World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Practical Magic 2 and Gal Gadot’s Runner lead a packed UK Friday, The Uprising and The Fix headline a separate US-only slate, Naza earns a 24.5-minute standing ovation at Venice, and happy birthday to Brian De Palma and Amy Madigan.
Morning all — proper new-release Friday today, on both sides of the Atlantic, plus a genuinely remarkable reaction out of Venice. Here’s what happened in the world of movies during the last 24 hours.
A packed Friday at UK cinemas: Leading today’s UK slate is Warner Bros.’ Practical Magic 2, reuniting Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the Owens sisters alongside newcomer Joey King, nearly three decades on from the original cult favourite. Amazingly, the film also has Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing reprising their roles as now very aged aunts! The fabulous WW2 meteorological drama Pressure continues to wow UK audiences and the mid-week release of the Oasis documentary Don’t Look Back in Anger also continues. Also arriving today is Gal Gadot’s action thriller Runner via Entertainment Film Distributors — the film she walked the Los Angeles red carpet for last week — alongside Tributary’s Better Go Mad In The Wild, Signature’s vertiguous Fall 2 (the sequel to 2022’s Fall), Break Out’s jazz biopic Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Moviegoers’ Hindi spy-comedy Udta Teer, MetFilm’s French coming-of-age comedy-drama Just An Illusion, the Hong-Kong comedy-thriller Unidentified Murder and the BFI’s 4K restoration of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 psychological thriller La Femme Infidèle. For the nostalgic, there’s a genuinely stacked re-release pairing too: Raiders Of The Lost Ark via Paramount – staggeringly 45 years since I saw it with the Illustrious Mrs Movie Mann in a fleapit cinema in Inverness – and Danny DeVito’s Matilda via Park Circus, celebrating its 30th anniversary. (Phew! What a list.)
Meanwhile, over in the US: American screens get their own separate slate today, several with no UK date yet. Leading the pack is Focus Features’ The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt drama starring Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell and Thomasin McKenzie — it won’t reach UK cinemas until 9th October. Also opening wide is Briarcliff’s The Fix, an action-thriller pairing Liam Neeson and Zachary Levi, alongside Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility adaptation (Daisy Edgar-Jones, George MacKay), which despite its British cast and setting is getting its US bow today ahead of the September 25th release in the UK. Warner Bros. also quietly drops Clayface into limited release, its DC horror-thriller starring Naomi Ackie.
Naza receives one of Venice’s longest ovations in years: Away from new releases, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s Gaza documentary Naza received a standing ovation lasting 24.5 minutes following its main competition premiere. I mean, this Cannes/Venice standing ovation thing is a bit ridiculous isn’t it? But the length of this piece of performance art speaks to just how much weight this year’s Venice has placed on confronting real-world conflict head-on. With the Golden Lion announced tomorrow, it’s shaping up as one of the genuine frontrunners, alongside Nicolas Pariser’s Un Peu Avant Minuit and Paolo Strippoli’s L’estranea also said to be in contention.
Happy birthday to Brian De Palma and Amy Madigan: Rounding things off, happy birthday today to Scarface and Carrie director Brian De Palma, who turns 86, alongside actress Amy Weapons Madigan, who turns 76.
That’s all for today. I’m on holiday abroad at the moment, so I won’t get to see and review any of these new releases for a while. (Sorry about the lack of reviews to by regular readers.)
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