News

Exclusive: U.S. sales outfit The Syndicate and financier Rabbits Black have set a strategic partnership heading into the European Film Market in Berlin.

The Syndicate will oversee sales rights moving forward on a slate of Rabbits Black-backed films, including upcoming thriller Midnight, starring Rosario Dawson, Milla Jovovich, and Alexandra Shipp, and the Clark Duke-directed Stranglehold, starring Ashley Benson, Jake Lacey and Ron Perlman.

Midnight, about a blind woman hunted by international criminals, and Stranglehold, about an exotic dancer and Army vet who rob a strip club, are both in post-production. Both were previously on sale with The Great Escape.

Michael Lurie and Jeffrey Giles, co-managers of The Syndicate, will oversee sales operations, while Great Escape’s Nick Donnermeyer will act as an advisor and oversee delivery and transition of the titles from Great Escape to The Syndicate.

We understand there are discussions between The Great Escape and The...

As we continue to explore the best in 2024, today we’re taking a look at the articles that you, our dear readers, enjoyed the most throughout the past twelve months. Spanning reviews, interviews, features, podcasts, news, and trailers, check out the highlights below and return for more year-end coverage.

Most-Read Reviews

1. The Goldfinger

2. From Darkness to Light

3. The Devil’s Bath

4. Only the River Flows

5. Longlegs

6. The Nature of Love

7. The 2024 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films, Reviewed

8. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2

9. Trap

10. Dune: Part Two

Most-Read Interviews

1. Richard Linklater on Sex, Murder, Hit Man, and the Infantilization of Culture

2. Will Menaker on the Year in Cinema: Oppenheimer, Scorsese, Friedkin & Beyond

3. Lee Daniels on The Deliverance, Shifting Culture, Douglas Sirk, and That Glenn Close Performance

4. “All Great DPs Become Alcoholics”: Rob Tregenza on Shooting Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies

5. In a Violent Nature Director Chris Nash on Creating a New Kind of Slasher,...

“What if woody [sic] Allen had brain injury,” remarks the comic Adam Friedland in his rather direct Letterboxd review of Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man. Continuing a theme, Will Sloan also hails The Nutty Professor as a “profoundly strange object from a broken brain” in his own piece on the platform. These critical appraisals are in keeping with renewed esteem for Lewis form the past 15 years, with Greta Gerwig paying The Ladies Man’s production design one of its greatest tributes with the Barbieworld homes in her 2023 blockbuster. If comedy famously equals “tragedy + time,” the formula for posthumous acclaim is surely “outright derision + time.”

So it’s a friendlier critical welcoming the premiere of From Darkness to Light, a peculiar but insightful documentary credited to Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler. Its subject is the most untouchable and elusive piece of Lewis-lore, his very own The Other Side of the Wind:...

Going into the documentary “From Darkness to Light,” most reasonably well-informed movie fans would know three things about “The Day the Clown Cried,” the Jerry Lewis Holocaust movie that is the subject of this doc: It was ahead of its time, it was never finished and it probably wasn’t any good.

Coming out of “From Darkness to Light,” which premiered on Sunday at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, you’d likely know the same three things, but at least you’d have more context and more evidence that Lewis’ legendary but unseen film is indeed a bad movie. There aren’t any real revelations in the doc, just the sad and tangled story of a questionable idea being undermined by creative choices, business conflicts and a comic icon’s determination to bury something that embarrassed him.

At one point early in the film, Lewis, in a conversation described as...

For over half a century, the tale of a missing movie has puzzled Hollywood: what happened to Jerry Lewis’ infamous dark comedy “The Day the Clown Cried”? Shot in Sweden in 1972, the film told the tale of a clown taken to a concentration camp and tasked with walking children to gas chambers. Controversy in front and behind the cameras meant the film was never released, with only a handful of people having seen snippets of the footage. Until now.

Eric Friedler’s and Michael Lurie’s documentary “From Darkness to Light,” world premiering at the Venice Film Festival, shares sections of the 1972 film with audiences for the first time while chronicling the making and the downfall of the famed film. “Everyone interested in film somehow heard about this story. It was always fascinating to us. I grew up with Jerry Lewis and thought it was worthwhile to find out a...

A new documentary explores the mystery behind The Day the Clown Cried, a never-finished, never-released 1970s movie set in a second world war death camp

It was a “disaster”. It was “so drastically wrong”. Its creator was “ashamed” and “embarrassed”. “No one will ever see it.” It was “bad, bad, bad”. The film that triggered this outpouring was Jerry Lewis’s catastrophic Holocaust drama The Day the Clown Cried. Shot in the early 1970s, it has notoriously never been officially released in any form, and only tiny snippets of footage have ever made their way into the public arena.

Lewis, at that point in his career, was trying to reinvent himself after his zany-comedy persona of the 50s and 60s was no longer so popular. He got interested in the project and cast himself as Helmut Doork, a down-at-heel clown who ends up in a Nazi death camp where he...

The lineup for the 81st Venice International Film Festival is here. Artistic director Alberto Barbera and Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco revealed the complete list of titles across sections early on Tuesday, July 23. Watch the live stream here or on YouTube.

Competition highlights included, as expected, Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” with Angelina Jolie, Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” with Daniel Craig, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.” Other gems in the lineup include “April,” from Georgian “Beginning” director Dea Kulumbegashvili; Brady Corbet’s “Fountainhead”-inspired epic “The Brutalist,” which runs a whopping 215 minutes and will present in 70mm; Aussie auteur Justin Kurzel’s thriller “The Order”; “Chevalier” director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Harvest” with Caleb Landry Jones; and Halina Reijn’s psychosexual thriller for A24, “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.

Out of competition across series and features, there’s new work from Harmony Korine,...