Latest news with #arthousefilms
Yahoo
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Dreams,' ‘Sentimental Value' Among Sarajevo Film Festival's Open Air Lineup
The 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for its Open Air Program, consisting of two sections, Open Air and Open Air Premiere. The program set for the Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema will be 'showcasing some of the most important arthouse films of the year, as well as cinematic classics,' organizers said. 'Some of the films in this program will be presented by acclaimed directors, actors, and screenwriters, [2025] recipients of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, including Paolo Sorrentino, Willem Dafoe, Ray Winstone, Stellan Skarsgård, and Michel Franco,' who received the honor several years ago. Meanwhile, the new Open Air Premiere lineup will 'showcase films from the former Yugoslav region in the unique setting of the Uniqa Open Air Cinema Stari Grad,' fest organizers highlighted. Check out the full Sarajevo open air lineups below. OPEN AIR PROGRAM The Pavilion (Paviljon) – opening film Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, 2025, 100 min. Director: Dino Mustafić Cast: Rade Šerbedžija, Zijah Sokolović, Miralem Zubčević, Ksenija Pajić, Jasna Diklić, Branka Petrić, Meto Jovanovski, Vladimir Jurc Lali, Kaća Dorić, Muhamed Bahonjić Brides United Kingdom, 2025, 93 min. Director: Nadia Fall Cast: Ebada Hassan, Safiyya Ingar, Leo Bill, Arthur Darvill, Sinead Matthews, Yusra Warsama, Ali Khan, Cemre Ebuzziya, Aziz Capkurt Case 137/Dossier 137 France, 2025, 115 min. Director: Dominik Moll Cast: Léa Drucker, Jonathan Turnbull, Mathilde Roehrich, Pascal Sangla, Claire Bodson, Florence Viala, Hélène Alexandridis Dreams Mexico, United States, 2025, 95 min. Director: Michel Franco Cast: Jessica Chastain, Isaác Hernández, Rupert Friend, Marshall Bell, Eligio Meléndez, Mercedes Hernández Leave One Day (Partir un Jour) France, 2025, 96 min. Director: Amélie Bonnin Cast: Juliette Armanet, Bastien Bouillon, François Rollin, Tewfik Jallab, Dominique Blanc, Mhamed Arezki, Pierre-Antoine Billon, Amandine Dewasmes Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi) Norway, Germany, Denmark, France, Sweden, United Kingdom, Türkiye, 2025, 132 min. Director: Joachim Trier Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning The Birthday PartyGreece, Spain, Netherlands, United Kingdom, 2025, 103 min. Director: Miguel Ángel Jimenéz Cast: Willem Dafoe, Vic Carmen Sonne, Emma Suárez, Joe Cole, Carlos Cuevas The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) Italy, France, 2013, 141 min. Director: Paolo Sorrentino Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Buccirosso, Iaia Forte, Pamela Villoresi, Galatea Ranzi, Massimo De Francovich, Roberto Herlitzka, Isabella Ferrari More from The Hollywood Reporter Cambodian Auteur Rithy Panh Chats About His Super 8 Plans and Whether Cinema Can Save Us Willem Dafoe to Receive Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at Sarajevo Film Festival Park Chan-wook's 'No Other Choice,' Starring Lee Byung-hun, to Open Busan Film Festival OPEN AIR PREMIERE PROGRAM Bosnian Knight (Bosanski Vitez)Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, 2025, 79 min. Director: Tarik Hodžić Cat's Cry (Mačiji Krik)Serbia, Canada, Croatia, 2024, 94 min. Director: Sanja Živković Cast: Jasmin Geljo, Andrijana Đorđević, Sanja Mikitišin, Marija Škaričić, Denis Murić Radio Rambo Amadeus Serbia, 2025, 73 min. Director: Dušan Varda Surviving EarthUnited Kingdom, 2025, 100 min. Director: Thea Gajić Cast: Slavko Sobin, Olive Gray, Stuart Martin, Peter Coonan, Toni Gojanović, Ann Ogbomo The Lost Dream Team (Izgubljeni Dream Team) Croatia, Serbia, Italy, Slovenia, 2025, 82 min. Director: Jure Pavlović The Track Canada, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2025, 92 min. Director: Ryan Sidhoo Whites Wash at Ninety (Belo Se Pere Na Devetdeset) Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, 2025, 142 min. Director: Marko Naberšnik Cast: Lea Cok, Anica Dobra, Jurij Zrnec, Tjaša Železnik, Žiga Šorli, Mei Rabič, Jaka Mehle, Vladimir Tintor, Iva Krajnc Bagola, Saša Tabaković, Jure Rajšp, Polona Juh, Blaž Dolenc Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 25 Best U.S. Film Schools in 2025 The 40 Greatest Needle Drops in Film History The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Solve the daily Crossword
The Verge
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Eddington gets the pandemic right but still isn't a great movie
A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed. Eddington, Aster's latest, feels like a continuation of the maximalist guilt-trip Beau Is Afraid. Joaquin Phoenix stars once again, though the concerns here are less Jewish and Oedipal and more wokeness and conspiracy theories. It's grounded in the contemporary: the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically. The movie's tagline is 'hindsight is 2020,' which is fitting for a movie that is clever and empty. In a fictional New Mexican town, Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) is unhappy about statewide COVID-19 precautions. He's not a clean stand-in for any particular kind of conservative; he simply hates wearing a mask, claiming that a KN95 is oppressive as someone who suffers from asthma. Though coronavirus has not arrived in Eddington yet, the anxiety created by mask mandates, grocery lines, and online misinformation loom just as large over the town as the virus itself. Cross doesn't like what the world has become so he announces on a livestream that he will run for mayor. Eddington is supposed to be a microcosm of what's wrong with the US, though Aster's diagnosis feels overly broad. The film works better when it comes to the finer details. The town is full of weirdos, embodied by a strong and familiar cast: Pedro Pascal plays incumbent mayor Ted Garcia, who's in the middle of selling out Eddington's future with the construction of a massive AI data center; Emma Stone plays Cross' wife Louise, who makes scary dolls as a hobby; Deirdre O'Connell is her mother Dawn, a YouTube-susceptible conspiracy theorist; Austin Butler makes an appearance as Vernon, a cult leader with tattoos that evoke a Hillsong pastor. In some ways, watching the first hour of Eddington feels a bit like watching a Wes Anderson movie or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos' cruel triptych Kinds of Kindness. The delights come from watching a bunch of recognizable actors inhabit and bounce off odd characters. (You get the sense that they had a good time on set, too.) As a time capsule of 2020, the movie also confronts Black Lives Matter protests, though the leader of Eddington's anti-racist movement is a white high schooler (Amélie Hoeferle) who repeatedly gives her ex, a Black police officer named Michael (Micheal Ward), tone-deaf lectures about joining the marches. Two other teenage characters begin protesting mostly because they think she's hot. Aster finds a lot of his jokes in the grating nature of social justice language. For all its themes, the early parts of Eddington are light on moralizing or righteousness. Even if the setups are somewhat obvious — the annoying performativeness of the left, the boneheaded ignorance of the right — the punchlines mostly land. Eddington posits that the thing that both sides can agree on is that, progressive or conservative, we are all manipulated by our phones and the incentives of social media. If the idea is obvious, at least Aster pulls it off convincingly. That is, until the last hour or so. Maybe Aster just struggles with endings? Tonally, Hereditary's ending works as a de-escalation, though the final twist is unsatisfying; the atrocious last act of Beau Is Afraid is as surreal as it is irritating, with Richard Kind stepping in as a kind of inverse Bing Bong. In Eddington, though, all of the threads that Aster puts into place seem to unravel as Joe Cross' motivations take an unconvincing, violent turn. Without giving it away, the plot moves in an absurdist direction — a fine choice for a black comedy, but a disappointing one in a film that begins with a more compelling, grounded worldview. Maybe five years isn't enough time to understand what exactly the pandemic did to us as individuals or as a society, but I think anyone would suspect that it's more complicated than 'it broke our brains.' If nothing else, Eddington proves that that reasoning is deeply boring on a narrative level. Joe Cross' unexpected arc, despite Phoenix's beguiling performance, comes across as confused and unearned. Eddington is memorable, though. Again, it's the details. At the police station, an officer's desktop computer is covered in anime stickers; you catch a brief glimpse of a TikTok video of a white woman doing a celebratory dance after reading Giovanni's Room. I could be convinced to watch Eddington again just to see all the hilarious, meticulous touches that Aster has embedded in the scenery. As a filmmaker, he demonstrates a strong care for the craft — so much thought has been put into the cinematography, the sets, the evocation of the pandemic. You just wish that same effort had been put into any of the film's ideas. Eddington is in theaters nationwide July 18.
