Cardi B has dropped “Like What (Freestyle),” her first new song of 2024. The track samples Missy Elliott’s 1999 Da Real World track “She’s a Bitch,” and it arrives with a music video directed by her husband, Offset.
17.02.2024 - 04:13 / variety.com
Catherine Bray In the grasslands of Southern Ukraine, between Crimea and mainland Ukraine, a natural history researcher named Yura (Dmytro Bahnenko) is hoping to track down and photograph a groundhog. If he succeeds, the land can be protected as a European reserve. This apparently simple premise — the kernel at the outset of “The Editorial Office” — can’t begin to hint at the rugged tapestry of thematic and topical threads that Roman Bondarchuk’s second narrative feature proceeds to weave together, the unique product of both the director’s vision and ambition, and also of the circumstances under which it gestated.
Set and shot just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and completed during the war, the film closes with a dedication to editor Viktor Onysko, who lost his life in the conflict during a combat mission (his job was completed by Nikon Romanchenko, with contributions from Heike Parplies, who also worked with Bondarchuk on his 2018 debut, “Volcano”). While attempting to track his groundhog target, Yura catches some arsonists on camera as they set a forest fire. Such a journalistic scoop ought to be an open-and-shut case: publish, expose, let the authorities take action.
Unfortunately, life in the Ukrainian provinces doesn’t work that way. As Yura attempts to interest various people in the story, most of them respond with a version of one editor’s blunt assessment that “no-one gives a shit about facts,” and a broader picture begins to unfold of a civilization collapsing into absurdity. Corrupt politicians learn fashionable dances and attempt to go viral.
Cardi B has dropped “Like What (Freestyle),” her first new song of 2024. The track samples Missy Elliott’s 1999 Da Real World track “She’s a Bitch,” and it arrives with a music video directed by her husband, Offset.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s not every day I get to review a documentary about a subject I feel personally close to, so let me put my bias right out there. “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World” is a movie about one of my favorite New York restaurants — and, in fact, countless New Yorkers feel the same way. When you walk into Veselka, the legendary Ukrainian restaurant/diner on the corner of 2nd Ave.
More musical chairs in the UK’s national radio ecosystem after popular presenter Graham Norton announced live on air that this will be his last weekend presenting his popular Saturday and Sunday shows on Virgin Radio.
It’s very easy to misread the title of Victor Kossakovsky’s latest documentary as “Architection,” since it is, in some ways, a detective story about the world we live in, albeit one in which it is very easy to figure out whodunit (spoiler: we did it to ourselves). The actual title, Architecton, is a Greek word that means “master builder,” and the film plays with the irony of what that may mean — pitting the “master builders” of yesteryear against the “master builders“ of today — from the very beginning, using a cryptic line from “L’aquilone,” a rumination on bygone times by Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). “There is something new within the sun today, or rather ancient,” he writes. This fascinating, engrossing film interrogates the subtext of this seemingly paradoxical statement.
With the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Saturday, Fox News‘ Bret Baier sat down with Volodymyr Zelensky for an interview on the front lines.
Annika Pham Fremantle’s Norwegian banner Monster, behind hit TV shows “Exit,” “Furia” and “Pørni, will be bringing to Series Mania Forum’s Co-Pro Pitching Sessions ‘The Odesa Wrestlers’, which has received development coin from Norwegian pubcaster NRK. Celebrated Norwegian podcaster Joachim Førsund and star actor Thorbjørn Harr (“Vikings”, “22 July”, “Sex”) are making their debut as co-creators, with Førsund also serving as screenwriter and Harr as episodic director.
Welcome to Deadline’s London TV Screenings list, our definitive look at next week’s buzzy event taking Soho by storm. If you’re wondering who’s exhibiting, what’s on offer and want to dive deeper into the distribs’ strategy, we’ve done the hard work for you, presenting profiles from nearly 30 exhibiting sales houses. Below, check out profiles for all the London TV Screenings founders, along with the outfits based in the UK. Read on, and find all our London TV Screenings content throughout the week here.
In the opening moments of 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov’s chilling account of the siege of the Ukrainian port city, a Russian tank marked with the ominous ‘Z’ swivels its turret toward a hospital. On an upper floor of the building, Chernov and his small team record as the cannon slowly rotates towards them, preparing to fire.
The State Department will screen 20 Days In Mariupol, nominated in the feature documentary Oscar category this year, at an event on February 27.
Christopher Vourlias Abel Ferrara has made a career out of staring unflinchingly into the abyss, interrogating man’s weakness and depravity and daring his audiences to look away. Faced with the catastrophic violence of the war in Ukraine, however, which he chronicles in the Berlin-premiering documentary “Turn in the Wound,” even the iconoclastic director finds himself at a loss — for words, and for easy answers.
With terrible conflicts raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, the world has rarely felt so troubled and simultaneously intertwined with geopolitics.
When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, it marked a watershed moment for the Documentary Feature category. All the nominated films focused on international subjects – stories from Uganda, Tunisia, Ukraine, India and Chile — and not a single American director was recognized.
Ed Meza @edmezavar Since its establishment in 2018, Gaumont Germany has produced a wide range of series and TV movies, among them such timely shows as the critically acclaimed “Deutsches Haus” (“The Interpreter of Silence”), which was nominated for the Critics Choice Awards, and the Ukrainian series “In Her Car.” A subsidiary of the French entertainment powerhouse, the Cologne and Berlin-based company also created such ambitious shows as Netflix’s historical epic “Barbarians” – the first season of which was one of the streamer’s most successful non-English-language series worldwide – and the award-winning Sky Original comedy “The Wasp,” about a professional dart player seeking to return to his former glory. Discussing the company’s latest productions, Gaumont Germany President Sabine de Mardt says it’s important to combine broader entertainment with relevance, something both “The Interpreter of Silence” and “In Her Car” offer.
Marta Balaga Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu and his Bucharest-based company Mobra Films will join forces with Poland’s Kijora Films on “Tales of the Golden Age – The Warsaw Pact,” a follow up to his 2009 sketch comedy referencing urban legends from the Ceausescu regime. Expanding to accommodate stories from different ex-communist Eastern European countries, including Poland, it will be written by Mungiu and directed by Ioana Uricaru.
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Playtime has had a busy EFM, where it’s locked a raft of major deals on “The Devil’s Bath,” a period psychological thriller in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. “The Devil’s Bath” is directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the Austrian filmmaking duo behind “Goodnight Mommy.” Set in rural Austria in 1750, “The Devil’s Bath” stars Anja Plaschg, the up-and-coming singer and composer known as Soap & Skin. Plaschg plays Agnes, a young married woman who feels oppressed in her husband’s world, which is devoid of emotions and limited to chores and expectations.
EXCLUSIVE: Urban Sales has unveiled key deals for Mascha Halberstad’s CGI animation Fox And Hare Save The Forest ahead of its world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s young audience-focused Generation Kplus sidebar this weekend.
Five international-themed films are competing for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards this year, stories set in Uganda, Chile, Tunisia, Ukraine, and India. To Kill a Tiger, which has brought director Nisha Pahuja the first Oscar nomination of her career, centers on a poor couple in the Indian state Jharkhand who bravely fought for justice after their teenage daughter became the victim of a brutal sexual assault.
Sir Keir Starmer said his party would deal with Donald Trump if the United States chooses him as the next president.
Christopher Vourlias The Russian invasion of Ukraine will mark its second somber anniversary next week, though in recent months the conflict has been pushed from the headlines in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. But with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy arriving in the German capital on Friday in an effort to shore up flagging European support for his country’s defense, Ukrainian film professionals at the Berlin Film Festival are determined not to quietly disappear from the global stage.
Siddhant Adlakha There’s a slim overlap in the Venn diagram of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Patti Smith. Into that nearly infinitesimal space fits Abel Ferrara’s obliquely reflective, geopolitical documentary “Turn in the Wound.” For that alone it deserves attention, though the Ukrainian president and the American poet/punk rocker aren’t Ferrara’s subjects so much as they are his featured co-authors — fellow painters of a portrait depicting the feeble but essential human instinct to chronicle the horrors of war.