‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Review: Lessons Are Taught and Taut in a Gripping Classroom-Ethics Thriller

EXCLUSIVE: Swiss filmmaker Simon Jaquemet returns to feature filmmaking with the forthcoming Electric Child. Today, Deadline can share a first look at the pic featuring Danish-American actor Elliott Crosset Hove.

had Keanu Reeves gallop on a horse through Brooklyn? Four tremendous films and nine years into the adrenaline-fueled, Reeves-led action series, director Chad Stahelski has yet to let his franchise noticeably dip in quality. “Wick” wields an assured identity and fireworks style with the same confidence of its main character carrying a deadly pistol.

Before Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic, there was Boris Becker. Affectionately known as “Boom Boom” for his fast and accurate serve and volleying technique, the West Germany-born Becker was one of the best tennis players of his generation.

Jessica Kiang In recent years, self-proclaimed Trump svengali Roger Stone has often been compared to DC Comics character the Penguin. Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s “A Storm Foretold,” a wild-ride doc that grants all-areas access to Stone over a three-year period starting with his 2019 indictment and subsequent pardon, suggests this is not strictly fair. For one thing, as the film begins, Stone is smoking the chunkiest cigar you have ever seen, rather than the more canonically acceptable cigarette holder wielded by the cartoon villain. For another, while Stone has more enemies that you can shake a fat stogie at, no single superherohas yet emerged to save Gotham/the United States of America from his brand of preening, gloating arrogance. If he is the Penguin, where the hell is Batman? 

Jessica Kiang In a log-cabin sauna nestled in pretty woods by a lake, a setting straight off the top of a chocolate box, a group of women gather on and off through the changing seasons to sweat out their secrets and heal each other with heat, talk and arcane sauna-based rituals. It is a practise so specific to the Voro community of Estonia that it joins Cuba’s rum makers, Turkey’s coffee culture and suchlike on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List, a fact revealed at the end of Anna Hint’s lovely feature doc debut “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.” And it feels exactly right, given that the small, smoky, steamy miracle of this film is how it creates something so intangible, so lyrical, from the absolutely elemental: fire, wood, water and lots of naked female flesh.

EXCLUSIVE: Production is underway in Canada on sci fi-thriller Levels, starring Cara Gee (The Expanse), Peter Mooney (Burden of Truth), Aaron Abrams (Hannibal), and David Hewlett (Nightmare Alley).

In the age of social media-centered video content creation, who was the first to do it? Many millennial or Gen Z-ers may say it all started when Jawed Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo” on Youtube in 2005, but the father of video art is actually Korean artist Nam June Paik, who predicted a future in which “everybody will have his own TV channel.”  READ MORE: ‘Nam June Paik: Moon Is The Oldest TV’ Review [Sundance] Paik was born in Seoul, Korea, but found himself in Germany as an adult to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition, and performance.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Sometimes, when a documentary has a great subject, it can explore that subject with an intimacy that’s arresting, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of cavalier casualness. “Love to Love You Donna Summer” is that kind of documentary. Co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano (who is Summer’s daughter), it’s full of home movies and photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, and it creates an eye-opening portrait of the ambitious yet deeply disconsolate woman she was. We see her when she was growing up in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift passing through her, knowing that she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at 19, to be in the German production of “Hair” (there’s a startling clip of her onstage, in long dark pigtails, singing “Aquarius” in German), or later on, after she’d become a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the empty mirror of fame.

YouTube TV is rolling out “multiview” streaming, enabling subscribers to view as many as four linear feeds simultaneously.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic “Righteous Thieves” ends with its protagonists having a wee festival of self-congratulation, sipping champagne as they promise themselves — and perhaps threaten viewers — they’ll have more adventures like the one that’s just wrapped. Their delight is not infectious, because this dopey caper’s prior 90 minutes have been rather like hoisting a flute of promised champers only to taste flat Fresca.  Director Anthony Nardolillo and writer Michael Corcoran’s film strikes a pose of sly ingeniousness throughout that is uncorroborated by any actual cleverness, surprise, wit, tension, thrills or much else you’d hope for in a high-end-heist tale. The “righteous” part — that our heroes are reclaiming artworks stolen by Nazis long ago — feels no less superficial than everything else in this uninspired genre piece. Lionsgate opens it in seven U.S. theatrical markets March 10, simultaneous with digital and on demand release. 

EXCLUSIVE: Alicia Witt (I Care a Lot) and Blair Underwood (Caste) have signed on to star alongside Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe in Longlegs — the horror-thriller from Jason Cloth and Dave Caplan’s C2 Motion Picture Group (Babylon), which Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) is directing from his own script.

2019’s “The Gentlemen,” he’d have the usually dapper Hugh Grant play a sleazy journalist who refers to England only as “Angleterre” in an East End accent, and in 2021’s “Wrath of Man” he showcased frequent collaborator Jason Statham’s ability to switch from hilarious to killing machine.With this director, we’re never so much watching an espionage or crime movie as enjoying another off-the-rails Guy Ritchie attraction. That is, until “Operation Fortune,” the co-writer and director’s most uninspired movie in a minute. Lazily bopping around to exotic locales like Cannes, France, Antalya, Turkey, and Doha, Qatar, it’s a generic collage of mega-yachts, luxe hotels, fancy parties, disguised identities and tame fights that add up to a big nothing.Worry not about your blood pressure at “Ruse de guerre.” One chase scene in sunny Antalya, with actor Max Beesley on a vespa, is downright soothing.

Over the weekend, Chris Wallace asked Bryan Cranston on CNN about “a tussle” he got into recently about critical race theory on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast. In the context of that conversation, Cranston told the host of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? on Sunday that Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan can be seen as racist.

Foo Fighters-themed pinball machine.The company released a short trailer on February 24 announcing the pinball machine, simply writing “Fighting Soon” on their social media.The trailer doesn’t show the actual machine, but has custom-drawn animations of the band as they battle aliens together.The video is soundtracked by Foo Fighters’ ‘All My Life’ and features cartoon versions of frontman Dave Grohl, guitarists Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear, bassist Nate Mendel, keyboardist Rami Jaffee and late drummer Taylor Hawkins.A small number of limited-edition pinball machines will be on sale and available to Stern All-Access members at 11am EST on February 28. Find them here.Other recent Stern Pinball titles include Rush, Iron Maiden, Metallica and KISS.Earlier this month, Foo Fighters paid tribute to their late drummer Taylor Hawkins on what would have been his 51st birthday.Hawkins was found dead in a hotel room in Bogota, Colombia in March 2022 while Foo Fighters were on tour in the country.The band lead the tributes to Hawkins, tweeting a black-and-white photo of him accompanied by the caption: “Miss you so much.”At the end of last year, Foo Fighters shared a message with fans, confirming they would continue to perform together following Hawkins’ death.

The trailer for Kiana Madeira‘s new movie has been released!

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Till the End of the Night” opens with what initially seems a Brechtian flourish: a nifty time-lapse shot of a bare shell of an apartment being painted, fitted, decorated and accessorized to an apparently lived-in state, as a vintage German torch song by Heidi Brühl crackles over the soundtrack. It’s not a film set being dressed, however, but a police one — the home base for an elaborate undercover investigation. It’s not the first time Christoph Hochhäusler’s romantic detective thriller will hint at subversive ambitions that turn out, upon closer investigation, to be rather conventional. Tossing a fraught transgender love story in the middle of an otherwise standard cop procedural, the film doesn’t much satisfy on either level, with superficial sexual politics and slack suspense. Despite a Berlinale competition slot, prospects beyond home turf appear limited.

Ilker Çatak’s ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Wins Europa Cinemas Prize In BerlinIlker Çatak’s The Teachers‘ Lounge has won the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European film in the Berlinale’s Panorama section. The award was voted on by a jury of four exhibitors from the Europa Cinemas network consisting of Marius Bălănescu (Cinema Victoria, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Will Fitzgerald (Pálás, Galway, Ireland), Tanja Helm (Cinematograph & Leokino, Innsbruck, Austria) and Ola Starmach (Kino Pod Baranami, Kraków, Poland). Members of the Europa Cinemas network will receive a financial incentive when they program the film, ensuring it a wider release. “The Teachers‘ Lounge is an intense and very well-made drama set in a German primary school. The film explores key subjects like the prevalence of bureaucracy in schools and issues of race and class, but above all, it is a compelling rollercoaster of a drama,” read the jury statement. The title is sold internationally by Brussels-based Be For Films and produced by Ingo Fliess for Munich-based if…Productions.

Wine always tastes better when it’s free, right? And budget supermarket Aldi is giving away bottles to dozens of shoppers next month - in return for their opinion.

The Sun, her Polish family have "flatly refused" to cooperate by giving a DNA test after they apparently started shunning her. Dr Fia Johansson, a psychologist, medium and private detective who is working with Julia at the moment, told the Sun that she wants to be "respectful" to the McCann family whilst dealing with the issue quickly, reports The Star. READ MORE: Madeleine McCann timeline: Woman claiming to be missing girl asks parents for DNA testShe said: "My feeling is that we need to force the mother or a member of Julia's family to take the DNA test rather than disrupt the peace of Kate and Gerry, which is not necessary.