It’s busy and Twister-y at the box office but a few indies are hoping to catch a breeze with very well reviewed Oddity looking to expand the market for high-end horror and Widow Clicquot to attract fans of good period films and bubbly.
Oddity from IFC Films, is a supernatural home invasion horror written-directed by Damian McCarthy (Caveat). It opens on 790 screens, the widest new indie release this week. Carolyn Bracken stars as Dani, who is restoring an old castle in rural Cork County, Ireland with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), a doctor at a facility for the criminally insane. When Dani is brutally murdered, her blind occultist twin sister Darcy (also Bracken) goes after those responsible using inherited haunted items as her tools of revenge. Premiered in SXSW’s Midnighter section, taking the Audience Award. At 98% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
Vertical’s Indie drama Widow Cliquot is the true story of the Veuve Clicquot champagne family and business that began in the late 18th century. After her husband’s untimely death, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, played by Haley Bennett, is just 26 but flouts convention by assuming the reins of the fledgling wine business the couple had nurtured together. Thomas Napper’s film is based on Tilar J. Mazzeo’s bestseller The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It. ‘Veuve’ is French for ‘widow’ and this one steered her company through dizzying political and financial reversals, defying her critics to bring the world its leading brand of champagne. Premiered at TIFF, Deadline’s review called it a “fast-paced and sexy biopic.”
Debuts on 102 screens in 50 markets. Theaters include the Angelika Film Center and Cinema 123 in NYC, and Laemmle Royal, Town Center 5, Regal Sherman Oaks and AMC Burbank Town Center in LA. Select Champagne Cinema Nights sneak previews around the country offered a complimentary glass of bubbly with a ticket.
Another smaller but engaging fright fest out this weekend is Crumb Catcher, the debut feature from Chris Skotchdopole, with indie horror icon Larry Fessenden a producer. Opens in 55 theaters with a big presence at Alamo Draft House and AMC. Distributor Doppelgänger Releasing is the alternative, genre-inspired label relaunched by Music Box last year. Newlyweds Shane and Leah have their marriage tested when two weirdos with entrepreneurial zeal and a half-baked blackmail plot crash their honeymoon — they’re looking for investors for their latest invention and won’t take no for an answer. Stars Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, Lorraine Farris, and John Speredako.
Originally launched in 2013, Doppelgänger’s films have included Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Slamdance award-winner 100 Bloody Acres, Lukas Feigelfeld’s German horror film Hagazussa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Japanese horror Penance, Fabrice Du Welz’s psychosexual thriller Alleluia, SXSW and Fantasia Festival favorite Heavy Trip, and the Blu-ray debut of Wes Craven’s 1978 cult classic Summer of Fear. The label most recently co-released SXSW award-winner Raging Grace with Brainstorm Media. The label has several more film coming this year.
Great Absence, a TIFF world premiere from Gaga opens at the Japan Society and Angelika Film Center in NYC, adding the Laemmle Monica Film Center and Laemmle Glendale in LA next week. Winner of Best Leading Performance at the 2023 San Sebastián International Film Festival and Best International Film at the 2024 San Francisco International Film Festival, Great Absence will have its New York Premiere at Japan Cuts 2024, where actor Tatsuya Fuji will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Distanced from his father for twenty years, Tokyo-based actor Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) is brought back home by a jarring police call – his father’s second wife, Naomi (Hideko Hara), is missing and Yohji (Fuji) himself has disconnected from reality. Takashi starts a search for truth in the present – that has long fingers into the truth of his past.
It’s the second film by emerging Japanese filmmaker and TIFF alumnus Kei Chika-ura, partly based on his personal experience and shot on 35mm.
Mubi opens Crossing by writer-director Levan Akin (And Then We Danced) in New York at Angelika Film Center and Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal. The film, which world premiered at the Berlinale and later played Tribeca, stars Mzia Arabuli as Lia, a retired teacher living Black Sea coastal city of Batumi in Georgia. She heads to Istanbul to find her niece, who had been kicked out of her family home after coming out as trans, where she meets Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights. Expands next week to major markets including Chicago (Gene Siskel), Seattle (SIFF Cinema), and Atlanta (The Tara), and throughout August.
A trio of documentaries incudes award-winning Join or Die from Abramorama, which opens at Firehouse DCTV in New York for a weeklong run with filmmaker Q&As, moving to Long Beach, Boulder, Columbus, Ohio and Charlotte, NC. Directed by sister-brother team Rebecca Davis (Netflix’s Explained) and Pete Davis (author of Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing), the doc explores America’s civic unraveling through the lens of legendary social scientist Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Aloneresearch into American community decline may hold the answers to our democracy’s present crisis.
Billed as “A film about why you should join a club … and why the fate of American Depends on it,” it features conversations with Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Jane McAlevey, Glenn Loury, Raj Chetty and Priya Parker, among others. Join Or Die debuted at Sundance and garnered kudos on the festival circuit.
Venice-premiering documentary Hollywoodgate by Ibrahim Hash’at Pashto, filmed at great personal risk over the course of one year, exposes the transformation of a fundamentalist Taliban militia into a military regime after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The Taliban immediately moved to occupy the Hollywood Gate complex, claimed to be a former CIA base in Kabul and find what the most technologically advanced military in history left behind — aircrafts, weapons, and valuable military equipment. AK-47s that were once used by the US and NATO are now in the hands of the Taliban; helicopters and fighter jets that were thought to be destroyed now lethally bomb the opposition, creating untold collateral damage in the process.
The Hollywoodgate team is working with Mia Bruno of Fourth Act Film to distribute the film in theaters and digital platforms. Opening at IFC Center today and expanding to LA at the Laemmle Glendale and Monica Film Center next week, then to the Roxie in San Francisco.
Modernism Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story, looks at the life and work of the influential mid-century architect and designer best remembered as the man behind IBM’s landmark design program in the 1950s and 1960s. The doc from First Run Features is directed by Jason Cohn (Eames: The Architect and the Painter), narrated by Sebastian Roché. Opens in New York at IFC Center in weekend, and in LA August 9 at Laemmle’s Royal.
Educated by Walter Gropius at Harvard, Noyes did more than anyone to align the Modernist design ethos to the needs of ascendant corporate America. His impact on companies like IBM paved the way for Apple and many of the other design-conscious brands we know today. Cohn uses the story of a mid-century icon to raise contemporary questions about the role of a designer in today’s world.
Nothing that Outsider Pictures is bringing a Latin Spanish Showcase of five award-winning films to Cinema Village in NYC this weekend and the Laemmle Royal in LA next.
Sica by Carla Subirana: Waiting for answers that don’t seem to come, Sica stares at the waves. Her father, a fisherman, drowned in the sea. In an isolated corner of the world, Sica doesn’t lose hope. Even if she needs to go against the current.
You Have to Come And Se This by Jonás Trueba: One winter night in Madrid, two couples of friends in their thirties are having dinner. Susana and Dani rejoice in their new home, on the outskirts of town and close to the countryside, then announce the imminent arrival of a child.
Lullaby by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa: Amaia, who has just become a mother, decides to return for guidance after her partner is temporarily away, to her parents’ house along the Basque coast.
The Punishment by Matías Bize: A seven-year-old child disappears from his parents’ sight in a mysterious but haunting forest after a punishment.
Creatura by Elena Martín: A sexual awakening causes a woman to reconsider her past relationships.