‘Perfect Days’ Director Wim Wenders On the Virus of Cinema and the European Dream: ‘It’s a Great Adventure to Get to See Someone Else’s Vision’

Wim Wenders returned to the Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival in a big way this year with “Perfect Days.” The German director’s first film since 2017’s “Submergence” wowed audiences at the festival, with the movie nabbing the Prize Of The Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for star Kōji Yakusho. Now, after further screenings at Telluride, TIFF, London, and NYFF this Fall, it’s time for US audiences to see “Perfect Days” for themselves.

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves and UK director Jonathan Glazer The Zone Of Interest lead the nominations in the main categories of the 36th European Film Awards which will take place in Berlin on December 9.

Karamo Brown is spilling some tea after hanging out with the cast of Vanderpump Rules behind the scenes at BravoCon 2023.

The Beatles‘ “final” song, ‘Now And Then‘, is on track to become the band’s 18th Number One single.‘Now And Then’ – the last single to feature all four original members – came out last Thursday (November 2), with a Peter Jackson-directed music video featuring newly unearthed footage of the members arriving the next day.The track debuted at number 42 in the UK last week – based on just 10 hours of sales – and is already outselling the top five, according to Official Charts. But it’s now expected to climb to Number One when Friday’s (November 10) Official Singles Chart is announced.It could also mean the band’s first chart-topping single in 54 years, with the last being 1969’s ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’.The track came to light thanks to a demo tape recorded by late bandmate John Lennon, completed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr along with the help of AI which lifted the songwriter’s vocals off the initial recording.The project was first teased by McCartney back in June when he confirmed that he was working on a new track with the drummer, which would serve as the “final” song of the band’s discography.Starr recently shared that working on the single was “like having John Lennon back”.Jackson’s visual accompaniment also includes archived footage of the Fab Four.

“Now and Then” — a brand new song by the Fab Four that was was released Thursday — well, the waterworks are about to begin again.The Peter Jackson-directed video, which dropped from the heavens Friday morning, is a flood of feels along a nostalgic, time-traveling trip that, true to the tune’s title, captures The Beatles “Now” and “Then.”When you first see present-day Paul McCartney and the eternally cool Ringo Starr — rocking a Ringo Starr T-shirt because, well, he can — all of a sudden surrounded by their late bandmates George Harrison and John Lennon in all their youthful glory, you’ll be reaching for a box of tissues.And trust us — one Kleenex will hardly be enough when you also see Harrison and Lennon sharing a mike in matching raincoats, Harrison in 1995 (when he laid down his guitar parts for “Now and Then”) trading licks with his “Sgt.

Japan has dominated this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA), with German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ latest Tokyo-set pic and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car follow-up taking the top prizes. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Two films from Japan, Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” and Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s “Evil Does Not Exist,” won the top prizes at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards on Friday. Multiple other honors went to films from Korea and Kazakhstan. The 16th edition of the APSA Awards was held on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia and recognized films from eight countries. “Perfect Days,” a gentle comedy drama about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo finding happiness in the everyday, premiered in Cannes and more recently was selected as Japan’s Oscar contender and as the opening title of the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Christmas has come early for Beatles fans… who fortunately have been granted a week between gifts, so they don’t have to choose which to unwrap first. There was Thursday’s release, of course, of the newsmaking “Now and Then” single, a track that features the late John Lennon and George Harrison that was recently completed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with Martin on board as McCartney’s co-producer.

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music With all the hoopla around “Now and Then” — which has been officially billed as “The Last Beatles Song” and erroneously described as the legendary group’s “first new song in 50 years” — some reality-checking is in order. Yes, it is a “new” Beatles song in that all four members, including the late John Lennon and George Harrison, play and sing on a previously unreleased composition.

Savina Petkova There is an ample tradition of historical dramas set in Interwar Poland, but there’s rarely one made by a woman director. Anna Jadowska wants to fill in this gap with her new project, “Tethys Ocean,” which will be presented at Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Agora Crossroads Co-production Forum next week. The story unfolds in 1938, as seven-year-old Wiktoria is being sent from a village near Kraków to become a servant at the mansion of a wealthy family where her older cousin also works.

Selome Hailu Mike Birbiglia has set his newest comedy special, “The Old Man and the Pool,” at Netflix. The hour-long set debuts on the streamer on Nov.

Naomie Harris is leading Robin and the Hood, a Sky family adventure film that has launched sales at AFM.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Berlin-based DCM Film Distribution has acquired Kristoffer Borgli’s surrealist comedy “Dream Scenario,” starring Nicolas Cage. In the A24 satire, which premiered in Toronto before opening this year’s Zurich Film Festival, Cage plays a college professor whose life is turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. “We love ‘Dream Scenario,’” says Carl Rickmers, DCM’s newly appointed director of film acquisitions and sales.

On the heels of the wonderful 2019 The Two Popes, in which Anthony Hopkins starred as Pope Benedict XVI in an imagined conversation with Jonathan Pryce’s future Pope Francis, Hopkins is once again involved in the same kind of cinematic historical fictional meeting as founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, who is engaged in a private debate with The Chronicles of Narnia author and theologian C.S. Lewis (played by Matthew Goode) on the existence of God. As with The Two Popes, there is no proof whatsoever that any meeting ever took place, but it clearly provides lots of material to wrap your head around. That is exactly what Mark St. Germain did in creating his 2009 play Freud’s Last Session, which was built on the 1967 Harvard lectures of Dr. Armond M. Nicholi Jr in his presentation “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.”

Is Tom Sandoval really a narcissist? We’re about to find out!

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Boys’ Love, or ‘BL’ as it is also known, was once a minor and lightly regarded type of Japanese manga catering mainly to female fans, delivering stories of handsome young guys falling in love with each other. Now its popularity has spread beyond Japan to much of East Asia and beyond, while metamorphozing into a film, TV and online genre with millions of fans. Just how big BL has become was evident in a Wednesday TIFFCOM seminar on the BL phenomenon in Thailand: Beyond Borders: Exploring the Global Appeal and Diversity of Thailand’s Boys’ Love Contents. The eleven speakers, including an official from the Office of Commercial Affairs, Royal Thai Embassy in Japan, vigorously pitched partnerships with Japanese content companies, which seemed to be a classic case of selling ice to Alaska’s indigenous inhabitants. Members of the packed seminar room might beg to differ, however.

EXCLUSIVE: After circling rights for weeks to the buzzy Vanity Fair article “True Crime, True Faith: The Serial Killer and the Texas Mom Who Stopped Him,” Amazon MGM Studios has locked them down, Deadline understands.

Thierry Frémaux is best known internationally as the long-time head of France’s Cannes Film Festival, which is organized out of its offices in Paris’s trendy Marais neighborhood.

Tokyo’s International Film Festival returned this evening for its first completely unrestricted, post-COVID-19 edition with a well-attended screening of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. 

Wim Wenders introduced the cast and crew of “Perfect Days” at an outdoor stage, giving the opening ceremony of the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival a moment of European cool. Inside the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater, Wenders was brought on stage twice more. “I had a dream that with ‘Perfect Days,’ I’d make a film that would play at the Cannes Film Festival. I dreamed that it would win the best acting prize.