examples with A-list stars have been pretty thin on the ground since the glory days of the ’90s and early 2000s, when “Pretty Woman,” “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” ruled at the box office. Bucking the trend is “Ticket to Paradise,” a glossy piece of fluff starring Hollywood royalty Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a divorced couple whose passion reignites in Bali during their hare-brained attempt to prevent their daughter from marrying a guy she’s only just met. While far from a classic of its kind, this is likely to be just the “Ticket” for general viewers relishing the chance to watch Roberts and Clooney trade poisonous barbs, before being struck by Cupid’s arrow all over again.
Shekhar Kapur’s first film since 2007’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” itself a sequel to his Best Picture nominated “Elizabeth” from 1998, curiously sees the filmmaker shifting from prestige period drama to lighter romantic comedy fare with “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”. Written by Jemima Khan (producer of “Impeachment: American Crime Story”), the film stars Lily James (“Pam & Tommy”) as Zoe, a documentarian making a film about the “assisted” marriage of Kaz (Shazad Latif, “Star Trek: Discovery”), the proverbial boy next door.
Spice Girls singer Melanie Chisholm has revealed she was sexually assaulted in a candid new interview.
Amanda Seyfried is now an Emmy winner!
Toronto International Film Festival, has been shrouded in secrecy for months. About all we knew going in was that the movie is based on the famed director’s own life, and stars Williams, Paul Dano and Seth Rogen. Running time: 151 minutes.
A lot has changed since the award-winning adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel premiered on Hulu in 2017. Handmaid red and white (designed by Ane Crabtree in Season 1) has become a go-to ensemble for those protesting restrictions on reproductive rights across the globe.
Parents gather around the tatami, the mat where one practices the martial art of judo. On the mat, children wrestle and grunt, tugging at each other with giddy joy.
Blended families, where children alternate between parents and spend their lives with an assortment of half-siblings or kids from their parents’ previous relationships, are now so normal that it’s easy to overlook how painful the blending process can be. Bitter separations, disrupted households, new beds and new people appearing in them, the resentments children feel for the grown-ups’ failures and the interloping new partners pawing at the mom or dad who is rightfully theirs: none of this is easy, even in splits later described smoothly as “amicable.”
French director Rebecca Zlotowski makes her Venice Film Festival competition debut on Sunday with drama Other People’s Children, casting the often neglected, sometimes maligned figure of the stepmother in a fresh light.
Guy Lodge Film Critic Six decades into a career of over 40 films, the last thing you might request of a new feature from 92-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman is that it surprise us. Yet after a run of expansive, richly process-oriented observations of mostly American institutions and communities, his new film, “A Couple,” upends expectations of his work in what feels an almost mirthfully perverse number of ways. For starters, it’s laser-focused on just one person, not a heaving collective of human labor and activity. It’s short — very much so, in fact, barely stretching past an hour. Also, lest we be burying the lede, it’s not a documentary. Wiseman’s first ever narrative feature sees him collaborating with French actor-writer Nathalie Boutefeu on a biopic of sorts: a portrait of Leo Tolstoy’s anguished wife Sophia, dramatizing her marital dissatisfaction and psychic pain with with a lyrical, literate ear.
Alpha Violet founding co-heads Virginie Devesa and Keiko Funato are in Venice this year with Indonesian filmmaker Makbul Mubarak’s first film Autobiography, which plays in Horizons ahead of trips to TIFF and London BFI among other festivals.
Lily Moayeri About six weeks ago, locals and visitors to the famed intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street saw one of the bare walls in the area begin to show some shapes and colors. Over on Instagram, posing at the same spot, Los Angeles urban pop artist Tristan Eaton wrote on July 17, “My dream wall is finally happening!” On Aug. 25, the six-story mural, which adorns the south-facing side of the Aster club and hotel, had its official reveal in a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The mural was created with spray paint and executed in Eaton’s signature collage style, which mixes pop art and traditional techniques. It’s a salute to Hollywood groundbreakers such as Judy Garland and Sidney Poitier, whose likenesses are the largest figurative elements of the work. Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft, and granddaughter, Vanessa Richards, were among the guests who attended the ribbon-cutting.