Latest news with #Compulsion
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Neil Marshall's ‘Compulsion' Set to Premiere at The Mediterrane Film Festival (EXCLUSIVE) – Film News in Brief
Actress Charlotte Kirk ('Duchess') reunites with acclaimed director Neil Marshall ('The Descent') for the steamy thriller 'Compulsion,' co-starring Anna-Maria Sieklucka ('365 Days') and Zach McGowan ('Dracula Untold'). The film will premiere at the Mediterrane Film Festival on June 28 in Malta. 'Compulsion' is set against the breathtaking backdrop of Malta, where two women become entangled in a string of horrifying murders. More from Variety Studio Ghibli's 'Ponyo,' Films of Laika and a Celebration of Marilyn Monroe Among Academy Museum Exhibitions for 2026 - Film News in Brief Malta's Mediterrane Film Festival to Feature 'The Return,' 'Compulsion,' 'Hot Milk' Catherine Hardwicke, Rick Carter Lead Jury for Mediterrane Film Festival The film, directed by Marshall and co-written with Kirk, was produced by Krystyna Sellnerova. This marks Kirk's fourth consecutive collaboration with director Neil Marshall, following their work on 'Duchess,' 'The Lair', and 'The Reckoning.' Kirk will be a special guest at the festival, along with Sieklucka. Kirk will next be seen in a slate of upcoming films set for release over the next year, which include 'Exit Protocol,' 'The Possession at Gladstone Manor.' 'Myra: Golden,' 'Jackie The Stripper,' and 'Mistletoe & Toe.' Kirk is represented by Bobby Moses of Mavrick Artists Agency and Sieklucka is managed by Marta Tarnowska. Opus One Pictures is handling international sales for 'Compulsion' across all territories. Saban Films will release the film in the U.S. this September. The Mediterrane Film Festival connects filmmakers, audiences, and brands through the power of storytelling, celebrating cinema in one of the world's most captivating cultural crossroads. The Mediterrance Film Festival will begin on June 21 to June 29, showcasing more than 40 films from 20 countries. This year's jury will include director Catherine Hardwicke ('Twilight'), costume designer Charlese Antoinette ('Air'), production designer Rick Carter ('Avatar') and production designer James Price ('Poor Things'), director Mario Philip Azzopardi ('ZOS: Zone of Separation'), and set decorator Elli Griff ('Napoleon') for the third edition of the festival. Academy Museum of Motion Pictures: Tom Dolby, Cindy Huang, Hiro Matsuoka, Jason Reitman, and Teddy Schwarzman Named Board of Trustees The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has elected Tom Dolby, Cindy Huang, Hiro Matsuoka, Jason Reitman and Teddy Schwarzman to its Board of Trustees. 'The Board of Trustees and I are thrilled to welcome Tom Dolby, Cindy Huang, Hiro Matsuoka, Jason Reitman, and Teddy Schwarzman to our Board of Trustees,' said Academy Museum Director and President Amy Homma. 'Their deep commitment to the mission of our museum will further help bring exciting exhibitions, screenings, programs, initiatives, and collections and help us to grow our audiences from around the globe.' Serving as the governing body of the Academy Museum, the Board of Trustees will lead the museum toward a sustainable future by adopting sound, ethical, and legal governance and financial management policies in addition to securing adequate resources to advance the museum's mission. 'The Academy Museum's mission is made possible by the support of visionary leadership and a diversity of perspectives,' said Olivier de Givenchy, Chair of the Academy Museum's Board of Trustees. 'I'm thrilled to welcome our new trustees who embody these values and will help guide the museum's continued growth and impact.' Fellow members of the Board of Trustees include Tom Hanks, Ryan Murphy, Ted Sarandos, Travis Knight, Hiro Matsuoka, Teddy Schwarzman, Regina K. Scully, Kimberly Steward, Janet Yang, and Kevin Yeaman. The Academy Museum is the largest museum in the world dedicated to global cinema and the arts, sciences, and artists of moviemaking. The museum advances the understanding, celebration, and preservation of cinema through inclusive and accessible exhibitions, screenings, programs, initiatives, and collections. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Neil Marshall's ‘Compulsion' Set to Premiere at The Mediterrane Film Festival (EXCLUSIVE) – Film News in Brief
Actress Charlotte Kirk ('Duchess') reunites with acclaimed director Neil Marshall ('The Descent') for the steamy thriller 'Compulsion,' co-starring Anna-Maria Sieklucka ('365 Days') and Zach McGowan ('Dracula Untold'). The film will premiere at the Mediterrane Film Festival on June 28 in Malta. 'Compulsion' is set against the breathtaking backdrop of Malta, where two women become entangled in a string of horrifying murders. More from Variety Studio Ghibli's 'Ponyo,' Films of Laika and a Celebration of Marilyn Monroe Among Academy Museum Exhibitions for 2026 - Film News in Brief Malta's Mediterrane Film Festival to Feature 'The Return,' 'Compulsion,' 'Hot Milk' Catherine Hardwicke, Rick Carter Lead Jury for Mediterrane Film Festival The film, directed by Marshall and co-written with Kirk, was produced by Krystyna Sellnerova. This marks Kirk's fourth consecutive collaboration with director Neil Marshall, following their work on 'Duchess,' 'The Lair', and 'The Reckoning.' Kirk will be a special guest at the festival, along with Sieklucka. Kirk will next be seen in a slate of upcoming films set for release over the next year, which include 'Exit Protocol,' 'The Possession at Gladstone Manor.' 'Myra: Golden,' 'Jackie The Stripper,' and 'Mistletoe & Toe.' Kirk is represented by Bobby Moses of Mavrick Artists Agency and Sieklucka is managed by Marta Tarnowska. Opus One Pictures is handling international sales for 'Compulsion' across all territories. Saban Films will release the film in the U.S. this September. The Mediterrane Film Festival connects filmmakers, audiences, and brands through the power of storytelling, celebrating cinema in one of the world's most captivating cultural crossroads. The Mediterrance Film Festival will begin on June 21 to June 29, showcasing more than 40 films from 20 countries. This year's jury will include director Catherine Hardwicke ('Twilight'), costume designer Charlese Antoinette ('Air'), production designer Rick Carter ('Avatar') and production designer James Price ('Poor Things'), director Mario Philip Azzopardi ('ZOS: Zone of Separation'), and set decorator Elli Griff ('Napoleon') for the third edition of the festival. Academy Museum of Motion Pictures: Tom Dolby, Cindy Huang, Hiro Matsuoka, Jason Reitman, and Teddy Schwarzman Named Board of Trustees The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has elected Tom Dolby, Cindy Huang, Hiro Matsuoka, Jason Reitman and Teddy Schwarzman to its Board of Trustees. 'The Board of Trustees and I are thrilled to welcome Tom Dolby, Cindy Huang, Hiro Matsuoka, Jason Reitman, and Teddy Schwarzman to our Board of Trustees,' said Academy Museum Director and President Amy Homma. 'Their deep commitment to the mission of our museum will further help bring exciting exhibitions, screenings, programs, initiatives, and collections and help us to grow our audiences from around the globe.' Serving as the governing body of the Academy Museum, the Board of Trustees will lead the museum toward a sustainable future by adopting sound, ethical, and legal governance and financial management policies in addition to securing adequate resources to advance the museum's mission. 'The Academy Museum's mission is made possible by the support of visionary leadership and a diversity of perspectives,' said Olivier de Givenchy, Chair of the Academy Museum's Board of Trustees. 'I'm thrilled to welcome our new trustees who embody these values and will help guide the museum's continued growth and impact.' Fellow members of the Board of Trustees include Tom Hanks, Ryan Murphy, Ted Sarandos, Travis Knight, Hiro Matsuoka, Teddy Schwarzman, Regina K. Scully, Kimberly Steward, Janet Yang, and Kevin Yeaman. The Academy Museum is the largest museum in the world dedicated to global cinema and the arts, sciences, and artists of moviemaking. The museum advances the understanding, celebration, and preservation of cinema through inclusive and accessible exhibitions, screenings, programs, initiatives, and collections. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
South of Midnight preview: Stopped motion
As I sat down to play the 90-minute South of Midnight preview, I had one major question: Why does the framerate look like that? The trailers display a purposefully choppy animation style that's meant to be reminiscent of stop-motion, but it wasn't clear how this effect would be applied in the game's cutscenes, combat and traversal moments. After playing the preview, I'm still unsure. I should state my bias at the top: I am super primed to enjoy South of Midnight. I've been a fan of Compulsion Games since the studio debuted Contrast in 2013, and I eagerly followed the development of its follow-up, We Happy Few, through 2018. Compulsion's games are stylish, with an emphasis on polished 3D graphics and lanky characters in fabulous outfits. Microsoft acquired Compulsion in 2018 and the studio has been working on South of Midnight ever since. My intrigue has only grown in the past year, following a drip-feed of trailers with luscious Southern Gothic settings, a bluesy soundtrack and the game's magic-weilding protagonist, a young Black woman named Hazel. First, let's talk about what the game does well. The preview begins at chapter three, after Hazel has discovered the basics of her magical abilities but has not mastered the power flowing through her veins. Hazel is a Weaver, capable of manipulating the invisible strands that hold reality together, and she's looking for her mother, Lacey, after a hurricane swept through their hometown of Prospero in the American Deep South. Advertisement If Hazel is the main character in South of Midnight, the environment is her co-star: The swamps of Prospero are lit with a rich, golden hue and they're buzzing with surreal life. Towering cypresses, lush ferns and thorny vines the size of tree trunks weave their way through the forest and its cloudy pools. The houses, half-demolished shacks connected over the bayou by crumbling wooden platforms, are filled with rotting trinkets and faded photos, and many have eviction notices stuck to the front doors. Car-sized peaches dot the landscape, plump pinkish skin sticking out of the swampwater and buried at the bases of trees. This land is drowning in magic. South of Midnight Though Hazel is on a linear journey to find her mom, there are plenty of opportunities for light exploring around Prospero. Chapter three features a handful of hidden paths that conclude with glowing bits of Floof, the game's currency, for Hazel to collect. These alternative routes are positioned in plain sight, but they're integrated into the landscape off the beaten path, so they're easy to miss if you're not paying attention. Hazel explores by running, jumping, double jumping, gliding and wall running, and her movements through the world feel utterly natural. Her abilities build on one another nicely and they're perfectly responsive, creating a mini parkour flow that I didn't expect in this game. At times Hazel uses magic to turn ghostly objects into tangible platforms, and her double-jump and glide combo is particularly fun. Hazel always looks cool, regardless of the framerate. She moves her long, thin limbs with the haphazard confidence befitting a teenage track star, and her clothes — a waffle-stitched sweatshirt tied around her waist, denim jeans, a tank top with a sports bra, leather arm bands and a holster across her chest — are heavily textured, lending each piece a tangible feel. Hazel's dialogue is delivered with a hefty amount of adolescent snark, too, and I laughed out loud when she met the giant talking catfish and immediately was like, 'Nope,' and turned to walk away. Actors Nona Parker Johnson, who performs Hazel's motion-capture and stunts, and Adriyan Rae, Hazel's voice, have done some fabulous work here. South of Midnight In the preview, Hazel encounters an eccentric local, a few magical creatures and at least one powerful ritual, and she eventually finds herself chasing the ghosts of two brothers, one of whom died after being stuffed inside the trunk of a tree. As she hunts their memories and traps their pain in a blue bottle, banjo music trickles into the scene until it becomes a full-on folk song recounting the brothers' tragic story. It's a unique and effective mechanic. The world around Hazel is composed of dark and surreal beauty, and after seeing (and hearing) this sliver of gameplay, I'm eager to uncover all of Prospero's hidden stories. Advertisement Combat in the South of Midnight preview takes place in contained stages, with spiky vines blocking off the exits as soon as the fight begins and the haints — ghosts, in Hazel's vernacular — pop up. The enemies in this chapter come in three basic forms: tall floaty haint, stationary haint nest and floaty blob haint. The enemies are made of gooey black tendons and red magic, and they attack in specific ways depending on their type. The tall one moves quickly and rushes forward, the nest spews out exploding bugs and the floaty blobs shoot parryable projectiles. Hazel has a basic attack, dodge, healing move and four magical abilities: weave, strand push, strand pull and a final locked move. Weave freezes an enemy in place, while strand pull and push can be used to throw objects back in the haints' faces. Each combat stage starts out with a healing totem that Hazel can tap into once, as long as she can reach it and (on Xbox Series X) press Y. She also receives health regen by pressing Y near a pile of freshly killed haint meat, unraveling their essence for a little boost. These piles are only available for a few seconds after each kill, so there's some light strategizing involved in staying alive mid-battle. South of Midnight Advertisement The fights flow just fine, and a lock-on system allows Hazel to swap her attention among the haints on the fly. Parrying projectiles is the toughest ability to master in the preview, but with a little more time to practice, I think it'll become second nature. South of Midnight is not an open-world RPG or anything, but Hazel has a small skill tree with three upgrades for each of her magical abilities and nine slots to unlock moves like ground slam. A second screen contains Hazel's collection of magical objects (five slots), patterns (six slots), readables (104 slots) and storybooks (14 slots). By the end of the demo, I'd collected four magical objects and one readable. Just looking at the menus, it seems like South of Midnight is a contained, sub-20-hour experience. Now, let's talk about the game's animations. South of Midnight begins with a gorgeous, handcrafted stop-motion intro movie that brings Hazel and her storybook adventure to life, but after that, the game's stop-motion conceit only half-works. Hazel's movements and the world at large are supposed to render at 60 fps, while her facial expressions in cutscenes render at something closer to 15 fps, mimicking the 'animated in twos' style of Into the Spider-Verse. This appears to be true for anything in the game with a face, and it's particularly apparent with the catfish character, which is basically all mouth. When it all comes together as Compulsion intended, the effect looks and feels very cool. Unfortunately, this is a rare occurrence. In practice, the stop-motion effect is inconsistent during third-person exploration moments and close-up cutscenes, and it tends to feel less artistic, and more like the game simply has an erratic framerate. It's possible to turn off stop-motion effects and I tried this, but honestly, I couldn't spot the difference. Even with stop-motion turned off, Hazel is rendered at an unpredictable rate that often dips well below 60 fps. The framerate issue appears across characters and vignettes, and it's especially shitty during brightly lit memory scenes, where NPCs appear in front of Hazel as glowing white ghosts, filled with particles and visually stuttering all over the place. South of Midnight targets 4K/60 on Xbox Series X, but my preview at times felt like it struggled to maintain 30 fps. What's more troubling, though, is the screen tearing that appears throughout the preview, spawning from the game's use of a-sync. The tearing often appears close to the center of the screen, suggesting the game is far away from its performance target. Of course, Compulsion is still working to optimize South of Midnight and there's some time to address these problems before the game comes out on April 8 — but they're cutting it close. Advertisement I think the stop-motion effect is a grand idea and it would work well if Compulsion committed to the bit. If the framerate is supposed to be low, keep it low, rather than popping in and out of higher framerates, which makes everything feel like a mistake. Consistency is the key, and South of Midnight hasn't nailed that yet. This is Compulsion's first attempt at building a game with all of the resources and attention that Xbox provides, and the studio has crafted a beautiful, mysterious world with an ambitious mechanical conceit and a badass protagonist. The stop-motion effect is still hit-or-miss, but that doesn't detract from the game's other successes. I remain incredibly stoked on South of Midnight. South of Midnight is due to hit Xbox Series X/S, PC and Game Pass on April 8.
