‘Occupied City’ Review: Steve McQueen’s Holocaust Documentary Is a Trial to Sit Through: Four Hours Long But Only an Inch Deep

TMZ on Friday, saying he was finally diagnosed with hydrocephalus in March following appointments with more than 100 doctors. Hydrocephalus is a neurological disorder caused by an abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the cavities of the brain. Symptoms in adults include problems with balance, blurred vision and memory loss, according to the National Institutes of Health.“I can’t figure out what caused it, because I’ve done so many stupid things,” Bonaduce self-deprecatingly admitted while speaking to TMZ.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Harrison Ford is taking some responsibility for the tension that developed with Brad Pitt during the making of their 1997 thriller “The Devil’s Own.” The film, which notably marked the last directorial effort from Alan J. Pakula (“All the President’s Men,” “Klute”), earned mixed reviews but grossed $140 million worldwide. Ford has often said in past interviews that it was difficult filming “The Devil’s Own.” When Esquire magazine recently asked why, Ford said it was due to creative differences he had with Pitt. “Heh. Yeah, I remember why,” Ford said. “Brad developed the script. Then they offered me the part. I saved my comments about the character and the construction of the thing—I admired Brad. First of all, I admire Brad. I think he’s a wonderful actor. He’s a really decent guy. But we couldn’t agree on a director until we came to Alan Pakula, who I had worked with before but Brad had not.”

more fun. What would a trip to the Italian seaside be without a headscarf and a flowing skirt, for example? There’s an art to nailing the fashion mood of whatever destination you’re visiting, and someone who nailed this approach today is none other than Selena Gomez. The was spotted in Paris dressing like a true French girl.

Fat Ham, James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy nominated for five Tony Awards, will add one week of performances to its Broadway run, producers announced today.

The 104-year-old theater formerly known as the Selwyn – and soon to be formerly known as the American Airlines – will be renamed to honor the late Todd Haimes, the artistic director and guiding force behind the Roundabout Theatre Company who died in April.

Phillip Schofield has spoken publicly about his affair with a much younger colleague at This Morning, for the first time in an interview with the BBC. During the interview which is just under 45 minutes long, Phillip was visibly emotional and as he talked about his version of events, his hands could be seen shaking.

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Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are breaking their silence on the new docu-series about their family and religion.

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson is back for a new season on Netflix, treating fans to more absurd and cringeworthy social scenarios.From creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, the sketch show has returned for a third season with six new episodes. You can check out the chaotic trailer for the comedy series’ latest offering below.Alongside Robinson, the new season features guest appearances from Jason Schwartzman, Tim Meadows, Fred Armisen, Sam Richardson, Will Forte, Patti Harrison, Ayo Edebiri, Mitra Jouhari, Tim Heidecker, Beck Bennett, Biff Wiff, Conner O’Malley, and Carmen Christopher.All six episodes of the new season are now available to stream on the service, having been released on May 30.I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson has received multiple WGA Awards, as well as an Emmy for Robinson for outstanding actor in a short form comedy or drama series.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's legal battles continue. In court documents filed on June 1 and obtained by ET, Pitt accuses Jolie of «secretly» selling her share of their Chateau Miraval Winery, which Pitt remains part owner of, in order «to seize profits she had not earned and returns on an investment she did not make.» Calling Jolie «vindictive,» Pitt's legal team claims that she «also sought to inflict harm on Pitt.»As ET previously reported, Jolie is accused of selling her share of the winery to Yuri Shefler, billionaire who owns the conglomerate Stoli Group, amid contentious divorce negotiations with Pitt. According to the newly-filed court docs, Shefler is designated as an «oligarch in the Russian Federation» by the U.S.

Phillip Schofield has broken his silence and revealed his sadness over the reports and rumours circulating about him after admitting to an affair with a much younger man while still married to his wife. Particularly keen to clarify the timeline of events, he revealed in a new interview that he first met the man when he visited the theatre academy he was a patron of.The man began working as a runner on This Morning in 2016 after receiving career advice from Phil and doing work experience at the show in 2015.

Burger King has announced plans to sell the Chicken Royale and Vegan Royale burgers for just £1 for one day next week.

The idea of Lil Uzi Vert as a rockstar might be a well-worn one by now, but it's something they have leaned into this week. First came an appearance with Paramore at Madison Square Garden, with Uzi joining the band to perform their song "Misery Business." Today they appear on a new Bring Me The Horizon track, arguably the heaviest musical moment of Uzi's career to date.

Trying to keep up with this week’s new music? Every Friday, we collect new albums available on streaming services on one page.

This Sunday (June 4) The Idol will premiere on HBO. The Weeknd (or Abel Tesfaye, as he prefers to be known right now)'s TV series screened at the Cannes Film Festival last month and critics took time out of applauding things for nine minutes straight to pan the show, dismissing it as "queasy" and "vulgar" among many other insults.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Most artists, if they’re lucky, invent one thing. But Kenneth Anger, who was a filmmaker, an author, a debauched aristocratic scenester and, to the day of his death at 96 (he reportedly died May 11, though it wasn’t made public until May 24), a figure of puckish mystery, invented several things, each of them epic. In “Fireworks,” his transcendent 14-minute avant-garde film of 1947, Anger invented the very consciousness and imagery of gay liberation — not the desire to be liberated (which was buried in the hearts of gay people everywhere), but the rapturous visual reverie of what that liberation might look like, what it would feel like, why it seemed so forbidden, and why it needed to be. In “Scorpio Rising,” his homoerotic demon-biker/Top-40-orgy blast from the underground, Anger invented MTV, invented what Martin Scorsese did in “Mean Streets” and David Lynch did in “Blue Velvet,” invented a way to express how music and reality talk to each other.

Marta Balaga Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” has scored a Fipresci award in Cannes.  The jury of the International Federation of Film Critics praised the film “for its formal radicality, the complexity of the sound and score, and its contrast between the invisible atrocities behind the wall and a supposed paradise,” Fipresci stated on Saturday.  “By presenting the horror as something usual, and using everyday-like dialogues, it’s a reflection on ignorance as a disease that connects the past with the present.” Glazer’s take on a Nazi family living next door to Auschwitz and enjoying it – loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis, who tragically passed away on May 19, just before the premiere – has been getting rave reviews at the French festival, becoming one of the frontrunners for this year’s Palme d’Or.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan cockeyed minimalist of Finland, has become the ultimate illustration of the principle that if you make movies in the same mood and style, with the same monosyllabic bombed-out hipster vibe, for a period of 30 years, your movies may not have changed — but the world around them has, so the films will have a totally different effect. In “Fallen Leaves,” the Kaurismäki bauble that’s showing at Cannes this year, there’s actually a scene in which a character uses a computer. The film’s heroine, Ansa (Alma Pöysti), loses her job as a supermarket worker, and to find another gig she rents an HP laptop at a makeshift Internet café that charges 10 Euro for half an hour. Apart from that, the movie unfolds in that scruffy and sparsely decorated so-familiar-it’s-cozy pre-tech Kaurismäki zone, where people still use electric adding machines or listen to a bulky kitchen radio that looks like it’s from the early ’60s. “Fallen Leaves” is set in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, but to our eyes it’s a weirdly underpopulated place where shopping, as a pastime, doesn’t exist, and neither, in any meaningful way, does conversation.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic As much as any filmmaker alive, Wes Anderson has a canon of movies that look and feel all of a piece. The diorama design, which extends from his life-size-dollhouse sets to his graphic lettering; the acting so stylized it’s like postmodern jokey-music-video kabuki; the fable-within-a-fable structure that can seem the cinematic equivalent of nested Russian dolls; the heavy frosting of ironic whimsicality. Most of his movies share these elements, yet the truth is that not all Wes Anderson film are alike. A few, like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” spin finely wrought tales beneath the filigree. One, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is an exhilarating caper — as well as (to me) his finest work, ironically because it isn’t pretending to be about anything.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Jessica Hausner, the director of the supremely audacious and disturbing eating-disorder thriller “Club Zero” (yes, I used the words “eating disorder” and “thriller” in the same sentence — that’s the kind of boundary-smashing movie this is), has the potential to be an important filmmaker. Her last movie, “Little Joe” (2019), a sci-fi creep-out about a sinister strain of houseplant, was really a dark-as-midnight parable of the psychotropic-drug era. “Club Zero” won’t be for everyone, but Hausner, channeling some combination of Hitchcock and Cronenberg and “Village of the Damned” and the Todd Haynes of “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” has now made an even more gripping and provocative mind-fuck.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic One of the grand paradoxes of Jean-Luc Godard is that he was a radical, an outlier, a filmmaker who guarded his purity and always looked askance at “the system,” yet because the nature of filmmaking is that it requires a lot of money, and is connected to fame, and produces images that can spread with iconic power, Godard was an outsider who was also an insider; a poet of cinema who made himself a celebrity; an artist who bridged the larger-than-life, old-school ethos of movies with the forbidding imperatives of the avant-garde. All of that contradiction is on full display, with a luscious kind of resonance, in “Godard par Godard,” an hour-long documentary, written by Frédéric Bonnaud and directed by Florence Platarets, that was presented at the Cannes Film Festival today as a tribute to Godard, eight months after his death on September 13, 2022. The documentary was shown along with Godard’s final film, the 20-minute-long “Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’.” All of which sounds like one of those Cannes–only special events, but au contraire: This is a program that was meant to be seen by the world at large, and with any luck it will be distributed that way. It’s an homage that invites us to look back, with fond fascination, on all the cinema Godard gave us, and on who he really was.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Black Flies,” a movie that keeps working to get high on its own intensity, Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan play paramedics who spend their nights driving through hell (I mean, Brooklyn). There are countless shots of the two in their EMS van, riding along under the tracks of an overhead subway train — the exact kind of grungy Brooklyn boulevard that Popeye Doyle went smashing through in the famous “French Connection” car/subway chase. As Rut (Penn) and Cross (Sheridan) patrol the borough neighborhood of Brownsville, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden sections of New York City, those overheard tracks become part of the film’s meticulously oppressive visual design. The two have so little breathing room they can barely see the sky. After a while, though, you start to think: Don’t these guys everdrive down a side street? Like everything else in “Black Flies,” those subway tracks are stylish signifiers of doom that are a little too in-your-face.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of the thousands of dramatic feature films that deal with the subject of the Holocaust, few have evoked — or have even tried to — the experience of what went on inside the concentration camps. That’s understandable; the horror of that experience is forbidding and in some ways unimaginable. But there’s a small group of movies, like “Schindler’s List” and “Son of Saul” and “The Grey Zone,” that have met that horror head-on, and in an indelible way. To that list we can now add Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality. “The Zone of Interest” isn’t a portrait of the victims of the Holocaust. It’s a portrait of the perpetrators. Yet what hovers over every moment is a human monstrousness that’s at once inflicted and repressed. The film’s haunting subject is the compartmentalization of evil.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum. It’s the fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” franchise, and though it has its quota of “relentless” action, it rarely tries to match (let alone top) the ingeniously staged kinetic bravura of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” How could it? “Raiders,” whatever one thinks of it as a movie (I always found it a trace impersonal in its ’40s-action-serial-on-steroids excitement), is arguably the most influential blockbuster of the last 45 years, even more so than “Star Wars.” Back in 1977, George Lucas took us through the looking glass of what would become our all-fantasy-all-the-time movie culture. But it was Steven Spielberg, teaming up with Lucas in “Raiders,” who introduced the structural DNA of the one-thing-after-another, action-movie-as-endless-set-piece escapist machine. This means that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” isn’t just coming after four previous “Indiana Jones” films. It’s coming after four decades of high-priced Hollywood action decadence, from the “Fast and Furious” series to the “Mission: Impossible” and “Terminator” and “Lara Croft” and “Transformers” and latter-day “Bond” films (not to mention the Marvel space operas), all of which owe a boundless debt to the aggro zap of the “Raiders” aesthetic.

Cannes Film Festival features an unusually robust selection of documentaries, two in the Main Competition alone, where nonfiction films almost never appear. And if the ones that have screened in the festival’s first three days have anything in common, it’s scale.

“Johnny! Johnny!! Johnny!!! Johnny Depp!!!!” The celebrity dutifully signed autographs for his followers on the red carpet for the premiere of Jeanne du Barry, director Maiwenn’s Cannes Film Festival opener.

Somewhere in the third hour of Steve McQueen’s documentary “Occupied City,” the camera slowly dollies left over a list of names in glowing green print on a black background, enumerating the thousands of Jews deported from Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. A moment of silence in the audio mix announces this as an important shot, an occasion to consider the enormity of the loss that this four-and-a-half-hour film itemizes with near-comprehensive diligence.

We walk among ghosts in cities, storied urban constructs with layers of misty memories one can sense in their distinct smells, and perceive in their dated cracks and imperfections. There are hundreds of thousands of such ghosts that haunt Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary essay “Occupied City,” a 2023 Cannes premiere that is as much a hypnotizing and cumulatively disquieting cinematic artifact about the Holocaust and World War II-era Amsterdam as it is a stubbornly single-minded historical art installation.The simplest way to describe “Occupied City” would be calling it an extensive guided tour of Amsterdam’s past that uses Bianca Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” as a compass.

In cinematic form, how do you tell history without archive footage? Occupied City shows how it can be done, and to what effect.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Steve McQueen looks stressed out. He’s a few weeks into post-production on “Blitz,” his World War II drama for Apple TV+, while starting promotion on his other, long-gestating wartime project, the documentary “Occupied City.” “It’s definitely pleasurable, but this is work,” declares McQueen with the wariness of a filmmaker who’s just been plucked out of the edit suite. “Hard work is always hard work. You can’t avoid it.” The British director, who was Oscar-nominated for “12 Years a Slave,” didn’t set out to make back-to-back movies about the war, but “you plant seeds, and some come to fruition and others don’t,” he explains. “These two happened to blossom fairly close to each other.”

Naman Ramachandran Signature Entertainment has snapped up U.K. and Ireland rights to Julia Louis-Dreyfus comedy “You Hurt My Feelings” from FilmNation Entertainment. Directed by Nicole Holofcener, the film stars Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies (“The Crown”) as a couple whose marriage is thrown into turmoil when she overhears his honest reaction to her latest book. The cast also includes Owen Teague, David Cross, Arian Moayed and Michaela Watkins. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will close Sundance London. Reviewing the film for Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman said: “The key to ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ is that the entire movie turns into a satire of what has become our fetishistically supportive and oversensitive therapeutic culture of positivity. All these things, in a way, are necessary. But maybe, the film suggests, we have tried to heal ourselves a little too much. Maybe we need a little more naked honesty mixed in with the wellness.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In a movie career that stretches back 25 years, Jennifer Lopez has on occasion done flaked-out underworld thriller romance (“Out of Sight”), capery action (“Parker”) and revenge (“Enough”). Yet she has never placed herself at the center of such a down-and-dirty, grimly overwrought, execute-now-and-ask-questions-later B-movie as “The Mother.” I’m tempted to call the film “minimalist,” because if you consider its bare-bones screenplay (by three writers!), its convoluted utilitarian set-up, its 2D villains, and its essential formulaic momentum, it’s a prime example of action filmmaking made basic. Yet “The Mother” is a Netflix action movie, which means that it has a certain flavor of ambition mixed into its pulp stew. The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad. Lopez, as a military sniper turned broker of underground arms deals turned FBI informant turned savagely cool-headed protector of her 12-year-old daughter, is playing a badass not so far removed from those played by Jason Statham or (in his grade-B prime) Bruce Willis, and she’s up to the task. She shoots, she stabs, she chops windpipes, she motorcycles down stone stairways in one of those chase-through-an-ancient-city action scenes (this one takes place in Havana), she tortures a man by punching him with a fist wrapped in barb wire, she grimaces in muscle-torn agony but mostly looks frozen and implacable. Even more important, she puts her own spin on those familiar motions.

Amsterdam today. Pause on a bridge and watch the Amstel River gently flow through picturesque canals. Eighty years ago, the same vista might have revealed a horror – bodies floating by of Jews who had flung themselves into the Amstel rather than face cruel death from the occupying Nazi forces.

Naman Ramachandran U.K.-based sales and distribution outfit Blue Finch Films has boarded international sales, excluding North America, for William Shatner documentary “You Can Call Me Bill” from Legion M and Exhibit A Pictures. Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, who has previously helmed documentaries such as “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” “Memory: The Origins of Alien,” and “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist,” the film had its world premiere at SXSW 2023 as part of the Documentary Spotlight section. The film is an intimate portrait of William Shatner’s personal journey across nine decades, stripping away all the masks he has worn during his storied career – most famously the Star Trek franchise – to reveal the man behind it all. The first and only feature-length documentary dedicated to Shatner’s life, career and philosophy, it delves into his most fervent passions, hopes and concerns, through a thematic distillation of his most recent autobiographical songs and a deep dive into the farthest reaches of his filmography.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Does chronic Lyme disease exist? That’s the question that haunts “The Quiet Epidemic,” Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch’s worthy and provocative documentary about the highly controversial syndrome. (The movie premieres on VOD on May 16.) The filmmakers argue, with unflinching advocacy and some very good reporting, that chronic Lyme disease most definitely exists. Among other things, “The Quiet Epidemic” is a portrait of individuals whose lives have been ravaged by it. Yet the movie, in its doggedly opinionated way, does acknowledge the profundity of the debate. The medical establishment, led by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, has long held the position — one it maintains to this day — that Lyme disease is a real thing, eminently curable with a two-to-four week regimen of antibiotics, but that chronic Lyme disease, with sometimes devastating symptoms stretching on for months, years, even decades, is not backed up by the science.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s beyond obvious that women deserve a movie that portrays and celebrates them in their sixties and seventies reveling in the joys of romantic adventure and uninhibited sex. It’s not so obvious that they deserved “Book Club,” the 2018 comedy about four hale, hearty, and prosperous senior friends who read “Fifty Shades of Grey” in their monthly literary white-wine klatsch, only to discover that E.L. James’s S&M princess fantasy jump-starts their hibernating libidos and/or their desire to commit to the men who are courting them. You could use a whole Thesaurus paragraph of withering descriptives to evoke the sort of movie “Book Club” was. It was prefab, it was cookie-cutter, it was paint-by-numbers, it was broad enough to play to the peanut gallery, it was four glorified sitcoms jammed into one overly synthetic package.