Nicolas Winding Refn: Last News

The man who struck major Channel 4 deals for the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Great is headed to BBC Studios to head up commercial for scripted.

San Sebastian Fetes Veteran Director Victor Erice

Neon’s re-release of Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 Oldboy grossed an estimated $495k on 250 screens this weekend for a total cume of $880k over five days. It’s set to cross the $1 million in its first week back – surpassing a cumulative North American gross of $707k with original distributor Metro Tartan Film. The classic revenge thriller came out in 2003 and was released Stateside in 2005. It was the first South Korean film to win the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2004 and took in $15 million worldwide.

EXCLUSIVE: North America’s largest genre festival, Fantasia, is currently in full flow, but amid two Hollywood strikes, its staff are speaking out about what they deem to be horror conditions.

Travis Scott has confirmed details of his new album and an accompanying movie. Circus Maximus is the title of the film, which Scott confirmed he made alongside "some of my favorite directors." A poster for the movie lists Gaspar Noé, Nicolas Winding Refn, Harmony Korine, Valdimar Jóhannsson, and Kahlil Joseph among collaborators on the project.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent “Decorado,” the awaited next animated feature film from Alberto Vázquez, director of 2015’s “Birdboy: The Forgotten Children” and last year’s “Unicorn Wars,” has been boarded by Le Pacte.     One of France’s most important independent film companies, a distributor in France of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” and Ken Loach’s “I: Daniel Blake” among its biggest foreign hits, Le Pacte, headed by Jean and Alice Labadie, has acquired rights to “Decorado” for distribution in France and international sales. “We picked up ‘Decorado’ because we were in love with ‘Unicorn Wars’ and ‘Decorado is even crazier,” said Jean Labadie. “We love animation and bold projects which are out of boundaries.” 

One beloved kid's TV show is set to return to our screens, decades after it came to an end.

When you think of films and TV series by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, you think of dark, gritty stories. These are stories where anyone can die at any moment and the lines between good and bad are awfully blurry.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Standing ovations at Cannes have become a festival tradition that both delights and infuriates cinephiles around the world. How can an audience really clap for more than 10 minutes? Does the continuous applause even mean a film is great? Are people really breaking out their stopwatches inside the theater to time the ovations? Let’s get this out of the way now: Festival standing ovations can be somewhat genuine but also entirely manufactured. At Cannes, a camera crew records the cast and crew in attendance at each world premiere after the screening ends and their faces get projected onto the enormous Palais screen in real-time.

Christina Hendricks (Mad Men, The Neon Demon) has signed on to lead the psychological thriller Reckoner, written and directed by Nissar Modi (Z for Zachariah) in his feature directorial debut.

Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s London-set, neo-noir thriller Femme, starring George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, world premieres in the Berlinale’s Panorama section this year.

JG Ballard meets Ben Wheatley in Brandon Cronenberg’s latest. Which is a bit of a surprise, since the two have already met: in 2015, in the latter’s dystopian satire High-Rise. There are (literal) shades of Nicolas Winding Refn, too, and a healthy smattering of body horror inherited from the old man, whose filmography Cronenberg Jr. raids to make an unlikely fusion of Videodrome and A History of Violence, two very opposing milestones in his father’s career.

Tom Hardy To Narrate Sky And Netflix Nature Doc ‘Predators’

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent The Danes may have surpassed the French in clashing with streamers. The Danish Producers’ Association and Create Denmark, the guild representing writers, actors and directors, among others, have been involved in a bitter dispute over fees and rights with local and global streaming services including Netflix and Viaplay since January. While Viaplay signed a temporary agreement over the summer which is valid through December, other services, including Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+ and Amazon Prime have fully stopped the development or production of Danish content since January. The estimated loss of revenue for the country is approximately $200 million, according to Lene Børglum, a leading producer in Denmark whose credits includes Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Only God Forgives” and “Copenhagen Cowboy” which Netflix had ordered way before the start of the dispute. The series world premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Pascal Breton’s European banner Federation Entertainment (“The Bureau”) has acquired a majority stake in Vertigo Films, the U.K. production company behind the hit TV shows “Britannia” and “Bulletproof.” The London-based company is also the producer of B.O. films such as “StreetDance 3D,” “The Sweeney” and award-winning titles including Gareth Edwards’s “Monsters” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Bronson.“ Founded 20 years ago by executive producers Allan Niblo and James Richardson, Vertigo is currently in post-production with Jez Butterworth’s new comedy-drama series “Mammals,” starring James Corden and Sally Hawkins for Amazon, and the 1980s-set gangster epic “A Town Called Malice” by Nick Love for Sky Max. The banner just wrapped principal photography on a new film for Sky Cinema, with further details to be announced at a later date.  

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticAt age 13, Ryan Gosling was spreading cheer on “The Mickey Mouse Club.” But something must have snapped in the dozen years between “The Notebook” and “La La Land.” The Canadian heartthrob seems committed to convincing us that he can be a cold-blooded, even-keeled, unsentimental killer. Starting with Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” followed by the Danish director’s “Only God Forgives” and now playing the title character in the Russo brothers’ “The Gray Man,” an actor who once radiated charisma in “Crazy Stupid Love” has been perfecting an inexpressive cool that borders on nihilism, keeping his pulse stable and poker face fixed as he offs whatever adversaries come his way. Gosling doesn’t just want to be an action star; he wants to be the Hollywood version of Alain Delon, the handsome French icon who played a sociopath with perfect cheekbones in “Purple Noon” and a hit man with no visible emotions in “Le Samouraï.” “The Gray Man” is the payoff of Gosling’s low-key reinvention: an incredibly expensive, stunningly executed action vehicle in which he plays Six, an ex-con-turned-CIA assassin who’s so good at his job that he becomes a kind of liability, landing him at the top of the agency’s kill list.A reportedly $200 million whopper that Netflix will release first in theaters (on July 15) and then a week later on its streaming service, this is “The Avengers: End Game” directors Anthony and Joe Russo’s answer to the James Bond franchise (which reached its end game, with Daniel Craig at least, in last year’s “No Time to Die”).

Clayton Davis Fifteen years in the game, English-born Carey Mulligan proves herself to be one of the best talented and exciting actresses working today. With two Oscar nominations to her name, she’s delivered an incredible array of characters and performances, many of which should have been recognized by the Academy.Many remember her film debut in Joe Wright’s breathtaking “Pride and Prejudice” (2005) as Kitty Bennett opposite Keira Knightley.

In part deux today of the Cannes Film Festival symposium on cinema, three female filmmakers were represented in You Were Never Really Here‘s Lynne Ramsay and Grand Central‘s Rebecca Zlotowski and French actress/director/scribe Agnes Jaoui, unlike yesterday when it was all men. The festival on social media took a licking for being tone deaf in the wake of yesterday’s panel.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentThe Cannes Film Festival celebrated its 75th anniversary Tuesday evening with a group of no less than 120 stars and filmmakers from all over the world, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Paolo Sorrentino, Isabelle Huppert, Diane Kruger, Guillermo del Toro, Jacques Audiard, Melanie Laurent, Gael Garcia Bernal and Nicolas Winding Refn who made the trip for the event.Some of them, notably del Toro, took part in a symposium earlier Tuesday to discuss the new challenges that cinema is facing today. The roster of talents on the ground at the gala ceremony also included the bevy of stars and filmmakers presenting films at this year’s festival, including Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen and David Cronenberg (“Crimes of the Future”), among many others.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the Cannes Film Festival gathered dozens upon dozens of previous laureates and special guests at the Palais des Festival this evening. Inside the Lumière Theatre, the fest’s artistic chief and general delegate, Thierry Frémaux, and outgoing Cannes President, Pierre Lescure, did a roll call of star actors and directors who left their seats and made their way to the stage .

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaAnn Dowd will star in “The Undertaker’s Children.” The thriller is currently in pre-production. The Exchange will introduce the title to buyers at the upcoming 2022 Cannes Film Market.  Dowd stars as a secretive undertaker forced to take in two orphans. When her sinister plan for getting rid of the kids in her care is revealed, the children plan a daring escape and find themselves facing evil forces.  Dowd is no stranger to ratcheting up the tension.