Latest news with #psychologicaldrama
Geek Tyrant
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
AFTER THE HUNT Trailer Sees Julia Roberts Face a Shattering #MeToo Scandal with Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri — GeekTyrant
Luca Guadagnino ( Call Me by Your Name, Challengers ) is back, and this time he's diving straight into the chaos of power, morality, and the #MeToo era with his upcoming psychological drama After the Hunt . The first trailer has been released, and it's tense, layered, and brimming with the kind of unease Guadagnino thrives on. Julia Roberts leads the film as a college professor who finds herself walking a razor's edge between loyalty, integrity, and survival when a scandal threatens to unravel her life. According to the official synopsis, After the Hunt follows a professor who 'finds herself at a personal and professional crossroad when a star student (Ayo Edebiri) levels an accusation against one of her colleagues (Andrew Garfield), threatening to expose a dark secret from her own past.' The trailer wastes no time setting the tone. It opens with Garfield's Hank delivering a barbed line aimed squarely at Gen Z: 'All your generation, you're scared of saying the wrong thing. When did offending someone become the preeminent cardinal sin?' Edebiri's Maggie isn't having it: 'Maybe it's around the same time your generation started making sweeping generalizations about ours?' The footage teases both Hank and Maggie's complicated, and possibly dangerous, fixations on Roberts' character. Everything detonates when Maggie arrives at the professor's home, shaken and accusing Hank of sexual assault. Hank fires back, claiming Maggie has been cheating in class. What begins as a battle of perspectives quickly ignites into a storm of accusations, secrets, and racial and generational fault lines. Guadagnino, known for exploring messy human desires and moral ambiguities, looks to be at his sharpest here, turning the academic world into a battlefield of identity politics, ethics, and raw ambition. The R-rated drama features an impressive supporting cast, including Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny. After The Hunt hits theaters in New York and L.A. on October 10, before expanding nationwide on October 17.
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Broken Voices' Dissects a Toxic Environment in All Its Complexity, Inspired by a Girls' Choir Sexual Abuse Scandal Long Before #MeToo
'An exclusive world, in which desirable prestige goes hand in hand with premature coming of age.' That is how the website of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) summarizes some of the conflicting factors that lead to, and enable, the traumatic in psychological drama Broken Voices (Sbormistr), the new film from Czech writer and director Ondřej Provazník (Old-Timers, A Town Called Hermitage) that world premieres in the fest's main Crystal Globe Competition on Sunday, July 6. The cast of the Czech-Slovak co-production includes Juraj Loj (Agnieska Holland's Charlatan) and an ensemble of mostly non-professional actors, led by Kateřina Falbrová. Other cast members include Maya Kintera, Zuzana Šulajová, Marek Cisovský, Ivana Wojtylová and Barrandov Studio. More from The Hollywood Reporter Dakota Johnson Gets Karlovy Vary Award and Love, Calls Celine Song "Probably the Best Filmmaker of Our Time" Dakota Johnson Wants to Direct Her First Feature, Avoid "Toxic Sets" and Play a Psychopath 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' TV Series, Told Through the Eyes of Chief Bromden, in the Works 'It's the early 1990s, and 13-year-old Karolína, a gifted novice singer, is given the chance to become a member of a world-famous girls' choir,' reads a synopsis that turns darker when it mentions that 'Karolína's exceptional talent has caught the attention of the formidable and much-admired choirmaster.' Even ahead of its world premiere, the drama, whose Czech release via CinemArt is set for July 10 and for which Salaud Morissetis is handling world sales, has been highly anticipated in the Czech Republic, drawing attention and magazine covers. The reason: It calls to mind 'the notorious case of Bambini di Praga, but also other devastating situations involving the clash of innocence and abusive authority,' as the KVIFF site notes. The famous Bambini di Praga girls' choir was a household name in the country and was for many years led by Bohumil Kulínský Jr., who took over from his father. In 2004, Kulínský Jr. was arrested and charged with various acts of sexual abuse of minors, with a tally of 49 victims between 1984 and 2004. In 2008, he was sentenced to three years in prison with parole, which was later extended to five and a half years in prison, a sentence that he started serving in January 2009. In June 2011, shortly after Kulínský's conditional release from prison, Bambini di Praga was shuttered. Kulínský died in September 2018. So much of this story happened well before the hashtag #MeToo started coming into broader public view in 2017. 'When #MeToo started, it came back to me, and I said this is something very important for Czech society, and I think that there's material in this for a movie,' Provazník recalls to THR. 'So, I started doing lots of research and interviews with former choir girls, watching things etc, and I started to work on the script.' Provazník approaches the difficult themes and topics raised in the film 'without sensationalism,' as the KVIFF website highlights, and with much sensitivity, which he says his first-time actors needed to feel safe and flourish. 'I had to change a lot of things during the shooting to make it safe for them. We were really focusing on the safety and environment for all the actresses and for all the parents, and making sure they understood what the script was about,' the writer-director recalls. 'We knew I had to do it all in such a way that it would not traumatize our 13-year-old lead actress and the others.' In a lot of scenes, power imbalances, competitive spirits, jealousy and more are hinted at through camera work, framing, looks, gestures and movements. 'I really like to tell stories gently and to only give the audience hints or some signs, because it provokes the imagination and thinking,' explains the director. 'So, my aim from the beginning was to do that and to tell a story that even a broader audience can understand.' This was more than a storytelling style choice, though. 'I think that it's somehow imprinted in all these scandals and cases when they come out later, 15, 20 years after. There's always some kind of mystery hidden in it. Not everybody knows everything,' highlights Provazník. 'Most people always only know part of the information. People guess some. Somebody knows more, somebody less. And this lack of full information and this mystery is what I wanted to put into the story.' In the Bambini di Praga scandal, for example, some girls and parents sided with the choirmaster and praised him. The filmmaker originally wanted to write the script from the point of view the older sister. 'It just didn't work, and I didn't know why, because I thought there was interesting drama in her, because she has a mix of jealousy, but also wants to protect the younger girl,' he says 'But they are in a prestigious club. And the older sister is already there, but the younger one is an outsider in the beginning. So when I changed the point of view, the story developed smoothly.' Not that the two sisters' perspectives aren't both being explored. 'I knew exactly at every point what the older sister knows, or what happened to her, and I somehow tried to secretly imprint that in the film,' Provazník reveals. 'So there are some hints about what has happened or happens to the older sister.' Through the sister and other characters, the movie also explores how various people can sustain or enable a toxic system. 'That's a very important part of the story, because when you are a teenager, you just don't know the consequences. Even as an adult, sometimes you don't know the consequences of the group that you're part of,' says Provazník. 'Of course, the main villain is obvious. But I wanted to portray this environment in all its complexity and not simple black-and-white morals. The main villain is clear, but the task for an artist is to also find some inner truth, some deeper truth.' Audiences won't guess that Broken Voices lead actress Kateřina Falbrová doesn't have an acting background. The director picked a singer by design. 'She was totally a non-actor. It was the system I wanted to use from the beginning,' says Provazník. 'I want to play the real music and songs. My audience experience with many films with choirs or orchestras is that when the music starts, meaning the playback starts, the power of the film goes down 50 percent for me. So I wanted all the music scenes in the film to be live and without playback.' After six to seven years of work on Broken Voices, Provazník says, 'it's very exhausting but very satisfying at the same time to make this film.' What is next for him? 'Recently, I started to write a new story,' he says. 'It's about a university professor who goes to the Alps with 10 of his students for an anthropology seminar, and they are following the traces of the Ötzi,' sometimes also called The Iceman, a man whose mummy was discovered at the Austrian-Italian border in 1991. The man is estimated to have lived between 3350 and 3105 BC. 'It is the oldest detective story as nobody knows who killed him. And so there are these parallels between this 5,000-year-old murder and the professor who has problems that are somehow catching up with him in the mountains.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts
Irish Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Armand review: An emergency parent-teacher conference bubbles into an unnerving psychological crucible
Armand Director : Halfdan Ullmann Tondel Cert : None Genre : Drama Starring : Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Oystein Roger, Vera Veljovic Running Time : 1 hr 57 mins In Armand, the feature debut from Halfdan Ullmann Tondel – grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann – an emergency parent-teacher conference bubbles into an unnerving psychological crucible. It's an improbable hellscape. The film, set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and (finally) something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé's dance horror. Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World , never better than here, plays Elisabeth, a once-celebrated actor and now single mother, summoned to discuss a troubling, possibly sexual playground incident involving Armand, her six-year-old son. She is met not only by Armand's caring, anxious teacher but also by her in-laws, Sarah and Anders, parents of the allegedly assaulted Jon. The meeting quickly devolves into a witch hunt; in a grotesque, climactic scene, Elisabeth bursts into prolonged uncontrollable laughter. READ MORE Such odd and inexplicable behaviours are sandwiched between gutting revelations. Reinsve's alternately steely, fragile performance is met with equal ferocity by Ellen Dorrit Petersen, from The Innocents , playing the heroine's embittered, estranged sister-in-law. A puzzled and ineffectual teaching staff watch on. Pal Ulvik Rokseth's cinematography adds claustrophobic weight to labyrinthine passages and isolated nooks. Loud and performative adult insecurities and inadequacies eclipse any real concern for the children they claim to defend. In this spirit the offending (and accusatory) children remain off-camera. As the meeting splinters into sidebars, whispered menace and stylised interludes dilute the impact of the initial pressure-cooker setting. But even when they demand a bigger leap of faith, Tondel directs these allegorical flourishes with confidence and verve. One scene finds Elisabeth in a two-step with a janitor; another renders a near-biblical judgment at a wordless parental gathering in the pouring rain. These sequences coalesce into an indelible, unsettling debut, one that rightly won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at Cannes film festival in 2024. In cinemas from Friday, July 11th
Yahoo
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bill Nighy, Mathew Horne, WWE's Jordynne Grace Board Fantasy Film ‘Welcome to Paradise' (EXCLUSIVE)
British thespian Bill Nighy and 'Gavin & Stacey' star Mathew Horne have joined the cast of genre-bending fantasy feature 'Welcome to Paradise,' alongside WWE superstar Jordynne Grace making her screen debut. Richard Summers-Calvert ('Drive Me to the End') is writing and directing the indie, which is currently in post-production. The surreal fantasy film blends psychological drama, dark comedy and mythic surrealism, centering on a mysterious carnival where winning may mean survival and losing could trap visitors in an alternate reality forever. More from Variety Tony Hinchcliffe to Host 'WWE Late Night' Comedy Show During SummerSlam Weekend 'Heart of Darkness' Animated Feature Being Voiced by Michael Sheen, James Norton and Bill Nighy Lands 'Loving Vincent' Studio as Co-Producer (EXCLUSIVE) WWE-AAA Crossover Worlds Collide Becomes Company's Most-Watched Live YouTube Broadcast Ever (EXCLUSIVE) Rising stars Georgina Bennett and Kirk Patterson topline the ensemble, which also includes Togo Igawa ('Tetris,' 'Johnny English'), Tracey Wilkinson ('Carnival Row') and the late Simon Fisher-Becker ('Harry Potter,' 'Doctor Who'). Nighy provides voice work for the project. The story follows Lisa, who awakens on a mysterious beach with no memory. After meeting a creature who tells her she's arrived at 'The Carnival,' she discovers a vibrant venue populated by humans and magical beasts. There she meets Harvey, another lost soul, as they attempt to uncover the truth about their pasts and find redemption — though everything comes with a price. 'I watched this film going in blind, and I'm now convinced Richard Summers-Calvert is both a genre-bending genius and a deeply deranged soul — in the best way,' said actor-disability advocate Adam Pearson ('The Elephant Man'). 'This film is a joy to behold.' Summers-Calvert describes the project as 'ambitious and unapologetically bold.' 'Some may doubt it could work, but that's because they've never witnessed something like this in the flesh,' the helmer said. 'This film has moments that people will have never seen, heard, or even dreamt before — and that's what excites me most.' Crucible Films and Silent D Pictures are producing, with the latter's Djonny Chen overseeing. Silent D's recent slate includes 'High Wire' (starring Isabella Wei of '1899'), 'Finding My Voice' (with Michelle Ryan of 'Bionic Woman'), 'Follow The Dark' (with James Cosmo of 'Game of Thrones') and Indonesian box office hit 'Before Night Falls.' The film is eyeing a late 2025 delivery with major festival berths in its sights. Best of Variety Oscars 2026: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Wagner Moura and More Among Early Contenders to Watch New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts?
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nicole Kidman hails explosive finale of Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2 as beginning of something deeper
Nicole Kidman has described the explosive finale of Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2 as the beginning of something deeper. "It's like it's only just beginning," the 57-year-old said of the combative final moments between her character, Masha Dmitrichenko, and billionaire David Sharpe, played by 61-year-old Mark Strong. Set in the Austrian Alps, the second season of Hulu's psychological drama ended on 2 July, with the guests of Masha's retreat confronting their traumas through a series of intense therapeutic sessions, often involving psychedelic drugs. According to Variety, the finale saw fractured relationships mended and new bonds formed. Among those attending were Wolfie, played by 32-year-old Maisie Richardson-Sellers, and Tina, portrayed by 25-year-old King Princess, who ultimately broke up, although Tina rediscovered her passion for music. Murray Bartlett, 53, appeared as disgraced former children's TV host Brian, who parted ways with the puppet that defined his past and struck up a new friendship with Agnes, a former nun played by 55-year-old Dolly de Leon. Christine Baranski, 72, and 38-year-old Annie Murphy portrayed Victoria and Imogen, a mother-daughter pair who reconciled, with Imogen later arranging a meeting with Peter, played by 37-year-old Henry Golding. However, the relationship between Masha and David took a darker turn. Earlier in the season, Masha had revealed that her deceased daughter Tatiana was also David's child. Mark said: "It's a fascinating premise that Masha has arranged this group of people knowing that all of them, as you find out in the final episode, have been affected by this guy." In the final episode, David attempts a gesture of reparation, promising to remove his company from the weapons industry. But Masha discovers this is a lie and uses an AI-generated video to publicly force his hand. The last scene takes place in a McDonald's outside Berlin, which Nicole confirmed was a real location. "Yeah, we absolutely were. Just outside of Berlin," she said. Nicole added: "Yeah, chocolate," when asked whether she was drinking a real milkshake. Mark said: "Come lunchtime, everybody just tucked into the McDonald's. It's on a kind of estate outside of Berlin, like a drive pass near a motorway." Filming took place across multiple locations in the Austrian Alps. Nicole said: "We were definitely up in those Austrian Alps." She added director Jonathan Levine and Anthony Byrne helped coordinate the complex schedule.
