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Few stories have been reimagined, relitigated, reframed, and remade as much as those from Greek myth and poetry, and of these, The Odyssey is a usual suspect. From the Coen brothers’ jailbreak flick O Brother, Where Art Thou? to James Joyce’s infamously dense Ulysses, this Homeric epic’s influence has reverberated through the ages.

The latest episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks," titled "The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel," takes place on the Cosmic Duchess, a massive, massive vacation cruise ship that has been outfitted with multiple enclosed, environmentally controlled vacation biomes. The ship includes a ski resort, a beach resort, a tropical river, and a slot machine-encrusted casino. The Duchess looks a lot like Earthship Ark from the short-lived 1973 Harlan Ellison sci-fi series "The Starlost," but it's unlikely anyone will understand that reference.

Early in the episode, Lieutenants Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Boimler (Jack Quaid) enthusiastically read a list of the Duchess' amenities. Mariner notes that they have 240 24-hour spas, an indoor water park, and, perhaps bafflingly, an underwater dry park. No one knows what an underwater dry park is, but they're eager to try. Boimler also notes that one of the space casinos has a bunch of Dixon Hill slot machines.

Ignoring for...

Time has always been kind to Francis Ford Coppola. The legendary filmmaker is no stranger to epic, unwieldy, ruinously expensive films, underappreciated upon release before later achieving classic status. Will his monumental, decades-in-the-making, self-funded passion-project Megalopolis follow a similar path to The Godfather and Apocalypse Now — or will it be more like One From The Heart? Only time will tell. It is certainly a film that requires some time digesting.

Coppola has compared the film to James Joyce’s Ulysses: like that grand experimental novel, it recasts ancient myths in a modern city. And like Ulysses, it is wildly ambitious, conceptually bold, frequently inscrutable, endlessly fascinating, and endlessly frustrating. It is a “fable” about the fall of empire, the parallels between modern America and ancient Rome, power and corruption, art and creativity, the violence of progress versus the cruelty of the status quo. It is, ultimately, a $120 million film about town planning.

“I pursued the glitz for a while. And I don’t regret it. But I know it wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t the real thing.” This sentiment, which could almost be poetry or song lyrics, is spoken by Edna O’Brien in one of the final interviews she gave, which appears toward the end of director Sinéad O’Shea’s engaging documentary. “Glitz” is if anything an understatement: The film opens with something of a roll-call of O’Brien’s famous friends, showing the celebrated Irish author in her prime rubbing shoulders with the likes of Paul McCartney, Shirley MacLaine, Sean Connery, Jane Fonda, Judy Garland and Laurence Olivier. Indeed, she rubs more than shoulders with some of them: Romantic conquests include Robert Mitchum. Yowza.

After the razzle dazzle prologue to get newcomers interested with the promise of famous faces, the film proper begins, tracing O’Brien’s more humble roots in County Clare,...

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through” — and the second mounting of a Nunez book this fall season alongside David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend” — “The Room Next Door” is mannered in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful, stilted and stiff where it should be sumptuous, and aches of the feeling that the Spanish auteur passed his sensibility, and his script, through a direct-to-English transferal that lacks the nuances that, say, a bilingual literary translator would bring to a text brought from Europe to the United States. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, playing longtime friends who reunite as the latter decides to give up stage-three cancer treatment to choose euthanasia instead, move and speak as if in different films.

Moore...

Devotion runs through the veins of Fontaines D.C.’s music. The Dublin group first crashed onto the post-punk scene with their 2019 debut Dogrel, a nuanced, gripping homage to their homeland; 2022’s guttural Skinty Fia unpacked the guilt they felt after relocating to London. Now, they’re considering devotion through an entirely new lens, introduced on the opening title track of their fourth album Romance. Over brooding, cinematic synths, singer Grian Chatten proclaims, “Maybe romance is a place/For me/And you.”

If there was any takeaway from the 4-single...

Dance First is a biographical drama film that attempts to present the unusual practices and nuances in the life of the Irish playwright and celebrated litterateur, Samuel Beckett. However, the academic or literary pursuits of the man do not take center stage in the film; instead, the various dilemmas, losses, and experiences in his personal life form the crux of the plot. Overall, Dance First stumbles at showing anything considerably new or interesting, and its formal experimentations appear too superficial, making it watchable only for the convincing performances by the cast.

Spoiler Alert

What is the film about?

Dance First begins inside a grand hall, where crowds have gathered to attend the award ceremony for the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, with many literary practitioners and their families seated inside. As the announcer gets up on the stage to announce the name of the winner, there is a momentary pause,...

This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.

Much like the decade that produced them, the movies of the 2000s were shaped in response to such profound and irrevocable change that it’s difficult to assign them a cohesive identity of their own; it can be tempting to think of them as a long suspension bridge between then and now rather than as a well-defined era unto itself. When the sun rose on the start of the new millennium, the vast majority of films were shot and projected on film, superhero movies were still considered an outlandish gamble, middle-class malaise was American cinema’s preoccupying crisis, and James Cameron was the biggest director on the planet. By the time the smoke cleared 10 years later, digital had pushed celluloid to the brink of extinction, Marvel was beginning to exert an iron grip on the multiplex,...

The acclaimed director James Marsh takes on the challenging task of bringing Samuel Beckett’s complex life to the screen in Dance First. Written by Neil Forsyth, the film stars Gabriel Byrne as the older Beckett, with Fionn O’Shea playing him in his younger days. It skips through key periods, relationships, and events in a largely linear chronology.

The story opens in 1969 at the Nobel Prize ceremony, from which Beckett hastily escapes. This prompts conversations with another Beckett where he reflects on those who caused him “shame”—his m mother, James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, and the two women in his life.

Through flashbacks we see Beckett’s difficult upbringing in Ireland, his arrival in Paris and work with Joyce, his involvement in the French Resistance, and his long relationships with his eventual wife Suzanne and translator Barbara Bray.

While providing glimpses into Beckett’s experiences, the film only touches on his groundbreaking works.

Director James Marsh has had great success telling the stories of extraordinary people. He won an Oscar for his documentary Man on Wire, about tightrope walker Philippe Petit, and his Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything, which won several awards, including Oscars. So Dance First — a biography about the iconic author and playwright Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), directed by Marsh and starring Garbiel Byrne (Hereditary) and Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones) — should be a slam dunk. Unfortunately, despite its attempts to break convention, Dance First feels far too safe to make much of an impact.

Dance First Review

Dance First tells the story of Irish writer Samuel Beckett and his incredible life, from his childhood to fighting in the French resistance during WWII to becoming one of the world’s most prolific writers and winning a Nobel Prize for literature. The story plays out pretty much as one would expect,...

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” So goes the famous opening line to Samuel Beckett’s 1938 avant-garde novel Murphy. There’s nothing much new to be found in director James Marsh’s film about the legendary Irish writer either, which takes a fairly rote cradle-to-grave approach to the Nobel laureate’s life. The great shame is that there were alternatives here and, in its best moments, Dance First hints at them, flirting with a more adventurous approach that, well, might have yielded something new.

The film begins promisingly at the 1969 Nobel Prize ceremony, where Beckett (Gabriel Byrne) learns the devastating news that he’s won the prize for literature. “Catastrophe,” he grumbles to his wife, Suzanne Dumesnil (Sandrine Bonnaire), before climbing the steps up to the stage, and then up the walls of the theater itself before clambering into a strange, cave-like crevice. The surreal place...

"Even in that horrible place, they couldn't turn off the stars..." Magnolia has revealed an official trailer for the film titled Dance First, an intriguing biopic about the life of literary genius Samuel Beckett. This premiered at the 2023 San Sebastian FIlm Festival last year, before then opening in the UK in November; Beckett was Irish so the UK got first dibs on this release. The film documents the Irish writer's life, from his childhood, his friendship with James Joyce until the incarceration of the latter's mentally ill daughter Lucia Joyce, his relationship with his future wife Suzanne Dumesnil, also as a fighter for the French Resistance during WWII, his postwar literary rise and subsequent Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, his affair with translator Barbara Bray and his later life until his death in 1989. Throughout the film, Beckett carries out an interior monologue. Irish actor Gabriel Byrne stars as Beckett, joined by Fionn O'Shea,...

Two works from the early queer literary canon will see audiobook release this June, narrated by actor Emile Hirsch.

Both were authored by Fritz Peters, an overlooked trailblazer in the 1950s who wrote frank and intimate depictions of homosexuality, spirituality and mental health struggles. The books are the novel “Finistère” and the memoir “Boyhood With Gurdjieff,” hitting audio platforms in time for global pride celebrations.

The recordings mark Hirsch’s first in the space, save voicing a character in “Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans,” the animated film from Guillermo del Toro. Known for films like “Into the Wild” and “Milk,” he will next appear in the holocaust film “‘Bau, Artist at War.”

Despite selling big in his time, Peters’ catalogue had fallen into relative obscurity compared to literati peers like Gore Vidal, Henry Miller and Eudora Welty. Production company Hirsch Giovanni acquired the author’s complete works two years ago and serve as re-release publishers.

Movies are hot, according to Marshall McLuhan, who wasn’t paying them a compliment but placing them within his theory of hot and cool media. He was referring to the sensory richness that makes movies such a captivating and complete experience that they require little active participation from the audience. Just sit in the dark and let the magic wash over you. Arnaud Desplechin doesn’t disagree about the magic, but he puts a different slant on things in the docufiction Filmlovers! (Spectateurs!), whose focus is the moviegoer as an essential part of the equation.

Abounding in movie love, the director’s first feature since Brother and Sister cites more than 50 films in its eloquent onrush of clips and philosophizing and memory. But, in a departure from most such cinema essays, there’s no auteur namechecking (or onscreen titles ID’ing clips); it’s not those 50 films’ making-of or even their makers that matter here,...

Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat won’t tell you much about what Flannery O’Connor accomplished. The audience won’t learn about O’Connor’s place in the literary world, the larger culture, or alongside other consciously Catholic fiction writers like Graham Greene. There’s a worthy determination to the way that Wildcat sees O’Connor’s world almost entirely from her mystical, pain-rattled perspective. But by limiting the film’s viewpoint so strictly, Hawke and co-screenwriter Shelby Gaines miss an opportunity to introduce O’Connor to a wider audience.

Hawke’s gnomic biopic opens with a 24-year-old O’Connor (Maya Hawke) trying to make it in New York, circa 1950. Having won a literary prize while attending the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, she’s trying to get her first novel, Wise Blood, published. But O’Connor, incapable of small talk or artistic compromise, isn’t a striving literary ingenue working the angles and currying favor.

"I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will watch the 'Leprechaun' movies." 

So went the final words of James Joyce's "Ulysses," a vital literary classic in the Western Canon, and one of the only major Irish novels devoted entirely to the watching of the "Leprechaun" film series. 

The "Leprechaun" film series bears the distinction of lasting for 25 without ever offering up at least one legitimate classic. Several slasher series begin strong, or have follow-up sequels along the way, even if the vast majority of their sequels are bad or uncreative. John Carpenter's "Halloween" from 1978, for example,...

The premise of Sherwood Schwartz's 1964 sitcom "Gilligan's Island" is succinctly laid out in its indelible theme song, written by Schwartz and George Wyle. The S.S. Minnow, helmed by Captain G. Jonas Grumby (Alan Hale) and his first officer Gilligan (Bob Denver) took on five passengers for a three-hour boat tour of Hawai'i. The ship hit some bad weather, got lost at sea, and washed up on an uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific. Now the two sailors, along with a millionaire (Jim Backus), his wife (Natalie Schafer), a movie star (Tina Louise), a professor (Russel Johnson), and a lottery-winning tourist (Dawn Wells), have to learn to survive, all to comedic effect.

"Gilligan's Island" has no themes of actual survival, instead rolling with its slapstick elements; the series clearly takes place in a cartoon reality. As such, the characters play as broad archetypes, mugging and screaming in an unrealistic fashion.

In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Captain's Holiday", Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) was forced to take a vacation on the sexed-up beach resort planet of Risa where his impishly playful crew hoped he would have a drink, get laid, and return to the job less stern and more relaxed. Picard, a studious and intellectual fellow, would have been more content drinking tea and reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" in a dark room. 

Luckily, Risa proves to be more exciting than Picard realized. He had no interest in beach shenanigans, but he did fall into the company of the utterly dazzling Indiana-Jone-type adventurer Vash (Jennifer Hetrick), a roguish tomb raider. Picard and Vash end up having to protect a rare, powerful artifact from time-traveling Vorgons, and fall in lust as a result. Picard returns to the Enterprise more relaxed and with a new romantic interest in the back of his mind.

In The Beatles’ early days of success, John Lennon set himself apart from his bandmates by publishing two books. He published his first book, In His Own Write, in 1964. His second, A Spaniard in the Works, came out the following year. After these two, Lennon said he felt he needed to take a break from writing books. He did not like the headspace into which writing brought him.

John Lennon shared why he lost interest in writing books

When Lennon compiled In His Own Write, he was able to pull from years worth of writing and artwork. For A Spaniard in the Works, he had to sit down and work on new material.

“The second book was more disciplined because it was started from scratch,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “They said, ‘You’ve got so many months to write a book in.’ I wrote In His Own Write...

Lindsay Lohan is back, this time with a lukewarm romantic drama that is reminiscent of many films of the genre from thirty years ago. Irish Wish is yet another film about a man who meets a woman, this time set in the scenic country of Ireland. Irish Wish is an hour and a half long and takes the audience through the cliched route every romantic film follows, and this article will attempt to navigate the story of Maddie and James and how they find their way back to each other.

Spoilers Ahead

What Was The Maddie-Paul Relationship Like?

Madeline ‘Maddie’ Kelly was the editor who was assigned to work with Paul Kennedy, who had trouble finding success with his previous books. Maddie not only edited his book but practically wrote it for him without expecting anything in return. Maddie was in love with him, information she had shared only with her mother.

When two stars have “chemistry,” we tend to think of it as basic animal magnetism. And maybe that’s the essence of it. Yet when a romantic movie works, even a synthetic magical rom-com trifle like “Irish Wish,” what draws us into the chemistry isn’t simply the actors’ sexy connection. It’s that the two characters have chemistry, and that each actor has it with the audience. That’s the connection Lindsay Lohan and Ed Speleers have in “Irish Wish. The movie is as frothy as the foam on a pint of Guinness, as formulaic as the last disposable Netflix rom-com. Yet these two make you believe that they belong together, and not every romantic comedy does that.

“Irish Wish” takes place in a version of the real world flecked with fairy-tale fantasy. But before we even arrive at the mystical part, the first sign that the movie’s...

Prior to making headlines the next day after a short-lived health scare that required a brief stay in hospital, Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins arrived at Dublin’s Complex arts center last Wednesday to present the Dublin film festival’s highest honor to Steve McQueen. Introduced in 2007 and named the Volta Award, after the first commercial cinema set up in Dublin in 1909 by writer James Joyce, its previous recipients include Daniel Day Lewis, Claudia Cardinale and Al Pacino. The famously serious director was in high spirits, enthusing that “festivals are about passion, a passion for film.” “There’s always a buzz, isn’t there?” he continued. “[As you] go to the next picture, the next film, you tend to give people tips and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to see this, you’ve got to see that…’”

McQueen was in and out of the festival, flying home the same night, fueling...

After a bumper 40th anniversary edition of IFFR Pro last year, there’s a sense that Rotterdam’s industry strand has fined tuned things rather than introduced major changes for 2024.

IFFR Pro centres around key initiatives including co-production market CineMart, talent development programme Rotterdam Lab, works in progress section Dark Room and financial support for filmmakers through the festival’s Hubert Bals Fund.

Head of IFFR Pro a.i. Alessia Acone, who is overseeing the industry strand while IFFR Pro head Inke Van Loocke is on maternity leave, says one of the main differences about CineMart this year is that...

Ahead of its 41st edition, International Film Festival Rotterdam’s industry event CineMart isn’t interested in uniformity.

“The trend is diversity,” says head of IFFR Pro Alessia Acone.

“We feature different themes, different production structures and different filmmakers. We want to make sure we can represent many things at the same time. This year, more than ever.”

The “eclectic” lineup of projects includes Aisling Walsh’s “Lucia,” about the only daughter of James Joyce, two-time Tiger Short Competition-winner Beatrice Gibson’s debut feature “La nuit,” Barbara Rupik’s animation “Cherub,” produced by Madants, previously behind “The Silent Twins,” and another animated film “Cloud of the Unknown.”

“We go from a bigger-budgeted film to a collectively written story and animations coming from two different sides of the world. From biographic stories to arctic expeditions, from dreamy landscapes to car chases,” observes Acone.

“A new set of awards, courtesy of Eurimages,...

International Film Festival Rotterdam has revealed its selection of 16 feature film projects for the 41st edition of CineMart, running Jan. 28-31.

In Another Journey Without Women six chain-smoking know-it-alls embark on a tragi-comedic polar expedition in Greenland in 1918. The film is directed by Illum Jacobi, whose The Trouble With Nature appeared at IFFR in 2020. The film features Greenlandic actor Hans-Henrik Suersaq Poulsen in the lead role, alongside David Dencik and Claes Bang as the famed explorer Knud Rasmussen.

“Lucia,” directed by Irish filmmaker Aisling Walsh, concerns the talented but troubled daughter of author James Joyce. The director’s “Maudie” (2016), starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, world premiered in Telluride.

In “Les Diplomates,” two diplomatic counterparts from Austria and Switzerland secretly negotiate the contours of history as the Eastern Bloc disintegrates – fueled by a petty personal grudge. The project is directed by Swiss filmmaker Andreas Fontana, whose eerie thriller “Azor” (2021) picked...

Selection includes new projects by Aisling Walsh, Ena Sendijarević, Andreas Fontana and Beatrice Gibson

Projects by directors including Aisling Walsh, Ena Sendijarević, Andreas Fontana and Beatrice Gibson are among the 2024 line-up for CineMart, the co-production market of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

CineMart has revealed 16 feature film projects and four immersive projects for its upcoming 41st edition, which runs from January 28-31. Cinemart is also presenting six works-in-progress, of which four are features and two immersive, as part of its Darkroom strand.

The project selection includes Lucia from Irish filmmaker Aisling Walsh whose Maudie (2016), starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke,...

Thousands of mourners converged on St. Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, Ireland, on Friday to pay their respects to the late Pogues frontman, Shane MacGowan. MacGowan died of complications from pneumonia on Nov. 30.

Those in attendance included Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, Bob Geldof, and Ireland’s President, Michael D. Higgins, according to Sky News. MacGowan’s sister, Siobhan MacGowan, told the congregation that her brother’s veins had run “with Irish blood.”

Cave performed the Pogues song “A Rainy Night in Soho” at the service. His face looked emotional,...

Tonight on “The Amazing Race,” teams travel to Dublin, Ireland, where they must complete four challenges in the penultimate leg including swimming in the Irish Sea, dancing with the legendary Riverdance troupe, scoring a point with the hurling team and reciting quotes from a famed Irish novelist, on this episode titled “We’re Finding Our Pot of Gold” airing Wednesday, December 6 on CBS. Phil Keoghan hosts.

CBS promised “the biggest season yet,” with 13 teams competing for the first time ever. We also see the return of commercial travel, no non-elimination legs, the express pass and a twist on the infamous U-Turn! Here are the teams still in contention: Steve & Anna Leigh (father/daughter), Ashlie & Todd (married), Greg & John (brothers), Rob & Corey (father/son) and Joel & Garrett (best friends). See the full cast in the gallery above. Follow our live blog recap of tonight’s episode below.

See ‘The Amazing Race...

Raise a farewell toast for Shane MacGowan, one of rock’s most fiendishly brilliant growlers, snarlers, songwriters, storytellers, and blackguards. Shane was the resident Celt-punk genius of The Pogues, one of the great Irish bards of his or any other era, which is why the world is mourning his death on Thursday. But Shane’s demise has been predicted so many times, over 65 years of hard living, it’s bizarrely shocking that the end has finally come. Hell, in one of his best-loved songs, “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain,” he interrupts his own funeral,...

The festival runs October 21 - 29.

Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival will have world premieres of three new Ukrainian films as well as Portuguese director Andrés Marques’ The Drunk in its first complete edition with both competition and non-competition programmes since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian director-DoP-artist-exhibition curator Ivan Sautkin’s debut documentary feature A Poem For Little People about a group of volunteers at the front-line zone and two elderly female friends from a village in the Chernihiv region will premiere in the documentary competition which will also feature Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann’s...

In a genre not traditionally given to brevity, James Marsh’s literary biopic “Dance First” at least has that on its side: In 100 minutes, it races through the key events and alliances in the life of Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett, even finding time for some metaphysical musings alongside the cradle-to-grave checklist. But Beckett’s characteristic terseness — or radical “lessness,” to borrow a title from one of his stories — isn’t a feature of this creditable but ponderous film, which ultimately achieves its efficient runtime by skirting any meaningful engagement with Beckett’s work and literary legacy. What’s left is an anatomy of his unhappiness via a procession of stymied or soured relationships: shot with grace, acted with intelligence, but short on Beckettian daring or wit.

It’s another biopic from Marsh, following 2014’s popular “The Theory of Everything” and 2017’s less-seen “The Mercy,” that resists bringing his...

The actor talks about his new movie Dance First, in which he plays the Irish dramatist, the time he shared a drink with Richard Burton and why he had to leave Los Angeles

In 1969, Samuel Beckett and his wife learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. “Dear Sam and Suzanne,” it read. “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a “catastrophe”. Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia, leaving them with a surreal mute interview.

Into this temporal void, a new psychological biopic has poured a monumental reckoning, in which the 63-year-old playwright scrambles out of the Nobel ceremony to find himself in a rough-hewn underworld.

European pay TV platform Sky has released the trailer for Sky Original film “Dance First,” ahead of its world premiere at San Sebastian Film Festival on Sept. 30. Film Constellation is handling international sales on the film.

The film is directed by BAFTA and Academy Award winner James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”) and written by BAFTA winner Neil Forsyth (“Guilt”). “Dance First” will be released in movie theaters in the U.K. and Ireland in November, on Sky Cinema in those countries in December and on Sky Arts and Freeview next year.

In “Dance First,” Golden Globe winner Gabriel Byrne (“The Usual Suspects”) plays Samuel Beckett with young Beckett played by Fionn O’Shea (“Normal People”) in a sweeping account of the life of this 20th century literary icon. Parisian bon vivant, World War II resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband and recluse, Beckett lived a life of many parts.

The Samuel Beckett biopic stars Gabriel Byrne, Aidan Gillan, Maxine Peake and Bronagh Gallagher.

The 71st San Sebastian International Film Festival will close with the world premiere of James Marsh’s Samuel Beckett biopic Dance First, playing out of competition.

Gabriel Byrne stars as the famous Irish playwright with Aidan Gillen playing James Joyce. Maxine Peake and Bronagh Gallagher co-star.

The film is the feature debut of UK TV writer Neil Forsyth whose series credits includeThe Gold and Guilt.

Dance First is produced by the UK’s 2Le, with Hungary’s Proton Cinema, Belgium’s Umedia and Constellation Productions. Film...

Dance First, a biographical drama from The Theory of Everything director James Marsh about the life of Irish Nobel prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett, will close the 71st San Sebastian Festival.

The feature, which stars Gabriel Byrne as Beckett alongside Sandrine Bonnaire as his longtime partner, and eventual wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, will close the 2023 San Sebastian festival on Sept. 30. Dance First will screen out of competition at San Sebastian.

Dance First follows Beckett’s life from his time as a fighter for the French Resistance during the Second World War, through his friendship with fellow Irish literary luminary James Joyce, his rise with such groundbreaking plays as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days — which established the Theater of the Absurd movement — to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, and his later life as a recluse. Written by Neil Forsyth, the film also features Aidan Gillen as James Joyce...

“Dance First,” a portrait of Irish writer Samuel Beckett starring Gabriel Byrne and directed by Oscar winner James Marsh, will close this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival, playing out of competition.

The closing film screening, on Sept. 30, will mark the film’s world premiere.

Byrne, a memorable lead in “The Usual Suspects” and “Miller’s Crossing” who also won a Golden Globe for his performance in “In Treatment,” plays Beckett. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright was a Parisian bon vivant and WWII resistance fighter who became a recluse, living the last years of his life in a single room in a nursing home, ashamed of past actions and convinced that for much of his life he had been a failure.

U.K. director Marsh won an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2009 with “Man on Wire.” He also directed the Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything,” which earned five nominations at the 2015 Oscars,...

Rupert Friend, currently on screens in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, has joined Sophie Thatcher in Companion, the sci-fi thriller from the team behind last year’s horror hit Barbarian.

The New Line feature begins production this month and has been filling out its call sheet at breakneck speed. Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri and Harvey Guillén all have signed on in recent weeks.

Drew Hancock wrote the original script and is making his directorial debut with the feature, the many plot points of which are being kept hush-hush. It is, however, being described as self-contained, and Thatcher is set to play a character who is more than meets the eye.

Friend’s character information is being kept in the dark, but suffice it to say the actor won’t be living up to his last name.

Zach Cregger will produce the feature along with Raphael Margules and J.D. Lifshitz of BoulderLight Pictures.

Tom Stoppard and the late Terrence McNally have won the most Tonys for a playwright taking home four each. The 85-year-old Stoppard is a strong contender to pick up his fifth Tony for his latest (and perhaps final) play “Leopoldstadt.” The acclaimed drama revolves around a wealthy Jewish family who had fled the programs in Eastern Europe and settled in Vienna. In an interview, Stoppard noted that the play “took a year to write but the gestation was much longer. Quite a lot of it is personal to me but I made it a Viennese family so that it wouldn’t seem to be about me. “ Stoppard, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, lost all four of his grandparents in the Holocaust.

“Leopoldstadt” earned six nominations on May 2 including Best Play and best director for Patrick Marber. It will be vying for the top prize against Jordon E. Cooper’s...

While "Star Trek" takes place in a technological utopia -- a utopia wherein people can teleport great distances, live in holographic environs, or replicate any food or drink they should want -- there still appears to be room for old media. While the characters on "Star Trek" are typically military officers, they are often careful to attend the theater to see plays, where Shakespeare might still be performed. 

On "Star Trek: The Next Generation," there are many, many classical music concerts, and performers still seem to have access to traditional brass, woodwind, and string instruments. Entire libraries may be accessed on a Padd, and Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating) once noted that he was attempting to make his way through James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." But other characters may be more comfortable holding an actual printed book on bound paper. One might be able to create a force field in the future,...

Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson) greets Shriver (Michael Shannon) in Michael Maren’s whimsical A Little White Lie

Michael Maren’s whimsical A Little White Lie (adapted from Chris Belden’s book Shriver) stars Michael Shannon (also a producer), Kate Hudson (executive producer), Don Johnson, and M Emmet Walsh with Kate Linder, Romy Byrne, Mark Boone Junior, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Jimmi Simpson, Wendie Malick, and Zach Braff.

Honoré de Balzac, Jerzy Kosinski and Hal Ashby’s Being There, starring Peter Sellers (shown to Olivia Colman by Toby Jones in Sam Mendes’s Empire Of Light), The Landlord, Harold And Maude, Linda Lavin and Harris Yulin in A Short History Of Decay, Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller and Call Me Gantenbein, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Lost Time, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper,...

‘Our budget was tiny. The forest was 12 trees on rollers – and for long shots we used bonsai. The crew had worked on Star Wars and thought we were absurd’

I met Angela Carter in 1982, while we were in Dublin attending a week celebrating the centenary of James Joyce’s birth. She’d written a script based on a short story of hers called The Company of Wolves, itself an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. It wasn’t long enough for a feature film but I proposed a kind of portmanteau structure, with a girl dreaming herself as a fairytale character and her dream grandmother telling cautionary tales. In that way, we could incorporate elements from other traditional tales in Angela’s collection The Bloody Chamber.

With final Oscar balloting closed on March 7, we’re continuing with our sixth annual series of interviews with Academy voters from different branches for their unfiltered takes on what got picked, overlooked, and overvalued in the 2023 award season. Interview edited for brevity.

Best Picture

Well, this year is the year of the repeat for me. I watched more movies a second time to try and figure out why I didn’t like them the first time.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” I watched three and a half times. I thought it was a generational thing. But then everyone else I know loved it. So I watched it once in the theater and I go, “I don’t really get it.” And I tried it a second time on the [Academy screening] portal. And I gave up halfway. And then it won all the awards. And I said to myself, “I’m not sure,...

With his animated drama “Art College 1994” about a group of students who contemplate about contemporary art, literature and philosophy in search of their own path, Liu Jian returns to the official competition of the Berlinale, six years after he walked down the red carpet to the Berlinale Palast for his multiple-awarded crime tale “Have a Nice Day”. In this story set up against the backdrop of reforms opening China to the rest of the world, there isn’t much of a plot, since Jian simply gazes back in his own college days, rummaging in the past. Different from anything he has done so far, apart from the animation style which is uncompromisingly his, are the loose plot and a multitude of characters that share almost the same attention.

Asian Movie Pulse was given an exclusive interview by Liu Jian straight after the world premiere of the film in Berlinale Palast.

The quote that opens Chinese director Liu Jian’s shaggy but amiable new animated feature is instructive. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” is a passage from James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and indeed, Liu was himself at art college as a young man in the early ’90s, when and where “Art College 1994” is, unsurprisingly, set. The quasi-memoir feel to the movie does have its charm — it’s always a kick to see animation techniques applied not to extravagant flights of fancy but to slices of real, ordinary life — but it’s also its chief flaw. In re-creating life out of life, Liu is quite successful; whether he makes it into drama is another question. Like its characters, “Art College 1994” gives the impression of having just too much time on its hands.

Liu...

Art College 1994, a deadpan slice of comic-sad social realism from Chinese animator Liu Jian (Have a Nice Day), offers reassuring evidence that although cultural specificities can shape artistic traditions — and fashion and tastes fluctuate — art students are basically all the same and always have been: slovenly, idealistic, and prone to pretentious waffle, especially when lubricated with alcohol. But also, at least based on the evidence of the characters here, reasonably endearing with their guileless dreams of making meaningful work in a world where it sometimes feels like everything has been done. Mind you, others just want to meet romantic partners, make money somehow and maybe go abroad someday.

There’s a sense that this gently meandering, sketchbook-like work is aware of its own cinematic precedents. It certainly seems to suffer from an anxiety of influence as it tries to carve out a space for itself somewhere in the region of Eric Rohmer wistful romances,...

Exclusive: Homeland and Death of Stalin actor Rupert Friend is set to star alongside Harry Potter star Evanna Lynch in James and Lucia, a biopic of celebrated author James Joyce which will focus on the Irish writer’s relationship with his daughter.

Written and to be directed by Robert Mullan (Mad to be Normal), Motus Studios is presenting the movie to buyers this week at the EFM in Berlin.

Based on the the final decade of Joyce’s life, firstly in Paris then in Zurich, the film highlights his struggles with his fading eyesight and, centrally, his attempts to protect his beloved daughter Lucia. Once treated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, Joyce was diagnosed as schizophrenic in the mid-1930s and institutionalized in Switzerland and in the UK.

Joyce, a towering figure in 20th Century literature, is known for works including Ulysses, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man,...

Legendary characters don’t die. They keep getting reinvented. If they exist in fiction, new authors come along to create new adventures for them. And if they exist onscreen, you can bet that a remake or reboot will come along every generation or so in hopes of recatching that lightning in a bottle.

And often both happens, as is the case with Philip Marlowe, the iconic hard-boiled detective invented by Raymond Chandler and portrayed onscreen over the decades by actors including Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and probably others I’ve forgotten.

The latest tough guy actor to don the fedora is Liam Neeson, in director Neil Jordan’s new film based on a 2014 novel by John Banville, writing under the name Benjamin Black. Suffice it to say that the results won’t erase anyone’s memories of The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye.

What is it about "The Shining" that induces such obsession? In the 43 years since its release, Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the book by Stephen King has inspired conspiratorial documentaries, tribute songs, countless fan theories, countless books, sequels both failed and succesful, and more. You're looking at someone who's always stuck by King's side in thinking the movie is an inferior rendering of the deep, psychological morass contained inside his chilling novel. But even I can't deny that there's something irresistible about Kubrick's film, something that beckons in the brief flashes of bizarre art hanging on the walls, the labyrinthine pattern of the hotel carpet, and the actual labyrinth outside the Overlook -- the beguiling hedge maze.

It seems "The Shining" will never be fully plumbed of its mysteries, but lifelong Kubrick obsessive and noted animated film director Lee Unkrich has given it the best try in years. Luxury...

New York, NY — January 18, 2023 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Caroline Shaw, vocals & Sō Percussion: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with special guests Bora Yoon and Iarla Ó Lionáird, vocals, on February 4, 2023 at 7:30pm Et at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at 25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/caroline-shaw-and-so-percussion..

Composer Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion make their only NYC appearance together this season. Their program draws from their Nonesuch recording project, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with original songs and lyrics inspired by and reflecting the artists’ broad span of interests: James Joyce, a poem by Anne Carson, the Sacred Harp hymn book, American roots music, and more. The program will...

Frank Miller ("Sin City") will develop a new TV series adaptation of Hugo Pratt’s 1967 "Corto Maltese" graphic novels, as a six-episode live action-adventure series in partnership with StudioCanal and Canal+:

"...'Corto Maltese', an adventurer from Valetta, Malta, was born in 1887 to a British sailor and an Andalusian gypsy prostitute/witch.

"Seeking excitement and wealth, Corto traveled the world, befriending people from all walks of life, while participating in many hair-raising historical events, including the 'Russian Civil War', 'World War I' and the 'Russo-Japanese War', with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jack London, Herman Hesse and Joseph Conrad..."

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