While many films arrived at Sundance with distribution deals already in place, many were still seeking acquisition. It’s been pretty quiet over the last week, but now it appears the first major acquisition is nearly in place, and it’s for the crowd-pleasing body horror, Together.
Deadline reports that NEON has won a days-long bidding war to acquire Together, the Michael Shanks-directed Midnight film starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie. I was in attendance at the January 26th world premiere and I can tell you the crowd had a Hell of a time with the film as it’s funny, scary, and even a bit romantic. It’s clear that studio heads were in the house, too.
It’s unclear what the final number will be, but the report estimates somewhere in the realm of $20M, which is great for a Midnight genre film. The deal could also set the bar for future acquisitions from the festival as there are a lot of crowd-pleasing titles left out there with a few days in Park City left.
Here’s the synopsis: With a move to the countryside already testing the limits of a couple’s relationship, a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Heart Eyes, Sony’s upcoming horror starring Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Jordana Brewster, and Devon Sawa.
SYNOPSIS: For the past several years, the “Heart Eyes Killer” has wreaked havoc on Valentine’s Day by stalking and murdering romantic couples. This Valentine’s Day, no couple is safe…
The screening takes place on Thursday, January 30th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic. If you’d like to attend, RSVP at the Sony Pictures site here. Please remember all screenings are first come first served and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show!
There’s nothing magical about Amalia Ulman’s sophomore feature, Magic Farm. If there’s a spell that it casts, it’s to dazzle you with its comic ineptitude and plethora of unwatchable characters. What a way to start this year’s Sundance! Perhaps the early debut (and late embargo) was to set a bar so low that everything else in a relatively weak year would look like they belong in the Library of Congress.
Magic Farm, Ulman’s follow-up to 2021’s El Planeta, feels experimental in that it offers jokes delivered with no confidence and without clear punchlines. The film follows a group of ugly, self-absorbed Americans, all part of a crappy news magazine program exploring bizarre trends in far-off subcultures. Sundance mainstay Chloë Sevigny plays the show’s bitchy host Edna, who knows the show is terrible but tries to stick it out, anyway. Along with her husband/producer (Simon Rex) and the team’s moronic, immature crew: whining man-baby Jeff (Alex Wolff), and best friends Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Elena (Ulman), they set out to cover a strange bunny ear-wearing musician. But because they’re all idiots, they whiff on the country completely and wind up in Argentina at a rundown hostel with something mildly resembling a farm. There’s a horse, anyway, that Edna occasionally speaks to. It’d be a more interesting movie if the horse spoke back.
From there, it’s a whole lot of nothing going on in Magic Farm as these awful people expose their personal quirks to the locals, good-hearted people dragged into the crew’s bullshit. With no story to tell, they decide to concoct out of whole cloth a phony trend of people wearing ribbons on their heads. It’s stupid. Edna’s husband flies back to the city to deal with a secret sexual misconduct case that should sink the show for good. The production is over-budget and ridiculous; the locals hired for it aren’t any good. Basically, the whole thing is doomed and that could be funny in the right hands, but Ulman’s script, which I’m guessing was aiming for a surreal “anything can happen” vibe, feels random in the worst possible way.
At 93-minutes, Magic Farm wears on you like a lead blanket and probably could’ve accomplished a lot more with half the time. It still wouldn’t be any good, but at least it would be less punishing. Ulman does get a few sweet, naturalistic performances by lesser-known members of the cast: Guillermo Jacubowicz as the kind hotel manager, a lonely widower who could be open to love for the first time in years. There’s also model/actress Camila del Campo, a fiery, restless spirit whose only mistake is that she gets involved with Jeff and proves she’s more of a man than he’ll ever be.
These forays into their personal lives (there’s also a medical emergency storyline that goes NOWHERE) won’t keep anybody hooked. Magic Farm is a tragic misfire of poor concepts and terrible characters that we can’t wait to shut the barn door on for good.
Ariel (Ayo Edibiri) can’t catch a break. A young music journalist with aspirations of writing something that matters, she finds that her best pitch ideas are taken by others or ignored. She longs to write a book, but as her friend Kent (Young Mazino) tells her over sushi, well…Ariel is “mid.” She comes from a good home, she isn’t wealthy or poor, she’s young, and basically he’s had none of the life experience or perspective that would give her opinion weight. Nobody cares what she thinks. By the end of Opus, Kent will be proven wrong, but the journey to get there is also “mid.”
Opus is the brainchild of writer/director Mark Anthony Green, a former GQ magazine journalist, and it shows. Ariel is like an avatar for Green as the film satirizes the relationship between entertainment journalists and the celebrities they orbit. John Malkovich plays Alfred Moretti, an Elton John-esque rock superstar who had a massive generation-spanning earworm with his anthemic track “Nina Simone”, then vanished from the spotlight. Thirty years later, Moretti has announced a new album that his publicist (Tony Hale) says is a musical masterpiece.
Ariel and a lucky few get surprise invitations to Moretti’s compound for a private album debut event. She’s joined by her pushy boss, Stan (Murray Bartlett), gossipy TV host Clara (Juliette Lewis), dogged paparazzi photog Bianca (Melissa Chambers), infamous podcast and Moretti archnemesis Bill (Mark Siverten), and influencer Emily (Stephanie Suganami). Things are off right from the start, as Moretti’s team all look and act like cult members, and take away the visitors’ cell phones so there’s no means of communication with the outside world. Furthermore, they all have a 24/7 attendant. Prey breakout Amber Midthunder plays Ariel’s attendant, shadowing her even when she goes on a long jog.
Promos for Opus would have you believe the film leans towards horror but nothing could be further from the truth. The first half plays most effectively as a celebrity satire, with Malkovich going wild as an unhinged Moretti. He’s clearly having an incredible time in such a nutty role, performing crazy New Wavy songs written by Nile Jones and The-Dream. Malkovich is nobody’s idea of a pop superstar so to watch him dancing around (he has this bizarre little hop step), grinding and thrusting his hips to the music is just priceless.
Even with Malkovich having a ball, Opus is never as funny as it should be. Edibiri does her best but I found her character, which is the best-developed outside of Malkovich, to be pretty flat and uninteresting. She’s the only one clever enough to see that Moretti’s followers are more than just fans, they’re dangerous. He’s built an entire cult of personality, his followers known as Levelists, and it’s all just very creepy and very weird.
When the horror elements come in, none of it is particularly scary or thrilling, and the funny satirical bits are left behind. The bloodshed and violence isn’t particularly well shot, and a chase scene involving Edibiri and Midthunder is very weak. But not as weak as the conclusion to Opus, which tries to set up a dynamic similar to Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, but Moretti isn’t that smart or charismatic, and Ariel isn’t interesting enough for us to care that much. If marketed around Malkovich’s performance, A24 could still have a decent-sized hit on their hands, but Opus won’t leave anyone begging for more.
Three generations of queer and creative people descend onto Amsterdam on a family holiday in Sophie Hyde’s latest film. You may remember her from 2023’s hilariously intimate Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. In Jimpa, she directs her own script, co-written with Matthew Cormack, and while the final product is moving, it lacks the cohesiveness and concise nature of her previous work.
At the heart of Jimpa is the interconnected relationships between filmmaker Hannah (Olivia Colman), her non-binary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), and her gay activist father, Jim (John Lithgow). As the former two make their way from Australia to Amsterdam to visit “Jimpa” with Hannah’s husband, Harry (Daniel Henshall), the question arises as to whether or not Frances should move to the LGBTQ-friendly city to live with Jim.
Wanting her child close but also realizing they need to make their own decision, Hannah hopes her father’s perpetual selfishness and unwillingness to embrace new ideas with deter Frances from the idea. Instead, feelings of resentment and abandonment resurface over her childhood. The film she is working on contradicts these feelings as it is centered on her parents choosing to co-parent peacefully instead of breaking apart when Jim came out of the closet.
Even if you didn’t know Jimpa was partially based on Hyde’s life and stars her child, the film feels deeply personal. There’s a gentleness to the directing and a grace given to all the characters. Some you get to know better than others which is to the film’s determent, but then again, Hyde and Cormack’s script is overstuffed. Eamon Farren’s Richard, assistant and boyfriend to the much older Jim, doesn’t get nearly enough time but steals every scene he’s in. Same with Jim’s mentee, other daughter, and his lifelong friends, who serve as a “gay Greek chorus.” To quote Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “In writing, you must kill your darlings” and Jimpa has multiple darlings that should have been killed. However, Olivia Colman and John Lithgow make the film worth the watch. The former plays Hannah as a calm woman trying her best for everyone but herself, while Lithgow gives Jim an exuberant frivolity that is both frustrating and a joy to watch. When their characters are locked in a battle of wills, you watch two geniuses play acting tennis across from one another.
Hyde tries to hit upon many concepts within the 120 runtime from the differing opinions between different generations of the LGBTQIA+ community to polyamory, parenting, and DNRs. She doesn’t try to resolve anything, which feelstoo safe for the content she is covering. Ultimately, Jimpa is a gentle exploration of an LGBTQ family, one that won’t change the world but could bring real comfort to those who decide to watch it.
Jimpa premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and does not have a release date.
A small military base sits between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. There, new recruits are immersed in a 24-hour live role-playing exercise complete with fake blood, fake bombs, and real people acting as Iraqi civilians and insurgents. This real place is ripe for satire, at least, that is what Hailey Gates believed when she wrote and directed Atropia.
The political romantic comedy stars Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Search Party) as Fayruz, a roleplayer hellbent on pursuing her acting dream. She films auditions for “Arab” roles in her downtime, wearing a headscarf and traditional garb. She knows the language and even encourages her fellow performers to dive deeper into their characters. When it is announced that a big Hollywood star is coming to observe the town for a role, she is all too willing to compromise the integrity of the exercise, something that attracts the eye of the head insurgent roleplayer, Abu Dice (Callum Turner).
Part love story, all-comedy, Gates follows their misadventures as they become closer and as war looms larger for all involved, showcasing other parts of the base. Jane Levy runs around as a constipated mock Fox News journalist. A soldier with an iPod taped to his helmet is forced to sing as a form of punishment. Tim Heidecker and Chloe Sevigny play two high-ranking officials who can’t be bothered to leave their tent but have no problem making life-changing decisions from their chairs.
This is Alia Shawkat’s movie and she has never been better. She should be the lead in every film she is in. Fayruz is torn between multiple identities and Shawkat plays all of them with gentle hilarity, never passing judgment on her character. Her chemistry with Turner is off the charts and you find yourself rooting for two of the most fucked up yet endearing people in cinema history. Turner is charming and his delivery is hilarious. As a former soldier anxiously wanting to go back into combat, he still has a grounded and weary presence that only adds to the complexity of his performance.
Shawkat and Turner are the comedic heart of this film. Whereas some of Gates’ writing loses its bite in the film’s final act, she knows she can count on her leading couple to pick up the slack. Gates falls into a few first-time filmmaker traps like not knowing how to end her lead’s character arc and ending on a cliche, but there’s something fresh about her approach. From the music to the lighting, there’s always something exciting to look at. While her first feature isn’t perfect, Gate has secret weapons in Shawkat and Turner that will make Atropia a direct hit.
“Atropia” premiered at Sundance and is competing in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. It doesn’t have a release date yet.
I know there have been some missteps but personally I’m glad the Alien and Predator franchises will never die, they are just too perfect for sci-fi/horror entertainment. Alien specifically is finally having a quality resurgence after the well received Alien: Romulus hit box offices ending a 30 year run of poorly received sequels. It’s not just the box office that you have to worry about now, as Alien: Earthslithers ever closer to it’s summer release on FX.
An Alien show on basic cable? I would normally write it off immediately knowing that it would be toned down for broadcast, but FX as we know, is a different animal. We know from their history they can pull off some pretty gnarly content so really the only concern we have is story. There’s always been an isolation component to a good Alien story, how is that going to translate when the threat is on home soil? We’ve seen it in some regard with the two Alien V Predator flicks but when it’s just the Xenomorph…it adds complications. This all being said, sometimes the best way to make your audience isolated and claustrophic is to put them in the last place you’d expect to find those feelings. The film itself takes place two years before the events of the original film. Whether the crew of the Nostromo were already in flight or not is unknown.
The teaser below gives us our first taste of the tone and feel for the upcoming series, depicting a facehugger trapped in, what looks like, an escape pod headed for terra firma. Everything about this teaser makes me feel like they’re headed in the right direction but it’s the poster that really drew my attention. Whoever had the idea to make the Xeno’s head morph into planet Earth deserves a raise, without question.
Alien: Earth premieres this Summer on Hulu and with Hulu On Disney+.
Love, Brooklyn is a deeply frustrating movie, the kind that leaves you scratching your head at how it goes so wrong. Directed by Rachael Abigail Holderv with a Barry Jenkins-esque sensitivity to the filmmaking, the film stars Andre Holland as one of those writers you find frequently in arthouse dramas, especially at a place like Sundance. He plays Roger, a journalist who has been assigned to write an essay on the changing landscape of Brooklyn, a place he claims to love. Roger never actually feels like someone who thinks all that deeply about the topic, and everything about the assignment rings hollow. Unfortunately, this is a problem for every aspect of the movie as it tries to untangle a love triangle between three Brooklynites we learn next to nothing about.
Roger, this journalist who doesn’t actually write anything but can afford to go out drinking every night, is best friends with Casey (Nicole Beharie), owner of a struggling art gallery due to construction in her rapidly gentrified neighborhood. Roger and Casey share a romantic past, and its easy the chemistry between them. They speak in a language only they can understand; they know one another’s jokes. They feel like they should still be together and we can’t help but wonder why they’re not. He invites her stick around at the bar for a while longer, but when she declines he heads over to the home of Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a single mom and widower that he’s been having casual flings with on a regular basis. Afterwards, she makes it a point to tell him that she is not his girlfriend. It’s clear that she’s not ready for anything serious, but when her young daughter starts asking to spend time with Roger, too, the matter gets complicated.
The film struggles to make sense of the contours of these relationships. Roger and Casey make the most sense. The seem so effortless when together. Things are a bit messy between Roger and Nicole, as she grapples with grief and her daughter’s needs, while he considers whether he wants to be a father figure. The film finds him bouncing around between the two; kickin’ it like homes with Casey but spendign evenings with Nicole. The two women know of one another, and both seem to sense the awkwardness of the situation better than Roger, who is a complete dope. Maybe that’s too harsh, but his indecisiveness is irritating and illogical.
It didn’t have to be that way, though, if Zimmerman’s screenplay were more thorough. Few details are revealed about Roger and Casey’s past together, other than she was unhappy. But that doesn’t make sense given how well they get along and how much they lean on one another for support. Beharie does her best to breathe life into an underwritten role. She brightens things up, giving Casey funny voices and quirky sayings, which Roger reciprocates because they’re both a little bit strange, as they both freely admit. Wise is also saddled with a thin role that demands Nicole be whatever the plot needs her to be in the moment. None of it feels very natural. It’s unbelievable that Holland’s Roger would be so desirable to both of these strong women. But what does he actually do other than ride around on his bike, smoke weed, drink coffee with his married pal (Roy Wood Jr.), and make all of the wrong decisions?
Love, Brooklyn is exec-produced by Steven Soderbergh, who worked with Holland on various projects incuding Showtime’s The Knick. Soderbergh’s influence can be felt in the film’s gradual pacing, sure, but also by the presence of Soderbergh’s Singani liquor, conveniently one of Roger’s favorites. It’s hard to get a grapple on what this movie is supposed to be, because little that it does has any real impact. It doesn’t work as a love story, and if you’re meant to believe the title, it’s also meant to be some kind of love letter to Brooklyn, but that love is confined to coffee shops, yellow cabs, and the occasional park where there may or may not be an ice cream stand.
Quick, what was Ryan Coogler’s last non-Marvel movie? That would be Creed way back in 2015. Fortunately, the working partnership with actor Michael B. Jordan has remained intact, and they are coming together again for Coogler’s first horror movie, Sinners, which has debuted a new trailer and poster today.
Written, directed, and produced by Coogler, Sinners stars Jordan as twin brothers who return home to try and leave their troubled lives behind. But when they arrive, they discover that something evil has taken over. Based on early reports, Coogler has made a vampire movie and that should be pretty cool to see.
Also in the cast are Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Miles Caton, Li Jun Li, Delroy Lindo, and Omar Benson Miller. Lots of Marvel vets in this one.
Sinners opens in theaters on April 18th.
SYNOPSIS: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers (Jordan) return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
The DC Studios series Lanterns is gearing up to start production, but you can’t do that going in with nothing but heroic Green Lanterns having been cast. You need their ultimate opponent, one of the great DC Comics villains, to be cast as well. Deadline reports that Ulrich Thomsen will play former Green Lantern Corps member Sinestro in the upcoming series.
Thomson is best a Dutch actor known for his roles in the Showtime series Banshee, and the films Brothers and The Celebration. He joins a cast led by Aaron Pierre as John Stewart and Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan. Other cast members include Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, and Poorna Jagannathan.
James Hawes (One Life) will direct the first two episodes.
Lanterns follows intergalactic cops Stewart and Jordan as they investigate a murder on Earth in a small town. DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran has said this investigation will lead to the central storyline throughout the DCU, so this is a show that vitally important.
Sinestro was once of the great champions of the Green Lantern Corps, but he began abusing the use of his power ring and was kicked out. He turned to evil, utilizing a yellow power ring that feeds on fear, going so far as to create his own Sinestro Corps.
Production on Lanterns begins in February, with the series expected to arrive around the same time as Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow in 2026.
