There’s a wave of new and intelligent life at the indie box office this weekend post-Academy Awards after the traditionally slow, slow period for new openings. There have been a smattering of interesting films (Universal Language for one) but things have absolutely picked up with a George R.R. Martin short story on screen, a nursing home creep-out starring John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush, the latest Atom Egoyan film, a duo that landed really well at Cannes, a Bruno Dumont sci-fi, a Bruce LaBruce sex romp, an Italian box office hit and more.
Moderate-wide: Vertical opens action fantasy In The Lost Lands on 1,365 screens as the distributor continues a push to dot its schedule with more moderate-wide releases. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and based on a George R.R. Martin short story of the same name, the pic stars Milla Jovovich, Dave Bautista and Arly Jover. Log line: A queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), must outwit and outfight both man and demon, reads the logline.
The screen story is from Anderson and Constantin Werner, who penned the screenplay. The film premiered this week with a special screening at George R.R. Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico with an after party at the Game of Thrones scribe’s s new immersive medieval apothecary-meets-craft cocktail bar, Milk of the Poppy.
Viva Pictures is releasing animated Night Of The Zoopocalypse on 1,400 screens. After a meteor unleashes a virus that turns zoo animals into zombies, a mountain lion (David Harbour) and wolf (Gabbi Kosmidis) lead a team of surviving animals to stop the virus and rescue their zoo. Written by Steven Hoban and James Kee, it’s 100% with Rotten Tomato critics (15 reviews).
IFC Film’s creepy nursing home drama The Rule Of Jenny Penn by James Ashcroft (Coming Home in the Dark) and starring John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush hits 878 screens.
Arrogant Judge Stefan Mortensen (Rush) suffers a near-fatal stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed and confined to a retirement home. Resistant to the staff and distant from his friendly roommate, Mortensen soon clashes with seemingly gentle resident Dave Crealy (Lithgow), who secretly terrorizes the home with a sadistic game called “The Rule of Jenny Pen” while wielding his dementia doll as an instrument of cruelty. What begins as childish torment quickly escalates into far more sinister and disturbing incidents. When Mortensen’s pleas to the staff go unanswered, he takes it upon himself to put an end to Crealy’s reign of terror.
Written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft. Deadline’s review calls the film “a master class in acting.”
Queen of the Ring by Ash Avildsen, from new distributor Sumerian, is out at over 200 theaters. Written by Avildsen from the book by Jeff Leenn, is stars Emily Bett Rickards, Josh Lucas, Tyler Posey, Francesca Eastwood, Walton Goggins, Gavin Casalegno, Cara Buono, Deborah Ann Woll, Marie Avgeropoulos, Martin Kove, Kelli Berglund, Damaris Lewis, Kailey Latimer, Toni Rossall, Adam Demos and WWE Superstar, Trinity Fatu. Based on the true story of Mildred Burke. In a time when pro wrestling for women was illegal all over the country, a small town single mother embraces the danger to change culture as she dominates America’s most masculine sport to become the first million dollar female athlete in history.
XYZ Films & Variance Films open Atom Egoyan’s latest, Seven Veils, on 160+ screens. The writer-director is in NYC for opening weekend Q&As. Stars Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O’Brien, Vinessa Antoine, Ambur Braid, Michael Kupfer-Radecky.
After years away, theater director Jeanine (Seyfried) re-enters the opera world to stage her former mentor’s most famous work. Haunted by dark and disturbing memories from her past, Jeanine allows her repressed trauma to color the present as her personal and professional lives begin to unravel. Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) shot the film on location during the staging of his acclaimed production of Salome.
Greenwich Entertainment debuts Italian box office hit There’s Still Tomorrow, the feature debut of Paola Cortellesi, on 105 U.S. screens and a handful between Toronto and Vancouver.
As Deadline has reported, the women’s rights drama released in October 2023 in its home market went on to become the most watched film of the year there, outperforming Barbie and Oppenheimer, becoming the fifth highest grossing film of all time in Italy, the third best local performer in the last decade, and the most successful Italian film directed by a woman.
Set in post-war 1940s Rome, There’s Still Tomorrow tells the story of Delia (Cortellesi), a working-class wife and mother trapped in a toxic marriage. American GI’s still patrol the streets, but change is in the air. Yet everything remains the same for Delia whose romantic fantasies have given way to an embrace of her roles as dutiful wife and loving mother despite the sneering condescension and outright physical abuse at the hands of her strutting petty tyrant husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea).
Premiered as the opener of the 2023 Rome Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize and Audience Award, followed by six David di Donatello Awards before launching the international festival circuit. It’s at a critics’ 97% on RT (29 reviews).
Limited releases: Music Box Films opens Eephus, the directorial debut of cinematographer and producer Carson Lund, on 2 screens – the IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center. Expanding next week to LA, Boston, Philly, DC, Phoenix, Denver, Milwaukee and more.
Screenplay by Michael Basta, Nate Fisher & Carson Lund. Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight section and played the New York Film Festival along with others. Lund’s uses of amateur baseball to reflect on the passage of time as a longstanding men’s baseball game stretches to extra innings on a beloved field’s final day before demolition stands at 100% with (29) critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
The director is a founding member of the LA-based filmmaker collective Omnes Films. Eephus marks the group’s second project to screen in the Directors’ Fortnight section along with Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which Lund shot.
Synopsis: Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids, and local hooligans as intermittent spectators. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era. Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s.
Stars Keith William Richards, Bill Lee, Wayne Diamond, Frederick Wiseman among a large cast.
A24’s Cannes-premiering On Becoming A Guinea Fowl opens in limited release at AMC Lincoln Square and the Angelika Film Center in NYC, and the Grove and Century City in LA. Expansion to follow. From director-screenwriter Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not A Witch), it stars Susan Chardy, Henry B.J. Phiri, Elizabeth Chisela. On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family, in the filmmaker’s surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves. This is 100% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes with 49 reviews, see Deadline’s here.
Kinor Lorber presents French slapstick space opera The Empire ( L’Epmire) by Bruno Dumont at the IFC Center. Expansion to follow. The 2024 Berlinale Silver Bear-winner stars Brandon Vlieghe, Anamaria Vartolomei, Lyna Khoudri, Camille Cottin and Fabrice Luchini.
In a quiet and picturesque fishing village in Northern France, a very special child is born, unleashing a secret war between extraterrestrial forces of good and evil. In an attempt to restore their empires, two opposing forces from the depths of outer space, One and Zero, unleash an apocalyptic conflict on Earth. The villainous Zero forces secretly take over the bodies of village locals in order to foster pandemonium on the planet. At the same time, a new species engineered by the One is working towards a new, harmonious evolution. While waiting for the final battle, the imperial legions struggle to win humanity over to their cause.
Utopia’s Circle Collective opens Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor, a British-set reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema on one screen in NYC (The Roxy Cinema). The quasi porno adds LA next week.
Pasolini’s enigmatic protagonist, known to everyone as “the visitor,” arrives at the house of an upper-class family and seduces each family member one after the other. When he suddenly departs, he leaves behind an emptiness for which the rest attempt to compensate in different ways. In The Visitor, it is a refugee who washes up in a small suitcase on the banks of the River Thames in London. He is one of several identical-looking men who simultaneously emerge from suitcases in other locations around the city. Dressed in the guise of a homeless man, he arrives at the house of an upper-class family and gets to know the maid. When she passes him off as her nephew, the family invites him to also work for them as a live-in servant. The guest makes love with each of the residents of the house one after the other, depicted in explicit sex scenes. Each member of the household experiences a radical sexual and spiritual transformation.
The Toronto-based filmmaker, photographer, writer and artist’s previous works include The Misandrists, Hustler White, Gerontophilia, L.A. Zombie, The Raspberry Reich, Otto, Or Up with Dead People. The Visitor, starring Bishop Black, Macklin Kowal, Amy Kingsmill, Kurtis Lincoln, Ray Filar, Luca Federici, began as an art exhibit in London and just premiered in Berlin. Screenplay by LaBruce, Alex Babboni and Victor Fraga,
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