Latest news with #TheThingwithFeathers
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Vue Lumière Acquires Benedict Cumberbatch Flick ‘The Thing With Feathers'
Vue Lumière has picked up The Thing with Feathers starring Benedict Cumberbatch for the UK and Ireland. Vue Lumière, the distribution arm of exhibition company Vue, acquired the film from mk2. The company has said it plans to release the film in cinemas across the UK and Ireland later this year. More from Deadline Briarcliff Acquires U.S. On Benedict Cumberbatch Sundance Premiere 'The Thing With Feathers' Searchlight To Bloom Jay Roach's 'The Roses' With Benedict Cumberbatch & Olivia Colman Over Labor Day Weekend Benedict Cumberbatch Talks Portraying A Father's Grief In 'The Thing With Feathers' & Why He Loves Producing - Berlin Film Festival The Thing with Feathers had its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year, then went on to play as a Special Gala at the 75th Berlinale. It is based on the bestselling book by Max Porter, published by Faber, and stars Cumberbatch as a grieving father of two young boys who loses his wife very suddenly. Written and directed by Dylan Southern, best known for his music documentaries Meet Me in the Bathroom, Shut Up and Play the Hits and the upcoming untitled Oasis project, it is produced by Adam Ackland and Leah Clarke for SunnyMarch (We Live in Time, The Mauritanian and the upcoming Roses) and Andrea Cornwell's Lobo Films (Love Lies Bleeding, Saint Maud). The film was developed with Film4, who co-financed alongside the BFI and Align, in association with Uncommon Creative Studio, mk2 Films, and Rank and File, in co-production with Film i Väst and Filmgate Film. mk2 Films is handling international sales. 'We feel that The Thing with Feathers fully embodies what we are doing with Vue Lumière and what we want to say to audiences around cinema, storytelling, performance, creativity, and impact,' Eve Gabereau, Director of Distribution at Vue Lumière, said in a statement. 'Also, we are committed to and energised by working with the filmmaking teams and UK partners Film4 and BFI in a joined-up way for the widest possible release.' Fionnuala Jamison, Managing Director of mk2 Films, added: 'We're very pleased to be partnering with Vue Lumière on their first major dramatic feature. It's a moving and distinctive film that we're proud to see embraced by such an ambitious new player in the UK market.' Best of Deadline Streamer Subscription Prices And Tiers – Everything To Know As Prices Increase And Ads Abound 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More
Telegraph
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Thing with Feathers: Benedict Cumberbatch's surreal horror is a squawking misfire
Some books cast a spell, which must be what attracted Benedict Cumberbatch to star in The Thing with Feathers. But that doesn't mean they're destined to make great films, however honest everyone's aims, and diligent their acting. Writer-director Dylan Southern turns a very literary tour de force into cinema that clomps, languishes and squawks 'METAPHOR!' with almost no plot to motor it along. On the page, the conceit of Max Porter's 2015 debut novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers – that of a giant crow presiding over a widower's bereavement – was certainly a flex, showing promising gumption. Lo and behold, Porter's next novel Lanny (2019) was altogether wondrous. The former book has already been adapted for the stage, in a well-liked 2018 version by Enda Walsh, starring Cillian Murphy. Southern wants to meet Porter's achievement anew, but it's an almighty hurdle to set himself as a first-time feature director. The supposed climax becomes a hellscape in all the wrong ways, as well as an unwieldy genre hybrid, about one-third of the way (but no more) to Babadook-esque horror. As a straight grief drama, which is how things start, The Thing with Feathers does make some gritty inroads – which is kind of impressive, given how weirdly unspecific it all is. Cumberbatch is a grieving father, unnamed except as 'Dad' by his two young sons (Henry and Richard Boxall). His late wife has collapsed in a freak accident at home and died; he found the body. While concealing his full devastation to preserve a sense of normality, he can't handle the small things: putting milk in the fridge, not burning the toast, stopping these tykes trundling all over him. He's an illustrator, which cues up his black feathered nemesis, Crow, to make a looming leap off the page. After the Netflix drama Eric, which paired Cumberbatch with an imaginary blue puppet monster that helped his character cope with losing his son, we perhaps need to call time now on him sharing the screen with lumbering personifications of emotion. This man-sized corvine figment rasps in the voice of David Thewlis – who else? – and taunts him as a 'Sad Dad' hitting the bottle. Alas, the relationship being sold between Crow and Dad's grief is so hammeringly obvious it gives the film nowhere to go but down. Southern directs the young brothers well – there's a degree of spite to their rough-housing that's believable. And Cumberbatch, who has never phoned in any performance I've seen, is doing everything he can to keep the film in touch with reality. But the problems are insurmountable. The material is just so ill-suited to this unpoetic quasi-horror approach. The lighting in the house turns sickly; the iffily designed creature starts flapping around in a frenzy; the viewer feels nothing. There's no way Southern can lift us out of this pit of despond, which is what Porter's flair for literary invention did. It's a grim situation – like watching a film peck at its own entrails.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How has fatherhood changed Benedict Cumberbatch?
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who stars as a grieving father in new drama "The Thing with Feathers," reveals the effect parenthood has had on his risk-taking. (Feb. 19)
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kiss of the Spider Woman review – Jennifer Lopez dazzles in unsteady musical
There are certain things one expects from a prime-slot Sundance premiere. Crowd-pleasing character-based comedies, rural mood-over-plot dramas, provocative and probing documentaries; all tied together by the importance of an independent spirit, the reason the festival was birthed back in the late 1970s. Sunday night then brought with it something a little more confounding: a splashy, Jennifer Lopez-starring, Affleck and Damon-produced adaptation of a Broadway musical combining Argentinian prison drama and technicolour song-and-dance setpieces. The inclusion of Kiss of the Spider Woman on a lineup that has been noticeably edging away from a reliance on A-list names raised a few eyebrows – wouldn't this have been a better play at a more commercial showcase like Toronto? – but it brought a welcome sense of the unexpected to Park City, grit briefly replaced with glamour. Related: The Thing with Feathers review – Benedict Cumberbatch's grief horror falls apart The story takes place with elements of both, a cellblock-set drama that indulges in flashy fantastical escapes, based on Manuel Puig's 70s novel which was turned into an 80s film, starring Raul Julia and an Oscar-winning William Hurt. It later become a Tonys-sweeping musical, written by Terrence McNally, and now this adaptation arrives at a banner time for the genre, as both Wicked and Emilia Pérez battle for Oscars. It shares superficial similarities with the latter – the theme of gender transformation, the combination of grounded crime saga and heightened music numbers – but it's a far more traditional crowd-pleaser, inspiring a packed-out premiere audience to both applaud and cheer. It's not quite worthy of either but it's a respectable attempt, a film that despite the current moment for the genre, still feels charmingly out-of-place. Director Bill Condon might have travelled to Sundance with his James Whale drama Gods and Monsters back in the late 90s but his work has since been known for its larger scale, mostly for worse. I enjoyed his smaller, yet still glossy, thriller The Good Liar but films such as Beauty and the Beast and two Twilight sequels carried little identity. Kiss of the Spider Woman is caught somewhere between these two worlds and Condon seems more comfortable operating on the grander side, dazzling us with his ode to MGM musicals while finding himself a little lost back in reality. It's a film about the necessity of escape, taking place in early 1980s Argentina as authorities violently crack down on those bravely speaking out against a repressive regime, including tireless revolutionary Valentin (Diego Luna). His political drive clashes with new cellmate Luis (Tonatiuh), a flamboyantly gay window dresser who would rather retreat to fantasy than deal with the horrors of the time. Given the current political hellscape, this remains a relatable tactic, but Condon is a little too reticent to lean into the true grimness of his setting, the film a little overly smoothed and sanitised, making the leaps into daydream feel a little less distinct and a lot less comforting. Those leaps are centered around Luis's obsession with a golden age movie star named Ingrid Luna (Lopez) and he starts to tell Valentin the story of one of her greatest films, an admittedly hokey tale of a glamorous magazine editor who finds herself at the mercy of a mysterious spider woman. While Condon's vibrant musical numbers might visually feel a little more Pedro Almodóvar than anything more specific to the period, they provide a delightfully over-designed showcase for a beautifully well-costumed Lopez as well as a well-pitched Luna and Tonatiuh, who are cast as characters in the absurdly plotted tale told in Luis's head. The songs themselves, from legendary Cabaret and Chicago duo Kander and Ebb, are largely rather forgettable with some often distractingly ungainly lyrics (an earworm exception is the fantastically slinky title song) but the setpieces that surround them are bright and buoyant enough to mostly distract. Lopez, who hasn't been recently well-served by her middling Netflix action oeuvre, is also a natural fit for the material and the knowingly over-the-top tone, a larger-than-life star perfect at playing one. Her background in music has largely brought more acclaim for her ability as a dancer rather than a singer but she pulls off both here. She's an actor who has long spoken about her dream to lead a traditional musical and is clearly, infectiously, having the time of her life. We're in safest hands with Lopez and Condon when he's playing in that sandbox as the cell-based scenes can be a little stagey and rushed in comparison. Luna is strong and able to switch between both modes well but Tonatiuh less so, the actor unable to switch off the over-emphatic acting that's needed for the fantasy scenes when they're back in reality, lessening the emotional impact of the tragic final act. The pair, and Condon's film as a whole, inevitably suffer in comparison with Héctor Babenco's original filmed adaptation, where dramatic stakes were that much more tangible, the progress of the central relationship that much clearer and the performances that much more effective. The rockiness can drag some of the film's two hour-plus runtime (which still, to the upcoming fury of superfans, removes many much-loved songs), but there's something fascinating about the unusual, overstuffed, indefinable mess of it all, especially when compared with last year's flat and colourless Wicked. A wider audience might not know what to make of it, but Lopez is undeniable. Kiss of the Spider Woman is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Thing with Feathers review – Benedict Cumberbatch's grief horror falls apart
The messiness of grief, something most of us know too well, has been given a smoothing effect on screen, an experience so awful and unpleasant made easily, annoyingly palatable. The cliches that have come to define it have become so normalised that we often forget what it's really like to see the horrible, frightening reality shown to us. On the page, and stage, Max Porter's novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers was for many, a fantastical yet identifiable story of loss, the tale of a father losing his wife transformed into a dark, magical fable of transformative horror. Its central conceit – a giant crow haunting the aftermath of death – was such a compelling visual that, despite the pitfalls that come with adapting something so beloved, the big screen felt like a natural next step. In his introduction before the adaptation's late-night Sundance premiere, writer and director Dylan Southern (whose work has previously focused on music documentaries) informed us that this would be no traditional grief drama, a subgenre one has come to often glumly expect from the festival. This would be something far more unusual. But The Thing with Feathers, a film that uses the word grief so much already that it was wisely removed from the title, is not as radical as those behind it might like to think. It's actually surprisingly, sometimes boringly, conventional, not just as a grounded drama of loss but as a metaphorical horror too, a trend that was given a new lease of life with 2014's The Babadook, which also premiered at Sundance (Benedict Cumberbatch's father even reads his sons a story involving the similar-sounding tale of the Slavic creature Baba Yaga, a perhaps unwise pre-bedtime choice given its themes). While Jennifer Kent found a way to make her film operate so effectively on both levels, Southern just can't figure out the right balance. It's never scary or jolting enough as a horror or as emotionally investing or psychologically insightful as it should be as a drama. What's crucially missing is detail, both in the characters themselves and the weight of what they're going through, red flags all the way up in an overly familiar introductory stretch following the unseen funeral. Cumberbatch's unnamed Dad is struggling already, forgetting the milk and burning the toast, his late wife having taken on 'everything' before she died. While a more traditionally common dynamic that it should be, there's not much interrogation of this unfair imbalance and what it really means for who the character was and now has to be (bar one flashback to Dad taking out his young sons in the snow in improper attire). There's nothing lived-in about Southern's recycled view of Dad's grief – screaming down the phone, refusing to clean the kitchen, dealing with well-intentioned yet inappropriate offers of support – and also nothing to remember about the anonymously written wife and mother who has gone, described as someone kind who smelled nice. The arrival of a menacing creature is therefore a desperately needed uplift as Dad starts to lose his grip on reality, faced with a David Thewlis-voiced menace, mocking him as he tries to push his new life on, caring for his two interchangeable sons while working on his latest graphic novel. But there's no real progress or substance to the confusingly paced relationship, a repetitive cycle of ineffective jump scares and smugly sardonic putdowns that fail to show how Dad is benefitting or changing from this new addition to the family. Like the book, the film is sectioned (Dad, Boys, Crow and Demon) and while a perspective shift seems to follow each time, it soon fades and we're back in the same, increasingly uninteresting, routine (the arrival of the wonderful Vinette Robinson is also sadly just a brief tease). There's a proudly absurd streak to many of the scenes (Southern used the word 'ridiculous' before the film) with Cumberbatch dancing and fighting with Crow while also taking on elements of his sounds and physicality himself. But it all feels a little dated, not as anarchic or as twisted as it's presented as, and somehow far less effective than something that's far less pretentious like Venom. Like Tom Hardy in those films, Cumberbatch is admirably committed yet the rather embarrassing silliness he's forced into can't be pulled off, especially since it remains unclear what or who Crow really is and wants, a character as underwritten as Dad. Cumberbatch's performance is certainly all-in but restricted by the limited nature of the script – cry, scream, scribble, repeat – and so he's left as visibly exhausted as we are. What one hopes for in a film about something so utterly terrible is that sink of sadness to set in, the pang that makes you feel for those you're watching while maybe also thinking of those you've lost yourself. The worst thing about The Thing with Feathers, a film that's supposedly about the all-consuming horror of grief, is that it never comes, not even for a second, a story about loss that fatally loses us first. The Thing with Feathers is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
