After directing together for over three decades, Joel and Ethan Coen have parted ways for their recent projects. The former helmed the black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth, while the latter premiered his documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind at Cannes last year and is awaiting a release, then followed it up with Drive-Away Dolls, a lesbian road trip comedy that will arrive this September.

Written by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, shot by Ari Wegner, scored by Carter Burwell, and starring Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, and Matt Damon, the first trailer has now arrived online after being attached to Asteroid City. In an interview with Collider, Coen and Cooke also reveal the film is only 83 minutes, has “a lot of sex stuff,” and is part of a trilogy of queer B movies they will make.

Here’s the synopsis: “This comedy caper follows Jamie, an uninhibited free spirit bemoaning yet another breakup with a girlfriend, and her demure friend Marian who desperately needs to loosen up. In search of a fresh start, the two embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, but things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way.”

See the trailer below.

Drive-Away Dolls opens on September 22, 2023.

The post First Trailer for Ethan Coen’s Lesbian Road Trip Comedy Drive-Away Dolls first appeared on The Film Stage.

It’d take approximately zero effort to supersede Baz Luhrmann’s dreadful Elvis but it’s nice that Sofia Coppola, of all people, chose to train her lens on the King. But from an aslant angle, obviously: she’s adapted Priscilla Presley’s tell-all memoir Elvis and Me, which showed the man at some of his most-complicated and least-palatable––drugs, infidelity, insecurity, which is to say a human contra the cartoon Luhrmann found more compelling.

A brief-even-by-teaser-standards teaser, cut to Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me,” has arrived before Priscilla‘s October release, giving first look at Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown, Bad Times at the El Royale) and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, The Sweet East) as (of course) Priscilla and Elvis, respectively. Avid Coppola fans might begin seeing where here interests lie, and the return of key creative collaborators––Philippe Le Sourd behind the camera; Sarah Flack on editing; costume designer Stacey Battat; production designer Tamara Deverell––point towards some general design.

Find preview and poster below:

When teenage Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley at a party, the man who is already a meteoric rock-and-roll superstar becomes someone entirely unexpected in private moments: a thrilling crush, an ally in loneliness, a vulnerable best friend. Through Priscilla’s eyes, Sofia Coppola tells the unseen side of a great American myth in Elvis and Priscilla’s long courtship and turbulent marriage, from a German army base to his dream-world estate at Graceland, in this deeply felt and ravishingly detailed portrait of love, fantasy, and fame.

The post Sofia Coppola Finds Graceland’s Dark Side in First Priscilla Teaser first appeared on The Film Stage.

Premiering earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Laura McGann’s documentary The Deepest Breath explores the life and passions of champion free-diver Alessia Zecchini. Accompanied by her safety diver, Stephen Keenan, they’ve dedicated their life to the extreme sport, which requires physical strength, mental determination, and an unwavering trust in the people who teach and support you along the way. Ahead of a July 19 release from Netflix, the first trailer has now arrived.

Jake Kring-Schreifels said in his review, “From the very beginning of The Deepest Breath, you know exactly what kind of documentary you’re in for. In the back of a car, director Laura McGann aims her camera at free-diver Alessia Zecchini and asks her a loaded question: “How do you think about death?” As you’ll later find out, Zecchini is in the midst of a global competition to swim deeper in one breath than anyone has ever done before. But the question is valid––especially when McGann cuts to the serene, crystal-blue footage of Zecchini paddling into the depths of the ocean. The camera follows her descent and subsequent sprint to the surface, where her brain loses function right before breaching; her eyes roll back while safety instructors begin performing CPR. “I’m not afraid of death,” she answers. When she regains consciousness, ready to dive again, you believe her.”

See the trailer below.

The Deepest Breath arrives on Netflix on July 19.

The post The Deepest Breath Trailer Plumbs the Depths of the Ocean first appeared on The Film Stage.

Following up last year’s cannibal romance Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino is back this fall with another MGM project. Starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, Challengers marks the Italian director’s foray into the sports film, a love triangle story set in the tennis world. The film follows a former tennis player who is now coach to her husband and she places him in a Challenger event to curb a recent losing streak, where he faces off against her former lover, who is also his former best friend.

Ahead of a September release, and likely Venice Film Festival debut, the first trailer has now arrived. “I think those three characters in that movie are beautifully complex and really fucked-up people that I love very much. And a sports film, why not? It’s hyperkinetic, and I do films, so it’s great,” the director told Indiewire last year.

Here’s the official synopsis: “From visionary filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married to a champion on a losing streak (Mike Faist – West Side Story), Tashi’s strategy for her husband’s redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against the washed-up Patrick (Josh O’Connor – The Crown) – his former best friend and Tashi’s former boyfriend. As their pasts and presents collide, and tensions run high, Tashi must ask herself, what will it cost to win.”

See the trailer below.

Challengers opens on September 15, 2023.

The post Challengers Trailer: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor & Mike Faist Hit the Court for Luca Guadagnino first appeared on The Film Stage.

While this summer will bring Barbies, nuclear explosions, and the return of both Ethan Hunt and our favorite professor of archaeology, our most-anticipated cinematic experience is certainly the latest work from German auteur Christian Petzold. Forgoing his standard fall film-festival run, following a Berlinale premiere (this time where he picked up the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize), Afire will arrive in theaters sooner than expected, specifically this July from Sideshow and Janus Films. Ahead of its release, the first U.S. trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “While vacationing by the Baltic Sea, writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) are surprised by the presence of Nadja (Paula Beer), a mysterious young woman staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home. Nadja distracts Leon from finishing his latest novel and with brutal honesty, forces him to confront his caustic temperament and self-absorption. As Nadja and Leon grow closer, an encroaching forest fire threatens the group and tensions escalate when a handsome lifeguard and Leon’s tight-lipped book editor also arrive.”

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Writing recently about the introduction of video umpires in baseball, of all things, Zach Helfand was skeptical: ‘accuracy is not the same as enjoyment,’ he wrote, ‘baseball is meant to kill time, not maximize it.’ The best films of German director Christian Petzold do both, though you sense his heart might belong to the latter. Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. It stars Thomas Schubert as a struggling writer who travels with a friend to a secluded house near the Baltic Sea. Their car breaks down. They encounter a beautiful woman. Somewhere in the distance, a forest fire rages. Soon, inevitably, another burns inside.”

See the trailer below.

Afire opens on July 14.

The post U.S. Trailer for Christian Petzold’s Afire Heats Up the Summer Movie Season first appeared on The Film Stage.

One of the most acclaimed titles from last year’s Sundance Fim Festival, where it picked up the top directing awards in its World Cinema Dramatic section, Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike premiered just weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Set in 2014, Ukraine’s Oscar entry for International Feature follows a pair of expectant parents living in eastern Ukraine near the start of the Donbas war. After an international air-crash catastrophe elevates the tension enveloping them, pregnant Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) refuses to be evacuated and leave her home, even as their village is captured by armed forces. Ahead of an August 4 theatrical release from Samuel Goldwyn Films, we’re pleased to exclusively premiere the U.S. trailer and poster.

Here’s the synopsis: “July 2014. Expectant parents Irka and Tolik live in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine near the Russian border, disputed territory in the early days of the Donbas war. Their nervous anticipation of their first child’s birth is violently disrupted as the vicinal crash of flight MH17 elevates the forbidding tension enveloping their village. The looming wreckage of the downed airliner and an incoming parade of mourners emphasize the surreal trauma of the moment. As Tolik’s separatist friends expect him to join their efforts, Irka’s brother is enraged by suspicions that the couple has betrayed Ukraine. Irka refuses to be evacuated even as the village gets captured by armed forces, and she tries to make peace between her husband and brother by asking them to repair their bombed house.”

As David Katz said in his Sundance review, “Klondike is a funny title for this harrowing, at times absurdist Ukrainian war drama, set as conflict with Russia began to spike in 2014. Referring as it does to the Klondike Gold Rush (the setting for Chaplin’s famous silent comedy), we could expect the resonance of two historical events to overlap, or at least sense a link between the actual subject and the analogy. But any gold in the grey expanse of the febrile Donbas region, where Klondike‘s set, is nary to be found: the landscape seems only dotted with cows and convoys of surface-to-air missiles. Perhaps it’s just a red herring designed to mock the idea of attributing meaning, which is what the shellshocked or aggressive characters in this film are also scrabbling to do, to no avail. “

See our exclusive trailer and poster premiere below.

Klondike opens in theaters on August 4.

The post Exclusive Trailer for Sundance Winner Klondike Takes a Chilling Look at Life During Wartime first appeared on The Film Stage.

Poised for quite a major fall with Martin Scorsese’s stellar Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone also leads one of our most recommended films of the summer. Though it premiered at last year’s SXSW festival to strong acclaim, Music Box Films smartly waited until this summer to release The Unknown Country ahead of Scorsese’s epic a few months later. Ahead of a July 28 release, the first trailer and poster have now arrived for Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature.

Here’s the synopsis: “Reeling from a devastating loss, Tana (Lily Gladstone) is pulled back into the world by an unexpected invitation to her cousin’s wedding. She packs up her late grandmother’s Cadillac and hits the open road, driving from her home in Minnesota to South Dakota. After reconnecting with her Oglala Lakota family, Tana sets off to retrace a surreal journey that her grandmother took decades ago, searching for the spot captured in an old family photograph. As she travels, Tana finds connection in the stories of everyday people who’ve settled down far off the main roads including Isaac (Raymond Lee), who provides a pivotal clue to understanding the lost location that could cultivate closure.”

John Fink said in his review, “Beginning with a departure in the dead of night in the middle of winter, and ending perhaps where its lead Tana (Lily Gladstone) was destined to go, Morrisa Maltz’s road trip film The Unknown Country was one of the most exciting offerings at SXSW. In a haunting exploration of biography and geography, Tana traverses a landscape from South Dakota to Texas, along the way stopping to examine lives well-lived as the film enters a quasi-documentary mode. The world proves quite a free place for Tana and we are given delightful, sometimes inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking insights into the people we pass by. They tell us their life stories as Tana flows between hotels, diners, gas stations, beer gardens, and convenience stores.”

Also starring Richard Ray Whitman, Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, Devin Shangreaux, Jazmine Bearkiller Shangreaux, Pam Richter, Scott Stample, Dale Leander Toller, Florence R. Perrin, and Teresa Boyd, see the trailer and poster below.

The Unknown Country opens on July 28.

The post Lily Gladstone Takes a Journey Through The Unknown Country in First Trailer for SXSW Hit first appeared on The Film Stage.

While we’ll have to wait a bit longer to get the U.S. releases for Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, for which Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes, both films will be arriving in France this summer. Ahead of the former’s release in August and the latter’s release in July, the first full trailers for both have arrived, albeit without English subtitles.

In his review of Anatomy of a Fall, David Katz said, “The ensuing days after a romantic breakup, even if it isn’t a cataclysmic one, are an uncanny time. Perhaps once the spell of verbal conflict and sparring’s ceased, suddenly your sole companion for the most intimate thoughts is yourself once again, but it’s an opportune moment for contemplation: how did it really go wrong? Or, can I be honest with myself and acknowledge my own partial responsibility for its demise? For Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel (Samuel Theis), the key onscreen and offscreen players in Anatomy of a Fall, are enduring this quagmire, although their inevitable breakup was enforced––the latter has just tragically died.”

In his review of About Dry Grasses, Leonardo Goi said, “The pastures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s luminous new film are only dry at the very end. Save for that brief summery coda, the landscape in About Dry Grasses remains a snowcapped immensity where prairies are ringed by belittling peaks, people stand out as calligraphic silhouettes, and snow falls so heavy as to blot out everything. It’s as if it fell “to make oblivion possible,” observes art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and in a film populated with wanderers trying to start anew, those words echo like a prayer. Geographically and thematically close to the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre, the film finds him working once again in a remote corner of Eastern Anatolia and revisiting leitmotifs in his preferred mode: long, talky symposiums that pit characters against each other in games of verbal fencing. But none of it feels like a retreading. If anything, About Dry Grasses is both a distillation of Ceylan’s recurrent tropes and a purification of his style, a film made of conversations that remain explosive even at their most forbidding, shivering with a sense of fluid emotions constantly at play.”

See both trailers and posters below.

Anatomy of a Fall will be released by NEON and About Dry Grasses will be released by Janus Films and Sideshow.

The post Cannes Winners Anatomy of a Fall and About Dry Grasses Get French Trailers first appeared on The Film Stage.

The summer just got quite a bit hotter. Directed by Ira Sachs, Passages brings together Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Ben Whishaw for a tale of fierce passion. Following the film’s rapturous response at Sundance and Berlinale, MUBI will release the drama in theaters this August and now the full trailer has arrived.

Per our review, “Taking the Scorsese wisdom of ‘more than 90% of directing a picture is the right casting’ to heart, Ira Sachs’ radiantly sexual three-hander Passages couldn’t have assembled a finer trio of actors to explore modern love in all its splendor and messiness. Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a German filmmaker finishing up his latest shoot, is married to Martin (Ben Whishaw), but when Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) comes into Tomas’ life, his world is torn asunder with a fiery passion. In hismost mature and focused work to date, Sachs stays mostly centered on Tomas as his shifting heart gets pulled in different directions, Rogowski’s fierce magnetism transfixing the viewer even as his character’s behavior grows all the more erratic.”

See the teaser below:

After completing his latest project, filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) impulsively begins a heated love affair with a young schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). For Tomas, the novelty of being with a woman is an exciting experience that he is eager to explore despite his marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw). But when Martin begins his own affair, the mercurial Tomas refocuses his attentions on his husband. Set in contemporary Paris, PASSAGES charts an escalating battle of desire between three people, where want is a constant and happiness is just out of reach. Exquisitely shot and featuring honest, emotionally nuanced performances, Sachs has created a breathtakingly intimate and insightful drama exploring the complexities, contradictions, and cruelties of love and longing.

The post Full Trailer for Ira Sachs’ Passages Puts Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Ben Whishaw in the Heat of Things first appeared on The Film Stage.

A pair of essential documentaries from Sundance Film Festival this year examined the lives of trans sex workers through their own perspectives, and now both will be arriving this summer. Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s The Stroll, coming to HBO and Max next week, explores 1990s sex work in NYC’s now-gentrified Meatpacking District, while D. Smith’s Kokomo City, opening in theaters later next month, gives the spotlight to four trans sex workers from Atlanta and NYC. Ahead of both releases, the first trailers have now arrived.

John Fink said in his review of The Stroll, “A frank celebration of a pre-Giuliani New York, Kristen Lovell and Zachary Drucker’s The Stroll explores a unique period from the inside. Lovell––an actress, activist, and the producer of the seminal trans film The Garden Left Behind––knows the streets well, and after being the subject of a 2007 documentary about prostitution her eyes were opened to the possibility of one day making a film. In fifteen years, she’s gone from being homeless and sleeping at a Times Square megaplex to debuting her HBO-backed feature in Park City at the nation’s premier indie film festival.”

I said in our summer preview about Kokomo City, “Brimming with style and intimacy, the simple conceit of D. Smith’s directorial debut allows space for its subjects––four transgender sex workers––to tell their stories with an entertaining and moving amount of humanity. Ranging from the harrowing dangers of their profession––only amplified by the recent devastating news of the murder of one of the film’s subjects, Rasheeda Williams aka Koko Da Doll––to the power held in satisfying their clients’ desires to delivering a humorous frankness in recalling certain stories, Kokomo City is a captivating window into lives often silenced.“

See both trailers below.

The Stroll arrives on HBO and Max on June 21 and Kokomo City opens in theaters on July 28.

The post Trans Sex Workers Tell Their Stories in First Trailers for The Stroll & Kokomo City first appeared on The Film Stage.

It used to be two options: live in a major city that busts out the one awful print or download the VHS rip from a dark-web torrent site. No wonder it was only hosannas upon learning the complete corpus of Jean Eustache would get its decades-overdue restoration––on basis of The Mother and the Whore alone it marks a moment in film history.

Janus Films (by extension Criterion) acquired the catalog from Les Films du Losange and begin their series, “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” this month at Lincoln Center before a larger rollout in weeks, months to come, and with it a trailer for Mother‘s 4K restoration is here. Just the first shot of Jean-Pierre Léaud––who, I feel compelled to note, is enduring hard times and seeking help via friends––completely rewires sense of a movie I’ve loved for a decade. But it’s all in tip-top shape: deep blacks, balanced whites, perceptible grain… not to get so dorky. (In a post about Eustache no less!) It’s good having The Mother and the Whore back, or––for most––finally, at last.

Find preview and poster below:

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.

The post Discover Jean Eustache’s Masterpiece In Trailer for The Mother and the Whore‘s 4K Restoration first appeared on The Film Stage.

Five years after The Favourite, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is back with Poor Things, which brings together Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley, and Kathryn Hunter. Scripted by Tony McNamara based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, Searchlight Pictures have now unveiled a new trailer ahead of a September 8 release. Looking refreshingly a good deal less palatable to general audiences than his previous film, we look forward to the strange wonders that await.

Rated R for “strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language,” here’s the synopsis: “From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.”

Watch below, along with a new poster.

Poor Things opens on September 8.

The post Second Trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things Conjures a Strange World first appeared on The Film Stage.