Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Renew a Collaboration That Should Last for ‘Evermore’: Concert Review

Netflix has greenlit a Japanese drama series about the last ninjas to remain in modern times.

K.J. Yossman “Anatomy of a Scandal” star Rupert Friend has signed on to star as famed Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache in “The Yellow Tie,” an upcoming biopic of Celibidache’s life, Variety can exclusively reveal. Friend will have a central role in the feature, playing the young Celibidache. As Variety revealed last year, John Malkovich is also signed on to play an older version of the conductor. The duo last appeared on screen together in 2004’s “The Libertine,” in which Johnny Depp also starred as the Duke of Rochester. Friend has also appeared in features including “Hitman: Agent 47” and “The Death of Stalin.” He will next be appearing in “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” alongside Benedict Cumberbatch.

Christopher Vourlias Building a bridge between American independent filmmakers and the European market is the goal of U.S. in Progress, which is hosted each year during the American Film Festival (AFF) in Wrocław, Poland. The event presents a carefully curated selection of roughly half a dozen American indie titles in the final stages of production to sales agents, distributors and festival programmers. This year’s edition takes place Nov. 9 – 11. Along with offering a showcase of those films for European buyers, U.S. in Progress each year invites leading Polish post-production companies to the event, with Fixafilm, Orka Studio, Black Photon, XANF and Soundflower Studio this year each offering a $10,000 in-kind award. That’s alongside a newly added $50,000 cash award being handed out by the Polish Film Institute, to be spent by the winning filmmaker on post-production, image, sound and/or VFX in Poland.

Christopher Vourlias A cross-section of works from revered masters and fresh faces will take center stage at Poland’s American Film Festival (AFF), whose 13th edition takes place Nov. 8 – 13 in Wrocław, Poland. Established in 2010 as the sister event of the New Horizons Film Festival, a showcase of independent and arthouse cinema launched in 2001, the AFF bills itself as the first film event in Central Europe solely devoted to the works of contemporary and classic American cinema. “We are searching for those voices, those auteurs, those talents and tendencies, and those waves of American film that are the most original and show some vibes of the current moment,” said festival director Ula Śniegowska.

A.D. Amorosi Jay-Z waxed outraged, last Thursday on social media, at having been called a ”capitalist” for his diverse business ventures and their wild fiduciary successes  — this after having once famously said, “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” But watching the fruit of Hova’s labors where his Made in America music festival was concerned, if making money and bringing together crowds for prime hip-hop and chart-topping Latin artistry is wrong, who needs to be right?

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Nick Lowe and Shakespeare were wrong, about having to be cruel to be kind. A tour stop Tuesday in Anaheim that had Lowe supporting headliner Elvis Costello as an opening act before eventually joining him for three climactic duets was kindly and 100% cruelty-free, reuniting the two former studio workmates in a fashion that made it seem as if no 40-year intervals had passed at all, except for the incidental actually-getting-better factors. (You’re not getting older, you’re getting Basher, etc.) Not that the show at the City National Grove of Anaheim — one of several SoCal appearances this week by Costello, with and without Lowe in tow — needed its crowning dream-teaminess to come up aces. Costello’s current sets with the Imposters represent the best example rock ‘n’ roll has at the moment of a vast catalog of classic material played with improvisational vigor by one of the great bands the medium has known, augmented by fresh material that can stand proudly alongside the vintage. “Indoor Fireworks” was one of the quieter songs performed Tuesday, but it’s an apt description of what’s occurring on this can’t-miss outing (with apologies to the shed stops where the group pyro happens outdoors).

Right at the beginning of The March On Rome, a special screening in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, Mark Cousins draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that cinema is most powerful weapon of all. It isn’t clear — to me, anyway — whether that joyful proclamation dates back to 1922, when Benito Mussolini led a Fascist march from Naples to Rome, or to some other eruption of historical optimism. Cinema isn’t as powerful as all that — if it were, Fascism would have been clobbered to a pulp by Chaplin, Lubitsch and all the other filmmakers who lampooned its vainglorious leaders. But images do matter. They certainly mattered to Italian Fascism.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In “The March on Rome,” which world premieres in the Venice Days sidebar of Venice Film Festival Wednesday, Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker Mark Cousins tracks the ascent of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. He also draws a dotted line from those events to the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in January 2021. The documentary, illustrated with archive footage and Cousins’ characteristic cinematic analysis, starts with Donald Trump defending his decision to retweet a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Later in the film, Cousins inserts footage of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, hoping to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

A.D. Amorosi For a band that busted apart nearly a decade ago, My Chemical Romance — the toast of the 21st century’s emo-glam-empowered power-pop crowd — never lost a beat in regards to packing in millennials, and those even younger, to its 2022 reunion tour. Youthful ebullience and loud adoration were immediately noticeable when attending MCR’s Monday night packed-to-the-rafters concert at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, a live showcase postponed for two years due to the pandemic’s slowdown.  Playing to an overwhelming majority of teen (and just-post-teen) faces — many dressed in the New Jersey band’s one-time brand of red and black — singer-lyricist Gerard Way’s school of song was, as always, dedicated to the disenfranchised, the alienated and the outliers. Taken from albums such as 2002’s “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” and 2006’s “The Black Parade,” each MCR moment of the past spoke to the present-day concerns of mental health, self-awakening and freedom from fear and shame.

Poland has selected Jerzy Skolimowski’s Cannes-winning title EO as its official submission to the International Oscar race this year.

Lily Moayeri The Brookside Golf Club at the Rose Bowl has seen a lot of foot traffic over the last few months, much of it unrelated to the sport. The expansive course has become a convenient setting for several music festivals and cultural events, including This Ain’t No Picnic, which touched down in Pasadena this past weekend. The all-ages, family-friendly, two-day festival — named after the Minutemen song — boasted a bill that read like an NPR playlist. A clear replacement for Los Angeles’ defunct, and sorely missed FYF Fest, This Ain’t No Picnic had a musical something for everyone — pop, hip-hop, dance, punk and rock were well-represented genres — and featured the sort of left-of-center artists who’ve become darlings of the indie scene, like Phoebe Bridgers, Wet Leg, Beach House, Courtney Barnett (pictured above), and of the last 20 years, as represented by Le Tigre, Caroline Polachek, and headliners the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem.

Ed Sheeran was joined at his Poland gig on Saturday night by Ukrainian band Antytila – watch them give a live debut of their collaborative remix of ‘2step’.Earlier this year Antytila reached out to Sheeran asking if they could perform remotely at the ‘Concert For Ukraine’ fundraiser event in Birmingham. Organisers refused because the event is “only able to focus on the humanitarian situation” and the band are currently fighting the Russians in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, but Sheeran did say he was going to be checking out their music.Following that, they released a collaborative remix of Sheeran’s track ‘2step’ in May, with Antytila sharing screenshots of conversations they’d had with Sheeran.“I’m up for whatever man, just please keep safe,” Sheeran wrote to the group.

Bolton Wanderers suffered back to back losses in League One following defeat on the road to Plymouth Argyle.

Angelique Jackson The cast for Academy Award-winner Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film “Saltburn” is shaping up with the addition of Oscar nominee Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe and Alison Oliver. The trio join previously announced stars Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi and Rosamund Pike in the MRC Film and Amazon Studios project. Following her best picture-nominated feature directorial debut “Promising Young Woman,” Fennell wrote and is directing “Saltburn,” which is described as a “story of obsession” with other plot details kept under wraps. Production is currently underway in the U.K. Variety exclusively announced plans for the film in January, noting that Fennell would also produce the project alongside LuckyChap Entertainment’s Josey McNamara, Tom Ackerley and Margot Robbie. Prime Video landed worldwide streaming rights to “Saltburn,” which will also be released in theaters by Amazon Studios and MGM, and then stream on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide.

William Earl Generally (and generationally) speaking, middle age and nostalgia come to us all, sooner or later — even Millennial indie-rock fans. In 2022 alone, Wilco played a series of spring shows commemorating 20 years of their epic “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” Peaches performed “The Teaches of Peaches” in full in a summer tour meant to (belatedly) celebrate two decades of the “Fuck the Pain Away” album, and Broken Social Scene is set to tour this fall to in honor of 20 years of their beloved sophomore outing “You Forgot it in People.” Add the Shins to that bunch, as they took to the stage at Radio City Music Hall on Aug. 23 to celebrate the 21st anniversary of their debut album “Oh, Inverted World.” Lead singer, rhythm guitarist and songwriter James Mercer is the only current member of the band who was actually around to record “World,” as he effectively fired the rest of the band in 2009 and has rotated different members in and out since. But Mercer’s current group — guitarist Mark Watrous, bassist Yuuki Matthews, keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist Patti King, and drummer Jon Sortland — is so energetic that even performing a well-worn record sounded not only fresh, but a bit daring.

Bolton Wanderers will be aiming to return to winning ways this weekend when focus returns to League One and a long trip to take on Plymouth Argyle.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticOn the second evening of his two-night-stand at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Father John Misty sang “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” early on in the show, as he does nearly every night on his current tour, and then confessed that, on the previous night, he’d blown a significant portion of the lyrics. At a loss to explain that uncharacteristic lapse, he attributed it to that particular song choice maybe being so on the nose that thinking about it kind of threw him a little.If he were a more woo-woo kind of person, maybe he’d have attributed it to the assembly of local spirits messing with him, for daring to be so meta as to finally play a gig on the hallowed-grounds-turned-entertainment-venue he named a song after.