‘Stress Positions’ Review: Where So Many Have Failed, This Team Delivers a Hilarious Pandemic Comedy

Germany‘s UFA Group has brought in a senior Netflix exec, as part of a management re-org.

As the latest feature from writers/directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero (“Identifying Features”) draws to a close, it’s hard to ignore the starkness, pacing, and tone overall; this is hardly the sort of film one puts on as any sort of a palate cleanser. While superbly well-made, beautifully shot, and comprised of a cast firing on all cylinders in terms of acting ability, to make it through “Sujo” is akin to a slight exercise in endurance, though not without a noticeable crescendo as the film chugs along.

The casting directors for the Marvel Cinematic Universe have the Midas touch. Every role that they cast is golden!

What To Watch. Today we recommend a mix of new releases and newly available titles, from movies and shows, all available to stream on the most popular platforms.What to Watch: 7 movies and shows to stream this week - Jan 12What to Watch: 7 movies and shows to stream this week - January 19Sofia Vergara is back on TV, with “Griselda” premiering on Netflix over the past week. The series follows the rise and fall of Griselda Blanco, one of the most successful drug lords in history.“Queer Eye” is back for its eighth season, set in New Orleans.

Masters of the Air is almost here, and we’re rounding up all the stars of Apple TV+’s new World War II series!

Three masked thugs robbed two men at knifepoint as they washed their off-road bikes outside a Texaco petrol station in Salford. Daniel Bebro, a 17-year-old who cannot be named for legal reasons and an unidentified man approached the group after filling up their car with petrol.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent By now, even the most hardcore fans of French cuisine and “Chocolat” star Juliette Binoche can agree that Justine Triet‘s “Anatomy of a Fall” – rather than Tran Anh Hung’s “The Taste of Things” — was the one movie that could have given France its first Oscar win for best international feature in over 30 years, since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine.” Over the last three decades, a number of French movies have earned Oscar recognition, but none have been the official French Oscar submission. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” earned five Oscar noms in 2013 and even won the best foreign-language Oscar but it represented Austria.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Veteran Italian film executive Claudio Rapino, prominent producer Andrea Iervolino and entrepreneur Pietro Peligra have teamed to form film and TV distribution and development company Maestro Distribution, which will launch from the upcoming European Film Market in Berlin. Rapino (pictured left), a former head of acquisitions and sales at top Italian companies including Leone Film Group, Notorious Pictures and Koch Media Italia, will head Maestro, which plans to buy and theatrically distribute up to 10 international feature films a year.

Berlinale Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian announced his final Competition and Encounters line-ups on Monday ahead of bowing out of the festival alongside Managing Director Mariette Rissenbeek at the end of the upcoming 74th edition in February.

—who also happens to be the brand’s first Black ambassador—stepped out in the daring look for the French fashion house’s spring-summer 2024 haute couture runway show.This outfit is a rich text, so let’s process it line by line. Atop a calf-length pencil skirt, the sported a puffy wrap coat that was cinched at the waist with a belt. Never afraid to walk the line between under- and over-accessorizing, Rihanna topped off the look with a pair of leather opera gloves, white ankle-strap pointed-toe pumps, a quilted Lady Dior bag, and a floppy black cap that sat somewhere between newsboy and baseball, designwise.

The nominations for the 2024 Razzie Awards are here, and this year, there’s a lot of big names on this list.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Adding to cinema’s long list of hellish bachelor parties to which nobody in their right mind should accept an invitation, “It’s What’s Inside” gathers a large crowd of mostly estranged friends in a remote mansion where either no one can hear you scream, or no one much cares if they do. It’s an age-old setup for a body-countdown horror movie, and it’s to the credit of Greg Jardin‘s highly strung, busily plotted debut feature that it doesn’t unfold exactly as you’d expect.

Seemingly not wasting one of its 111 offbeat minutes, sprawling and long for a comedy, but not undeserved here, Nate Silver’s “Between The Temples” begins with immediate hilarity. Ben Gottlieb (a terrific Jason Schwartzman) is a sad sack cantor living at home.

Neon is opening Origin on 130 screens and plans to expand the Ava DuVernay film, which premiered in Venice and had a excellent qualifying run in December.

EXCLUSIVE: Jim Hosking, the award-winning British filmmaker behind idiosyncratic Sundance titles The Greasy Strangler and An Evening with Beverly Luff Lin, has been tapped to direct Gleek, a sports action comedy that has Tim Heidecker and Dave Kneebone of renowned comedy-focused production company Abso Lutely (Nathan for You, Tim & Eric Awesome Show) amongst its producers.

German studio Constantin Film has greenlit The Canoe of Manitou, a sequel to Manitou’s Shoe, one of the most successful German-language movies ever. Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig returns to write, star and direct.

Theda Hammel’s latest dramedy at Neon Stressed Positions stars Hammel, John Early, Qaher Harhash, Amy Zimmer, Faheem Ali, and Rebecca F. Wright follows Bahlul, a queer Moroccan-American model that everyone wants to meet. While moments emerge showing the glimmer of an insightful character study, the film quickly dissolves into an endurance test drowned out by superficial noise. One must tip the cap to Hammel’s sheer feat of micro-budget production, but his organic style choices bewilder more than enlighten.The film follows Bahlul (Harhash), a 20-year old  Moroccan, American model, spending his time in recovery from a broken leg with his uncle Terry in Brooklyn, Ny. Terry is not Moroccan, but American and white and are family by marriage. The injured Bahlul meets a cast of eccentric characters, including Terry’s best friend Karla (Hammel), Carla‘s girlfriend, Vanessa (Zimmer), Terry’s husband Leo (Roberts), Ronald (Ali), the local GrubHub delivery guy, and Coco (Wright), the woman living in the apartment above them. 

PARK CITY – It’s 2024. Are you ready for a movie set in the pandemic summer of 2020? Or, like September 11th, another historical event that was hard for Americans to stomach on screen for a good while, do you need a decade or so to process? Your answer to those questions will likely, for better or worse, determine your opinion of Theda Hammel’s “Stress Positions” which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Not much is funny about those terrifying early days of COVID, when the world was cloaked in an apocalyptic doom and the president was telling us to drink bleach. But in “Stress Positions,” Theda Hammel miraculously finds the funny side of lockdown, mining the masks, Purell and social distancing that defined that unhappy era for physical comedy. “Those gestures are like balloons, and they’re filled with the sense of danger and a sense of peril,” Hammel says of the Sundance-bound film that she directed and co-wrote.

Paving slabs from Albert Square will be re-used at the newest park to come to the city — which will mark the end of Ancoats’ regeneration.