Todd Maccarthy Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

We’re fast approaching the end of the third year of Covid and it’s clear by now, if it wasn’t before, that filmgoing will never be the same. The habit is gone, everyone has become accustomed to checking out films at home rather than in theaters, it’s unclear what films people are actually seeing and what they think of them, and it’s evident that most people have, with certain exceptions, simply lost the incentive to mobilize, to actually get off their butts and plunk them down in a theater to see a movie. For a life-long film fanatic as well as a critic for more than a few decades, I’m dismayed that it’s all come to this, but I can’t pretend otherwise, that I don’t see the writing — and the images — on the wall.

EXCLUSIVE: Cohen Media Group has acquired all North American distribution rights to filmmaker Mark Cousins’ Alfred Hitchcock doc My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock.

The first time Cecil B. DeMille parted the waters of the Red Sea, to film the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, he did it at Seal Beach, CA, just 30 miles down the Pacific coast from Santa Monica. Three decades later, when Paramount Pictures decided to remake the Old Testament tale in Technicolor and VistaVision, the same director returned to do it again, only this time on location on the Sinai Peninsula with thousands of extras provided by the Egyptian army — no matter that the country’s military was rather busy with urgent geopolitical matters at the time. Both versions were massive hits, with the remake serving as the capper to DeMille’s illustrious career.

EXCLUSIVE: In October, Breaking Glass Pictures acquired Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, Italy’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar for North America, and today we have a first look at the official trailer (check it out above). 

EXCLUSIVE: In a deal with True Colours, Breaking Glass Pictures has acquired North American rights to Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, Italy’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar. The drama debuted in the Cannes competition last May, and Breaking Glass will continue its festival run in the U.S. through the end of the year with theatrical rollout set for early 2023.

The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s return to the Venice Film Festival after 2017’s triumphant Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, had its world premiere Monday night, getting the biggest response from fest audience so far this year with a 15-minute standing ovation.

Romain Gavras’ immersive modern tragedy Athena just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, receiving a 4 1/2-minute standing ovation in the process.

Alejandro G Iñárritu‘s three-hour-long opus Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) received a warm reception at its Venice Film Festival world premiere on Thursday night. Six minutes of applause began inside the Sala Grande as the credits rolled, with attendees standing for the Oscar winning filmmaker for about four of those.

Todd Field’s Tár clearly struck a chord with the world premiere audience inside the Venice Film Festival’s Sala Grande tonight. The movie was given a standing ovation of more than six minutes, which was only halted when the film team filtered out.

Reteaming after last year’s collaboration on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car, Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to veteran auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes this past weekend. A fall theatrical release is planned.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterOne of the most intriguing film actors of his generation, and a pioneering advocate for numerous social causes, Elliot Page has spent the majority of his life in front of cameras. A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Page notched his first role at the age of 10, earning a Young Artist Award nomination for a part in the Halifax-set Canadian TV movie “Pit Pony,” which eventually spun off into a two-season series.After a few other scattered television parts, his feature film debut came three years later, and was the first of several emotionally weighty roles that the thesp tackled at a very young age.

This past year couldn’t be expiring soon enough as far as most of the world is concerned, and we can only hope that the next one will at least provide small measures of relief in one regard or another. May this be true for the planet first and foremost, but also for the world of films.

Leave No Traces director Jan P. Matuszynski said that although the Polish population might know about the murder of Grzegorz Przemyk, most didn’t understand the full scope of the operation. Matuszynski and lead actor Tomasz Zietek joined film critic Todd McCarthy to talk about the political drama during Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles award-season event Sunday at the DGA Theater.

After all the excitement and explosion of new talent in the 1960s and 1970s, the cinema in general and Hollywood in particular hit a dry spell in the 1980s, without question the dullest decade for movies on record. Hollywood studio fare became more standardized, most movies were too long, bloated and unambitious, and let’s not even get started on the dreadful fashions and women’s frizzed hairstyles.

Juliette Binoche has a field day and then some in Who You Think I Am, an insidiously smart, multi-layered yarn that shrewdly plays with the possibilities that modern media offers for presenting alternate versions of oneself publicly and especially privately.

Amanda Knox is speaking out against Matt Damon’s new film, “Stillwater”.

Amanda Knox is speaking out against Matt Damon's new film, The 34-year-old writer and journalist called out the people involved in the movie that «profits off my name, face, & story without my consent,» she wrote on her website on Thursday.

Only Ten Months Until the Next Cannes.

CANNES – In Tom McCarthy’s “Stillwater,” Matt Damon plays Bill Baker, a “roughneck” (oil rig worker) from Oklahoma who is trying to help his daughter Allison prove her innocence for a murder she was convicted of in France. The film, which debuted to mixed reviews at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, attempts to mix humor into its sometimes messy dramatic thriller mix.

The Annency International Animation Film Festival announced Saturday evening the winners of its major awards.

How many Vietnamese films have you ever seen? Or even heard of? For a heavily populated country that was controlled during roughly the first half of the 20th century by one of the most cinematically advanced nations, France, it’s surprising that Vietnam has such a thin history where film is concerned. The only Vietnamese director to ever make much of mark internationally is Tran Anh Hung, who in the 1990s gained an art house reputation with such films as The Scent Of Green Papaya and Cyclo.

The familiar vengeance payback genre has some goofy and entirely welcome top-spin applied to it in Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders Of Justice. The Danish film also features a version of Mads Mikkelsen — currently at a career peak — that we’ve never seen before, with his handsome face hidden behind an Ozark-style full beard as a tough army officer ill-prepared to console his bereft teenaged daughter in the wake of her mother’s violent death.

The 15 shortlisted films vying to become one of the five Best International Feature nominees at the 2021 Academy Awards are a surprising and creatively engaging bunch. Their stories often are drenched in history — much of it tragic and disturbing — and turbulent social and political currents course through any number of them.

The doings of the international art world often seem arcane and over the top, but never moreso than as depicted in The Man Who Sold His Skin. This is a madly dramatic and engrossing melodrama about a political refugee whose unique predicament bundles with it issues pertaining to personal and political identity, the Middle East quagmire, romantic rejection and the outer limits of art world presumption and extravagance.

Norwegian director Maria Sodhal made her first feature, Limbo, a decade ago and her second makes the reason for the long time gap dramatically clear: She developed lung cancer, which then metastasized and spread to her brain, a virtual death sentence. But she fought back and lived to make a film about it, the closely observed Hope, which is all she had going for her as she faced almost certain oblivion.

Artists of all stripes have openly grappled with the spectres of their own mortality, but few film directors have confronted their own looming deaths as bluntly, or with as much vitality, as did Hector Babenco by participating in this climactic work, the part-sober documentary/part-boisterous extravaganza Babenco: Tell Me When I Die.

“Charlatan” seems too harshly definitive a term to apply to the fascinating protagonist of the new film with the self-same title, given that the Middle European physician titularly accused of medical deception successfully plied a busy career treating eager patients across more than three decades under three vastly different political regimes.

If someone had told me a year ago that I would never set foot in a movie theater or screening room in 2020 after the first week of March (the impressive The Outpost and lousy The Hunt were the last films I saw on big screens) but that I would remain healthy and somehow seeing new films, I couldn’t have guessed what they were talking about.

Todd McCarthy For many dozens of Norman Lloyd’s closest friends, one of the most highly anticipated events of every year has long been the great character actor Norman Lloyd’s birthday party on November 6. The countdown (or, more accurately, count-up) to 100 was a much-relished slow-motion occasion, but Norman has long since put that milestone in the rear-view mirror.

Todd McCarthy There are certain films that you just know are Canadian after five minutes — they’re milder, softer, more congenial and eager to please than their south-of-the-border counterparts would be — and that’s what makes The Kid Detective, despite its twisty ending, such a mild piece of cheese.The film premiered — where else? — at this year’s shaved-down Toronto Film Festival.To its credit, Evan Morgan’s feature directorial debut isn’t exactly what its title makes you imagine it might be,

Todd McCarthy At the time, in November 1970, it must have seemed like an ideal match, a meeting of renegade titans: Orson Welles, the long-ago boy genius of theater and films who never got a job directing in Hollywood after 1958, and Dennis Hopper, whose out-of-nowhere smash with Easy Rider in 1969 made him the boy wonder of the hippie age and ostensible leader of a new wave of counterculture movies.Just as Welles had cratered from a Hollywood-career perspective, Hopper hit the rocks with his

Todd McCarthy Watching Lovers Rock is akin to going to see Romeo and Juliet and only staying through the first act, to departing a basketball game after the first quarter, to sipping the soup and skipping the rest of the meal. A mere wisp of a thing, Steve McQueen’s 68-minute feature, the only fictional section of a five-film anthology called Small Axe about London’s West Indian community between the late 1960s and 1980, steeps you in the atmosphere and music of the latter date.

Todd McCarthy Concrete Cowboy is about a different kind of urban cowboy — in this case, an outcast Black teenager who finds an unlikely home amongst a group of horse aficionados in a Philadelphia ghetto.

Todd McCarthy It’s time to start packing, to call around to find out what might be playing, to pull out the sweaters and a warm jacket for the first time in months and, above all, to look forward to a guaranteed long weekend of films that will all be worth seeing and that will provide a strong indication of what kind of serious movie year this will be.Unfortunately, everyone knows the depressing answer to that question.

Todd McCarthy Drive-in movies are back, and it took the deadly COVID-19 virus to resurrect them.

Todd McCarthy After nearly a half-year of involuntary confinement, of one day monotonously blending into the next with precious little change, of repeating the same limited routines with no hope of breaking out of the rut anytime soon, this week I finally saw the film that speaks to this moment far more than does any other.