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Racheal Cain’s debut feature feels derivative, with plotlines that are forced together and cartoonish reductions that sell its characters short Hard on the heels of The Substance comes another film about a dodgy Los Angeles experimental clinic and showbiz obsession – only this medical outfit, Somnium, is a shonky mind-fixing operation à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . Wannabe actor Gemma (Chloë Levine) lands a “sleep-sitting” job at the firm, watching over patients in pods who are hoping to improve their lives by having helpful dreams injected into their subconsciouses. Already working the audition circuit hard, she doesn’t appear to need that kind of assistance – but flashbacks to the idyllic relationship she ditched in Georgia hint at a festering inner wound. Appealing though its crisp sci-fi premise makes it, Racheal Cain’s debut feature nonetheless feels as if it has been directly imprinted with far too many secondhand pop-cultural memories: some decaying Eternal Suns...

Janhvi Kapoor is presently in the news for her performance in Param Sundari with Sidharth Malhotra. The actress has also created waves with the teaser of Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsikumari co-starring Varun Dhawan. And now, Bollywood Hungama has got another exciting update on Janhvi Kapoor. If our sources are to be believed, Janhvi Kapoor is all set to step into the shoes of her mother. A reliable insider informs us that a leading producer has offered the official remake of Chaalbaaz to Janhvi Kapoor. "For Janhvi, Chaalbaaz is a lot more than just a film. It's an emotion. She has jumped onto the chance of playing the lead role in Chaalbaaz, but is treading this with utmost caution," a source told Bollywood Hungama. The source also informed us that Janhvi doesn't want to just cash in on her mother's legacy. "She is taking opinions from people around for the Chaalbaaz remake. She is excited, but is also wary of all the comparisons. She is expected to take a call o...

Venice film festival Pierfrancesco Favino is a robust lead as a teenage tennis hopeful’s charming yet flawed new coach in a film that’s too long and too indecisive to stand up to recent big hitters We have had some sparky tennis movies recently, such as Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard , and it seemed at first as if this coming-of-age comedy from Italian actor turned director Andrea Di Stefano could be joining them. But despite a very robust lead performance from Pierfrancesco Favino, the enjoyably grizzled alpha male of Italian cinema, this completely runs aground in the third act, quite unable to decide if it should offer the traditional comeback story of an underdog sports movie, or if it should pursue its implied repudiation of the win-at-all-costs ethic. The other issue is whether its young hero should ignore what his dad has to say in favour of an attractive, if flawed, new mentor. The film does in fact appear finally to get off the fence ...

Venice film festival Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi star as the freethinking anatomist and his creature as Mary Shelley’s story is reimagined with bombast in the director’s unmistakable visual style Guillermo del Toro has created a movie about a grotesquely unnatural attempt to make a human being shocking in his physical strangeness … but that’s enough about his film version of Pinocchio . Now Del Toro has written and directed a bombastic but watchable new version of Mary Shelley’s great novel and makes of it a stately melodrama, starring Oscar Isaac as the anatomist and passionate freethinker Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creature: no passé neck-bolts or big fringey forehead, of course, and if you compare him with portrayals by other actors – Boris Karloff, Peter Boyle, Robert De Niro – he is, for all the picturesque prosthetic scars, the nearest this iconic figure has come to being a bit of a hottie. It’s an epic bromance between scientist and monster, both of whom spe...

Venice film festival There is a real end-of-days quality to Gianfranco Rosi’s utterly distinctive documentary of war, violence, cynicism and the climate crisis in an uneasy city Gianfranco Rosi has made a movie that could be thought of as the last of a conceptual trilogy about normal life and spiritual life in Italy: the first was his Sacro GRA from 2013 about Rome, for which Rosi won the Venice Golden Lion; the next was Fire at Sea about the migration crisis as experienced in Lampedusa in Sicily. Now there is Below the Clouds, in luminous black-and-white. It’s another of his brilliantly composed docu-mosaic assemblages of scenes and tableaux, shot from fixed camera positions without any camera narration. The title is taken from Jean Cocteau: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” Rosi reports from Naples, a city uneasily preoccupied with the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions for which it is famed, and with the great catastrophe of AD79 that buried nearby Pompeii. We see t...

Venice film festival A postman’s forgotten poetry collection finds new admirers in a tale of how the mystique of the past filters to the present Ed Saxberger is an amiable, unassuming New Yorker on the cusp of old age who works at the post office and wears a pen behind one ear. In his youth, he published an anthology of poetry called Way Past Go, which caused barely a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Then one day he is accosted outside his apartment by an NYU student, who explains that he stumbled across Way Past Go at a secondhand bookstore and was transported, blown away and could scarcely believe what he’d found. “You’re a man of letters,” the student tells Saxberger, which is undeniably true given that he spends his days sorting them. Hitchcock once said that nine-tenths of a film’s success is in the casting, by which measure Late Fame already qualifies as a hit. Saxberger is portrayed with a loose, warm-leather ease by Willem Dafoe, who makes the man look bemused but ne...

Another slice of Mumbai’s cinematic legacy is set to disappear. Famous Studios, the 79-year-old film hub in Mahalaxmi that once echoed with lights, cameras, and action, will soon be razed to make room for a glitzy residential skyscraper. The studio, founded in 1943 by J. B. Roongta, has been a part of Bollywood’s history for nearly eight decades, offering state-of-the-art facilities for shooting, sound recording, and post-production. From iconic films to ad shoots, countless projects passed through its gates, making it a landmark in the city’s creative ecosystem. But the curtains are finally coming down. Reports suggest that the landowners themselves will be sealing the deal and currently quite keen on partnering with K Raheja Corp Real Estate. It has been learnt that they have finalized plans to redevelop the 70,000 sq ft plot into a high-rise residential tower. According to layouts submitted to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the new project will rise 69 floors above Mahala...

The actor and director on struggling with Dostoevsky, her love of Maggie Smith and flossing in her car Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Lucy Lawless, 57, studied drama in Canada. In the 1990s she starred on television in Xena: Warrior Princess. She went on to appear in Battlestar Galactica, Spartacus, Parks and Recreation, Agents of SHIELD and Salem. Her films include Spider-Man, EuroTrip, Boogeyman, Bedtime Stories and Minions: The Rise of Gru. In 2024 she made her directorial debut with Never Look Away . She plays Alexa Crowe in the crime series My Life Is Murder; all four series are now available on DVD and digital. She is married for the second time, has three children and lives in New Zealand. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Laziness. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/7GLVR64 via IFTTT

After delivering films like The Tashkent Files (2019), The Kashmir Files (2022) and The Vaccine War (2023), director Vivek Agnihotri is back with another hard hitting film, The Bengal Files. The makers of the film secured the censor certificate in advance and Bollywood Hungama, in this article, would exclusively focus on the same. To begin with, the film wasn't passed by the Examining Committee of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). The Bengal Files was referred to the Reviving Committee (RC) presumably due to its content. The RC passed the film but asked for some changes. The RC asked the makers to remove 'contemptuous' words against the transgender community and replace them with appropriate terms. Similarly, the pictures of prominent personalities were removed and replaced. As per the directive of the RC, the makers submitted supporting documents for the historical events depicted in the film. The makers also provided consent letters from the parents of the...

Bollywood stars Ayushmann Khurrana and Sara Ali Khan faced a shocking ordeal along with the entire team of Pati Patni Aur Woh 2 during the shoot of this upcoming romantic comedy in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. According to recent reports, local miscreants attacked members of the film crew in broad daylight, exposing glaring lapses in security arrangements for film productions in the state. And now, All Indian Cine Workers Association (AICWA) has issued a press statement calling out this kind of behaviour. The incident, captured in videos that surfaced on social media over the past two days, shows the crew being assaulted while shooting on location. AICWA’s statement strongly condemned the attack, questioning how filmmakers, actors, and technicians can risk their lives in an environment where law and order are evidently compromised. The association said, “If the Uttar Pradesh Government cannot provide safety and security to those engaged in film production, then what is the purpose of pro...