David Cronenberg is back with his lates Cannes premiere The Shrouds, a blend of body horror, grief, comedy, sex, high-tech graveyards and international intrigue starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger (in three roles), Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt. Sideshow/Janus Films is opening the film – the first English-language foray by the distributor of Drive My Car and Flow — at three theaters: NYC’s Angelika Film Center and Film at Lincoln Center, and LA’s AMC Grove. Cronenberg will be in-person with screenings hosted by Brady Corbet and Richard Kelly, with the iconic director traveling to San Francisco and Chicago later in the week ahead of a move to 250+ screens, Sideshow’s widest expansion this early in a film’s run.
The director of The Fly, Dead Ringers and Videodrome has “long been one of my favorite filmmakers. It’s his most personal film. I loved it when I saw it in Cannes last year … and I think that we are all pinching ourselves that we get to work with David Cronenberg,” says Jonathn Sehring, who launched Sideshow four years ago with Janus Films to release foreign language fare for a U.S. audience. In this case, the distributor happily broke its own rule. He noted sellouts, not surprisingly, at all shows with Q&As and strong sales at the Angelika in particular as of earlier Friday.
Cassel is a tech entrepreneur named Karsh, who is reeling from the death of his wife Becca (Kruger) to cancer. He develops a new high-tech shroud embedded with tiny cameras and accessed via an app that allows the bereaved to view inside the gravesites and bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones buried in the earth. It is Cronenberg’s most personal film. The 82-year-old director’s wife, film editor and filmmaker Carolyn Cronenberg, passed away in 2017 after 43 years of marriage.
Karsh’s company, called GraveTech, is successful and expanding its surreal-looking video cemeteries internationally until an act of sabotage, including of Becca’s grave, signals a potentially vast surveillance conspiracy involving the Chinese, or maybe the Russians. “I love his body horror, but there is so much more to him,” says Sehring. “He’s a really unique filmmaker.”
The Shrouds premiered at Cannes, see Deadline review, and screened at TIFF, the New York Film Festival and AFI Fest.
Bleecker Street’s The Wedding Banquet, directed by Andrew Ahn and starring Lily Gladstone, Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan, Joan Chen and Youn Yuh-jung, debuts at 1,139 theaters after a buzzy Sundance premier. This is Ahn’s reinterpretation of writer James Schamus and director Ang Lee’s 1993 arthouse hit, a joyful comedy of errors about a chosen family navigating cultural identity, queerness and expectations. Frustrated with his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris and running out of time, Min makes a proposal: a green-card marriage with their friend Angela in exchange for her partner Lee’s expensive IVF. Elopement plans are upended, however, when Min’s grandmother surprises them with an extravagant Korean wedding banquet.
“The particular stroke of genius at play here,” says Deadline’s review, is that Ahn has actually put some thought into the way the original story — in which a closeted gay Taiwanese-American man goes through with a fake straight marriage to please his conservative parents — could maintain its relevance so far into the age of gay marriage. His workarounds are ingenious and very funny, and his biggest changes see a playful inversion of traditionally uptight Asian stereotypes.” At 89% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie gets 3 stars from PostTrak audiences and a 50% definite recommend.
IFC Films opens The Ugly Stepsisters — the Berlin and Sundance-premiering Nordic beauty horror-satire written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt in her feature debut – on 501 screens. A sinister twist on the classic Cinderella story, The Ugly Stepsister follows Elvira (Lea Myren) as she prepares to earn the prince’s affection at any cost. In a kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira will compete with the beautiful and enchanting Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) to become the belle of the ball in a film that bitingly examines body image and beauty standards. It’s 96% Certified Fresh with RT critics.
A24’s Sundance-premiering fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi from debut filmmaker Isaiah Saxon opens at four locations across NY and LA — AMC Lincoln Square, the Angelika, AMC Grove and AMC Burbank. The film has been years in the making, utilizing bespoke craftsmanship of puppetry, animatronics, matte paintings and 3D animation to tell the story of a farm girl in a remote village on the island of Carpathia. Helena Zengel stars as Yuri, who is raised to fear an elusive animal species known as ochi. But when Yuri discovers a wounded baby ochi left behind after a hunt, she embarks on a quest to bring him home. With Finn Wolfhard, Emily Watson and Willem Dafoe. Score by: David Longstreth. Executive producers include Joe Russo and Anthony Russo. Deadline’s review calls it visually stunning and a children’s film “that doesn’t fall into that easy definition.”
Briarcliff Entertainment’s animated Sneaks opens at 1,430 theaters. A pair of one-of-a-kind, collector sneakers, Ty (Anthony Mackie), and Maxine (Chloe Bailey) are stolen by ‘the Collector’ (Laurence Fishburne). In their attempt to escape, Ty ends up separated from his sister in the middle of NYC. Alone, and desperate to find her, Ty meets with JB (Martin Lawrence), a streetwise, scuffed up sneaker with an affinity for anything shiny, learning that your best life begins when you get out of your box. Directed by Rob Edwards and Chris Jenkins.
Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing from GKIDS hits 800 U.S. screens after grossing a nice $720k in previews at special event screenings on Thursday. The feature is based on Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage!, the globally popular rhythm game featuring the iconic character Hatsune Miku first released in 2020 that’s since grown into a global hit reaching over 10 million users. The film initially launched in Japan on January 17 where it has grossed over ¥1 billion. This U.S. release is subtitled only. Canada release will start May 11.
Cohen Media Group is out with Catherine Deneuve-starring satire The President’s Wife, the feature debut of Léa Domenach, in over a dozen major markets including the Quad in NYC, the Laemmle Royal in LA, the Opera Plaza in San Francisco and various AMC locations, ahead of a national rollout. It was released in France in 2023 where it topped the box office and the director nabbed a César award nomination for Best First Feature.
The legendary actress is Bernadette Chirac, the under-appreciated and underestimated wife of mid-nineties French president Jacques Chirac (Michael Vuillermoz). When it becomes evident that her long running, long suffering support of her husband’s professional ascent will go unacknowledged and unrewarded, she embarks on a steel-willed campaign of her own to achieve her much deserved place as a major media figure among the political elite. CMG calls it a timely story about bumbling, near corrupt politicians and their sycophants wrapped in a feel good, commercial, arthouse comedy that champions female empowerment.
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