Latest news with #Kontinental
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Ivan Demidov set for NHL debut with Montreal Canadiens
MONTREAL (AP) — Ivan Demidov is set to make his anticipated — and sooner-than-expected — NHL debut on Monday night. The 19-year-old Russian forward is expected to take the Bell Centre ice when the Montreal Canadiens host the Chicago Blackhawks with a chance to clinch a playoff spot. 'He has a unique blend of skill, hockey sense, deception,' general manager Kent Hughes said, highlighting Demidov's ability to move laterally on the ice. 'Let's see how it is. He's going to adjust to a different game of hockey here.' Demidov was the No. 5 pick in last year's NHL draft. He led his Russian club, SKA Saint Petersburg, in scoring with 49 points (19 goals, 30 assists) in 65 games this season, setting a Kontinental Hockey League record for under-20 players despite having inconsistent ice time. Canadiens fans watched from afar while Demidov continued his impressive play in Russia. They've been buzzing with even more excitement since his arrival. A large group of fans waited to greet him when he touched down on Canadian soil Thursday night at Toronto Pearson Airport. Canadiens defenseman Mike Matheson said the fervor surrounding Demidov's arrival has been crazy. 'It obviously shows how excited our fans are,' the 31-year-old Matheson said. 'Social media kind of causes it to be way (bigger) than it could have ever been when I was growing up.' The pressure is high, but Matheson said he has been reminding Demidov that it's only a hockey game. 'It's a great time to be a Habs fan,' Matheson said. 'But for him I think it's important to know that he doesn't need to come in and be the savior.' Demidov, who wasn't expected to be made available to the media until after Monday's game, skated on the right wing of Montreal's third line alongside center Alex Newhook and winger Joel Armia at the morning skate. Coach Martin St. Louis said he also would join the team's second power-play unit. Demidov's move to Montreal this season appeared highly improbable a week ago. The slick forward had been expected to join the Canadiens in 2025-26, but he signed an entry-level contract last week after he was suddenly released by SKA more than a month before his KHL contract ran out. Hughes, scout Nick Bobrov and special adviser Vincent Lecavalier drew criticism for visiting their prospect last December in Russia amid the country's ongoing war in Ukraine, but the Canadiens GM believes that trip helped make the early signing possible. 'It's always better to have established relationships, to have gotten the chance to meet them face-to-face instead of only over the phone,' Hughes said of meeting the SKA organization, including coach Roman Rotenberg. At a midseason news conference on Jan. 8, Hughes downplayed the possibility that Demidov would join the Canadiens this season. So what changed? 'Two things: They were eliminated earlier than expected, and we have a chance to make the playoffs,' he said. Hughes also said he didn't ask for Demidov's early release during his visit in December. 'If we left for Russia and upon arrival tried to ask for his release, I think, for me at least, I would've seen it from their side as disingenuous,' he said. Demidov skated with the Canadiens' extras Saturday morning at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, but watched that night's game against the Maple Leafs from the press box. His entry into the lineup comes at a key moment for Montreal. The Canadiens (39-31-10) held the second wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference with 88 points — three more than the Columbus Blue Jackets with two games remaining for both teams — entering play Monday. A win against the lowly Blackhawks (23-46-11) would secure their place in the playoffs and set up a first-round series against the Washington Capitals. ___ AP NHL:
Associated Press
14-04-2025
- Sport
- Associated Press
Ivan Demidov set for NHL debut with Montreal Canadiens
MONTREAL (AP) — Ivan Demidov is set to make his anticipated — and sooner-than-expected — NHL debut on Monday night. The 19-year-old Russian forward is expected to take the Bell Centre ice when the Montreal Canadiens host the Chicago Blackhawks with a chance to clinch a playoff spot. 'He has a unique blend of skill, hockey sense, deception,' general manager Kent Hughes said, highlighting Demidov's ability to move laterally on the ice. 'Let's see how it is. He's going to adjust to a different game of hockey here.' Demidov was the No. 5 pick in last year's NHL draft. He led his Russian club, SKA Saint Petersburg, in scoring with 49 points (19 goals, 30 assists) in 65 games this season, setting a Kontinental Hockey League record for under-20 players despite having inconsistent ice time. Canadiens fans watched from afar while Demidov continued his impressive play in Russia. They've been buzzing with even more excitement since his arrival. A large group of fans waited to greet him when he touched down on Canadian soil Thursday night at Toronto Pearson Airport. Canadiens defenseman Mike Matheson said the fervor surrounding Demidov's arrival has been crazy. 'It obviously shows how excited our fans are,' the 31-year-old Matheson said. 'Social media kind of causes it to be way (bigger) than it could have ever been when I was growing up.' The pressure is high, but Matheson said he has been reminding Demidov that it's only a hockey game. 'It's a great time to be a Habs fan,' Matheson said. 'But for him I think it's important to know that he doesn't need to come in and be the savior.' Demidov, who wasn't expected to be made available to the media until after Monday's game, skated on the right wing of Montreal's third line alongside center Alex Newhook and winger Joel Armia at the morning skate. Coach Martin St. Louis said he also would join the team's second power-play unit. Demidov's move to Montreal this season appeared highly improbable a week ago. The slick forward had been expected to join the Canadiens in 2025-26, but he signed an entry-level contract last week after he was suddenly released by SKA more than a month before his KHL contract ran out. Hughes, scout Nick Bobrov and special adviser Vincent Lecavalier drew criticism for visiting their prospect last December in Russia amid the country's ongoing war in Ukraine, but the Canadiens GM believes that trip helped make the early signing possible. 'It's always better to have established relationships, to have gotten the chance to meet them face-to-face instead of only over the phone,' Hughes said of meeting the SKA organization, including coach Roman Rotenberg. At a midseason news conference on Jan. 8, Hughes downplayed the possibility that Demidov would join the Canadiens this season. So what changed? 'Two things: They were eliminated earlier than expected, and we have a chance to make the playoffs,' he said. Hughes also said he didn't ask for Demidov's early release during his visit in December. 'If we left for Russia and upon arrival tried to ask for his release, I think, for me at least, I would've seen it from their side as disingenuous,' he said. Demidov skated with the Canadiens' extras Saturday morning at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, but watched that night's game against the Maple Leafs from the press box. His entry into the lineup comes at a key moment for Montreal. The Canadiens (39-31-10) held the second wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference with 88 points — three more than the Columbus Blue Jackets with two games remaining for both teams — entering play Monday. A win against the lowly Blackhawks (23-46-11) would secure their place in the playoffs and set up a first-round series against the Washington Capitals. ___ AP NHL:
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kontinental '25 review – scattergun satire on a tour of Romania's social ills
Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair. Like his previous film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (whose lead actor Ilinca Manolache appears briefly in cameo here), Jude takes aim at bad faith and bad taste and takes us on what is almost a kind of architectural tour of Romanian malaise – this time in Cluj – in which he shows us the racism, nationalism, and a pointless obsession in the country's governing classes with real estate and property development as a kind of universal aspiration. The movie closes with an acid montage of seedy public housing juxtaposed with gated private estates. And like the previous film, there is a repeated visual trope of a woman driving in a car, shown in profile, driving, driving, driving, looking for something – anything. Kontinental '25 is loosely inspired by Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51, in which Ingrid Bergman's character is radicalised by a tragedy in her own life – a poster for this is shown in one scene in which our heroine is getting drunk in a cinema bar. Eszter Tompa plays Orsolya, a former law professor who has apparently lost her job and now humiliatingly works as a bailiff. She is now tasked with evicting a homeless, depressed man holed up in the squalid basement of an apartment building bought by a German property firm who intend to raze it to the ground and replace it with a luxury boutique hotel called the Kontinental (a building much bigger than the original and clearly conceived with minimal interest in the existing architectural forms). This man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) is to be seen at first wandering chaotically through the city in various locations that we will come to recognise when other characters wander through them as well. Overwhelmed with despair at the bailiff's appearance Ion takes his own life and Orsolya is stricken with guilt of a strangely neurotic kind; tearfully asking friends and colleagues if she was morally at fault, clearly expecting and receiving the answer no. She is further aghast to learn that the homeless man was a Romanian former Olympic athlete fallen on hard times and so, as an ethnic Hungarian, she may well be abused in the right-wing press for having driven this tragic patriot to his death. (She has already been abused online for having evicted some student radicals from a squat.) So Orsolya refuses to go on a booked holiday with her husband and children; they go off without her and she instead goes on a midlife crisis tour of the city, having anguished encounters with everyone she knows, in a series of two-shot dialogue scenes, asking them for … what? Understanding? Absolution? She doesn't quite have the dignity of Ingrid Bergman but an old friend wryly sympathises – noting that incidentally the Romanians stole Cluj and Transylvania from the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Orsolya's elderly mother manages to steer the conversation around to how thoroughly admirable she considers Viktor Orbán's Hungary and when Orsolya indignantly calls Orban a fascist, her mother throws her out, calling her a 'whore'. She then gets drunk with one of her old law students who is working as a food delivery cyclist with a sign on his back saying 'I'm Romanian' because racist drivers will run over the Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans doing this job. After having alfresco sex with him, Orsolya talks earnestly to a priest who assures her that suicide is a terrible sin for the individual themselves and no one else is responsible. It is a bizarre, clamorous tour of anxiety, disclosing a panorama of indifference, of dyspeptic lack of interest in the idea that other people's suffering (or wellbeing) is of the smallest significance or interest. It's not an easy watch, but Jude's film-making has such energy and punch. Kontinental '25 screened at the Berlin film festival.
