BFI London Film Festival Announces LFF Expanded Lineup; Guy Maddin To Debut New Work

Jon Hamm is stepping into a role first made famous by Chevy Chase.

Sky has unveiled seven original comedy shorts at the Edinburgh Television Festival written by and starring the likes of Rosie Jones, Desiree Burch and Jordan Stephens, while ordering Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy Moir (working title) and greenlighting a fifth season of Brassic.

Rihanna and A$AP Rocky enjoyed a late night on the town this week!

Thania Garcia After surviving seven gun shots in an attempted robbery back in June, Lil Tjay is releasing a new single and video on Friday called “Beat the Odds” to tell his side of the story. On Thursday morning, the rapper posted the cover art for the upcoming single on Instagram, which shows him rapping on a mic while sitting up in a hospital bed.

EXCLUSIVE: The long-awaited adaptation of the renowned video game franchise, BioShock, looks to be gaining momentum in a big way as sources tell Deadline that Netflix has tapped Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence to helm the pic with Michael Green adapting the script. The directing and writing assignment had been some of the more sough after jobs in the industry after Netflix announced in February that they were partnering with video game holding company Take-Two Interactive and its game publisher subsidiary, 2K, to produce a BioShock film. Since then, the studio and its partners have been aiming high on who would help guide this project given the scope of the property looking at A-list directors and writers for the job.

EXCLUSIVE: Dita Von Teese has signed with A3 Artists Agency for representation.

This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield has shared a snap of himself wearing a hospital gown with a patch over his eye as he smiled alongside doctors and nurses. The 60-year-old has undergone surgery for his eye condition, which he has previously described as "debilitating".

EJ Panaligan editorNetflix has debuted the first teaser for its black comedy “White Noise,” unveiling writer-director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s landmark novel.“White Noise” will be the first film to open both the Venice Film Festival (at the end of August) and the New York Film Festival (in October). Baumbach’s most recent film, “Marriage Story,” also starring Adam Driver (opposite Scarlett Johansson), played at both festivals in 2019.Driver stars as Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies at a Midwest liberal arts college. In the original novel, Gladney, his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their children must grapple with the “Airborne Toxic Event,” which casts chemical waste over their town and puts them all in danger. Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lars Eidinger, Don Cheadle and André Benjamin, better known as André 3000 of Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast, round out the cast.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent When Angelina Jolie read Alessandro Baricco’s short novel “Without Blood” — the basis for her next directorial effort — the Italian fable about the brutality of war and healing in its aftermath had an immediate  therapeutic effect.  “I read it right as I was going through the beginning of a very dark time in my life. I read it in the month that followed my divorce [from Brad Pitt in 2016],” recalls Jolie, who shot the adaptation at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. “It had the effect on me that it’s had on so many people,” Jolie says, noting that the blurb on the cover says that the book is about the complexity of the human condition.  

Fashion faux pas don’t exist for Rihanna! The singer proved you can mix patterns and prints when she stepped out for a date night with boyfriend A$AP Rocky.

The pan-Canadian Selection Committee has chosen director Jason Loftus’ Eternal Spring as its entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar.

Solange has confirmed details of a new book commemorating her 2019 performance at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale de Venezia. The book, 188-page In Past Pupils and Smiles, retails at $55 and can be purchased here.

Veep and The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci is still angry. In fact, he told delegates here at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday that he is “angrier than ever” at the direction of the UK’s politics and broadcasting, seven years after his blistering MacTaggart lecture urged the BBC to fight back against its critics and railed against a sale of Channel 4 — both topics now back on the agenda.

Naman Ramachandran “Me, My Mom & Sharmila,” the feature directorial debut of queer Muslim writer-director Fawzia Mirza, has set its cast. The film will feature Amrit Kaur, the breakout star of Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s HBO Max series “The Sex Lives of College Girls”; Hamza Haq, who won best actor in 2021 and 2022 at the Canadian Screen Awards for CTV medical drama “Transplant”; and Nimra Bucha (“Ms. Marvel,” “Churails”). Set in 1999, the film follows Azra (Kaur) over 48 hours as she travels from her home in Canada to her parents’ homeland of Pakistan to bury her father (Haq). Azra struggles to connect with her conservative mother Mariam (Bucha), but her return to Pakistan launches her into memories both real and imagined that reveal their unexpected similarities.

Naman Ramachandran On Aug. 24, Ukraine independence day, the Venice Film Festival has revealed that it will host a Ukrainian Day on Sept. 8, as part of the festival’s Venice Production Bridge initiative. The day will kick off with a panel discussion introduced by the president of the Biennale, Roberto Cicutto, and the artistic director of the 79th festival, Alberto Barbera. Panelists include the Ambassador of Ukraine to Italy, Yaroslav Melnyk; the head of the National Cinema Institution of Ukraine, Marina Kuderchuk; the director of the film “Luxembourg, Luxembourg” (which will screen in competition in the festival’s Horizons strand), Antonio Lukich; the director of the film “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” (screening out of competition), Evgeny Afineevsky; the exhibiting artist in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Biennale Arte, Pavlo Makov; the curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Biennale Arte, Boris Filonenko; the representative of Ukraine’s Council for State Support of Cinematography, Polina Tolmacheva; the Cultural Attaché of Ukraine, the actor and filmmaker Daria Tregubova; and the producer and head of civic organization Andriy Nogin. The panel will be moderated by Volodymyr Ostapchuk.

A historic mansion house owned by Falkirk Council that has lain vacant since 2005 will be put up for sale on the open market in the hope it will get "a new lease of life".

EXCLUSIVE: French network M6 has ordered a drama about a man who manipulates women and turns deception into an art form.

Naman Ramachandran The BFI London Film Festival has revealed the line-up for LFF Expanded, its immersive art and extended realities strand (Oct. 5-16). Programmed by Ulrich Schrauth, the BFI’s immersive art and XR curator, this year’s program features interactive virtual reality, screen-based installations, augmented reality, mixed reality, immersive audio experience and live performance. The program will be at multiple venues on London’s South Bank. The highlight of the program is the world premiere, commissioned by the festival, of Guy Maddin’s “Haunted Hotel: A Melodrama in Augmented Reality,” which promises to transport the audience into a surreal paper world, created from a selection of clippings drawn from Maddin’s own personal archive, set to a soundscape by composer Magnus Fiennes.

Harry Potter's famous Halloween film scenes, as the popular Dark Arts exhibition returns to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour.From Professor Quirrell shouting "troll in the dungeon!" during the Halloween feast scene in Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, to the Hogwarts students singing alongside frogs in The Prisoner Of Azkaban, there are plenty of memorable and spooky moments in the film series.READ NEXT: UK cities sorted into Harry Potter houses - and where your home features on the listBack by popular demand, The Dark Arts exhibition will return to Warner Brothers Studio Tour, London this Autumn and will see the Harry Potter film sets transformed into spookier versions for Halloween.Opening on September 23, 2022, visitors will be able to enter the Great Hall, which will be decorated with over 100 floating pumpkins, along with a Halloween feast of lollipops and red apples dressing the tables.That's not all, as the famous Platform 9 3/4 and wizarding shopping favourite Diagon Alley will all be redecorated especially for the Dark Arts exhibition, which will run between September 23 to November 6, 2022.Visitors can also put their skills to the test on the Dark Mark Trail - so are you up to the challenge?The Dark Arts were usually used by Voldemort's followers, The Death Eaters, who will also feature in the exhibition as visitors can test their wand combat skills against the characters in a live duel.It is just one of many exhibitions set to open at the Harry Potter Warner Brothers Studio Tour in 2022, following the success of The Mandrakes and Magical Creatures exhibition which is currently on display at the studios.Future events also include the highly anticipated Hogwarts in The Snow.Visitors will also be able to