Peter Pearce: Last News

Valerie Wu Intern The Palm Springs International Film Festival has announced its 2024 lineup. Held by the Palm Springs International Film Society, the PSIFF aims to spotlight and celebrate a range of global films. The 35th annual festival’s opening night will host the U.S.

After a World Premiere at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and its North American Premiere over the weekend at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Noah Pritzker’s (Quitters) second film goes for a mix of Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, Paul Mazursky, Noah Baumbach and other white male filmmakers, past and present, who enjoy basking in the midlife marital crisis in which many guys find themselves trapped. While not on the level of those acclaimed filmmakers, in this case though Pritzker manages to cast his net wider into an early, mid, and late life crisis over three generations of the men in the Pearce clan. The result is an engaging indie exercise that in an age of highlighting diversity in films puts the focus solely on its white male central characters and their personal woes, thus oddly taking what was once common Hollywood storytelling into a bit of an anomaly in 2023. It is for sale to any distributor who finds promise in a premise that might be a tough sell for mainstream buyers despite a game cast that lifts it up a notch or two. Art Houses would seem to be its theatrical future, if not PVOD.

Jessica Kiang Perhaps deciding that the relationship tribulations of white, coastal-American men of medium-to-high class-privilege levels — which were well-served on the big screen in previous decades — have been rather overlooked of late, writer-director Noah Pritzker goes back to the well of male midlife neurosis for his sophomore feature and dredges up not quite enough to fill up one amiable indie dramedy. Powered largely by the affability of Griffin Dunne playing a reluctant pending-divorcé whose aging father has recently left his aging mother and whose adult son is having woman troubles of his own, “Ex-Husbands” which world-premieres at the San Sebastian Film Festival, is likable enough in intention, but flounders en route to its destination.

EXCLUSIVE: Griffin Dunne (This Is Us), Rosanna Arquette (Pulp Fiction), Richard Benjamin (Michael Crichton’s Westworld), Miles Heizer (13 Reasons Why) and James Norton (Little Women) will lead the cast of an as-yet-untitled film from writer-director Noah Pritzker (Quitters).