Yates’ colleague Lewis Taylor sent him the original article and Yates was blown away. “I read the article and what immediately attracted me was it portrayed a healthcare system and an industry that was so far removed from anything I knew in the UK. It seemed extraordinary that these practices were taking place when it came to the whole industry of looking after people,” Yates told TheWrap.

“That was exciting and intriguing to me coming from a national health system basis in the UK. And I was looking for a drama, I guess, having spent a long time doing various wizard films. I wanted a drama based in the real world, a social issue-based drama that was part of the national conversation. And this had all of that and to boot, it also had a bunch of characters in situations that felt very vivid and extraordinary.”

Together with producer Lawrence Grey and screenwriter Wells Tower, Yates said, they “came together four years ago or so and we sort of built the screenplay from the ground up.” Far from being intimidated by capturing a world removed from his British upbringing, Yates said he was “excited” by the possibility. “It was part of the appeal and the attraction of diving into that world and exploring it,” Yates said.

“Pain Hustlers” is lean and mean, with Blunt and Evans (and a superbly unsettling Andy Garcia as the head of the pharmaceutical firm) all giving terrific performances but without the cumbersome complications of massive visual effects or other technical hurdles. It was enough to wonder if Yates could have slotted this movie into his ongoing commitments to the “Fantastic Beasts” movies, which were at one point scheduled to stretch across five movies.

“The plan was really to just develop the script and Sony picked it up originally. We built it originally for Sony. Then we went into turnaround and took it to market to Cannes last year, and then Netflix came in,” Yates explained. “The plan, as ever, when you develop things, you develop half a dozen things at a time and you kind of go, ‘Well, hopefully that will fit into the schedule.’ And this one fit into the schedule. I finished ‘Secrets of Dumbledore’ and we released that last year and we took this to Cannes. Netflix stepped up with a good offer and we flowed straight into production. As these things often happen, it was part planned, but partly things just aligned in the way that you hope they sometimes do.” Yates said the Netflix version of the movie is nearly identical to the one they initially developed for Sony.

As much as he loved his time in the Wizarding World, Yates said that the process of making “Pain Hustlers” was a breath of fresh air – literally. “It was really invigorating to be outside, real locations, on the road doing three locations a day. The contrast couldn’t have been greater,” Yates said. For the filmmaker it was like a return to his roots.

“I started in British television making stories, dramas predominantly, and that’s what put me on the radar with Hollywood. But they were all location-based, real world stories with a very earthy agenda,” Yates said. It was these projects that “catapulted” him into the Wizarding World and projects like “The Legend of Tarzan.” But “Pain Hustlers” took him back. “It felt like I was coming home, I was coming back to the kind of work that I always enjoyed doing. And it was great to dive back into that kind of stuff,” Yates said.

You can feel certain touchstones in “Pain Hustlers” – the kitchen sink dramas of English auteur Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are nestled alongside the candy-colored vibrancy of Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project.” But first and foremost to Yates was the story – both the original article and the screenplay by Wells Tower, which he described as “massive creative opportunities.” Well, that and Florida itself.

“Everything about that Floridian landscape seemed to lend itself to the slightly more outrageous elements of this story, Yates said. “It was a series of images and photographs that I’d seen that I just thought, Whoa. This could be quite a fun context for our story. Obviously there are lots of movies that you see that kind of inspire and excite you, but these photographs I’d seen were quite fun of Florida and Wells’ writing and his sort of hold on character was kind of fun.”

Yates was also keenly aware that other projects about the opioid epidemic were being developed, which helped him solidify the tone and style of “Pain Hustlers.” “We decided really early on, right from the first draft, to take a more playful, subversive approach to the storytelling,” Yates explained.

Comedy quickly became “a huge part of the experience for the audience.” “I think if you’re going to bring an audience into a film, you really want to entertain them and beguile them to get the message across,” Yates said. Humor has been such a big part of everything I’ve ever made, even my thriller, ‘State of Play,’ or all the early television work, however serious the story was, it was always embedded with a bit of irony or subversive humor.” This was another way Yates was able to harken back to the work that he “used to love doing – social issue drama, touching on lots of bigger themes and ideas to do with capitalism and how we choose to organize our lives to be successful.” But, of course, with “some real wit and some real dark humor.” Both are very much present in “Pain Hustlers.”

Another way that “Pain Hustlers” sets itself apart from other stories about the opioid crisis is how small it is – the entire narrative is shot through a prism of these pharmaceutical reps. It’s not the story of Big Pharma or lapses in the American healthcare system, although you get glimpses of all that.

“We wanted to look at the grassroots. I’m intrigued by salespeople and the whole business of sales. And because our whole life and the way we orchestrate our societies in the West, it’s based on sales. It’s based on the need to maximize profit,” Yates said. “It’s the ideology that we all embrace. It’s brought as many benefits and it’s been hugely helpful in some ways. But when it gets out of control, it goes a bit nuts and dodgy things can happen. And to navigate that, to really zone in on a single character, Liza Drake [Blunt’s character] who’s a fictional character that we created, made a lot of sense to us. She’s an everywoman. We could all relate to her. She’s someone who’s trying to do the best she can for her kid. She’s someone who’s never had the validation that she deserves. She didn’t really get a high education, but she’s ambitious and she’s persistent.”

Instead of looking “at the whole hierarchy of the pharma world,” Yates said, “I was more intrigued by the grassroots, in the thickets, low rent element of it. And that to me appealed more as a world to be in than trying to do the whole thing.” In other words: Yates wrote the perfect prescription.

“Pain Hustlers” was released in select theaters on Oct. 20, 2023 and will be on Netflix on Oct. 27.

The post How ‘Pain Hustlers’ Director David Yates Went From Fantastic Beasts to Corrupt Pharmaceutical Reps appeared first on TheWrap.

The film stars Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen as a trio of estranged sisters who try to maintain their frayed relationship while taking care of their dying father in his small apartment.

The three actors are also executive producers on the film alongside Maya Rudolph, Danielle Renfrew Behrens, Peter Friedland, Neil Shah and Sophia Lin. Jacobs produces alongside Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery, Lia Buman, Marc Marrie, Mal Ward, Matt Aselton, Tim Headington, Jack Selby and Diaz Jacobs.

“His Three Daughters” is the third Netflix acquisition from this year’s TIFF. Previously, the streamer acquired Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” for $20 million and Anna Kendrick directorial debut “Woman of the Hour” for $10 million.

“Hit Man” stars Glen Powell and tells the story of a Houston undercover police officer who poses as a hit man until he discovers a woman in need. “Woman of the Hour” stars Kendrick as Cheryl Bradshaw, a woman who appeared as a contestant on “The Dating Game” and ended up winning a lavish date with Rodney Alcala… who turned out to be a serial killer.

The acquisition of “His Three Daughters” was first reported by Deadline.

The post Netflix Acquires Natasha Lyonne Drama ‘His Three Daughters’ Out of TIFF appeared first on TheWrap.

The lack of activity was in sync with the festival season for 2023 so far, as Sundance and Cannes went off with a smattering of deals compared to years past.

“In this marketplace, the studios and streamers, aside from Netflix, would rather spend big bucks on one or two movies that they are passionate about versus spending a boatload of money to fill a slate or clog up the pipeline with regular content,” a high-level distribution executive told TheWrap who declined to be named.

According to multiple executives who spoke to TheWrap, shifting priorities for the streamers, ongoing challenges for theatrically-minded legacy studios and concerns about strike-related variables kept Hollywood purses closed. With one big exception.

Netflix stands alone 

In addition to eight-figure deals for “Woman of the Hour” and “Hit Man” — which complement their $20 million acquisition of Chloe Domont’s erotic thriller “Fair Play” at Sundance — streaming giant Netflix also grabbed the documentary “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa” by director Lucy Walker and then purchased rights to Matthew Heineman’s Jon Batiste documentary “American Symphony.”

Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour” is a thriller about a serial killer who appeared on “The Dating Game,” based on a true story. Linklater’s “Hit Man,” which he co-wrote with star Glen Powell, tells the story of Gary Johnson, a staff investigator who plays the role of a hit man to catch individuals ordering a hit, also based on a true story.

Netflix is paying up for select titles that they believe will perform with their subscribers and attract new ones. This year marked their busiest TIFF since 2020 when they picked up “Bruised,” “Pieces of a Woman,” “I Care a Lot” and Sam Levinson’s “Malcolm & Marie.”

As independent film producer Ted Hope told TheWrap, platforms like Netflix and Amazon have “deep data to super specify what they want. For the most part, they are creating it themselves.” 

All the Netflix acquistions are commercial in the conventional sense, two uplifting, seemingly inoffensive documentaries about an unlikely accomplishment and professional triumph over adversity alongside three star-driven, adult-skewing, crowd-pleasers.

Considering $20 million pays for nearly an episode or two of shows like “The Crown” and “Stranger Things,” the streamer must feel confident that “Woman of the Hour” and “Hit Man” will both play to Netflix viewers who like watching true crime melodramas and movies about serial killers.

A Netflix representative declined TheWrap’s request for comment. 

A natural evolution

Deal-making is likely to extend into well after the conclusion of the festival. However, thus far the TIFF marketplace has been full of promising films and comparatively barren of willing buyers. This continues a trend for the entirety of 2023.

“[The soft TIFF market] confirms, especially post-Sundance and South by Southwest this year, that the indie cinema market is still operating but at a more lukewarm pace,” Redefine Entertainment co-founder Jairo Alvarado told TheWrap. “You can feel the hesitancy from buyers to be less risky.”  

The streamers have been pledging to cut costs and release fewer films and TV shows for nearly two years since Wall Street changed its mind in early 2022 and started prioritizing profits and revenue over content spending and subscription figures. It’s no longer enough for a streamer or a studio operating a streamer to make headlines with a provocative buy or pricey original production.

The same can be said for a legacy studio buying a well-liked or buzzy title in the hopes of theatrical glory safe in the knowledge that they’ll have assuredly viable post-theatrical revenue streams like DVD to make up for a shortfall.  

If nobody watches the film in theaters or on streaming, or if that quarter’s revenue doesn’t impress the investors, they don’t get extra credit for buying, let alone overpaying for, a film like Ian McKellen’s “The Critic” that inspires online discourse or a movie like “His Three Daughters” which earns critical huzzahs.  

Conversely, one sales industry insider argued that the slowing sales marketplace was a natural evolution and less a reaction to the current marketplace.

“Newer studios often emphasize, for practical reasons, acquisition and grabbing high-profile festival flicks,” the sales insider said. “However, as the studios grow, they tend to tilt toward in-house production, whereby the hustle-and-bustle of the festival scene becomes an unnecessary variable.”

No more truth to power 

Moreover, with all the streamers trying to expand into as many overseas territories as possible, there is a hesitancy to purchase a film that might inspire controversy in a potentially lucrative marketplace like China or (eventually) Russia. This is especially prevalent in the documentary sandbox.

“Look at how Netflix won a lot of prestige with ‘Winter on Fire‘ and ‘Icarus,'” noted Hope. Those two films nabbed Oscar nominations. And in both cases, the filmmakers made sequels or follow-ups.

“Netflix did not acquire these films, even when they had the IP from the previous films,” Hope continued. “Nobody has bought these films, because they are afraid of being able to sell them on a large basis that can justify the costs.”  

Hope believes that streaming companies are fearful of releasing a film globally that might impact the relationship with a given territory.

Considering the very real impact in terms of subscriber loss from even an arguably politically-motivated campaign waged over a film like “Cuties,” it’s hard to fault streaming giants for avoiding risk. Controversy may increase awareness, but as streamers prioritize international growth, there are deeper pitfalls to consider.

Alvarado stated that streamers and studios are stressing the importance of commerciality. “Even if someone pays $5 to $10 million, even if it has known cast members, you will hear a lot of buyers talking about whether it’s ‘adjacent to commercial’ or ‘some version of commercial.'”

Streamers once sold themselves as a safe space for films that were less-than-surefire smash hits. Now, with changing market pressures, territory-specific challenges and every studio needing their streaming service to stand out from the crowd, there’s less incentive to merely offer approximations of what Hollywood stereotypically won’t.

Netflix strikes back 

The dual labor stoppages are also having repercussions on the marketplace. For films, the screenwriters and actors are currently forbidden from doing conventional publicity for the duration of the strikes, which most insiders said contributed to the muted environment at this fall’s festivals.

“The combination of [the soft market in] Venice and Toronto showed the need for talent to promote movies,” the distribution executive said. “You can’t just necessarily buy buzz without media-friendly talent.” 

However, even here, Netflix has an advantage. 

As evidenced time and time again, Netflix can produce or acquire a mainstream, star-driven high-concept film, conduct comparatively minimal publicity, and then drop the movie on the service comfortable in the notion that the thumbnail on the front page will do most of the work for them.

As such, if you’re Anna Kendrick or Glen Powell, going with Netflix means a big paycheck in an uncertain marketplace and less pressure placed on whether you’ll be able to perform pre-release marketing when the film finally does arrive for mass consumption. Netflix gets to create the impression that it’s the global streaming superpower without spending buckets of billions of dollars on countless films, and the filmmakers are safe in the knowledge that, if the strike presses on, they won’t suffer financially due to being unable to promote.  

The spending spree suggests that Netflix will still seek out worthwhile films that aren’t produced under their roof.  

It’s a win-win, unless you’re a filmmaker whose film wasn’t among the lucky few. For you, 2023 is turning into the year of orphaned indies.  

The post TIFF Market: Why Netflix Is Shelling Out Big Bucks for Festival Flicks | Analysis appeared first on TheWrap.

The Orion/MGM film by first-time director Cord Jefferson is a barbed satire that stars Jeffrey Wright as a writer who, to his dismay, achieves enormous success after as a joke writing a book filled with what he feels are the worst and most pandering cliches of Black representation. In its review, TheWrap called the film “an outlandishly assured directorial debut, a beautifully modulated film that takes a great actor, Jeffrey Wright, and gives him a spectacular showcase.”

While the film did not come into the festival as one of its highest profile selections, it was an immediate sensation after its Friday night premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre, drawing some of TIFF’s most positive reviews. It currently stands at 86% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and has a score of 83 on Metacritic.

Unlike festivals like Cannes, Sundance and Venice, Toronto does not give out a jury award to the festival’s top film. Instead, viewers at all public screenings are invited to vote for their favorite films on the TIFF website, with the resulting audience awards announced at the end of the festival.  

While only two People’s Choice Award winners went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture in the first 30 years of the TIFF prize, with five others receiving Academy Award nominations in the category, the award has become an increasingly reliable indicator of Oscar success. For the last 11 years in a row, and for 14 of the last 15 years, the winner of the TIFF People’s Choice Award has gone on to receive a Best Picture nomination, and the TIFF winner has won the Oscar five times: “Slumdog Millionaire” in 2008, “The King’s Speech” in 2010, “12 Years a Slave” in 2013, “Green Book” in 2018 and “Nomadland” in 2020. (Only “Green Book” was not already an Oscar favorite before winning TIFF.)

Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” was the runner-up for the People’s Choice Award, while legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” finished third.

Over the last decade, four of Toronto’s second-place winners have received Oscar nominations, including 2012 Oscar winner “Argo,” and five of TIFF’s third-place winners have been nominated, including winners “Spotlight” and “Parasite.”

In the documentary category, Robert McCallum’s “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe” was the audience favorite, followed by Jen Markowitz’s “Summer Qamp” and Lucy Walker’s “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.”

In the Midnight Madness section, Larry Charles’ “Dicks: The Musical” won and “Kill” and “Hell of a Summer” were runners-up.

A jury consisting of directors Barry Jenkins, Nadine Labaki and Anthony Shim gave a $20,000 CAD prize to Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s “Dear Jassi” as the best film in the Platform program at the festival. Platform consisted of 10 films from 12 different countries, with other contenders including Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario,” Kei Chika-ura’s “Great Absence,” Jaione Camborda’s “The Rye Horn” and Axel Peterson’s “Shame on Dry Land.”

Sophie Dupuis’ “Solo” won the award for best Canadian feature.

Additional prizes, including NETPAC, FIPRESCI and short-film awards, were also announced at the brunch. The full list of winners is below.

People’s Choice Award: “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson
First Runner-up: “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne
Second Runner-up: “The Boy and the Heron,” Hayao Miyazaki

People’s Choice Documentary Award: “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe,” Robert McCallum
First Runner-up: “Summer Qamp,” Jen Markowitz | Canada
Second Runner-up: “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa,” Lucy Walker

Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award: “Dicks: The Musical,” Larry Charles
First Runner-up: “KILL,” Nikhil Nagesh Bhat
Second Runner-up: “Hell of a Summer,” Finn Wolfhard, Billy Bryk

Platform Jury Prize: “Dear Jassi,” Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

Best Canadian Feature Film: “Solo,” Sophie Dupuis
Best Canadian Feature Honorable mention: “Kanaval,” Henri Pardo

Changemaker Award: “We Grow Now,” Minhal Baig

Amplify Voices Award for Best BIPOC Canadian Feature Film: “Kanaval,” Henri Pardo
Amplify Voices Award for BIPOC Canadian First Feature Film: “Tautuktavuk” (“What We See”), Carol Kunnuk, Lucy Tulugarjuk
Amplify Voices Producers Award for Canadian BIPOC Trailblazer: Damon D’Oliveira

IMDbPro Short Cuts Award for Best Film: “Electra,” Daria Kascheeva

IMDbPro Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film: “Motherland,” Jasmin Mozaffari

Short Cuts Share Her Journey Award: “She (Snake),” Renee Zhan

NETPAC Award: “A Match,” Jayant Digambar Somalkar
NETPAC Award Honorable Mention: “Mimang,” Ken Taeyang
FIPRESCI Prize: “Seagrass,” Meredith Hama-Brown

The post ‘American Fiction’ Wins Toronto Film Festival’s Audience Award appeared first on TheWrap.

And a year later, during the final days of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, another movie that belongs in that company had its world premiere. “The Movie Teller,” a Spanish-language film set in Chile and made by a Danish director with a cast whose biggest names are known for French and German movies, puts an international spin on the love of movies and embraces the art of storytelling in a way that is at times profoundly moving.

The film is a mixture of genres, celebrating cinema in one scene and delving into the politics of Chile in the 1960s and ’70s in the next. It’s a portrait of hardscrabble lives in the Atacama Desert, “the driest place on earth,” but also a rapturous celebration of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “The 10 Commandments,” “Pierrot Le Fou,” “Spartacus,” “The Apartment,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “From Here to Eternity,” “Paths of Glory” and dozens of other movies. And it’s a “Last Picture Show”-style lament for the vanishing days in which strangers came together to sit in the dark and watch images on a big screen.

It takes place 50 years ago, but feels appropriate for today — at least for anybody who still loves movies.

Lone Scherfig, best known for her Oscar nominated 2009 drama “An Education,” ended up directing the project that Brazilian director Walter Salles (“The Motorcycle Diaries,” “On the Road”) had been nurturing for years. Based on the bestselling novel by Hernán Rivera Letelier, it was written by Salles, Rafa Russo and Isabel Coixet and filmed in a small mining town in the Atacama Desert, now deserted and empty, where the action is set.  

Bérénice Bejo (“The Artist”) and Daniel Brühl (“Inglorious Basterds,” “All Quiet on the Western Front”) get top billing, but the actors who really own the movie are Alondra Valenzuela and Sara Becker. Together, they play María Margarita, a young girl who lives for her family’s trips to the local movie theater every Sunday.

The father, Medardo (Antonio de la Torre), works in the local saltpeter mine, as do almost all the men in the town. The mother, María Magnolia (Bejo), cares for her four children, but still yearns for a life on stage or on screen.

Sunday at the movies is a grand ritual for the family, but that changes when an explosion puts Medardo in a wheelchair and takes away his livelihood. No longer able to afford movie tickets for the entire family, the family sends one child and has them describe the movie to everyone else – and after a couple of her brothers flub the assignment, María Margarita turns out to have a knack for remembering what she saw and capturing it in words.

“That crazy girl narrates black-and-white films like they were in Technicolor and CinemaScope,” says an amazed villager who urges Medardo to charge for his daughter’s weekly appearances as “Rita Valentina, the Movie Teller.”

This part of the story is rendered with delicacy and lyricism, aided by graceful music from Fernando Velazquez. At one point, María Margarita quotes the Shakespeare line, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” then adds, “I think we’re made of the same stuff as movies.” In these scenes, “The Movie Teller” finds the rhythms of those dreams and puts them on screen.

But there’s lots more going on than just the movie-telling. María Magnolia leaves her family without notice, forcing María Margarita to turn for help to a boss, Hauser (Brühl), who has always seemed unduly attracted to her mother. The workers try to unionize, hoping to ride the wave of progressivism they see sweeping the country. A local loan shark hires María Margarita to tell him a movie, but has darker plans for her. Plus, the rise of the Pinochet regime threatens to return the country to authoritarianism.

That’s a lot to juggle alongside the story of a young woman’s coming of age, but the haunting performances by Valenzuela as the young María Margarita and especially Becker as the older one keep the focus on her story. And even when the narrative veers into politics and despair, the movie never loses its faith in the power of cinema and of storytelling itself.

In its happiest moments, “The Movie Teller” is glorious and, yes, a little corny; in its darkest ones, it’s still lovely and sad. And with narration by María Margarita guiding us through the film, we eventually realize that we’re one more audience for Rita Valentina, listening to one more movie.

“The Movie Teller” is a sales title at TIFF.

The post ‘The Movie Teller’ Review: Lone Scherfig Delivers a Lovely Ode to the Power of Cinema appeared first on TheWrap.

Putting that quote up front is a smart way to introduce a film about the man whose career sometimes seems to have resulted in equal parts iconography and mockery. The actor, screenwriter and director created the classic characters Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, but struggled to find respect and made more than his share of terrible films.

Another smart move: New conversations with Stallone run throughout the film, but these are not the usual talking-head interviews in which the subject sits in a chair and runs through his life. Instead, Stallone almost always talks to the camera while standing up and moving around.

Zimny’s camera stays on the go, bobbing and weaving like a prize-fighter as Stallone walks down the hall or simply shifts his weigh in mid-sentence. It’s a dance of sorts, one that creates an image of a restless man in motion – and for a star whose physicality is a big part of his success, it makes perfect sense. (In one of the few interviews done with him sitting down, he’s in a moving car.)

Much of the Netflix film takes place in a lavish home that Stallone is leaving, and the boxes he’s packing serve as a central metaphor for “Sly.” He rummages through his memories and packs away countless sculptures of his most iconic creations, Rocky and Rambo.  

(There are also three Academy Award statuettes on a shelf in the house, which is curious — the original “Rocky” won three Oscars, but they went to producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, director John G. Avildsen and editors Richard Halsey and Scott Conrad. Stallone himself was nominated for two Oscars for “Rocky” in 1976 and one for “Creed” in 2015, but he never won.)

Some of the film plays like mythmaking while some of it, particularly when it’s dealing with Stallone’s father, plays like confessional. There’s a certain grandeur to the way the actor carries himself, but also enough of a sense of humor that the grandeur doesn’t become overbearing.  

For Zimny, this is relatively new territory. The director and editor has worked on shows like “The Wire” and “Independent Lens” as an editor, but as a director he’s best known for his work on music-related films, including “Willie Nelson & Family,” “Elvis Presley: The Searcher,” “The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash” and almost 30 documentaries, music videos and concert films with Bruce Springsteen.  

Stallone, though, is not about the music — as the few who’ve seen his lamentable teamup with Dolly Parton in the 1984 flop “Rhinestone” can attest. His story is that of a kid from Hell’s Kitchen in New York City who somehow got into acting, then discovered that if he wanted good roles, he’d better write them himself — or at least rewrite his lines, as he did in “The Lords of Flatbush.” That was the first movie for which he received any real attention. (Quentin Tarantino shows up in “Sly” to sing its praises.)

Stallone headed to Los Angeles in search of a movie career, but his car broke down at the corner of Hollywood and Vine as soon as he got there — so he called the only person he knew in L.A., his “Flatbush” co-star Henry Winkler. The famously kind Fonz actor helped Stallone get settled.

And then he struggled to find work, until he wrote a screenplay about a down-on-his-luck palooka who, after a few rewrites, became a boxer named Rocky Balboa. “He was a bum, he was Terry Malloy in ‘On the Waterfront,’” Stallone says of the character, which he famously insisted on playing himself.

“Rocky” made Stallone a star, but it also typecast him as a loveable but inarticulate thug. It was a hard act to follow until he wrote, directed and starred in its 1979 sequel, then took the role of an embittered Vietnam vet in the 1982 drama “First Blood,” which launched the John Rambo character.

At the time, Stallone’s mother, astrologer and promoter Jackie Stallone was often in the news. But in “Sly,” Jackie is far less of a presence than her husband, Frank Stallone Sr., a barber who according to the film was competitive with and brutal toward his son.

“I know I got a certain kind of ferocity from my father,” says Stallone. He goes on to describe the original Rambo character as a homicidal maniac and then says, “My father was Rambo in reality.”

Stories of his father run throughout the film and provide many of its saddest moments. After “Rocky” was a hit, his dad approached Stallone’s friend, director John Herzfeld, with a script he’d written for a boxing movie. “He was still competing with his son,” says Herzfeld.

And at the height of Stallone’s success, he once again took up polo, a sport he’d excelled in as a child, and invited his dad to participate in a match. During the action, his father hit him in the back with his mallet, knocking him to the ground and out of the game. Afterwards, Stallone sold everything — horses, trucks, ranch — and never played again.

Frank Stallone Sr. is an uncomfortable if revelatory presence throughout “Sly,” but he’s not the only obstacle his son faced after making it big.

“I always tell people, don’t watch the second half of any biography of a star,” Stallone says, and his bio has some of that rise-and-fall arc as he tries to figure out if viewers are interested in him playing anything other than an action hero. “Don’t sit there and try to do Shakespeare,” he concludes, “if you look like me.”

But Stallone managed to honor his legacy and gain respect with 2006’s “Rocky Balboa” (his proudest achievement) and then with “Creed” in 2015. These days, it seems, the physical toll of all those action movies has slowed him down, and his priorities are visibly shifting. When the conversation turns to his third wife, Jennifer Flavin, and his five children, he actually sits down at the kitchen table to talk about making time for family.

And then, of course, he stands up in the middle of a sentence. Because if “Sly” shows us anything, it’s that Stallone can’t be a talking head unless he’s also a walking head.

Mixing familiar stories with fresh insights, Zimny’s film is a portrait in restlessness, a picture of a man who has been both wildly successful and thoroughly dismissed — sometimes simultaneously. It won’t change your mind about the guy either way, but it’ll show some of the heart and the brain behind the muscles.

And it’ll let Stallone restate the case he’s been making for decades, sometimes in the strangest of ways. “I’m in the hope business, and I just hate sad endings,” he says. “Sorry, shoot me.”

“Sly” will be released by Netflix.

The post ‘Sly’ Review: Sylvester Stallone Documentary Is a Portrait in Restlessness appeared first on TheWrap.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it is one of a number of wildly varied films in which women claim power that had been denied to them in patriarchal societies. (Others include “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” “Fair Play,” “Lee,” “The Promised Land,” “Woman of the Year,” “Wicked Little Letters” and more.) But the gender-driven power struggles in “Widow Clicquot” are in some ways the most conventional part of the film, which can soar in one moment and feel routine in the next.

Bennett stars as the real-life Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, a.k.a. “the grand dame of champagne,” who had an arranged but passionate marriage to winemaking heir François Clicquot when she was 19. She became a widow six years later. (The official accounts of the day say he died of typhoid; the movie says it was suicide brought on by mental illness.) The film begins in the aftermath of his death, with François lying dead on a table and his wife looking at the vineyards and bemoaning in voiceover, “It seems impossible that anything will ever grow here again.”

But to say the movie “begins” with a specific event is perhaps misleading, because “Widow Clicquot” swoops and turns with the flamboyant emotions of its characters. One moment we’re in what passes for the present, in a gloomy, darkened room with Madame Clicquot reacting angrily when her father-in-law reveals his plan to sell the vineyard to their neighbor, Jean-Remy Moët; the next we’re with the couple at the height of their passion, light streaming through the windows as they make love.

The film moves in an ecstatic fantasia, slipping from joy (Barbe-Nicole in white and in love) to despair (in black and in pain). The relationship is what transports you, with Bennett and Tom Sturridge throwing themselves into a passion too extreme to last.

There’s something out of time about Bennett, a lovely fit for period roles, even if she hangs onto a grit that doesn’t yield to the restrictions of the time. Sturridge is effective in a shorter and flashier role as a grand romantic who has innovative ideas about winemaking (sing to the vines!) but is far too besotted with Voltaire, tragedy and the opiates of the era.

Cinematographer Caroline Champetier has both the right name and the right touch for the beauty and drama of the story, while composer Bryce Dessner — who also scored and wrote songs for “Cyrano” — moves from stately to insistent to rhapsodic along with the film’s own shifts.

But while the nonlinear storytelling gives “Widow Clicquot” an appropriate air of reverie, it doesn’t help with the story that serves as the movie’s backbone. Mme. Clicquot is put in charge of the vineyard because that’s what her husband wanted, but she has to fight to preserve his way of doing things. She also battles the Napoleonic Codes, which specifically forbade women from running companies. She does so with the help of Louis Bohne (Sam Riley), a wine salesman with a requisite rakish charm and a few tricks to get around the codes and embargoes.

“Men are so certain,” she says after being called in front of a hearing engineered to take away her company. “But do they know the truth, or are they only certain of themselves?”

There’s no real mystery here – we know she’ll suffer big setbacks and things will look dire, but we also know that Veuve Clicquot is still a brand of champagne, so it seems unlikely that she’ll go down in history as a failure. (Besides, Veuve Clicquot translates as Widow Clicquot.) This is a female-empowerment story that has the right actress at its center, but is only fully satisfying when it breaks free of the plot to find those moments of rapture.

“Widow Clicquot” is a sales title at TIFF.

The post ‘Widow Clicquot’ Review: Haley Bennett Shines in Ode to Champagne, Doomed Romance and Girl Power appeared first on TheWrap.

The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and A24 is planning a 2024 theatrical release. The deal is reported to be in the seven figures.

In his review of the film, TheWrap’s Steve Pond wrote: “Written and directed by Greg Kwedar (‘Jockey’), the indie drama is a curious concoction that finds veteran actor Domingo playing a would-be playwright in a theater program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility; his fellow actors, with the notable exception of ‘Sound of Metal’ Oscar nominee Paul Raci, are, for the most part, former prisoners who took place in that actual program and are billed in the credits as playing themselves. The result isn’t seamless or slick, but there’s an urgency and a grit to it, and a sense of lives lost and occasionally regained. These men aren’t making great theater, but behind these walls, they’re doing something other than waiting for time to run out.”

Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar adapted the script from Brent Buell’s play, “Breakin’ The Mummy’s Code,” and “The Sing Sing Follies” by John H. Richardson.

“Sing Sing” was directed by Kewdar and financed and produced by Black Bear, the Marfa Peach Company and Edith Productions. The producers are Bentley and Kwedar, along with Monique Walton.

The domestic deal was brokered by CAA Media Finance. Black Bear is handling international sales. Its executive producers are Colman Domingo, Raúl Domingo, Michael Heimler, Teddy Schwarzman, Larry Kalas, Larry Kelly, Nancy Schafer, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield.

Deadline first reported the news.

The post Colman Domingo’s ‘Sing Sing’ Acquired by A24 appeared first on TheWrap.

That’s because the film is a chronicle of countless journeys that took Ukrainians out of their war-torn country in the aftermath of the Russian invasion, ferrying  individuals and families to Poland in search of safer places to live. For many of those journeys, Hamela himself served as the driver, with the film made up almost entirely of what happened inside the car during trips through the devastated landscape. He may have directed the movie, but there wouldn’t be a movie unless Hamela first got the refugees out of Ukraine.

“In the Rearview,” which played at the Toronto International Film Festival after premiering in Cannes’ ACID program, is a road movie that is simple in concept and devastating in execution. One group of refugees after another rides out of Ukraine and into Poland, talking about why they’re leaving and what they’ve left behind. Cameras in the front seat are pointed at the passengers. When one group gets out, another takes its place. And slowly, methodically, it adds up to a wrenching portrait of the human side of war – faces to remember rather than faceless statistics.

There’s no real attempt to give context, because all the context we need is within the confines of this car. Here’s a man who says, mournfully, “Everything we own, we’re leaving it. We set the dogs loose. What could we do?” Then a woman talking about the cow they had to leave behind, until an elderly man cautions her, “Stop talking about the cow, you’ll start crying again.”

Here’s a pregnant young woman who’s serving as a surrogate mother – but the agency shut down during the war and stopped answering her calls, so she’s got to get out rather than pursuing her dream to open a café. Then a group who talk matter-of-factly about being tortured by the Russians. “The first one is the worst,” says a man. “Then you get used to it.”

And above all, here are the children. A little girl who looks out the window and says, “Such beautiful buildings, not bombed at all.” Another girl who hasn’t spoken since a bomb blew the door off a room where she was standing. A five-year-old who’s permanently scared of airplanes, and who plays rock-paper-scissors but adds her own sign: a gun.

The cameras occasionally move outside when passengers are picked up or let off, and news sometimes comes through on the radio or from soldiers at checkpoints. (A common directive: You can’t keep going down this road, it’s been mined.)  but for the most part, we are inside the car with the kind of people who, when they’re asked where they want to go in Poland, answer, “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere in Poland that is safe.”

The trips go through bucolic fields and countrysides, but also around bomb craters and through devastated cities. And the editing, especially in the first half of the film, is purposefully jumbled: It shifts from person to person, from one carload to another, from day to night with no attempt to introduce these people. We don’t get to officially meet them, but we do get to know them, passengers in a car that never stops except to pick up or drop off refugees and casualties.

By the second half of “In the Rearview,” the individual stories are allowed to play out at greater length, including a woman who is fleeing with her cat and a Congolese woman who needs an ambulance but can’t get one because nobody from the ministry has authorized transporting a foreigner. There’s nothing flashy about the way these stories are assembled or told, but the cumulative power becomes overwhelming.

And individual moments hit hard and resonate. “There’s no more boom-boom,” a father tells the girl who hasn’t spoken since the bomb fell on her house, and another child sitting nearby shrugs at the prospect of more bombing. “We’ll die,” she says casually. “That’s all.”

“In the Rearview” is a sales title at TIFF.

The post ‘In the Rearview’ Review: Road Trip Doc Puts a Face on Cost of War in Ukraine appeared first on TheWrap.

“The Monk and the Gun,” though, is a more mature and more intriguing work than its predecessor. “Lunana,” for all the abundant charm that made it an Oscar surprise, put a gender-swapped, romance-deprived and geographically distant spin on the plots of about half the Hallmark movies in existence: city dweller who’s been living the fast life must go to a small town, where they learn what truly matters and decide to leave the bright lights behind for the simple pleasures. The new film has plenty of culture shock, it’s more intricately constructed while remaining fun from start to finish.  

When the film begins, it’s 2006 in the remote mountain country of Bhutan. “The internet has arrived,” titles tell us – but more to the point, the king has abdicated in favor of the country’s first election. But the people need to be taught what an election is and how it works, so government officials are traveling the country holding mock elections in an attempt to get a skeptical public on board.

At a monastery in Ura, in northeastern Bhutan, a lama listens to the news of this on the radio, shakes his head and summons a young monk (a wonderfully deadpan Tandin Wangchuk). The country, he says, has gone wrong. He needs to set it right, and to do that he needs the monk to bring him two guns before the full moon. “Do we have guns in Bhutan?” the monk says.

That’s the setup for a delightfully strange saga. The monk searches for a gun in a country where firearms are scarce, and finds an old American Civil War rifle from a local man. Another local, Benji (Tandin Sonam) is serving as the guide for a Ron (Harry Einhorn), an American collector who’s prepared to pay big money for that rare rifle, but the monk will only give it up in exchange for two AK47s (because of a poster in which Daniel Craig’s James Bond is holding one). The police are very suspicious of Benji and Ron, with good reason considering the lengths to which they’re willing to go to secure that rifle. And the government officials are getting increasingly frustrated over the villagers’ inability to grasp the concept of a free election; when the monk is asked if he knows about the election, he replies, “Is that the new pig disease?”

A winding, tangled parable about modern life coming to a people that don’t understand why they can’t keep doing things the way that’s always worked for them, “The Monk and the Gun” starts with a crazy premise and quietly gets sillier and wilder. But Dorji never loses his light touch, even as you can’t help but wonder what the lama has in mind with those guns.

“You don’t think he’s gonna kill anyone, do you?” Ron asks at one point. “I mean, he’s a monk.”

“I don’t know, man,” says Benji. “These are strange times.”

They are indeed strange times, and they get stranger when the cops arrive at the same time as the election, the lama’s ceremony and a villager carrying a giant red penis statue. Things come to a head in a way that is simultaneously slapstick-y and touching, and entirely in keeping with a movie that has never lost its sense of charm through an hour and a half of twists and turns and engaging mountain escapades.  

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