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One month ahead of this year’s ceremony, France’s Cesar Academy has promised not to “spotlight” anyone accused of sexual or physical violence while issuing regulatory changes to curtail the voting rights of any Academy member facing legal accusations of that nature.

If a member is ultimately convicted, they will be expelled from the Academy for the duration of their sentence.

“In the event of legal proceedings against a member for acts of violence, particularly of a sexist or sexual nature,” the Academy announced, “the board will suspend the member’s voting rights until the ongoing procedure is concluded, or exclude them entirely until the full completion of the sentence, in the case of a final conviction.”

The Cesar Academy adopted a new charter on Jan. 23, promising to “fight against all forms of violence” while instating these zero-tolerance regulations for all legal accusations of sexual assaut. This rule change...

It really shouldn't be news that France is promising not to "spotlight" actors and filmmakers accused of sexual assault at the César Awards—its version of the Oscars—next month. But it's 2025 and this writer is American, so it's not just news—it's a massive, envy-inducing update.

The move isn't...

Stars: Noémie Merlant, Will Sharpe, Naomi Watts, Jamie Campbell Bower, Chacha Huang, Anthony Wong, Harrison Arevalo | Written by Emmanuelle Arsan, Audrey Diwan, Rebecca Zlotowski | Directed by Audrey Diwan

Back in 1974, the original Emmanuelle was something of a cause celebre, a French soft-core erotic drama that became a huge crossover hit, inspiring multiple sequels and bestowing instant fame on its eponymous star, Sylvia Kristel. Now it’s been remade, with French star Noemie Merlant in the lead, and given a 21st century spin by director Audrey Diwan, the acclaimed director of 2021’s Golden Lion-winning abortion drama Happening. However, whatever Diwan and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski were intending with this supposedly erotic dalliance, it does not appear to have penetrated, so to speak.

Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) plays Emmanuelle, a high-flying quality controller for a chain of luxury hotels. She’s first introduced having a spot of mile-high fun with...

Rotten Tomatoes has now awarded a movie that was shut out at the Golden Globes ceremony. The review aggregator web site has presented their Golden Tomato Awards to the best-reviewed titles of the year annually for the past quarter-century. Previous picks for their biggest prize, Best Movie, have included 2023's Best Picture Oscar winner Oppenheimer, 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2020's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and 2019's Avengers: Endgame, representing an eclectic mix of big-budget blockbusters and well-regarded arthouse cinema.

In 2025, Rotten Tomatoes is presenting the 26th annual Golden Tomato Awards, honoring the best movies and television shows of 2024. This comes relatively early in the 2024-2025 awards season, sandwiched between the Golden Globes ceremony on January 5 and the 2025 Oscar nominations, which will be announced on January 19 after a two-day delay amid the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires.

Dune: Part Two Has Been Awarded By Rotten...

South Korea’s Green Narae Media won the inaugural Unifrance Distribution Prize at this year’s Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris, claiming $10,290 in prize money honoring the distributor’s innovative local rollout of Trần Anh Hùng’s “The Taste of Things.”

Released in South Korea this past June, the Cannes prizewinner turned French Oscar submission went on to bank more than 45,000 local admissions, making the romantic drama a boutique success story for 2024. After buying the title off script, the Korean distributor put together a robust social media campaign that targeted young audiences while emphasizing the film’s mouth-watering content.

“[The film] contains many scenes of cooking and food that may cause stomach rumbling, which may affect viewers on an empty stomach,” teased the witty campaign. “Please be careful when watching.”

“They organized many events, most notably with [Michelin starred chef and ‘The Taste of Things’ actor] Pierre Gagnaire, who owns a renowned restaurant in Seoul,” says Charles Tesson, who oversees this new prize.

After delivering one of the year’s best films, I Saw the TV Glow filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is already working on their next feature project in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. At a recent screening, Schoenbrun teased more details about the film’s grisly and funny story.

It’s Schoenbrun’s description that has our curiosity piqued. Film critic Siddhant Adlakha, attending the event, shared on social media that Schoenbrun described the upcoming film as “Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel.“

The film’s plot, revealed earlier this year by the New Yorker, follows “a queer filmmaker hired to direct a new installment of a long-running slasher franchise. The director fixates on the prospect of casting the ‘final girl‘ from the original movie, and the two women descend into a frenzy of psychosexual mania.”

That premise alone sounds like an exciting...

Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun caught a lot of attention with their debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The film even caught the attention of Emma Stone, who produced Schoenbrun’s second feature, I Saw the TV Glow – which didn’t impress our review Chris Bumbray (you can read his 5/10 review at This Link), but did earn praise from Martin Scorsese. Now, film critic Siddhant Adlakha has taken to social media to reveal that, during a Q&a, Schoenbrun revealed their third film will be called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Even better than the title is the fact that Schoenbrun described the idea as being like “Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel.”

In case you missed it, Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a 2019 French historical romantic drama film written and directed by Céline Sciamma. It told the story of “Marianne,...

A Paris prosecutor has requested a five-year sentence for French film director Christophe Ruggia who is accused of sexually assaulting actress Adèle Haenel when she was a minor.

The sentence, including three years suspended and two under house arrest with an electronic bracelet, was requested after a two-day hearing, that wrapped in Paris’ criminal court late Tuesday (December 10).

The trial has drawn widespread attention for being among the first #MeToo cases in French cinema that has gone to court.

It comes five years after Haenel spoke out against Ruggia, accusing him of grooming and sexual abuse when she was 12 and...

Paris prosecutors have requested a five-year prison sentence for filmmaker Christophe Ruggia over sexual assault charges involving actor Adele Haenel when she was a minor, Le Monde reports. Haenel is the star of the Cannes prize-winning film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Bpm.”

The sentence, requested on Tuesday, includes two years under house arrest with electronic monitoring and three years suspended. Prosecutor Camille Poch said during the hearing that it must “remind us of the forbidden, who was the adult, who was the child, it must set the world straight.”

The case stems from incidents that allegedly occurred when Haenel was between 12 and 14 years old, following her role in Ruggia’s 2001 film “Les Diables” (“The Devils”). The prosecution outlined a pattern of “progressive hold” over Haenel, which included approximately 100 Saturday afternoons spent at Ruggia’s residence until February 2004.

Defense attorney Orly Rezlan pointed to a 2014 letter from Haenel to Ruggia,...

Former mk2 films acquisition and sales agents Olivier Barbier and Ola Byszuk are joining forces with ex-Orange Studio exec Lenny Porte to create international sales company Lucky Number.

The trio, who have worked on hundreds of auteur titles between them, including Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist to name but a few – are currently building their slate for an early 2025 market launch.

Their aim is to handle 10 French and international auteur films a year, split roughly between two to three animated features, and seven to eight fiction films and docs, including work by new voices.

The trio want to offer a boutique service, which also involves financing and distribution strategies from the earliest stages of development, to ensure maximum impact on international markets.

“In an industry that has become increasingly complex both in terms of production and distribution,...

Coralie Fargeat has pulled her Cannes sensation The Substance from Camerimage in response to recent remarks by festival director MarekŻydowicz about representation of female filmmakers.

The Polish cinematography festival kicks off on Saturday and Fargeat’s film had been scheduled to screen on Sunday afternoon with cinematographer Benjamin Kračun in attendance. Kračun will now not attend, just as Steve McQueen said earlier this week he will stay away from the opening night presentation of his film Blitz, which will go ahead,

On Friday Fargeat and Kračun issued a statement to Screen that read: “After discovering the highly misogynistic and offensive...

Updated As Camerimage, a leading cinematography festival, gets ready to open on Friday, Women in Cinematography, a body that presses for better representation for women DPs, has called for significant changes to the festival, which will this year host the world premiere of “Rust.”

The demands are a response to a heated dispute over a column by Marek Żydowicz, the festival director, in Cinematography World magazine, that provoked allegations of misogyny.

In the column, Żydowicz seemed to suggest that the selection in the program of more female cinematographers and directors could lead to the inclusion of “mediocre film productions” at the expense of “works and artists with outstanding artistic achievements.”

He posed the question: “Should we reject what is esteemed and valuable just to ‘make space’ for the necessity of social change?” He went on to argue: “Whilst festivals like Cannes, Berlin or Venice are criticized for their selections due...

With the exception of maybe Bruno Mars, it would be nearly impossible for any artist to sustain a healthy career with one foot forever planted in the 1980s. And so it came to pass that, after a decade of playful sex comedies, capped with his era-defining “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” that famed flamboyant ally Pedro Almodóvar would reluctantly move into the next decade with a more focused direction. Where, oh where, will we get our goofy, uneven sex satires from now?

Enter salvation in 2024 from an unlikely source: Noémie Merlant, the French performer primarily known for her acting in the achingly somber “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” takes the reins—with the help of her “Portrait” director Céline Sciamma as co-writer—for “The Balconettes,” a fiery ode to the silliness of Almodóvar’s formative decade, with a distinctly modern take on female autonomy beneath the crushing bulk of patriarchal violence.

Tras ‘Jackie’ y ‘Spencer’, Larraín centra la cámara en la conocida cantante. © Netflix

Ya se ha publicado el primer tráiler y póster de María, la película del director Pablo Larraín (El conde) y el guionista Steven Knight, creador de Peaky Blinders.

María narra los últimos días de vida de la legendaria soprano María Callas en el París de los años setenta, cuando se retira a la capital francesa tras una vida glamurosa y tumultuosa en el ojo público.

La película está protagonizada por Angelina Jolie (El sustituto), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Memoir of a Snail), Alba Rohrwacher (Yo soy el amor), Pierfrancesco Favino (El conde de Montecristo) y Valeria Golino (Retrato de una mujer en llamas).

Sobre el largometraje, Larraín ha dicho: «Es una imaginación creativa y un retrato psicológico de María Callas que, después de dedicar su vida a actuar para audiencias de todo el mundo, decide finalmente encontrar su propia voz,...

It’s true that queer representation in cinema has come a long way from what it used to be, and society has evolved enough to make way for important and timely conversations on the LGBTQ+ community. Now, if you take a look at the highest-rated queer movies of all time, you’ll come across titles like Bpm, Moonlight, God’s Own Country, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Shiva Baby, The Half of It, The Handmaiden, Dog Day Afternoon, Love Lies Bleeding, The Power of the Dog, Carol, and more. Upon closer examination, you’ll realize that a lot of these films are very White or they are centered around stories set in first-world countries because they are either more marketable and more accessible than queer tales from the disenfranchised sections of society. This phenomenon is not only hindering the queer discourse but also preventing the queer cinema of third-world countries from progressing.

Reflecting the breadth of her legacy across different continents, French actor Isabelle Huppert was celebrated by the likes of Alfonso Cuarón, Claire Denis, Alejandro Jodorowsky and François Ozon at the 15th edition of the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon where she received a sprawling career tribute on Oct. 18.

Huppert kicked off the festivities as she entered the 3000-seat auditorium dancing to the 1980’s disco beats of “Nuit de folie,” dressed in a shimmery champagne gown.

The joyful ceremony, emceed by Huppert’s longtime friend (and Cannes boss) Thierry Fremaux who runs the Lumiere Film Festival, was punctuated by live musical numbers ranging widely from Camelia Jordana’s singing a capella “I Will Survive,” to Julien Clerc performing his 1978 cult song “Ma Preference” by the piano, and French actor Sandrine Kiberlain playfully singing “Nuit de folie” which was said to be Huppert’s unexpected all-time favorite song.

The most vibrant homage...

Exclusive: Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Lacoste and Luana Bajrami have been unveiled as supporting cast members in Rebecca Zlotowski’s murder mystery movie Vie Privée starring Jodie Foster.

The production has also unveiled the plotline for the film which follows renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner, played by previously-announced Foster, who mounts her own private investigation into the death of one of her patients, whom she is convinced has been murdered.

The supporting cast news and plot reveal comes as filming – running from September 30 to November 22 between Paris and Normandy – enters its third week.

The feature is Zlotowski’s sixth film after 2023 Venice Golden Lion contender Other People’s Children, An Easy Girl, Planetarium, Grand Central and Dear Prudence.

Zlotowski co-wrote the screenplay with Anne Berest, whose credits include Audrey Diwan’s Venice Golden Lion winner Happening and Other People’s Children, as well as long-time collaborator Gaëlle Macé.

The film...

Four in-development films from young Japanese producers and directors — including a project produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda — are being showcased at Acfm by Japan’s Visual Industry Promotion Organization (Vipo) and Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti).

That Drive will be the feature directorial debut of Miyoh Yamaura, who works as an assistant to Palme d’Or-winner Kore-eda, and whose short Moles played at the Asia International Youth Film Festival in 2019. The film, based on a real incident from Yamaura’s life, centres on a fatal car accident and asks “how an offender can ever atone for the past,...

They say that in life there are three guarantees: death, taxes, and that if there is a complicated woman in need of a stylishly done, painstakingly constructed biopic, then Pablo Larraín is the man to make it. Having sensitively explored the grief of Jackie Kennedy in the wake of JFK's death with 2017's Natalie Portman starrer Jackie, and then made a haunting portrait of Princess Diana's vulnerability with Kristen Stewart in 2021's Spencer, Larraín has enlisted the services of Angelina Jolie to help tell the story of fêted opera singer Maria Callas in the aptly titled Maria. Check out the first teaser for the film below:

"Maria, what do you want to sing?" asks a pianist as Jolie's Maria looks out on a grand, empty music hall. From there, we get shots of Callas – in black and white, on vintage film, in a plethora of gorgeous outfits...

The 1974 romantic drama Emmanuelle caused quite a stir upon its release. Based on an erotic novel, the film featured explicit love scenes that were virtually unprecedented for mainstream cinema at the time. Starring a young Sylvia Kristel, Emmanuelle told the sexually liberated story of a woman discovering intimacy in Thailand alongside her husband. It proved a massive box office hit and cultural talking point, ostensibly helping to normalize depiction of female sexuality on screen.

Fast forward several decades, and French filmmaker Audrey Diwan took on reviving the property. Fresh off her acclaimed drama Happening about the 1960s abortion battle, Diwan set out to bring Emmanuelle into the modern era. This new version casts Noémie Merlant as the title character, now recast as a quality inspector for luxury hotels. Her latest assignment brings her to Hong Kong, where she finds herself drawn to both women and men.

With its stylish visuals...

Audrey Diwan: «El movimiento Me Too nos ha permitido encontrar nuestro propio espacio» © Ssiff

La 72 edición del Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián abrió ayer sus puertas con la proyección de la película Emmanuelle, dirigida por la cineasta francesa Audrey Diwan. Basada en la novela homónima de Marayat Rollet-Andriane, más conocida por el sudónimo de Emmanuelle Arsan, la película regresa casi cinco décadas después de su icónica adaptación de 1974, la cual estuvo prohibida en España bajo el régimen franquista (y también en muchos otros países). Ahora, en un contexto muy diferente, esta nueva versión a manos de Diwan se presenta como la película inaugural de la Sección Oficial en Donostia, y lo hace con la promesa de generar debate.

El equipo de la película desfiló ayer por la alfombra roja de San Sebastián para acompañar su estreno. Entre ellos, la directora Audrey Diwan, cuyo último largometraje, El acontecimiento,...

The 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival is underway after the world premiere of Audrey Diwan’s racy flick Emmanuelle kicked off the festivities in Spain.

The film, which boasts stars such as Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Naomi Watts (Mullholland Drive, Birdman), Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) and Jamie Campbell Bower (Stranger Things), is inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s erotic novel. Chacha Huang and Anthony Wong round out the cast, all of whom, barring Watts, appeared briefly onstage before the showing at the city’s Kursaal Theater.

The director’s project centers around a woman, Emmanuelle (Merlant), on a business trip to Hong Kong working with a luxury hotel group. Searching for a lost pleasure, she seeks her arousal in experiences with some of the hotel’s guests. One of them, Kei (Sharpe), seems to constantly elude her. Diwan has said the script was conceived as an...

MK2 Films, the European sales, production and finance powerhouse behind movies by Justine Triet and Joachim Trier, is getting ready to ramp up its global scope and move further in the English-language space.

Following its appointment of Protagonist’s former managing director Vanessa Saal as executive consultant and U.K. lead earlier this month, MK2 Films has struck a multi-year financing deal with the investment fund manager Ipr.Vc to gain financial ammunitions and build a robust slate of projects.

The company has established itself as a leading force in auteur-driven cinema with a number of critical and commercial hits in recent years, including Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” and Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It just rolled off a successful Cannes with internationally-driven movies such as Andrew Haigh’s “Belly of the Beast” starring Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell,...

European sales, production and finance company mk2 films has announced a multi-year slate financing deal with investment fund manager Ipr.Vc, which will provide “significant financial backing for a slate of future projects”.

The French firm did not divulge details of the value of the deal or how many projects it was projected to include, but said Ipr.Vc’s financial support would enable it to deliver a robust slate of projects and further strengthen “its status as a leading force in auteur-driven cinema”.

“We are thrilled to work with Ipr.Vc and its experienced management team, and to have found the perfect partners to allow us to scale our efforts while maintaining the artistic integrity that defines mk2 films and our commitment to bold, visionary filmmaking,” mk2 films CEO Nathanael Karmitz and Managing Director Fionnuala Jamison said in a joint statement.

Recent mk2 films successes include Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall,...

French production and sales outfit mk2 films has signed a multi-year financing deal with the Finnish private equity fund Ipr.Vc to bankroll a slate of new projects, the two companies unveiled on Thursday.

The new capital will come in handy for mk2, which is looking to build on recent crossover success, including its co-productions The Worst Person in the World from director Joachim Trier, and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, as well as Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall and Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, both of which mk2 sold worldwide.

In Cannes this year, mk2 unveiled its most ambitious slate ever, with several English-language projects, including Belly of the Beast, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers follow-up, starring Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell, and The Zellner Brothers’ Alpha Gang starring Cate Blanchett. Among its features already in production include Trier’s Sentimental Value,...

Angelina Jolie says Maria, her latest movie where she plays the world’s greatest opera singer, is about an artist faced with creative struggles and doubt.

“Towards the end of her life of her life she had highs and the greatest highs, were where she could really feel she was connecting, and she had times where she felt she couldn’t, and it really broke her and she felt she wasn’t able to connect,” Jolie added when introducing a private screening at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday.

Pablo Larrain’s biopic Maria, based on true accounts, tells the tumultuous, beautiful and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest opera singer, relived and reimagined during her final days in 1970s Paris.

Jolie, introducing the film, said Callas passed away during “darker times in her life.” So the film’s lead welcomed the Toronto audience and screening,...

Netflix has picked up Pablo Larraín’s Maria, which stars Angelina Jolie as famed opera singer Maria Callas. The move comes ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 29.

Following its debut on the Lido, it will stream on Netflix at an undisclosed date.

On Wednesday, Larraín said in a statement: “I’m excited to partner again with the Netflix team who care so passionately about movies. This film is my most personal work yet. It is a creative imagining and psychological portrait of Maria Callas who, after dedicating her life to performing for audiences around the world, decides finally to find her own voice, her own identity, and sing for herself. I’m deeply honored to tell this story and share it with audiences worldwide like Maria did with her life.”

Based on true accounts, the film Maria will tell the tumultuous, beautiful...

French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia has been ordered by a French magistrate to stand trial on charges of sexually assaulting actress Adèle Haenel when she was a minor in the early 2000s.

The Paris trial date is set for December 9 and 10, according to French media reports. Ruggia has denied all charges and his lawyers have yet to comment publicly on the trial.

Haenel, now 35, filed a complaint against Ruggia in 2019 accusing him of “constant sexual harassment” when she was between 12 and 15 years old and he was in his 30s, which she says included “forced kisses on the neck” and unwanted touching.

Longlegs had Neon's biggest opening weekend ever, grossing $22.6 million. Nicolas Cage's performance as the serial killer in Longlegs received rave reviews. Longlegs holds the record for the biggest box office opening for an original horror movie in 2024.

Longlegs debuted in theaters in the United States on Friday, July 12, 2024, and its impressive opening weekend at the box office was one for the record books. The Neon horror thriller film, directed and written by Osgood Perkins, chronicles the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) search for an occultist serial killer. Agent Lee Harker, played by Makia Monroe, is a new recruit with the FBI who gets assigned to the decades-long case, and during her investigation, Lee comes to realize that she has a personal connection to the murderer (Nicolas Cage's character in Longlegs).

Makia Monroe is scheduled to work with Neon again in They Follow, a sequel to the 2014 horror film It Follows.

Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse" and Céline Sciamma's "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" were both released in the United States in 2019, providing audiences with two of the best films of the year. The two films might serve as two sides of the same coin, and would make an excellent double feature. They both have a similar setup, each with two individuals, sealed off from out outside world, lost on a remote island with only one another's company to keep them sane. 

"The Lighthouse" sees its isolated world as infected with brutish masculine pride, leavened only by violent outbursts of idiocy. In "Portrait," two women stare at each other, make art, and fall madly in love, finding beauty, affection, and an exhilarating, potentially new world where their love with prevail over patriarchal norms. Women create, we see. Men destroy. 

Women fall in love in their dreams, singing with their fellow women around a campfire.

Audrey Diwan is following up her Golden Lion win for “Happening” with an adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel “Emmanuelle.”

The sensual thriller centers on a titular woman (Noémie Merlant) whose business trip to Hong Kong awakens an insatiability inside of her. Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe, “Stranger Things” breakout Jamie Campbell Bower, Anthony Wong, and Chacha Huang also co-star.

An official synopsis for the film reads: Emmanuelle is in search of a lost pleasure. She flies alone to Hong Kong, for a business trip. In this sensual world city, she multiplies experiences and meets Kei, a man who never ceases to elude her. Diwan’s film, freely adapted from Arsan’s novel, casts a female gaze on the intimate quest of the woman whose name still evokes one cinema’s most provocative characters.

“Emmanuelle” will open the San Sebastián Film Festival on September 20. The feature is distributed by Pathé.

Chantelouve,...

Un thriller erótico protagonizado por Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe y Jamie Campbell Bower. © BetaFiction

Se han hecho públicos el primer tráiler y póster de “Emmanuelle”, la nueva película de Audrey Diwan, directora de la ganadora del León de Oro del Festival de Venecia en 2021 con “L’événement”, que abrirá la 72 edición del Festival de San Sebastián a concurso y que contará con la presencia de su directora y su reparto.

“Emmanuelle”, que se inspira en el personaje y el mundo creado por la escritora Emmanuelle Arsan, sigue a Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant), una mujer acostumbrada a tener encuentros sexuales ocasionales por los que no siente ningún placer. Un día, la cadena de hoteles de lujo para la que trabaja la llama para que vaya a Hong Kong a revisar la caída de ingresos de uno de sus establecimientos, pero cuando llega se encuentra con un hotel que funciona perfectamente.

Break out the tissues. Today, Pathé released the official French trailer and poster for French writer/director Audrey Diwan’s (Happening) upcoming film, Emmanuelle, which will have its World Premiere as the Opening Night film, In Competition, at the San Sebastián Film Festival on the September 20.

The synopsis reads,

“Emmanuelle (Merlant) is in search of a lost pleasure. She flies alone to Hong Kong on a business trip. In this sensual global city, where she initiates numerous encounters, she meets Kei, a man who constantly eludes her.”

Audrey Diwan’s film, freely adapted from Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel, casts a female gaze on the intimate quest of the woman whose name still evokes one cinema’s most provocative characters. The film stars actor-director Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive), Will Sharpe (The White Lotus), Jamie Campbell Bower (Stranger Things), Chacha Huang, and Anthony Wong (Internal Affairs). Chantelouve, Rectangle Productions and Goodfellas produced the film.

Audrey Diwan’s erotic quest movie “Emmanuelle” has dropped a first trailer and poster ahead of its world premiere screening in September at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Shot in Hong Kong, the film is freely adapted from Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel of the same name. It casts a female gaze on the intimate quest of the woman whose name still evokes one cinema’s most provocative characters.

With “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Noémie Merlant in the title role, Emmanuelle goes in search of a lost pleasure. She flies alone to Hong Kong on a business trip. In this sensual global city, she initiates numerous encounters and meets Kei (Will Sharpe), a man who constantly eludes her.

Alongside Merlant, the film also stars Naomi Watts, Jamie Campbell Bower, Chacha Huang and Anthony Wong.

Diwan, a Venice Golden Lion winner for her 2021 film “Happening,” co-wrote “Emmanuelle” with fellow filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski,...

Screen can reveal the first trailer for Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, ahead of its world premiere as the opening night film of San Sebastian Film Festival on September 20.

Loosely adapted from Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel of the same name, Diwan’s film follows a woman flying alone to Hong Kong on a business trip where she initiates numerous encounters including with Kei, a man who constantly eludes her.

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire star Noemie Merlant plays the title role, alongside Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe, Jamie Campbell Bower, Chacha Huang and Anthony Wong. The film is produced by Chantelouve,...

The last few years have not only brought LGBTQ films and stories further into the mainstream, but queer movies have dominated awards seasons and found commercial success in unlikely places.

Lydia Tár — played by “Carol” star and esteemed lesbian (adjacent?) icon Cate Blanchett — dominated the 2022 Oscars race and became a well-worn touchstone in the year’s critical film and cancel culture conversations. The summer before that, Billy Eichner and Nicholas Stoller made history with Universal Pictures’ “Bros,” among the first ever gay rom-coms funded by a major studio: an important victory — even if that film did go, uh, soft at the box office.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg on another banner year for queer film: at least one win in a hard-fought cultural movement, seemingly poised to face new challenges in the not-so-distant future.

New Queer Cinema was a major influence on the indie film boom of the ’90s,...

Honored by Sight and Sound, A History of Violence stands the test of time on the list of top films of the 21st century. Screenwriter Josh Olson proud of the film's recognition, jokingly blames Sight and Sound if he is insufferable over the next bit of time. Despite missing previous polls, any recognition from Sight and Sound is a prestigious honor deserved by Olson and the team.

Screenwriter Josh Olson reacts to the news that A History of Violence has been named one of the films of the century. Written by Olson and directed by David Cronenberg, the action thriller tells the story of a once even-keeled man who is grapples with the aftermath of one heroic act of violence that left him revered by his community but shocked at his own capability. A History of Violence stars a leading cast including Viggo Mortensen, Mario Bello, Ed Harris, and William Hurt,...

Kanopy – the no-fee, ad-free film and TV show streaming service that’s available to some 45 million people in the United States with a library card and through more than 85% of large American colleges and universities – is featuring movies selected by GLAAD in celebration of Pride Month in June. The GLAAD Pride Month Picks include films that feature “fair, accurate and inclusive LGBTQ+ representation” as part of the service’s full Pride Month collection of 107 movies and documentaries.

GLAAD is the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer media advocacy organization. Its Pride Month choices (including the 2023 Oscar Best Picture winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) are below:

“The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994) “The Aggressives: The World of Lesbian Subculture” (2005) “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” (2022) “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022) “The Blue Caftan” (2022) “But I’m a Cheerleader” (1999) “Call Her Ganda” (2018) “Changing the Game” (2019) “Everything Everywhere All at Once...

“Anora,” Sean Baker’s comic look at an exotic dancer and sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, will hit theaters next fall. The film will open in limited release on Oct. 18 from Neon.

It’s a lucky time of year for the indie studio. Neon previously launched “Parasite” on Oct. 11, debuted “Triangle of Sadness” on Oct. 7 and opened “Anatomy of a Fall” on Oct 13. Like “Anora,” all three of those films premiered at Cannes and won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top honor. “Anora” was the first U.S. film to earn the prize since 2011’s “Tree of Life” from director Terrence Malick.

In a rave review for Variety, Peter Debruge enthused that the film was the “uncut gem of this year’s Cannes competition,” adding that it is “a rowdy Safdie-style movie about two cultures (Russian and American), two languages (Russian and English...

The actor and film-maker talks from Cannes about swapping Rain Man and Hot Shots! for an arthouse epic about a pansexual femme fatale

Valeria Golino rolls into her Cannes hotel late, trailing cigarette smoke and apologies. She hasn’t even had time to check in when a publicist steers her into the garden and plumps her beneath an awning. She’s being rained on a little and has to reposition her chair. “Let us sit very close together,” she says, which is lovely when she is still and faintly alarming when she’s not. Her emphatic hand gestures almost take my nose off.

Golino won the best actress prize at Venice (for Francesco Maselli’s A Tale of Love) when she was still a teenager. She has appeared in arthouse European films and Hollywood spectaculars alike. These days she’s primarily known as a film-maker, having played in Cannes with her first two features.

For crisp tension or thematic clarity, nothing in “The Balconettes” quite outdoes the nearly self-contained, minutes-long short that opens actor-director Noémie Merlant’s frenzied, heatstruck genre mashup. On a 115-degree summer afternoon in a wilting, AC-challenged Marseilles apartment block, a put-upon middle-aged wife passes out on her balcony. Roused with a splash of water by her boorish husband, who demands she get back to her chores, the poor woman breaks: Getting to her feet, she whacks him unconscious with a steel dustpan, smothers him with a towel, and sits on him for good measure until all life seeps out of his body. With not a scrap of backstory required, this immensely satisfying vignette earns the film an early round of cheers.

That’s the last we see of this character’s plight, save for a brief shot later of her being led away from the building by police. (Cue some...

Revisiting the murder mysteries of his award-winning 2013 feature, Stranger by the Lake, but with a more darkly comic tone found in much of his other work, French writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s latest, Misericordia (Miséricorde), plays like two films at once: The first is a sinister, small-town homicide story in the vein of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in which a man shows up to wreak havoc on the seemingly innocent. The second is a twisted variation on Pasolini’s Teorema, in which a family is torn apart by a visitor’s pervasive sexuality and refusal to leave them alone.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France,...

Noemie Merlant, best known beyond France for her performances in Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Todd Field’s Tár, made her debut as a writer-director-actor a few years back with Mi Iubita, mon amour, which starts with a bachelorette party. Merlant offers up another female-solidarity story in the shape of The Balconettes (Les femmes au balcon), a comedy with a very dark streak or a giggly drama depending on how you look at it.

Given at one point that a writer character in the film rejects the supposed rules of storytelling, which require clear acts and so forth, Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool. It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold sui generis experiment than a hot mess.

Then again, most of the female characters...

Ghost story, body horror, feminist comedy and a freshly minted edition of that very French subgenre, How to Get Rid of a Troublesome Corpse: Noémie Merlant, familiar as a fine actress from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, packs a good deal into her sophomore feature as director, The Balconettes. The message is essentially Time’s Up, maxxed out to include revenge killings; the medium is Mediterranean color. Sciamma co-wrote the script with Merlant, which may come as a surprise given that this swirl of blood and wackiness, complete with a running gag about a severed penis, is about as far from the restraint of Sciamma’s own films as could be.

We start with a weather report. It’s 46 degrees Celsius in Marseille, which is 115 degrees Fahrenheit: too damn hot. The camera hovers over the laundry-heavy balconies of a down-at-heel apartment block, which suggests we’re...

Noemie Merlant’s sophomore feature “The Balconettes” plays as a raunchy horror-comedy with a greater social conscience. The film follows three roommates – an actress, played by Merlant, a camgirl played by “Dune: Part Two” breakout Souheila Yacoub and a frustrated writer played Sanda Condreanu – who are initially infatuated and eventually repelled by a lothario neighbor from across the yard. Exploring questions of coercion and consent with a healthy dose of blood and guts, “The Balconettes” wants to entertain and energize in equal measure.

Variety spoke with the filmmaker ahead of her film’s world premiere in Cannes.

How did this film come about?

Four years ago, I found myself escaping from a daily life that was suffocating. I went to live with women, with friends of mine, including Sanda Codreanu, who stars in the film. This was the first time I’d lived with other women, and the first time...

It’s one of those perfect Cannes mornings. The sun is shining, there’s a slight breeze off the sea and the streets are not yet stuffed with pedestrians hustling towards screenings or official festival business. Lucas Bravo matches the city’s calm energy when he emerges from a back room of an airy second-floor apartment just a stone’s throw from the Croisette. He takes a seat on the sofa opposite The Hollywood Reporter for what will be his first conversation about his Cannes Film Festival selection, The Balconettes.

Writer, filmmaker and actress Noémi Merlant, known for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed Balconettes, which centers on a Marseille neighborhood during a summer heat wave. Three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbors from their balcony until a late-night drink turns into a bloody affair. Bravo — who broke out as dashing love interest Gabriel on Netflix...

Noémie Merlant’s star is rising as an actress. Baby Ruby and Tár won her international recognition across 2022 and 2023, while anticipation is growing around her starring role in Audrey Diwan’s English-language reboot of erotica classic Emmanuelle. In the meantime, Merlant is hitting Cannes with The Balconettes, her second film in the director’s chair after Mi iubita, mon amour. Set against a Marseille heatwave, the riotous comedy and gorefest co-stars Merlant alongside Souheila Yacoub and Sanda Codreanu as female flatmates who are pushed to the brink when a late-night drink with an attractive neighbor (played by Emily in Paris actor Lucas Bravo) takes a bloody turn.

Deadline: What was the inspiration for Les Balconettes?

NOÉMIE Merlant: Four, five years ago I fled my home in a sort of escape from something that was suffocating me. I sought refuge with two girlfriends who were living together and stayed for several months.

Italian auteur Pietro Marcello – whose 2019 film “Martin Eden” made a splash on the international art-house scene – is shooting “Duse,” a movie about legendary Italian stage diva Eleonora Duse. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi stars as Duse and Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) plays her daughter.

The Match Factory has acquired international rights to “Duse” and is kicking off sales on this buzzy biopic in Cannes. See an exclusive first-look image above.

Duse, who lived between 1858 and 1924, was considered by many the greatest actress of her time. She performed in many countries, most notably in plays by Gabriele D’Annunzio and Henrik Ibsen.

Marcello’s “Duse” will look at the latter part of her life when she is 60 “and her legendary career is now long over,” says the provided synopsis.

“But in the brutal years between the First World War and the rise of fascism, the Divina chooses to return to...

The 2024 Cannes Film Festival may be lighter on glitz and glamour than in years past, but that means arthouse and international fare from emerging and established filmmakers will get a chance to shine. Still, at least two American auteurs, Francis Ford Coppola (“Megalopolis”) and Paul Schrader, have films in the main competition for the first time in decades. David Cronenberg (“The Shrouds”) and Yorgos Lanthimos (“Kinds of Kindness”) are also back at the festival, with both making personal stories in their own way: Cronenberg, here, reckons with grief over the death of his wife seven years ago, while Lanthimos appears to retreat back into “Dogtooth” territory in a film that’s almost a rebuke of the global success he’s acquired with “Poor Things” and “The Favourite.”

Sean Baker, Andrea Arnold, Ali Abbasi, Jia Zhangke, Karim Aïnouz, and Paolo Sorrentino are also back at Cannes this year with new films in the competition.

The iconic ending of "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" explores deep themes through poignant moments and layers of meaning. The film's connection to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice adds depth to Marianne and Hlose's love story. The French language nuances, the number 28, and the ending music all add to the emotional impact of the film's conclusion.

Cline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire has a great ending scene, with its final moments packed with deeper meaning and encompassing the movie's themes. Sciamma's fourth feature-length movie made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, where it won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm awards. It eventually made its wide release in the United States in February 2020. Like similar romance films, Portrait of a Lady on Fire tells the story of Marianne (Nomie Merlant) and Hlose (Adle Haenel); the former a painter, the latter the subject she's...