Star Wars Eclipse™ is an upcoming video game in development by award-winning studio Quantic Dream in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games.
Star Wars Eclipse™ is the first video game to be set in an uncharted region of the Outer Rim during The High Republic era, known as the golden age of the Jedi. The game will build upon Quantic Dream's expertise in delivering deeply branching narratives and will go beyond their already established acclaim. Player’s choices will be at the heart of the experience, as every decision can have a dramatic impact on the course of the story.
Crafted by a diverse team of writers, game creators, and interactive storytelling experts, all with a deep affinity for the Star Wars™ franchise, Star Wars Eclipse™ will feature new places to explore through untold stories with unique characters, each with their own path, abilities, and roles to play.
Star Wars Eclipse™ is currently in early development in Paris, France, and Montreal, Canada and will be published globally by Quantic Dream. The team is recruiting in both locations for top talents in the world to work on this exciting new project.
Visit StarWarsEclipse.com to stay up to date on the latest news about the game.
After a whistleblower informed PETA US that a pig was shot and killed for Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn’s upcoming Danish Netflix series, the group sent a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings asking for the scene be cut.
“No animal should suffer or die for human entertainment,”
says PETA Vice President of International Programmes Mimi Bekhechi.
“Taking the life of a sentient animal for a series is unacceptable and
may be illegal. Netflix needs to cut any footage that might glorify this
pig’s needless, senseless death.”
PETA
US has been told that the farmer who supplied live pigs admitted that
one was going to be killed specifically for a scene in the show. Copenhagen
Zoo confirmed it received a dead pig from the production, and Danish
police are currently investigating. Danish animal welfare law states,
“Animals shall not be trained or used in shows, circus performances,
film shootings, or the like if the animal thereby suffers significant
discomfort.”
PETA
urges anyone who witnesses cruelty to animals in the entertainment
industry to report it by calling the PETA US whistleblower hotline at
001 323-210-2233 or by visiting PETA.org/Report. Whistleblowers’ anonymity will be taken very seriously.
It was a favourite of The Guardian which wrote: "The Father has something of Michael Haneke’s Amour in its one-apartment setting, and also something of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 stage-play Woman in Mind, in which the heroine retreats from reality. Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive."
"This is what makes The Father so brilliant – the film seamlessly blends genuine fear with overwhelming sadness," adds FilmCompanion. "In places, Anthony’s disorientation, which is also ours, seems straight out of a horror film. In one scene, he hears the voice of his second daughter Lucy and walks out of his bedroom but the apartment transforms into a nursing home. We also see flashes of viciousness in his behaviour, especially with his caregivers. Early in the film, we are told that the third one recently left – among other things, he called her a bitch. There are moments in which a hint of Hannibal Lecter seems to flutter over his expressions."
Why The Father is the best film of 2021
Said The Spectator: "Colman is, of course, terrific, but it’s Hopkins’s film, as he rages King Lear-style one moment, and is a scared, abandoned child wanting his mummy the next. Or is vicious one moment, and extraordinarily vulnerable the next. There is stand-out scene after stand-out scene, including one where he convinces his new carer (Imogen Poots) that he had been a tap dancer — he’d actually been an engineer — which is kind of joyful, but also excruciatingly heart-breaking. I’d like to say a scene like that is something I will never forget but, as this film tells us, you can never say that for sure."
"Without resorting to exploitative, amped-up mystery or obfuscation, Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton — adapting the former's play to resourceful, Oscar-winning effect, with a subtly cinematic eye — have fashioned a sort of gaslight thriller in which the mind is both predator and prey, as it keeps short-cutting and short-circuiting, going directly to jail without passing go," says Film of the Week. "There's no unreliable narrator here, since no one is being misled: Anthony's reality, with all its unchosen confusions, is fully and authentically his. Hopkins, earning every gold-plated inch of his second Oscar, inhabits it with gut-punching empathy and conviction, making us alive to every moment until, in another devastating reversal of perspective, we stand outside him once more. It's not fair to recommend The Father without a certain kind of trigger warning: if dementia has been a part of your life, Zeller's film will cut as close as you think it will. But not cruelly so, for once the sobs subside, there is a strange kind of comfort to be found in its understanding."
Tell me more about The Father
The Father is a 2020 psychological drama film co-written and directed by Florian Zeller, in his directorial debut; he co-wrote it with fellow playwright Christopher Hampton based on Zeller's 2012 play Le Père. A French-British co-production, the film stars Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, and Olivia Williams, and follows an aging man who must deal with his progressing dementia. It is the second adaptation of the play after the 2015 film Floride.
The Father had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 27 January 2020, and was released in the United States on 26 February 2021, in France on 26 May 2021 by UGC Distribution and in the United Kingdom on 11 June 2021 by Lionsgate UK. It grossed $28 million on a $6 million budget and was acclaimed by critics, who lauded the performances of Hopkins and Colman, as well as the production values and its portrayal of dementia.
At the 93rd Academy Awards, Hopkins won Best Actor and Zeller and Hampton won Best Adapted Screenplay; the film received six nominations in total, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress (Colman).[5] At the 78th Golden Globe Awards, the film received four nominations, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and it received six nominations at the 74th British Academy Film Awards, winning Best Actor (Hopkins) and Best Adapted Screenplay. In addition, Hopkins and Colman were nominated for Outstanding Leading Actor and Outstanding Supporting Actress respectively at the 27th Screen Actors Guild Awards. [Source: Wikipedia] Writing for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said The Father is "stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting" and described it as a "majestic depiction of things falling away". The Guardian's Anne Billson ranked Hopkins's performance in the film as the best of his career. Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman said "The Father does something that few movies about mental deterioration in old age have brought off in quite this way, or this fully. It places us in the mind of someone losing his mind—and it does so by revealing that mind to be a place of seemingly rational and coherent experience." For The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote of Hopkins's performance: "It's astounding, heartbreaking work, watching him try to rationally explain to himself and those around him what he's experiencing. In some of the film's most quietly upsetting moments, his world has shifted yet again but he remains silent, knowing that any attempt to question what he's woken up to will only fall on deaf ears. Hopkins runs the full gamut of emotions from fury to outrage to longing for his mother like a little child and never once does it feel like a constructed character bit, despite our association with him as an actor with a storied career." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago, The Father takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted. Fronted by a stupendous performance from Anthony Hopkins as a proud [man] in denial of his condition, this penetrating work marks an outstanding directorial debut by the play's French author Florian Zeller."
Writing for Indiewire, David Ehrlich said: "Zeller adapts his award-winning play of the same name with steely vision and remarkable confidence, as the writer-director makes use of the camera like he's been standing behind one for his entire life. ... In Zeller's hands, what appears to be a conventional-seeming portrait of an unmoored old man as he rages against his daughter and caretaker slowly reveals itself to be the brilliant study of a mind at sea, and of the indescribable pain of watching someone drown."
"What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise (played by Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams) keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people." [Source: Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian]
"Uniquely, this is told mostly from Anthony’s point of view as we’re taken into his bewildering, distressing world. We experience his confusion as if it were our own. Cut to the next scene and the kitchen in the flat is different, or chairs from the doctor’s office are stacked in the hall. What’s going on here?, he is asking himself, and we are asking the same. Is this even his flat, as he seems to believe, or has he moved in with Anne and her partner, Paul (Rufus Sewell)? He is starting to fail to recognise people. Why is Anne no longer Anne and now being played by Olivia Williams and why is Paul now being played by Mark Gatiss? He must negotiate one illogical situation after another as if trapped in a puzzle that can never be solved. We lose our grip on reality with him and comprehend his suffering — most painfully, a once-controlling man is no longer in control — as well as Anne’s. She is deeply attached to her father, even if her younger sister was his favourite, and even if he was probably never a particularly nice man. Anne sometimes fantasises about putting a pillow over Anthony’s head but when, at one stage, she helps him put his sweater on, that scene is so suffused with compassion and love it will undo you." [Source: The Spectator]
"Florian Zeller is something of a sensation in the theatre world, where starry productions of his plays The Mother, The Truth, and The Height of the Storm have been scooping up awards for more than a decade. With this film version of The Father – a play previously adapted for the big screen in France as Floride (2015) with Jean Rochefort – Zeller has added the Oscar for best adapted screenplay to his tally. Working with Dangerous Liasons screenwriter Christopher Hampton and the brilliant production designer Peter Francis, he has crafted a very moving dementia drama, albeit one that can’t wholly escape its theatrical origins. Much of the project’s power is derived from Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning central performance. Where previous successful attempts to bring Alzheimer’s to the screen have, like Away from Her, centred on the carer’s experience, The Father distorts and disorients in keeping with its protagonist’s increasingly confused view of the world." [Source: Financial Times]
"The play upon which this film is based was described by The Times as “one of the great theatrical experiences of the decade”. This extraordinary adaptation, by turns beguiling, disturbing and profoundly upsetting, is one of the great cinematic experiences of the decade. And by “cinematic” I mean that the director Florian Zeller, adapting his work, has deployed almost every formal weapon in the film-maker’s arsenal — from horror lighting to elliptical edits to asynchronous sound to clever casting twists — to create a visceral viewing experience that is as thrilling as anything in Tenet, John Wick or a million Marvel movies. Only it’s also crushingly sad." [Source: The Times]
For her leading roles in erotic and adult-themed feature films such as Basic Instinct, Sliver, and The Specialist, Stone cemented what was described as a "tough-talking, no-underwear, voyeuristic, cool-as-ice, sex symbol" status during the 1990s. She has appeared in the covers and photo session of over 300 celebrity and fashion magazines throughout her four-decade acting career; in 1986, she graced the June–July cover of French Vogue, and to coincide with the release of Total Recall, she posed nude for the July 1990 issue of Playboy, showing off the muscles she developed in preparation for the film. Following Basic Instinct, photographer George Hurrell took a series of photographs of Stone, Sherilyn Fenn, Julian Sands, Raquel Welch, Eric Roberts, and Sean Penn. Stone, who was Hurrell's reportedly last sitting before his death in 1992, is also a collector of the photographer's original prints and wrote the foreword to the book Hurrell's Hollywood.
In 1992, she was listed by People as one of the "50 most beautiful people in the world". In 1993, she appeared in Pirelli’s commercial, Driving Instinct. In 1995, Empire chose her as one of the "100 sexiest stars in film history", and in October 1997, she was ranked among the "top 100 film stars of all time" by the magazine.[93] In 1999, she was rated among the "25 sexiest stars of the century" by Playboy. She has been the subject of four television documentary specials, and several biographies have been written about her.
On her sex symbol image, Stone told Oprah Winfrey on Oprah Prime in 2014: "It's a pleasure for me now. I mean, I'm gonna be 56 years old. If people want to think I'm a sex symbol, it's, like, yeah. Think it up. You know. I mean, like, good for me". In 2015, Stone posed naked for the September issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine, in which she stated: "At a certain point you start asking yourself, 'What really is sexy?' It's not just the elevation of your boobs. It's being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that's with you".In 2016, Stone starred with Paul Sculfor in Airfield's (de) Fashion Is a Lovestory short film.
It's that time of year again. The Christmas tree is up, the presents have been wrapped, and Santa will soon be on the way. But while we wait, what has Sky Cinema and Now TV got in store for us?
The film that's definitely worth seeing is the brand new Sky Original, A Boy Called Christmas.
It's a reimagining of the story of Father Christmas, Nikolas is a boy who sets off into the snowy white north in search of his father. “I wrote this story to cheer myself up,” Haig wrote in a recent Instagram post of the film’s star-studded poster. “A story of hope in the dark. Never expected this to happen.”
We follow an ordinary young boy called Nikolas who sets out on an extraordinary adventure into the snowy north in search of his father who is on a quest to discover the fabled village of the elves, Elfham. Taking with him a headstrong reindeer called Blitzen and a loyal pet mouse, Nikolas soon meets his destiny in this magical, comic and endearing story that proves nothing is impossible.
Downton Abbey’s Maggie Smith stars alongside Kristen Wiig, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, Michiel Huisman , as well as newcomer Henry Lawfull, who will play protagonist Nikolas. The story is framed as a bedtime story, relayed by Smith’s reliably crabby Aunt Ruth to three wide-eyed children on Christmas Eve. It’s familiar stuff — a wicked aunt, scary encounters with bears and trolls, a tyrannical despot, flying-through-the-air antics, lots of life lessons — but the film isn’t as marred by its predictability as you might expect. That’s thanks largely to its genuine sweetness.
Next up is The Last Train to Christmas, another Sky Original movie that'll debut on Sky Cinema and Now TV in December 2021.
On top of these two must-see new entries in the Christmas movie niche, Mark Gatiss, co-creator of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch, brings us a new version of The Amazing Mr Blunden.
Then there's the familiar favourites like National Lampoon's Vacation, Scrooged, and Miracle on 34th Street.
A Christmas Number One, a Sky Original is produced by Sky, Genesius Pictures, Lupus Films and Space Age Films. The film will release in on Sky Cinema in December 2021. Starring Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) and Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones), A Christmas Number One is produced by Debbie Gray (Genesius), Camilla Deakin and Ruth Fielding (Lupus Films) and Robert Chandler (Space Age Films).
Fresh from a breakup with the world’s hottest popstar, music manager Meg Rai (Frieda Pinto) leaves New York for London to manage a boyband, 5 Together, who are desperate for a Christmas hit after their latest self-written album flopped. Meanwhile, Blake Cutter (Iwan Rheon), persuaded by his Christmas obsessive niece, Nina Cutter (Helena Zengel), puts his thrash metal band, Scurve, to one side to write Nina the ultimate Christmas song. When Meg discovers the hit in the making, will this be the Christmas number one the boy band desperately needs or will Blake, the song, and Nina show Meg what truly matters?
Following the final departure of Sean Connery in 1971, late English actor Roger Moore took over the role from 1973 to 1985. To date he is the second longest-serving James Bond actor, after Daniel Craig, spanning twelve years in the role. He is also the oldest actor to play Bond; having begun the role at 45 and retiring from it at the age of 58. The character was doubled by stuntmen Vic Armstrong, Loren Willard, Rick Sylvester, Willy Bogner, Jake Lombard, Martin Grace, Richard Graydon, Rémy Julienne, and Paul Weston.[2][3] He appeared in Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983) and A View to a Kill (1985).
Roger Moore's first out as James Bond came in the 1973 film Live and Let Die
Live and Let Die (1973)
After a successful mission in Rome, Italy alongside Italian agent Miss Caruso, James Bond is sent to investigate the murder of three British MI6 agents, Dawes, Hamilton and Baines (who in fact shared the same bootmaker with Bond), all of whom have been killed within 24 hours. He discovers the victims were all separately investigating the operations of Dr. Kananga, the dictator of a small Caribbean island, San Monique. He also establishes that Kananga also acts as "Mr. Big", a ruthless and cunning gangster in the United States.
Upon visiting San Monique, Bond determines that Kananga is producing two tons of heroin and is protecting the poppy fields by exploiting the locals' fear of voodoo and the occult. Through his alter ego, Mr. Big, Kananga plans to distribute the heroin free of charge at his Fillet of Soul restaurants, which will increase the number of addicts. Bond teams up with Kananga's womanservant, Solitaire to foil his plans, but is captured by Kananga, but they escape, killing Kananga and destroying the drug crops.
