Sundance Deals On Verge Of Virtual Consummation? Searchlight In Lead For Emma Thompson Sexy Sundance Starrer ‘Good Luck To You, Leo Grande’

Showtime has renewed its hit series for Season 7.

The deals keep coming at the 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival. MUBI closed the docu Free Chol Soo Lee, including North America, and Warner Bros is negotiating a near $7 million WW rights deal for the Tig Notaro/Stephanie Allynne film Am I Ok? to place the film on HBO Max. The Lauren Pomerantz-scripted film stars Dakota Johnson, Sonoya Mizuno, Jermaine Fowler, Molly Gordon, June Diane Raphael, and Sean Hayes.

The Sundance Film Festival is revealing award winners for its 2022 edition on Friday afternoon beginning at 2 p.m. PT. Like the rest of this year’s festival, which was forced to go all-virtual because of the recent Omicron surge, the awards ceremony is playing out on Twitter.

Welcome to this week’s International Insider. Max Goldbart here bringing you the latest in what’s been a busy seven days in the world of international TV and film.

EXCLUSIVE: Searchlight Pictures has closed a deal around $7.5 million for U.S. rights to Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. the Sophie Hyde-directed film that stars Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack (The Wheel of Time & Peaky Blinders). Deadline reported yesterday  that Searchlight was poised to win the film that was bid on by several distributors, and the plan is to wage an awards season campaign for Thompson in a standout turn. Searchlight will release through Hulu, in a deal similar to the preemptive one it made for another Sundance film, Fresh. Hyde directed 52 Tuesdays and Animals. The film is scripted by Katy Brand, whose credits include Nanny McPhee Returns, which starred Thompson, and Walking On Sunshine.

Emma Thompson finds the fad around cosmetic surgery in Hollywood very odd.

Emma Thompson is baring it all in her new film, . Thompson spoke about going nude for her role in the film at the movie's Sundance Film Festival premiere on Saturday.«It's very challenging to be nude at 62,» Thompson said during a Cinema Café discussion, before revealing that her character completely disrobes in one scene.

Stripping down in her sixties. Emma Thompson got real about embracing nude scenes for her new movie, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. 

told Entertainment Weekly.“I don’t think I could’ve done it before the age that I am,” Thompson said of a scene that sees her drop her bath robe in front of a mirror to reveal her full form. “And yet, of course, the age that I am makes it extremely challenging because we aren’t used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen.”“Nothing has changed in the dreadful demands made upon women in the real world but also in acting,” she added.

Celebrated actress Emma Thompson is starring in the film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, which sees a woman hire a male prostitute in the hopes of having an orgasm for the very first time.The film, which also features Peaky Blinders star Daryl McCormack, had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival over the weekend.Emma, 62, revealed that both herself and Daryl rehearsed their nude scene in the buff, while director Sophie Hyde also disrobed in way of support for her actors. “Sophie, Daryl, and I rehearsed entirely nude and talked about our bodies, talked about our relationship with our bodies, drew them, discussed the things that we find difficult about, things we like about them, described one another's bodies,” Emma explained in a Cinema Cafe conversation at Sundance.“It's very challenging to be nude at 62.She stands in front of a mirror alone and she drops her robe,” she said of her character, Nancy Stokes. The film follows widowed school teacher Nancy, who hires male prostitute ‘Leo Grande’ (Daryl) in an attempt to finally achieve her first orgasm. In her interview with Entertainment Weekly, she continued: “Nothing has changed in the dreadful demands made upon women in the real-world world but also in acting.“This thing of having to be thin is still the same as it ever was, and actually in some ways I think it's worse now.The star went on to admit: “The age that I am makes it extremely challenging because we aren't used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen.”Emma also reminisced about the time she spent getting comfortable with her co-star by going on walks around the muddy banks of Hampstead Heath, London.“That was very important that we could hold onto each other and laugh.

Fans will be seeing a lot more of Emma Thompson in her new movie Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, with the actress revealing how she prepared for a nude scene.The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend, with the 62-year-old actress opening up about going nude with Entertainment Weekly.The actress revealed that she and co-star Daryl McCormack both rehearsed the scene fully nude, while director Sophie Hyde also disrobed. Nude scene:Fans will be seeing a lot more of Emma Thompson in her new movie Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, with the actress revealing how she prepared for a nude scene'Sophie, Daryl, and I rehearsed entirely nude and talked about our bodies, talked about our relationship with our bodies, drew them, discussed the things that we find difficult about, things we like about them, described one another's bodies,' Thompson said in a Cinema Cafe conversation at Sundance.'It's very challenging to be nude at 62.

Emma Thompson is opening up about going nude in her new movie.

hits Hulu March 4, will more likely make you hurl than send you racing for a cold shower.The title doesn’t describe the movie very well. “Fresh” is a familiar and somewhat successful horror film in the socially conscious mold of “Get Out.” There are shocks and suspense. When the twist — which will not be revealed here — arrived, I let out a loud expletive.

Emma Thompson is baring it all in her latest film. 

The complexities of female sexuality are still frustratingly misrepresented in mainstream cinema. In one corner, we have the eruptive rise of a certain type of one-dimensional badass feminism, featuring often straight, go-getting women who can win a fistfight, have it their way and enjoy great, consequence-free sex.

Even in its truncated virtual Covid-afflicted form last year, the Sundance Film Festival was remarkably able to debut several movies that a year later we are still talking about in the Oscar conversation including CODA, Jockey, Passing, Flee, and Mass. Maybe this success was due to the fact they all had one word titles, but more realistically it was because despite all the drawbacks, the fest honchos picked very well and now awards voters are enjoying the riches.  As I have been seeing one film after another in this year’s (virtual) fest I find myself looking for that breakout movie or performance which with the right distribution we will be talking about still a year from now. There have been some promising performances so far from the likes of Julianne Moore, Bill Nighy and a couple still to come later, but the wow factor really hit me in seeing Emma Thompson in the British film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, premiering today at Sundance, where to put it mildly, she knocks it out of the park. This is Thompson at her best, a witty, dazzling. and above all brave performance that will undoubtedly be talked about. Her co-star Daryl McCormack  in this two-hander is equally good in the movie which centers on a 60ish widowed mother of two and religious studies teacher who hires a sex worker for a tryst in a hotel room. It is much more complicated than that, in this story of two disparate souls who come together, one full of anxiety and past regrets, the other professional to his core but with a guard he will not let down and a line he will not cross.

Amy Nicholson In the opening sequence of Sophie Hyde’s riveting “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a suave young man (Daryl McCormack) steps out of an ice cream parlor, catches a mint candy in his mouth, and swings around a street pole like a hipster Gene Kelly. The Irishman is confidently cool — and not quite himself. He’s getting into character as Leo Grande, a charming sex worker who sells the Leo Grande Fantasy: a “service,” he calls it, where he gives paying customers exactly what they need, be it physical release, conversation or, for one client, dressing like a cat.

The 2022 edition of the Sundance Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, Jan. 20, going virtual for the second year in a row.

Jenelle Riley Deputy Awards, Features EditorOn the surface, a film set primarily in one hotel room with a pair of actors might seem simple. But in the case of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which premieres Jan. 22 at the Sundance Film Festival, limiting the location gave the film an opportunity to explore what star Emma Thompson calls “the emotional landscape.”Thompson plays Nancy, a widow and former teacher who has stepped outside her comfort zone for the first time in her life and hired a sex worker, the titular Leo Grande, played by “Peaky Blinders” actor Daryl McCormack.

We should have seen this coming. After “Promising Young Woman” made a splash at Sundance two years ago, the festival was bound to feature more films (cl)aiming to undermine expectations and play with films tropes to craft a fiercely feminist take-down of the patriarchy.

William Earl Variety is returning to the Sundance Film Festival, hosting virtual interviews in the Variety Studio in collaboration with Audible. Throughout the festival, videos from the studio will appear on Variety.com beginning on Jan.