Latest news with #AlexScharfman
Geek Vibes Nation
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
A24 To Release The Paul Rudd & Jenna Ortega Horror Comedy 'Death Of A Unicorn' On Blu-Ray This July
A24 has just announced that they will be releasing director Alex Scharfman's riotous action-horror Death of a Unicorn in a special Blu-Ray Collector's Edition that is expected to ship in July 2025, exclusively from the A24 Shop. The monster mash stars Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, and Richard E. Grant. The release will come with a Dolby Atmos track and new special features including a commentary track, featurettes, and more. Get more details below! Synopsis: A father and daughter accidentally hit and kill a unicorn while en route to a weekend retreat, where his billionaire boss seeks to exploit the creature's miraculous curative properties. Special features: Commentary with Writer-Director Alex Scharfman 'How to Kill a Unicorn' Featurette Deleted Scenes Six Collectible Postcards This is the latest of many Collector's Editions from A24. Which of their films would you like to see get this treatment next? Let us know in the comments or over on Twitter.
Euronews
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Death Of A Unicorn' - Impale the rich!
ADVERTISEMENT Considering the times we live in and how we're faced with constantly escalating global crises, the lunatic behaviour of multi-billionaires and the out-of-touch elites shining by their mediocrity on a daily basis, it's hardly surprising that the ability to tolerate the rich has become as rare as... well, finding a unicorn in the wild. This has been mirrored through the zeitgeist-flooding trend of Eat The Rich movies, with the likes of Parasite , Triangle of Sadness , Knives Out , The Menu and Saltburn - all delivering some cathartic goods. TV hasn't fared too badly either, with the ubiquity of shows like Succession and White Lotus also utilising satire to expose the downfall of morally loathsome one percenters. A24 clearly wanted in on the Rich People Are Shit action and tapped writer-director Alex Scharfman to deliver the goods. The trouble is that clued-up audience members now expect their late-stage capitalism satires to be scathing, original and potent... And sadly, Scharfman's feature debut can't even get the balance right between horror and comedy. Death Of A Unicorn A24 Death Of A Unicorn follows workaholic Elliot (Paul Rudd), a compliance lawyer for a pharmaceutical company run by dying CEO Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). He's dragging his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) to his billionaire tycoon boss' luxurious estate, thinking he's about to be promoted to the executive board. On the drive to the secluded retreat, the father-daughter duo accidentally hit a unicorn with their rental car. The words 'Death Of A Unicorn' immediately appear on screen - a perfectly timed and goofy monster B-movie nod that promises much. With no place to dump the corpse, they bring their roadkill to the retreat - but not before Ridley manages to establish a psychic connection with the creature by touching its horn. Despite their best efforts to keep the creature under wraps, the unicorn is discovered by the Leopolds – Odell, his glamorous wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and their dipshit-in-stripey-pleated-shorts heir Shepard (Will Poulter). And when they realize that the unicorn's blood may contain magical healing properties, the terminally ill patriarch and his Sackler-shaped family waste no time in poking and draining the poor beast for profit. A lucrative new drug is at stake and nothing will stop them from harnessing the creature's regenerative talents. Little do they know that unicorns may have magic blood, but they're not all rainbows and cuddles. They're ferocious legends, and if one goes down, you can bet its family will muster enough vengeful determination to make Michael Myers soil himself... Death Of A Unicorn A24 From the premise alone, there's plenty to love about Death Of A Unicorn . Caricatures of pharma arseholes getting bloodily impaled while a fractured father-daughter dynamic gets healed in the process. It sounds like something Roger Corman would have saluted. Frustratingly, Death Of A Unicorn settles for being very predictable and unsure of what it wants to be. It's not camp or irreverent enough to be hilarious; too thinly drawn to function as a proper takedown of the resource-hoarding ultra wealthy; and it lacks the appropriate amount of on-screen gore to make it a bloody B-movie blast. In its defense, some of the slasher kills are funny, and the Leopolds have a blast - especially Will Poulter who stands out as the feckless and entitled Shepard. His Ted Talk line delivery, as well as his plan to defeat the unicorns in the 'marketplace of ideas', do make up for some of the film's shortcomings. However, we've seen the ever-reliable Paul Rudd play this type of affable and bumbling character a million times, and Jenna Ortega is once again lumped in the archetypal Gen-Zer category, spouting suspiciously ChatGPT-sounding lines like 'Philanthropy is reputation-laundering for the oligarchy'. She clearly has more range and needs to be cast in roles that don't feel like retreads of her detached-youth turns in Wednesday and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice . There are worst ways of spending 107 minutes than Death Of A Unicorn , especially when rich and exploitative narcissists get slashed, gutted and stabbed by crazed unicorns. It's certainly not the crushing bore that was Cocaine Bear . However, much like Elizabeth Banks' 2023 'Bear Trips Balls On Nose Candy' dud, A24 needed a surer grasp when it came to elevating the equally promising pitch of 'What If Unicorns Started Skewering The Rich?' to satirical heights. This just needed more bite. Sorry, more "girthsome" horn. Death Of A Unicorn is out now.
Telegraph
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Death of a Unicorn: A gorily idiotic skewering of the super-rich
Death of a Unicorn wants to skewer the privilege of the 0.01 per cent – just like The Menu did, and Glass Onion did, and Saltburn, Blink Twice and Triangle of Sadness. Using an alicorn – unicorn's horn – to go about this, in the goriest ways imaginable, makes it the most outlandish of these splashy satires. But it also strongly suggests the end of the road has been reached with this lazy vogue for disembowelling the rich. Indeed, it panics when coming to that very realisation, and tonally swerves off a cliff. Writer-director Alex Scharfman earns credit for a first hour studded with laughs, as does Will Poulter, the pick of the cast as an unbearably pampered heir apparent. Some snappy comedy gets served, but the horror end of the equation is shocking mainly for being so basic. Espying the executive producer credit for Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) only makes it more conspicuous that A24 have gone so calculatedly downmarket with this one. You'll also need to get past a grossly distressing start, especially if prolonged harm to animals on screen – even mythical ones – is in any way a worry. It's hard to come around ever again to Elliot (an uneasy Paul Rudd), a widowed lawyer headed to a country estate with his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), after his reaction to running over a unicorn foal. (Their existence here surprises the characters as much as it would us.) He bludgeons it savagely with a tire-iron – less to put it out of its misery than get the poor creature off the road and hide the evidence. Unfortunately, it isn't dead, and kicks off enough of a frenzy in the back of an SUV to alert the entire household of their host, a cancer-riddled Big Pharma mogul named Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant). When it transpires that the beast's horn has healing properties, dollar signs leap into everyone's eyes except Ridley's. Her appalled Gen Z principles are merely an irritant to the Leopold clan, meaning they shush her – with her dad's acquiescence – while swiftly hatching a battle plan. It's good to see Téa Leoni, always such a spry comic actress, back in films for the first time in 14 years as Odell's wife, a charitable foundation queen who knows which side her bread is buttered on. Poulter steals many scenes as their dreadful son Shepard – indeed, already funny lines ('Gloss is gauche!', he barks about printer paper) get bonus bounce from his killer timing. It's a shame, albeit a predictable one, that Scharfman's answer to everything his premise asks is just a numbing splurge of digital carnage from the halfway mark. The foal's parents ride in, unforgivingly, and everyone runs around being ripped to shreds, like the cast of Clue if they'd fallen down a weird wormhole. This may still sound crassly entertaining, but the execution is ugly, the laughs dry up, and the script's glimmers of intelligence are extinguished by screaming. Knowing how to end one of these films seems to defeat just about everybody, which is ample reason in itself to call time on the subgenre. 15 cert, 107 min. In cinemas from Friday April 4
Express Tribune
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Uniqueness of unicorns
Be it children's television or woven tapestries, unicorns are here to stay. Photos: File Death of a Unicorn, directed by Alex Scharfman and starring Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd, features something you don't hear about every day: Killer unicorns. As per DW, the film, which released in the United States on March 28, is a story about human greed, poking fun at the ultra wealthy in the context of humans hunting down unicorns they discover on a remote ranch in Canada. The creatures are said to have magical healing properties. As the chase begins, gory chaos ensues. From medieval tapestries to sculptures by Salvador Dali, the film is the latest cultural product to harness the centuries-old symbolism of the mythical one-horned creature. Sage-like origins Ancient depictions of the mythical creature date back to the Bronze Age. A bovine animal with one long horn was commonly featured on seals used by the Indus Valley civilisation starting around 2600 BC. Some historians have suggested that the seal might have been influenced by Rishyasringa, a sage in Hindu and Buddhist mythology who is described as having deer horns and is associated with fertility. The Greek historian Ctesias, who lived during the 5th century BC, described a single-horned "Monokeros" - an animal he said was found in India, and was similar in size to a horse with a white body, purple head and blue eyes. It was said that anyone who drank from its horn would be cured from epilepsy or poison. Scholars have since decided Ctesias was probably referring to a rhinoceros. A magical creature Legends from around the world tell of the unicorn's magical powers, including purifying water with its horn. This has led to the beast being associated with immortality. Rumours of the unicorn's healing properties proved to be so compelling that during the Renaissance, its mythical horn was highly sought after by rulers around the world who were willing to pay a hefty sum for one. But these were likely tusks from a narwhal, or toothed whale, passing as a unicorn horn. Even the English Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1533 to 1603, was gifted an elaborately decorated tusk from an explorer in her court. Similar to the myth that eating ground pearls could cure illness, "unicorn horns" could supposedly bring water to boil or detoxify a drink if dipped into a cup, which was useful in preventing any attempts at poisoning. Kings and queens thereby drank from goblets lined with "unicorn horn." It wasn't until the 16th century that Ambroise Pare, a leading medical authority at the time, questioned the properties attributed to the unicorn horn in his Discourse on the Mummy and the Unicorn (1582). Notably didn't refute the idea that unicorns exist in the first place. By the 17th century, the cat was out of the bag that these precious unicorn horns were in fact narwhal tusks. Immortalised in art Among the most iconic unicorn-bearing artworks are the seven Unicorn Tapestries (1495-1505) currently on view at The Met Cloisters in New York City. The luxuriously woven works depict scenes associated with a hunt for an elusive unicorn. On them, we see a group of hunters chasing the animal, appearing to kill it before it then reappears unharmed and chained to a tree. Art historians have posited that the red marks on the chained unicorn do not represent blood, but rather pomegranate juice dripping from the tree above; pomegranate being a symbol of marriage and fertility. The unicorn was also associated with themes of Christianity in artwork throughout the ages. Around 1500, another seminal work of the western art cannon was woven: The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. The six tapestries feature a royally dressed woman surrounded by various animals, with one creature prominently displayed among all: a regal unicorn. Each of the five depicts a sense - touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight - while the sixth is the most mysterious. It is accompanied by the words "À mon seul désir" (To my only desire), and has inspired a number of theories. Is the woman renouncing earthly pleasures? These works are currently on display in the Cluny Museum in Paris and will travel to the Barberini Museum in Potsdam for a unicorn-themed exhibition in October 2025. Symbol of love Later in art history, Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali used the symbolism of the unicorn to represent love. In the 1977 sculpture The Unicorn, he features the creature boring a heart-shaped hole in a wall with a figure of a woman on the ground. He said it symbolised his love for this wife Gala and wrote in his autobiography that he envisioned her riding the creature. Contemporary artists such as England's Damien Hirst and Rebecca Horn, who was a German visual artist, also prominently featured unicorns in their works. American 1990s kids will remember the colourful rainbow unicorn found on Lisa Frank brand school supplies. The hit animated TV series, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010-2019), a makeover of the 1980s My Little Pony franchise, also contributed to the revival of unicorns. Whether hunted in richly woven tapestries of the Middle Ages or starring in films like Death of a Unicorn, the allure of this mythical beast is unlikely to fade anytime soon.
