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In 2011, French thesps Omar Sy and Anne Le Ny co-starred in the comedy hit “Untouchable.” Now, the two are reunited in the domestic thriller “Out of Control,” with “Lupin” star Sy in one of the leading roles next to Elodie Bouchez, José Garcia and Vanessa Paradis, while Le Ny serves as director and Axella Cachman’s co-writer.

“There was a real bond and warmth between us then, which was easy to revive 13 years later,” says Le Ny, who shared the screen time with Matt Damon in “Stillwater” and earned her first writing/helming kudos for her breakthrough movie “Those Who Remain” (2008).

Her seventh pic as helmer, “Out of Control (“Dis moi juste que tu m’aimes”) world premieres at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival official competition on Nov. 16, is being produced by Move Movie’s Bruno Levy, in co-production with Sy’s production company Korokoro, France 2 Cinéma and La Compagnie Cinématographique & Panache Productions,...

Among the four (at last count) vampire-related titles to surface on the Lido this year we find the Orizzonti selected En attendant la nuit (For Night Will Come) — the sophomore feature by Céline Rouzet stars Mathias Legoût-Hammond, Elodie Bouchez, Jean-Charles Clichet, Céleste Brunnquell and Laly Mercier. We’ve got a quartet of clips to debut here and it gives us a sense of one family’s balancing act to contain the secret from infancy but also the pains of growing up with the need to quench one’s thirst.…...

Jacques Audiard’s dark comedy western won best film and best director.

Jacques Audiard’s dark comedy western The Sisters Brothers, co-starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix, won best film and best director at the 24th edition of France’s Lumière awards on Monday evening.

In a third prize for Audiard’s English-language debut, Benoît Debie, who was also nominated for his work on Gaspar Noé’s Climax, won best cinematography.

The Sisters Brothers was a front-runner at the nomination stage alongside comedy of manners Mademoiselle de Joncquières, adoption drama Pupille and Venice-winning divorce drama Custody although there were no stand-out favourites this year.

Paris — Two Cannes Critics’ Week hits – ‘Guy,” “Sauvage” – and Erick Zonca’s comeback, “Black Tide,” are three potential highlights in a still-expanding MyFrenchFilmFestival, French promotion org UniFrance’s annual online selection of French and French-language films.

Unveiling MyFFF’s 2019 edition in Paris on Wednesday, UniFrance also revealed that this year’s ninth edition will bow a TV strand, showcasing espionage thriller “The Bureau,” a recent and game-changing Canal Plus Création Originale. The international filmmakers’ jury – unveiled by UniFrance’s president Serge Toubiana and co-managing director Isabelle Giordano on Wednesday morning at Google’s offices in Paris — comprises Jaco Van Dormael (“The Brand New Testament”), Houda Benyamina (“Divines”), Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”), Mikhaël Hers (“Amanda”) and Kim Nguyen (“Rebelle”). Citing “Divines” which sold to Netflix, and “Revenge” which was acquired by AMC’s Shudder, Toubiana and Giordano said all the filmmakers on the jury have had a connection with a digital service.

Despite his scant output, French director Erick Zonca still carries a mythic reputation twenty years after the debut of his first feature “The Dreamlife of Angels.” For his first theatrical feature since 2008’s Tilda Swinton vehicle “Julia,” the filmmaker chose to adapt “The Missing File,” a work of crime fiction by Israeli novelist Dror Mishani. The resulting film is “Black Tide,” which premiered at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.

Continue reading Filmmaker Erick Zonca Returns After A Decade With Solid Crime Thriller ‘Black Tide’ [Fantasia Review] at The Playlist.

Black River

Director: Erick Zonca

Writer: Erick Zonca, Lou de Fanget Signolet

French director Erick Zonca scored his most critically acclaimed hit with his 1998 debut The Dreamlife of Angels, which competed in the Cannes main competition and won Best Actress awards for its lead stars Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier.

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All week long our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century. Check here for a complete list of our essays. Just one glance at the Oscar nominees for 1998 might make it seem less a questionable choice for “best year in film” — and more an insane one. Instead of a 1974 – The Godfather II, The Conversation, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, etc – or even a 1994, where Shawshank, Quiz Show, and Pulp Fiction lost to Gump – you choose a year where the Oscars would allow Roberto Benigni to climb atop both the figurative and literal chairs of the Shrine? Fine, step away from the Oscars. Would you still celebrate a year that saw not one, but two movies about asteroids threatening the Earth? A year that saw such scars carved across cinematic history as Patch Adams, My Giant, Stepmom, and Krippendorf’s Tribe? It bears repeating: Krippendorf’S Tribe?...

In the movie If I Stay, Chloe Grace Moretz plays a teenage girl who winds up in a coma when she’s in a car accident with her family. As her body lies in a hospital bed, her consciousness stands to the side, able to observe what’s going on in the room. She can watch her loved ones visit, see her boyfriend play her a song. And she also flashes back to past events while contemplating whether or not she should wake up and stay alive. Her choice, apparently. Do comatose patients actually have out-of-body experiences? Some claim so, but OBEs are not really scientifically recognized, at least not as anything other than a dream. Movies aren’t subject to the rules of accepted science, though, and that goes for depictions of comas in general. In 2006, a doctor conducted a study of 30 movies featuring comatose persons (not including Liz Garbus‘s solid HBO doc Coma, made...

In Blue is the Warmest Color the camera cleaves to actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays the young main character Adèle. Yet, such intimate photography can border on filmic torture, similar to that employed by cinema's most grand incubus, Lars von Trier. Most of the film is a reality show of Adèle’s day to day existence where she has trained herself to hold the recorder by her face without glancing at the lens. She goes to school, she eats, she reads, she kisses other people, she cries, she sleeps, she dreams. Maybe it’s emblematic of the current generation of device-addicts, as most spaces in the film’s world disappear in favor of the star's image, including the school she goes to, the one she later teaches at, and the hallways of her house. Like pictures people take of themselves by phone or laptop, the terrain we live in isn...

With Anchor Bay Films’ psychological rape/revenge feature Girls Against Boys opening theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on February 1st, we conducted a lengthy interview with the flick’s acclaimed writer and director, Austin Chick.

Girls Against Boys (review here), which lands on Blu-ray and DVD on February 26th, stars Danielle Panabaker (2009’s Friday the 13th ), Nicole Laliberte (“Dexter”), Liam Aiken (Road to Perdition), Michael Stahl-David (Cloverfield), and Andrew Howard (2010’s I Spit On Your Grave) in a film which revolves around the character of Shae (Panabaker), a naïve New York college student, who, after being tormented by several men in a matter of days, reaches her breaking point and is drawn into co-worker Lu’s (Laliberte) twisted plan for revenge.

Filmmaker Chick chatted with us at length regarding the production. Dig in!

Dread Central: In ways the film seems the offspring of Baise-moi and Fight Club, although with a more languid,...

Below you will find a list of movie that Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright has never seen. Not long ago Wright went out and asked his friends and fans to recommend some movies they thought he may have missed over the last thirty years of his life. He got recommendations from Quentin Tarantino, Daniel Waters, Bill Hader, John Landis, Guillermo Del Toro, Joe Dante, Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, Greg Mottola, Schwartzman, Doug Benson, Rian Johnson, Larry Karaszeski, Josh Olson, Harry Knowles and hundreds of fans on this blog.

From these recommendations, Wright created a master list of recommended films that were frequently mentioned. The director now wants the fans to choose which of the films on the list he should watch on the big screen.

Wright is holding a film event at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles called Films Edgar Has Never Seen.

Edgar Wright's latest epic project [1] has him partnering with Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, Bill Hader, Guillermo Del Toro, Joe Dante, Greg Mottola, Harry Knowles, Rian Johnson and, probably, several of you. Like all of us, Wright has a bunch of classic and cult films he's never seen. Unlike all of us, he has the means to see them for the first time on the big screen and will do just that in December [2] at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles during Films Edgar Has Never Seen. The director of Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World asked both his famous friends (some of which are listed above) and fans to send in their personal must see lists and, from those titles, Wright came up with one mega list from which he'll pick a few movies to watch December 9-16. After the jump check...

For the last couple of years, September has, along with the beginning of the school year, meant one thing: the Toronto International Film Fest has again reared its head. This year, though, things turned out differently. Way back in April, I applied to be one of fifty students admitted to the Telluride Film Festival’s Student Symposium, a process that involved writing an essay. The essay question: “If you were being sent into the distant future, and you could take just one film with you, which would you take, and why?”

The following was my response:

My choice of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1984) is a personally loaded one. I first saw Brazil when I was about fourteen years old, growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where there was only one video store worth frequenting – Halifax Video. (That’s still the case.) I was quickly developing elitist tastes in music – much...

Tilda Swinton has delivered several stellar supporting performances over the past few years in movies as diverse as The Chronicles Of Narnia and Michael Clayton, so it’s high time she got a leading role as strong as the colossally self-absorbed alcoholic she plays in Julia. It’s also great to see another film written and directed by Erick Zonca, who impressed with The Dreamlife Of Angels a decade ago but has been largely idle since. Like Zonca’s earlier success, Julia follows its own unsteady rhythm, careening from comedy to suspense to pathos so heedlessly that some audience members ...