Holly rings her school to tell them she is staying at home. She isn’t sick. She just can’t bring herself to go. “Bad things are going to happen today,” she says just above a whisper, her voice cracking.
25.08.2023 - 20:51 / variety.com
Jessica Kiang It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević’s magnificently composed, eerily satirical “Sweet Dreams” has something more like acid flowing through its veins. Acid — or maybe formaldehyde, given the embalmed pallor of the dysfunctional Dutch colonial family whose values are so elegantly dissected within it.
In only her second feature, after the Rotterdam-awarded “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” the Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker has established herself as a formidable talent with an eye for absurdity in Academy ratio, and a feel for the manicured, placid surfaces that contain rot and rebellion just as corsetry cinches in flesh. It is 1900, and this little corner of the Dutch East Indies is verdant, damp jungle terrain.
The air is thick with biting insects — Vincent Sinceretti’s extravagantly rich sound design is so multilayered that you can differentiate the crickets from the gnats from the omnipresent, whining mosquitoes. But part of the wilderness has been tamed — or more accurately, despoiled — to cultivate sugar cane, and a gloomy, opulent mansion has been built for the owners of the nearby refinery.
Agathe (Locarno Best Performance-winner Renée Soutendijk), wife of plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) moves through its ebony-panelled rooms like an imperious ghost. In high-necked, bone-colored gowns that seem old-fashioned even for the time, she’s proudly uninvolved in the family business except insofar as it supplies the sugar she spoons copiously into her tea.
Holly rings her school to tell them she is staying at home. She isn’t sick. She just can’t bring herself to go. “Bad things are going to happen today,” she says just above a whisper, her voice cracking.
Carlos Aguilar When lay minister Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) first reaches the shores of New Zealand in 1830, he does so on a white horse. A religious British man riding into a far-off land on his milky stallion is the picture of a white savior if there ever was one.
Dave Stewart has announced a UK and European tour featuring Eurythmics‘ greatest hits.Entitled ‘Eurythmics Songbook: Sweet Dreams 40th Anniversary Tour’, this will see Stewart hit the road with an female band for a series of shows which will mark 40 years since the band’s breakthrough album ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’.It comes after Stewart previously played a one-off show at the London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2019 featuring the band’s greatest songs, with the blessing of Annie Lennox, who no longer tours.The new dates, which kick off off in Switzerland on November 7, also include two UK shows at the Sunderland Empire on November 10 and the London Palladium on November 17.The tour wraps up in the Netherlands on November 28. Tickets are on pre-sale now and can be purchased here.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon has received mostly positive reactions in first reviews, despite its clear similarities with The Last Of Us.Norman Reedus returns in the second post-Walking Dead spin-off following Dead City, which centred around Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan).In The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, which has already been renewed for a second season, the character finds himself escorting a young girl who might be humanity’s saviour across post-apocalyptic France.The premise echoes the Joel and Ellie dynamic of HBO’s The Last Of Us. While reviews from critics do highlight some differences between the two shows, the comparison is repeatedly noted as a potential sticking point.“While this spin-off is often derivative, with some moments becoming almost comical in how much they feel like The Last Of Us-lite, Daryl himself is a study foundation to build from,” Collider writes, giving the show a ‘B’ rating.
Christopher Vourlias Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s Locarno prizewinner “Sweet Dreams,” a droll satire set on a sugar plantation in colonial-era Indonesia, has released its first trailer. Athens-based production and sales outfit Heretic has given Variety exclusive access ahead of the film’s North American premiere in the Centerpiece section of the Toronto Film Festival (see below).
Catherine Bray Billed as the first feature film to be co-directed by an Iranian and an Israeli filmmaker, “Tatami” goes all in with a lean and tense narrative that is part sport movie, part political thriller — with both parts equally neatly realized. Directed by Guy Nattiv and “Holy Spider” lead actor Zar Amir Ebrahimi (who also stars), from a screenplay by Nattiv and Elham Erfani, the film is set during the Judo World Championships in Tbilisi, Georgia, in which Iranian judo fighter Leila (Arienne Mandi) starts to perform better than anyone except perhaps her coach Maryam (Amir Ebrahimi) expected.
While it was difficult for the world to discern at the time, and maybe even now, to the legendary, notorious absurdist comedian Andy Kaufman, comedy was an art, and the act of performance was an act worth living in beyond the stage. Infamous for his strange, bizarre comedic behavior and erratic and provocative, even goading, live appearances, Kaufman, the subject of the documentary “Thank You Very Much: Andy Kaufman,” was seemingly on a quest for truth.
Sammi Sweetheart is back!
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic We’ve all seen our share of stories about inspirational teachers. “The Holdovers” is dedicated to the opposite sort: a hard-ass named Paul Hunham whom everyone hates. The feeling is mutual, as Mr.
Michael Mann would seem a perfect fit for a biopic of Italian motorsports legend Enzo Ferrari, himself being a master technician and a director working at the high end of his commercial craft. The result, though, is a strangely tame beast, an introspective look at an in-between moment in its subject’s life, when his business hit the rocks, his marriage all but imploded and a series of fatal accidents kept his name in the papers for all the wrong reasons.
Guy Lodge Film Critic Who does a documentary truly belong to — the people who make it, the people who fund it, or the people it depicts? On the face of it, the answer seems obvious: At a spiritual level, if not always a corporate one, we tend to think of art as the property of the artist. Yet in dusting off a long-languishing nonfiction feature from the 1970s that was taken from its stymied director by his bankrollers and sent to the vault, Andrés Peyrot’s thoughtful, mirror-holding doc “God is a Woman” makes a compelling case for the third option.
Travel blog by Travels of Adam (Hipster Blog) – Travels of Adam (Hipster Blog) - Travel & Lifestyle Hipster Blog In the vast and colorful spectrum of modern romance, the way we bid each other farewell at the end of the day has evolved into a delightful art form. For gay millennial men like myself, the phrase “goodnight babe” has emerged as a charming and endearing way to close the chapter on the day and set the tone for a restful night’s sleep. It gets me emotional every time.
Allison Holker has her dancing shoes back on.
New mom Ashley Olsen is getting some love from her Full House co-stars.
cast was thrilled to hear that their house just got a little fuller!On Monday's episode of, a recap podcast hosted by series stars Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber, the pair took some time to send well wishes to their former co-star, Ashley Olsen, who has welcomed her first child with husband Louis Eisner.«I just heard this this morning, that Ashley Olsen had a baby! That blows my mind,» Barber said as the pair discussed a scene featuring baby Michelle Tanner, who was played by both Ashley and her twin sister, Mary-Kate, when they were toddlers.«The baby had a baby!» Sweetin confirmed with a laugh. «I'm sorry, I know she's not a baby.
J. Kim Murphy Break-ups are often protracted sagas, littered with fading sympathy, belated realizations and a lot of dead air — all irritations that define Dane Elcar’s low-budget “Brightwood,” a sci-fi tall tale that follows a couple on the downslope of a marriage that becomes mysteriously ensnared in a time loop while jogging in the woods. Inelegantly extending the premise of his 2018 short “The Pond” to feature length, the writer-director quickly expends all interesting angles on his barebones premise.
A rescue centre has taken in a 21-year-old dog after its owner reportedly wanted her put down for being too old. Holly, a 21-year-old Labrador mix, who was surrendered to a warden and deemed unwanted.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Is comic-book movie culture reaching a tipping point…into peak exhaustion? This summer, we’ve seen signs of that in the ho-hum box-office returns for “The Flash” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” To be fair, the mega-success of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” has testified to the genre’s continuing appeal. Still, there are onscreen indicators that the superhero-movie audience, while it remains vast, might be entering the thrill-is-gone zone.
Here are your Manchester United morning headlines on Monday, August 14.
Gogglebox favourite Jenny Newby has welcomed her third great grandchild and shared the baby's sweet name in a social media post.