Toronto: Christos Nikou on Channelling Charlie Kaufman in the Offbeat 'Apples'

Eli Countryman Writer, director and producer Charlie Kaufman will be honored with Variety‘s creative impact in screenwriting award during its virtual 10 Screenwriters to Watch event on Oct. 13.The virtual event will be hosted by the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Ted Johnson Joe Biden will participate in an NBC News town hall on Oct. 5 in Miami, with Lester Holt moderating.The event was announced following this evening’s debate between Biden and President Donald Trump.This will be Biden’s second town hall of the fall campaign.

Justin Kroll Senior Film ReporterEXCLUSIVE: Cherry Jones and Segel are set to join Grace Kaufman in The Sky Is Everywhere, a new Apple Original film that hails from Apple’s existing partnership with A24.Based on the novel by Jandy Nelson, she will adapt the script from her own novel, and Josephine Decker, who helmed Madeline’s Madeline and the Elisabeth Moss-starrer Shirley, is attached to direct. The novel follows a teen as she works through the loss of her sister.

Joseph Baena truly is his father’s mini-me! The 22-year-old lookalike son of Arnold Schwarzenegger has posed for a series of snaps in the gym, and bore a striking resemblance to his muscular dad. “When the squad rolls up to the gym!” he captioned the September 3 carousel post on Instagram. The first shot showed Joseph, and two of his mates, flexing their muscles while shirtless in the training facility.

Denise Petski Senior Managing EditorEXCLUSIVE: FilmNation Entertainment, producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO limited series I Know This Much Is True, is signaling a further push into television, signing a multi-year TV development fund deal with Wishmore (The Personal History of David Copperfield), the company owned and run by Greek film financier and producer Christos V. Konstantakopoulos.

In 2013, a fisherman from Gaza netted a 2000-year-old statue of the ancient Greek god Apollo from the waters near the Egyptian border. Sensing the opportunity to drag themselves out of destitution, the fisherman’s family put the 300kg bronze relic on eBay for $500,000, only for the ruling Hamas authorities to confiscate it for themselves.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefNishikawa Miwa, the woman filmmaker who is a protégé of Japan’s celebrated “Shoplifters” director Kore-eda Hirokazu, may be about to step out from his shadow. Her social drama “Under the Open Sky” is set for premiere and a prominent position at the Toronto Intl.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThis is the weekend American film fans have been waiting for with the release of a pair of the year’s biggest movies — Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” and Disney’s live-action version of “Mulan” — after considerable delay.The fact that the two strategies for sharing these two movies with the public are so wildly different — Nolan insisted on releasing “Tenet” in theaters, while “Mulan” will test Disney Plus’ pricey new “Prime Access” model — shows the degree of

In a welcome sign for a struggling independent film market, the Venice Film Festival kicked off this week with a series of international deals. Sony Pictures Classics picked up worldwide rights, outside of Italy, for Luca Guadagnino’s documentary Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, which covers the life of fashion icon Salvatore Ferragamo.

Clayton Davis Netflix has given a platform to various voices in the Hollywood industry such as Alfonso Cuarón (“Roma”), Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), and most recently Martin Scorsese (“The Irishman”), in which filmmakers get to bring their distinct visions to life with the autonomy they wouldn’t be afforded at a traditional studio.

In a post-COVID-19 world, ruminating upon memories seems like an everyday occasion—reflecting on the ways that that civilization functioned before the impact of an unforeseen global pandemic that robbed the globe of its perceived normality.

“I try to imbue my work with a sort of interiority,” says Lucy (Jessie Buckley), the artists-physics student-girlfriend of Charlie Kaufman's “I'm Thinking of Ending Things.”The line could hardly describe Kaufman better, all the more so because it’s spoken by a character that may or may not be a figment of subconsciousness. No film writer has more regularly made his home inside the brain, treating the labyrinthine corridors of thought like sets to be peopled.

For a while now, especially during the promotion of the upcoming film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” filmmaker Charlie Kaufman has consistently discussed the idea that he might be done with directing. While the idea of him not directing features anymore is a bit worrisome for film fans, Kaufman explained in a recent interview with UPROXX why it is the issues that go along with releasing a film that has led him to this point of just not caring if he makes another or not.

The list of American screenwriters who have attained name-brand status in the last thirty years is a relatively short one. It used to be that the writer was king in Hollywood; the advent of the so-called auteur theory effectively quelled that notion.

Yorgos Lanthimos' dark absurdist comedy Dogtooth in 2009 ushered in the so-called Greek Weird Wave, which blossomed at least partly out of national chaos triggered by the country's financial crisis that same year. Christos Nikou, whose background includes working as an assistant director on that film, establishes himself as an exciting new voice in the movement with his assured feature debut, Apples.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticChristos Nikou couldn’t have anticipated the almost unrecognizable world into which he would be releasing his debut feature, “Apples,” but it’s a testament to the strength of this lonely and aloof tragicomedy’s central allegory that it adapts so well to our pear-shaped times.

Christopher Vourlias Curzon Artificial Eye has acquired distribution rights in the U.K. and Ireland for “Apples,” the feature directorial debut of Greece’s Christos Nikou, which opens the Horizons section of the 77th Venice Film Festival on Sep.

Charlie Kaufman is unlike any other creative force in the business. One only needs to look at his resume and you’ll see, both as a writer as well as a director, that he’s a singular talent.