Russell Crowe Says He Should Be ‘F—ing Paid’ for the Amount of Questions He Is Asked About ‘Gladiator 2’: ‘I Am Not Even in It!’

Marta Balaga At Frontières Market and Forum, it’s all about the exploding heads.  “Big, bloody and messy explosions of heads. Old-school style explosions à la ‘Scanners’,” enthuses director Olivier Godin, who will bring neo-noir comedy “Anna Will Talk to Us” to its official selection, about a book that literally blows people’s minds. The much-anticipated event, back for its 15th edition, is bound to satisfy the oddest of tastes, delivering the likes of “Animal Realm” – “Full on Wuxia. Total cyberpunk. Stop-motion animation in full action,” teases director Caochong Maing – or vampire story “Drawn” in which the bloodsuckers don’t actually drink blood.

Princess Catherine has returned to Wimbledon!

French publishing house Gallimard.“Unbearable Lightness,” about a philandering Czech surgeon who regularly cheats on his wife with a carefree artist, was a global hit reprinted in dozens of languages. Its political undertones mirrored Kundera’s own experiences during the 1968 Prague Spring, the setting for the novel, which was crushed by Soviet invaders and sent him to exile in France in 1975.“Lightness” was adapted for the screen by Philip Kaufman in 1988, and starred Day-Lewis as Tomas, who becomes a window washer after his political views get him expelled from his profession.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Milan Kundera, whose novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was turned into an Oscar-nominated film, has died at the age of 94. Kundera died Tuesday in Paris after a long illness, Jindra Pavelková, a representative of the Moravian Library, the Czech library housing his personal collection, told Variety Wednesday. “Milan Kundera was a writer who reached whole generations of readers across all continents and achieved global fame,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said. “He leaves behind not only notable fiction, but also significant essay work.” The 1988 film adaptation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was directed by Philip Kaufman and starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Jean-Claude Carrière and Kaufman were Oscar nominated for adapted screenplay, and Sven Nykvist was Oscar nominated for cinematography.

Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera, author of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94, according to Czech media and sources close to the writer.

Manchester United are set to play rivals Leeds United on Wednesday as their pre-season campaign kicks off in Oslo. Among those who will be motivated to make a statement during the game is Matej Kovar, a young goalkeeper looking to become the first backup option for the 2023/24 season.

Marta Balaga Photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková – no stranger to Prague’s nightlife in the 1970s and 80s, as depicted in upcoming documentary “I’m Not Everything I Want to Be” – has already earned comparisons to a certain American icon. “Libuše had this big exhibition in France in 2019 and on the radio they said: ‘She is like Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia,’” says producer Lukáš Kokeš. Klára Tasovská directs. Recently, Goldin has been the subject of Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” “The very first time we pitched this project, our tutor, ‘Navalny’s’ editor Maya Daisy Hawke, said: ‘That’s funny. My husband [Joe Bini] is actually editing a film about Goldin next door,’” laughs Kokeš.

Jessica Kiang At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 27 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.  It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year, you could feel it happen in real time during the screenings of Masumura’s  “A Cheerful Girl” (1957), “Hoodlum Soldier” (1965), “Spider Tattoo” (1966) and so on.  

Manchester City goalkeeper James Trafford wrote himself into the history books with a last-minute penalty save to hand England the European under-21 Championships on Saturday evening.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The loose, lolling chapters of “The Girls Are Alright” are marked and separated by a simple visual motif: for each one, a different close-up panel of ornately illustrated Toile de Jouy fabric, rendered in various pastel shades against a calico background. The material’s distinctive period pastoral scenes, depicting gussied-up women in various states of passive repose and their corresponding noblemen, contrast pleasingly with the more modern, less dependent portrait of 21st-century femininity presented in Spanish writer-director-star Itsaso Arana’s short, sweet, winsome freshman feature. When its female characters don Toile-appropriate corsets and hoop skirts, it’s with a postmodern, literally performative sense of irony.

Guy Lodge Film Critic You have to admire the moxie of authors and filmmakers who set their science-fiction spectaculars in the very near future, essentially confronting viewers with what may seem a pretty outlandish forecast for their own lives. Those that pull it off present us with possibilities resonant enough to ponder, even when they’re too far-fetched to actively fear: So it proves in “Restore Point,” a sharp, high-shine sci-fi outing from the Czech Republic, in which earthly life after death is routine, a cellular rather than spiritual matter. Set in an unspecified (though Czech-speaking) central Europe in the year 2041, director Robert Hloz’s whopper of a calling-card debut may offer a more credibly subdued, budget-constrained visual of the mid-21st century than the lavishly built “Blade Runner 2049” — unless we’re in for a drastic design (r)evolution over the course of the 2040s — but its ideas are sky-high in concept. Marrying glossy mainstream genre aesthetics to probing, elaborately conceived speculative storytelling, this is a notably ambitious and auspiciously well-realized first feature for Hloz: the kind that appears to be flaunting his capabilities for even bigger international and Hollywood assignments.

Johnny Depp isn’t against making a comeback at Disney.

Will Tizard Contributor Major international productions have been bypassing the Czech Republic for the past year — but local producers and lawmakers have a plan to win such players back, they announced at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival this week. The Czech incentives system essentially shut down in 2022 after major productions used up the $62.7 million annual cash-back rebate funds available — or so said the officials overseeing the program. The Czech Republic has offered competitive 20% rebates — with a $6.8 million cap per project — as incentives for major productions for a decade now. The system has been heralded as the key to staying competitive in a part of Europe that’s highly in demand for big-budget shoots by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and the Hollywood majors.

The spectrum of gender and sexuality may seem to be a subject firmly rooted in the political and cultural squabbles of 2023, but Czech director Matej Chlupacek has chosen to look at it through the lens of 1937 in “We Have Never Been Modern,” an affecting drama that both relies on and transcends its period setting.Set in the old Czechoslovakia (a fitting setting for a rare Czech and Slovak co-production) just prior to World War II, the film opened the Crystal Globe competition section of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Friday. Titled “Úsvit” in Czech but borrowing its English title from Bruno Latour’s 1991 cultural study, the film uses its prewar setting to add resonance to a portrait of a society trying to transform itself even as a large and destructive transformation looms just out of sight.

Will Tizard Contributor In Robert Hloz’s sci-fi feature debut “Restore Point,” second chances are big business. In the year 2041, anyone who has an unnatural death has the right to be brought back to life, provided they’ve dutifully created a backup of their personality called a “restore point.” Naturally, some object to the notion of artificially extending life ad infinitum, wherein the story begins to get complicated. “I wanted to make a sci-fi film since I was a little kid,” Hloz says, “but I would never guess that it will happen to be my debut. I thought maybe third, fourth film.”

Karim Ainouz film “Firebrand,” in which she stars as the 16th-century British queen Catherine Parr opposite Jude Law’s King Henry VIII. For Vikander, it marked a return to the Czech Republic, where she made her first international movie, 2012’s “A Royal Affair,” starring as another queen, Denmark’s controversial 16th-century monarch Caroline Matilda.In between those two royal dramas, Vikander has starred in movies that include “Anna Karenina,” “Ex Machina,” “Jason Bourne,” “The Green Knight” and “The Danish Girl,” for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.During her trip to Karlovy Vary, Vikander sat down with TheWrap for a discussion of “Firebrand,” the importance of depicting honest, unapologetic women onscreen and just how disgusting it was to smell the special perfume Jude Law commissioned to capture the scent of a dying Henry VIII.

Ewan McGregor has said he used to show his kids the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting.The actor, who had his breakthrough role as drug addict Mark Renton in the 1996 film, discussed introducing his children to his filmography at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.Speaking to press at the festival (via Variety), where he was joined by his daughter Clara, McGregor said: “I wasn’t there when Clara watched Trainspotting for the first time. But I did used to show my kids the toilet scene. Just for a laugh.

Johnny Depp has just delivered an unexpected performance in the opening trailer for the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) currently underway in the Czech Republic.

The raucous period drama “Firebrand” was the official opening-night film at the 57th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Friday night in the spa resort town outside Prague, but there was a lot more going on in and around the Grand Hall at the Hotel Thermal than just the on-screen battle between Alicia Vikander’s Catherine Parr and Jude Law’s King Henry VIII. It also included the presentation of awards to Vikander and Russell Crowe, the usual complement of opening-night speeches, an extended dance number that appeared to be performed on ice skates (though it wasn’t on ice but on an artificial surface that mimicked ice but could be walked on safely) and, during breaks and after the movie, complete concerts by the British band Morcheeba and by Crowe’s nine-piece band, Indoor Garden Party.

The 57th Karlovy Vary Film Festival opened last night with a spirited musical performance from Russell Crowe, and the energy remained high this evening with actor Ewan McGregor in town to receive the fest’s honorary President’s Award.