Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
The Boys in the Boat (George Clooney)
This is, from start to finish, an underdog sports picture. Edgerton puts a welcome spin on the gruff-but-caring coach archetype, and Turner does the same with his lead character. Soft-spoken, stern, and handsome, this is a role someone like Ronald Reagan would have excelled at bringing to the screen some 80 years ago; Turner, luckily, is more interesting to look at and a better actor. Alexandre Desplat’s score is maybe the most playful thing about this film, and it works when it needs to. The race sequences are unquestionably Boys‘ highlight, Clooney making use of zoom lenses and well-placed cameras to capture the speed and fluidity of each competition. There is a real tension mined in these scenes,...
The Boys in the Boat (George Clooney)
This is, from start to finish, an underdog sports picture. Edgerton puts a welcome spin on the gruff-but-caring coach archetype, and Turner does the same with his lead character. Soft-spoken, stern, and handsome, this is a role someone like Ronald Reagan would have excelled at bringing to the screen some 80 years ago; Turner, luckily, is more interesting to look at and a better actor. Alexandre Desplat’s score is maybe the most playful thing about this film, and it works when it needs to. The race sequences are unquestionably Boys‘ highlight, Clooney making use of zoom lenses and well-placed cameras to capture the speed and fluidity of each competition. There is a real tension mined in these scenes,...
- 1/19/2024
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Aki Kaurismäki is back with this new film Fallen Leaves that won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The legendary Finnish director has made a film that is bound to be the darling of the upcoming awards season and which could possibly see it win the Best Foreign Feature film at the Oscars in 2024. Fallen Leaves is a simple film that takes us through the lives of two lonely souls as they navigate their bleak lives. This is a very low-key, subtle kind of film, funny but also absurd at times. A refreshing comedy of errors love story that hits all the right notes powered by the creative storytelling ingenuity of the critically acclaimed director.
The movie kicks off with a series of shots following Ansa (Alma Pöysti) who works at a grocery store. She is closely watched by a security guard, a little too closely like he is stalking her.
The movie kicks off with a series of shots following Ansa (Alma Pöysti) who works at a grocery store. She is closely watched by a security guard, a little too closely like he is stalking her.
- 12/15/2023
- by Prem
- Talking Films
Alma Pöysti as Ansa and Jussi Vatanen as Holappa, in Fallen Leaves. Courtesy of Mubi.
Fallen Leaves is a romantic comedy from Finland, with the driest of humor. Bone-dry does not cover it; this is a Sahara Desert of dry humor. No one cracks a smile and no one winks at the audience as they deadpan their satiric comedy lines. This is also the bad-luck couple of the year, who can’t seem to catch a break, except through the most absurd of coincidence. Fallen Leaves is undeniably funny, in it deadpan Nordic way but you have to meet the humor on its own terms. It is not there to help you.
If all that sounds good to you, dive in. Personally I like Nordic humor and I appreciate the film’s touches of social commentary in its absurdist humor, but it is not for everyone.
In Helsinki, two lonely people meet by chance.
Fallen Leaves is a romantic comedy from Finland, with the driest of humor. Bone-dry does not cover it; this is a Sahara Desert of dry humor. No one cracks a smile and no one winks at the audience as they deadpan their satiric comedy lines. This is also the bad-luck couple of the year, who can’t seem to catch a break, except through the most absurd of coincidence. Fallen Leaves is undeniably funny, in it deadpan Nordic way but you have to meet the humor on its own terms. It is not there to help you.
If all that sounds good to you, dive in. Personally I like Nordic humor and I appreciate the film’s touches of social commentary in its absurdist humor, but it is not for everyone.
In Helsinki, two lonely people meet by chance.
- 12/8/2023
- by Cate Marquis
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Aki Kaurismäki’s 20th film keeps his signature humor and style. Fallen Leaves, starring Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen as lonely, meant-to-be lovers, finds the Finnish director at one of the peaks of his career, with his most recent film coming six years ago. In that time, the world has missed the droll comedy, dry warmth, and simplicity of Kaurismäki.
Fallen Leaves features everything one might want from a romcom in 2023: a cute dog, a one-liner about Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, and a singular karaoke scene in which neither of the main characters get on stage. Both Pöysti and Vatanen are wonderful, each of their characters existing in a state of hyperextended loneliness, finding one another through initial circumstance, then thrust together even when everything else seems intent on keeping them apart. Ansa (Pöysti) and Holappa (Vatanen), in many ways, need one another. Their lives are...
Fallen Leaves features everything one might want from a romcom in 2023: a cute dog, a one-liner about Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, and a singular karaoke scene in which neither of the main characters get on stage. Both Pöysti and Vatanen are wonderful, each of their characters existing in a state of hyperextended loneliness, finding one another through initial circumstance, then thrust together even when everything else seems intent on keeping them apart. Ansa (Pöysti) and Holappa (Vatanen), in many ways, need one another. Their lives are...
- 11/22/2023
- by Michael Frank
- The Film Stage
Writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s new deadpan dark dramedy Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) delighted the jury at Cannes in May 2023, as well as audiences at London Film Festival in October.
The Finnish filmmaker’s candid expertise at understanding emotional complexity is unrivalled in this tender, enchanting and romantic tale of love between two lonely singletons in Helsinki.
Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works in a local supermarket then goes home to her small inherited apartment, before repeating her daily grind the following day. Laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) has a similar existence, minus a home to call home, with his only passion coming from a cigarette and a drink with work colleague and friend Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen) at the end of the day.
All three characters have a chance meeting at a local karaoke bar, with Ansa, accompanied by best friend Tonja (Alina Tomnikov), making a lasting impression on Holappa, without a single word uttered between them.
The Finnish filmmaker’s candid expertise at understanding emotional complexity is unrivalled in this tender, enchanting and romantic tale of love between two lonely singletons in Helsinki.
Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works in a local supermarket then goes home to her small inherited apartment, before repeating her daily grind the following day. Laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) has a similar existence, minus a home to call home, with his only passion coming from a cigarette and a drink with work colleague and friend Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen) at the end of the day.
All three characters have a chance meeting at a local karaoke bar, with Ansa, accompanied by best friend Tonja (Alina Tomnikov), making a lasting impression on Holappa, without a single word uttered between them.
- 10/17/2023
- by Lisa Giles-Keddie
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
If you’re vibing with Aki Kaurismäki‘s droll wavelength of dry comedies about ordinary people in Helsinki, “Fallen Leaves” is definitely for you. This warm and witty romantic comedy about two lost souls adrift, who eventually find each other on the existential carousel to nowhere, won a Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival (where Ruben Östlund served as Jury President) and now represents Finland in the 2024 Best International Feature Film Oscar race. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for this Mubi release below on the heels of its New York Film Festival premiere.
The latest film from the Finnish director of “The Man Without a Past” and “Le Havre” tells the story of two lonely people. Ansa (whose name literally means “trapped” in Finnish and who is played wonderfully by Alma Pöysti) and Holappa, in between soul-numbing blue-collar jobs, meet each other by chance in the Helsinki night and maybe discover the first,...
The latest film from the Finnish director of “The Man Without a Past” and “Le Havre” tells the story of two lonely people. Ansa (whose name literally means “trapped” in Finnish and who is played wonderfully by Alma Pöysti) and Holappa, in between soul-numbing blue-collar jobs, meet each other by chance in the Helsinki night and maybe discover the first,...
- 10/12/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
An amuse-bouche of a film, Aki Kaurismäki’s latest comedy romance may leave you wanting more but it’s also a fully rounded, good looking experience packed with all the flavours we’ve come to expect from the master of deadpan down the years.
Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is working a dead-end job which, steeped in the sort of irony that the Finnish filmmaker has made his stock-in-trade, involves checking supermarket shelves for the products that have come to the end of their shelf life. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), meanwhile, is a metal worker with not much else in his life except a drink problem that's about to cost him his job. The pair of them don’t know each other… yet.
This, coupled with an unexpected meeting of eyes at the karaoke bar they’ve both gone to with friends, is the simple set up for Fallen Leaves that blooms, or rather threatens to bloom,...
Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is working a dead-end job which, steeped in the sort of irony that the Finnish filmmaker has made his stock-in-trade, involves checking supermarket shelves for the products that have come to the end of their shelf life. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), meanwhile, is a metal worker with not much else in his life except a drink problem that's about to cost him his job. The pair of them don’t know each other… yet.
This, coupled with an unexpected meeting of eyes at the karaoke bar they’ve both gone to with friends, is the simple set up for Fallen Leaves that blooms, or rather threatens to bloom,...
- 9/22/2023
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
While watching Aki Kaurismäki’s films, one may become aware of how peculiarly attentive the Finnish auteur is to room tones. And his latest, Fallen Leaves, is no exception: the vacuum-sealed deadness of a prefabricated one-room apartment; the cavernous bellow of a factory, enlivened by faraway clanks and moans; the slightly reverberant calm of a bar after the activity has died down; and the humming sine waves of a hospital room.
Such pleasantly varied tones constitute the sparse sonic world of Fallen Leaves, which takes place in an impoverished, industrial corner of Helsinki that will be familiar to viewers of Kaurismäki’s stubbornly proletariat cinema. They provide shades to the film’s overarching loneliness and drudgery, and it seems there are only two alternatives to this droning stillness: music, which wafts in the air from karaoke bar stages and record players, and radio news broadcasts, which unfailingly transmit tragic missives from the war in Ukraine.
Such pleasantly varied tones constitute the sparse sonic world of Fallen Leaves, which takes place in an impoverished, industrial corner of Helsinki that will be familiar to viewers of Kaurismäki’s stubbornly proletariat cinema. They provide shades to the film’s overarching loneliness and drudgery, and it seems there are only two alternatives to this droning stillness: music, which wafts in the air from karaoke bar stages and record players, and radio news broadcasts, which unfailingly transmit tragic missives from the war in Ukraine.
- 9/9/2023
- by Carson Lund
- Slant Magazine
Aki Kaurismäki’s Cannes Jury Prize winner “Fallen Leaves” has snagged the 2023 Intl. Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci) Grand Prix for best film of the past year. All films released after July 1 2022 were eligible.
The Fipresci Grand Prix will be presented to Kaurismäki at the San Sebastian Film Festival’s opening night gala ceremony on Sept. 22, a tradition that dates back to 1999. “Fallen Leaves” will also play in San Sebastian’s Perlak best of fests section.
Chosen by 669 Fipresci members from three finalists — the other two were “The Banshees of Inisherin,” by Martin McDonagh, and “Tár,” by Todd Field – “Fallen Leaves’” triumph reflects the general critical rapture with which the film was greeted at Cannes, though Variety didn’t join the party.
This is the second time that Kaurismäki will have received this recognition from the international critics, which went in 2017 to
“The Other Side of Hope.”
The fourth part...
The Fipresci Grand Prix will be presented to Kaurismäki at the San Sebastian Film Festival’s opening night gala ceremony on Sept. 22, a tradition that dates back to 1999. “Fallen Leaves” will also play in San Sebastian’s Perlak best of fests section.
Chosen by 669 Fipresci members from three finalists — the other two were “The Banshees of Inisherin,” by Martin McDonagh, and “Tár,” by Todd Field – “Fallen Leaves’” triumph reflects the general critical rapture with which the film was greeted at Cannes, though Variety didn’t join the party.
This is the second time that Kaurismäki will have received this recognition from the international critics, which went in 2017 to
“The Other Side of Hope.”
The fourth part...
- 8/23/2023
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki). What do we mean by “late films”? For Theodor Adorno, the maturity of late works of art did not resemble the kind one finds in fruit: “they are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.” Granted, Adorno was writing about Beethoven, but this idea of contrarian lateness still survives in debates around the term’s use in cinema. Intransigent and confrontational, late films are both a summation of a filmmaker’s oeuvre and a stripping down of their style. They’re masterful distillations of decades of craft, sheared, in a senescent bid for simplicity, until whatever’s left is honed and impenetrable to the point of alienation.I was thinking of this on my last days in Cannes, as the festival kept yielding new works by august masters: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer,...
- 5/31/2023
- MUBI
In 2006, Aki Kaurismäki was asked what he felt young filmmakers lacked. His response was almost Cartesian: “Humility,” the director suggested, “Above all, it is necessary to forget oneself.” The Finnish auteur returns with Fallen Leaves, a charming, moving, bittersweet romance packed with all the lovely things we’ve come to associate with him after four decades. The locations and colors still come in admirable shades of mustard and pea soup––as do the characters and their moods. As a film, Fallen Leaves could hardly be simpler––two people living separate, lonesome lives meet and maybe fall in love––but there is beauty in that simplicity and, as ever, Kaurismäki’s characters live far richer inner lives.
Few filmmakers warm the soul with such economy: Fallen Leaves is funny, heartbreaking, and only 82 minutes long. Alma Pöysti stars as Ansa, a supermarket worker who loses her job when she’s caught pocketing an expired sandwich.
Few filmmakers warm the soul with such economy: Fallen Leaves is funny, heartbreaking, and only 82 minutes long. Alma Pöysti stars as Ansa, a supermarket worker who loses her job when she’s caught pocketing an expired sandwich.
- 5/25/2023
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
To judge by Aki Kaurismäki’s typically wry and winsome “Fallen Leaves,” the Finnish auteur’s first movie since threatening to retire after “The Other Side of Hope” came out 2017, only two things have any significant importance have happened in the world over the last six years.
The first and most pressing of those is the war in Ukraine, which bleeds into Ansa’s (Alma Pöysti) already depressing kitchen every time the supermarket cashier dares to turn on her radio after work. Listening to news of the latest atrocity in Kyiv is the only thing worse than eating her microwaved dinner in the complete silence Ansa settles for when she can’t find anything more comforting on the airwaves. She doesn’t need any further evidence of the darkness outside her window, thank you very much.
The other major historical milestone since 2017 was obviously the release of Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,...
The first and most pressing of those is the war in Ukraine, which bleeds into Ansa’s (Alma Pöysti) already depressing kitchen every time the supermarket cashier dares to turn on her radio after work. Listening to news of the latest atrocity in Kyiv is the only thing worse than eating her microwaved dinner in the complete silence Ansa settles for when she can’t find anything more comforting on the airwaves. She doesn’t need any further evidence of the darkness outside her window, thank you very much.
The other major historical milestone since 2017 was obviously the release of Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,...
- 5/24/2023
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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...
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...
- 5/23/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Early in Aki Kaurismäki’s slender but enormously satisfying Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet Lehdet), the male protagonist is invited by his buddy to go to Friday night karaoke. “Tough guys don’t sing,” he replies, in the signature affectless deadpan shared by all the Finnish master’s characters. But that tough guy turns out to be yearning for love, refusing to give up when a lost phone number and a series of other obstacles keep him from a woman he barely knows. In a sense the tough guy is also Kaurismäki himself, inhabiting a world defined by dourness and melancholy but always seeking pathways to comfort, hope and light.
The director had spoken of retirement after his beautiful Syrian refugee tale The Other Side of Hope in 2017, and this return after six years is waggishly described as a work previously believed to be lost. It’s an expansion of Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy,...
The director had spoken of retirement after his beautiful Syrian refugee tale The Other Side of Hope in 2017, and this return after six years is waggishly described as a work previously believed to be lost. It’s an expansion of Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy,...
- 5/22/2023
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Humor, it seems, has returned to the Main Competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. After a few days of mostly serious dramas about Nazis and terrorists and sweatshops, a lighter touch has emerged from a couple of expected sources: first Todd Haynes, a filmmaker with a great range but also a real touch for pulpy material that he shows in “May December,” and now Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master of comedy so deadpan that it can take an audience half the movie to figure out that it’s Ok to laugh.
They figured it out when Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” premiered in Cannes on Monday. With a brisk one-hour-and-21-minute running time, the film is a wry delight whose very restraint is part of the joke. Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes standout “The Zone of Interest” might be a movie without a single closeup, but “Fallen Leaves” is pretty much a...
They figured it out when Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” premiered in Cannes on Monday. With a brisk one-hour-and-21-minute running time, the film is a wry delight whose very restraint is part of the joke. Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes standout “The Zone of Interest” might be a movie without a single closeup, but “Fallen Leaves” is pretty much a...
- 5/22/2023
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
The very first winner of the Palme d’Or in 1955 was future Best Picture Oscar winner Marty, which starred Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair as two lonely middle-age adults beginning a tentative relationship in search of love. Before it was called the Palme d’Or, the top Cannes prize known then as the Grand Prix, went in 1946 at the festival’s beginning to David Lean’s Brief Encounter, also the story of two adults who meet by chance and get together.
Both of those Cannes Classics have something inherently in common with Aki Kaurismaki’s wonderful, wryly funny, and poignant new film, Fallen Leaves, which premiered today at Cannes, the latest Competition entry for the master Finnish filmmaker who was last in the run for the Palme d’Or with 2011’s equally great Le Havre. Despite several Eumenical prizes at the fest over the years, Kaurismaki only came close to...
Both of those Cannes Classics have something inherently in common with Aki Kaurismaki’s wonderful, wryly funny, and poignant new film, Fallen Leaves, which premiered today at Cannes, the latest Competition entry for the master Finnish filmmaker who was last in the run for the Palme d’Or with 2011’s equally great Le Havre. Despite several Eumenical prizes at the fest over the years, Kaurismaki only came close to...
- 5/22/2023
- by Pete Hammond
- Deadline Film + TV
"I don't even know your name." "I'll tell you next time." The Match Factory has revealed a trailer for Aki Kaurismäki's latest film Fallen Leaves, his light-hearted romantic "tragicomedy". This is premiering at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival later this month, playing in the Main Competition, not his first time either (he won the Grand Prix once before in Cannes for The Man Without a Past). Two lonely people who meet each other by chance in the Helsinki night and try to find the first love of their lives. "With this film, Kaurismäki tips his hat to Bresson, Ozu and Chaplin, wanting to tell a story about the things that may lead humanity to a future: longing for love, solidarity, hope, and respect for another human being, nature and anything living or dead." The movie is inspired by the song “Les feuilles mortes" (translates to "Dead Leaves”), composed by Joseph Kosma...
- 5/10/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey has denied he has been keeping a low profile since a string of sexual misconduct accusations brought his stellar career to a halt in 2017, in a rare meeting with the press ahead of an awards ceremony in northern Italy on Monday evening.
“I live my life every day, I go to restaurants, I meet people, drive, play tennis, I’ve always managed to meet generous, genuine, compassionate people,” Spacey told Italian news agency Ansa.
“I haven’t hidden away, I haven’t gone to live in a cave,” he said.
Spacey was speaking ahead of a special honorary event organized by Italy’s National Cinema Museum in the northern city of Turin on Monday.
Deadline’s request to speak to Spacey was turned down but the actor agreed to speak to a handful of Italian outlets including local news agency Ansa.
The actor is due to give a public masterclass,...
“I live my life every day, I go to restaurants, I meet people, drive, play tennis, I’ve always managed to meet generous, genuine, compassionate people,” Spacey told Italian news agency Ansa.
“I haven’t hidden away, I haven’t gone to live in a cave,” he said.
Spacey was speaking ahead of a special honorary event organized by Italy’s National Cinema Museum in the northern city of Turin on Monday.
Deadline’s request to speak to Spacey was turned down but the actor agreed to speak to a handful of Italian outlets including local news agency Ansa.
The actor is due to give a public masterclass,...
- 1/16/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
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