There are some movies that we should never remake. However, make no mistake, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead is not one of them. We should celebrate when bad movies are remade. Yet, while most people look back at the Christina Applegate 1991 modern (imagine me using air quotes) classic, you shouldn’t. It’s unfunny and hardly worth your time.
It’s a perfect example of why the audience dictates classics. For some reason, like the ridiculous remake of Road House, people fondly look back at films they grew up with. The remake of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead misses the mark like the original by not embracing the dark comedy possibilities and trading away any originality for a family comedy premise that doesn’t work.
And that’s too bad because Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead has a likable cast and has positive messaging.
Simone Joy Jones...
It’s a perfect example of why the audience dictates classics. For some reason, like the ridiculous remake of Road House, people fondly look back at films they grew up with. The remake of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead misses the mark like the original by not embracing the dark comedy possibilities and trading away any originality for a family comedy premise that doesn’t work.
And that’s too bad because Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead has a likable cast and has positive messaging.
Simone Joy Jones...
- 4/9/2024
- by M.N. Miller
- FandomWire
Steve Buscemi’s “The Listener” is heading to the Sarasota Film Festival.
The 26th edition of the Florida fest will feature live and in-person screenings and events that will take place across Sarasota beginning on April 5. The 10-day fest will feature 23 narrative features, 41 documentary features and 81 short films.
Buscemi will be in Sarasota to participate in a Q&a following the screening of “The Listener,” which will serve as the closing night film. About a crisis hotline worker enduring the pressures of her job, the film starring Tessa Thompson made its world premiere at Venice Film Festival in 2022.
Lynn Dow’s “Bull Street,” starring Loretta Devine and Amy Madigan, will open the fest on April 5. The drama centers on a South Carolina small-town lawyer (Malynda Hale) as she faces local politics and an unwavering judge (Madigan) when her estranged father’s family tries to evict her and her grandmother (Devine) from her home.
The 26th edition of the Florida fest will feature live and in-person screenings and events that will take place across Sarasota beginning on April 5. The 10-day fest will feature 23 narrative features, 41 documentary features and 81 short films.
Buscemi will be in Sarasota to participate in a Q&a following the screening of “The Listener,” which will serve as the closing night film. About a crisis hotline worker enduring the pressures of her job, the film starring Tessa Thompson made its world premiere at Venice Film Festival in 2022.
Lynn Dow’s “Bull Street,” starring Loretta Devine and Amy Madigan, will open the fest on April 5. The drama centers on a South Carolina small-town lawyer (Malynda Hale) as she faces local politics and an unwavering judge (Madigan) when her estranged father’s family tries to evict her and her grandmother (Devine) from her home.
- 3/21/2024
- by Addie Morfoot
- Variety Film + TV
"It isn't about me... I'm just hearing their stories, they're the ones living them." Vertical has revealed their trailer for an indie film titled The Listener, a solo drama starring Tessa Thompson as the only person actually in the film. The latest work directed by Steve Buscemi, who also made the underrated Interview back in 2007. After first premiering at festivals in 2022 and playing throughout 2023 on the festival circuit, The Listener is finally set for a proper debut at the end of March this year. Beth is a crisis helpline volunteer that gets on the phone every night, fielding calls from people feeling lonely, broken, and hopeless. During tonight’s shift, the stakes rise: is this the night she will save a hurting soul - or lose one? Tessa Thompson stars as Beth; other voices heard on the phone come from actors Rebecca Hall, Derek Cecil, Margaret Cho, Blu del Barrio,...
- 3/15/2024
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Steve Buscemi hasn’t directed a film in a while: since 2007, with “Interview,” which he co-starred in with Sienna Miller. But now the “actor’s actor” is again behind the camera for his latest film. Or rather, he premiered “The Listener” at the Venice Film Festival two years ago, and Vertical Entertainment finally has it ready for a day-and-date theatrical release later this month.
Continue reading ‘The Listener’ Trailer: Steve Buscemi’s Latest Drama Starring Tessa Thompson Hits Theaters On March 29 at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘The Listener’ Trailer: Steve Buscemi’s Latest Drama Starring Tessa Thompson Hits Theaters On March 29 at The Playlist.
- 3/15/2024
- by Ned Booth
- The Playlist
Vicky Cristina Barcelona star Rebecca Hall was one of the buzziest names to feature on the BBC’s recent 12-strong drama slate and the BAFTA winner can now be seen in first look images playing a teacher in Element Pictures’ The Listeners.
Adapted by the novel’s author Jordan Tannahill, Hall’s character Claire is tormented by a low humming sound that no one else around her can hear. This seemingly innocuous noise gradually upsets the balance of her life, increasing tension between herself and her husband, Paul, and daughter, Ashley. But despite multiple doctors, no obvious source or medical cause can be found.
Scroll down for more pics, including another of Hall and one of Ollie West (Hamnet), who plays student Kyle and can also hear the sound.
Also starring in the series, which was filmed in Greater Manchester, are Prasanna Puwanarajah, Amr Waked (Ramy), Gayle Rankin, Mia Tharia (Phoenix Rise), Franc Ashman, Samuel Edward Cook, Karen Henthorn, Lucy Sheen (Ping Pong) and Ian Mercer.
Deadline revealed the show’s development last March and Poor Things producer Element is making it with Janicza Bravo – whose past credits include Zola, Mrs America and Them – directing. Hall is also starring in James L. Brooks’ next movie Ella McCay and Tessa Thompson’s similarly-named helpline drama The Listener. Fremantle is distributing The Listeners.
Rebecca Dundon, SVP Scripted Content, International at Fremantle said: “The Listeners is a thriller like no other that will surprise, provoke and challenge the status quo.”
Ollie West as Kyle and Rebecca Hall as Claire. Image: Element Pictures/Fremantle/BBC/Des Willie Rebecca Hall as Claire. Image: Element Pictures/Fremantle/BBC/Will Robson-Scott
Tannahill and Bravo are EP-ing alongside Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann and Rachel Dargavel for Element Pictures, Rebecca Ferguson for the BBC, and Alice Birch. The series is produced by BAFTA-nominated Ed King. Fremantle is handling global sales.
Adapted by the novel’s author Jordan Tannahill, Hall’s character Claire is tormented by a low humming sound that no one else around her can hear. This seemingly innocuous noise gradually upsets the balance of her life, increasing tension between herself and her husband, Paul, and daughter, Ashley. But despite multiple doctors, no obvious source or medical cause can be found.
Scroll down for more pics, including another of Hall and one of Ollie West (Hamnet), who plays student Kyle and can also hear the sound.
Also starring in the series, which was filmed in Greater Manchester, are Prasanna Puwanarajah, Amr Waked (Ramy), Gayle Rankin, Mia Tharia (Phoenix Rise), Franc Ashman, Samuel Edward Cook, Karen Henthorn, Lucy Sheen (Ping Pong) and Ian Mercer.
Deadline revealed the show’s development last March and Poor Things producer Element is making it with Janicza Bravo – whose past credits include Zola, Mrs America and Them – directing. Hall is also starring in James L. Brooks’ next movie Ella McCay and Tessa Thompson’s similarly-named helpline drama The Listener. Fremantle is distributing The Listeners.
Rebecca Dundon, SVP Scripted Content, International at Fremantle said: “The Listeners is a thriller like no other that will surprise, provoke and challenge the status quo.”
Ollie West as Kyle and Rebecca Hall as Claire. Image: Element Pictures/Fremantle/BBC/Des Willie Rebecca Hall as Claire. Image: Element Pictures/Fremantle/BBC/Will Robson-Scott
Tannahill and Bravo are EP-ing alongside Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann and Rachel Dargavel for Element Pictures, Rebecca Ferguson for the BBC, and Alice Birch. The series is produced by BAFTA-nominated Ed King. Fremantle is handling global sales.
- 3/1/2024
- by Max Goldbart
- Deadline Film + TV
The upcoming Woodstock Film Festival will kick off with Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” and present a lifetime achievement award to James Ivory.
The 24th edition of the fest, which runs from Sept. 27 to Oct. 1 in New York’s Hudson Valley, about 100 miles north of Manhattan, features a lineup of world, U.S. and New York premieres of feature films directed by filmmakers ranging from Steve Buscemi (“The Listener”) and Wim Wenders (“Anselm”) to Roger Ross Williams (“Stamped From the Beginning”).
Opening night “Fair Play,” an erotic thriller about a power-hungry couple contending for power at a cutthroat financial firm, was acquired by Netflix for $20 million after debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Wff will be held at venues in Woodstock, Rosendale and Saugerties, all of which are Hudson Valley towns where many Academy members own homes, making the fest an award season campaign hotspot.
Additional narrative feature...
The 24th edition of the fest, which runs from Sept. 27 to Oct. 1 in New York’s Hudson Valley, about 100 miles north of Manhattan, features a lineup of world, U.S. and New York premieres of feature films directed by filmmakers ranging from Steve Buscemi (“The Listener”) and Wim Wenders (“Anselm”) to Roger Ross Williams (“Stamped From the Beginning”).
Opening night “Fair Play,” an erotic thriller about a power-hungry couple contending for power at a cutthroat financial firm, was acquired by Netflix for $20 million after debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Wff will be held at venues in Woodstock, Rosendale and Saugerties, all of which are Hudson Valley towns where many Academy members own homes, making the fest an award season campaign hotspot.
Additional narrative feature...
- 8/29/2023
- by Addie Morfoot
- Variety Film + TV
Click here to read the full article.
Taking a breather from some of the physically demanding and sometimes villainous roles she’s played of late in the likes of Marvel franchises and HBO’s Westworld, Tessa Thompson stars in The Listener as a more unsung sort of superhuman: a crisis hotline worker.
Perhaps seeing a chance to push to nearly the limit that old thespian saying — sometimes attributed to performance coach Stella Adler — that “acting is reacting,” this spare, low-tech work mostly focuses on Thompson’s expressive face as she listens to calls for help from 10 very different people in distress. The voice cast offers a mix of famous (Margaret Cho, Alia Shawkat, Rebecca Hall) and less well-known names, democratically allotted roughly the same amount of air time by the film.
The Listener represents actor-director Steve Buscemi’s fifth directing credit, the second after Lonesome Jim where’s he’s stayed strictly behind the camera.
Taking a breather from some of the physically demanding and sometimes villainous roles she’s played of late in the likes of Marvel franchises and HBO’s Westworld, Tessa Thompson stars in The Listener as a more unsung sort of superhuman: a crisis hotline worker.
Perhaps seeing a chance to push to nearly the limit that old thespian saying — sometimes attributed to performance coach Stella Adler — that “acting is reacting,” this spare, low-tech work mostly focuses on Thompson’s expressive face as she listens to calls for help from 10 very different people in distress. The voice cast offers a mix of famous (Margaret Cho, Alia Shawkat, Rebecca Hall) and less well-known names, democratically allotted roughly the same amount of air time by the film.
The Listener represents actor-director Steve Buscemi’s fifth directing credit, the second after Lonesome Jim where’s he’s stayed strictly behind the camera.
- 9/12/2022
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Standing between Steve Buscemi’s newest directorial effort, “The Listener,” and his last time on the director’s chair for the Sienna Miller-starring drama “Interview” is a whopping 15 years. Buscemi has been open about his desire to direct again, but nothing seemed to work out until Oscar-nominated writer Alessandro Camon knocked on his door, script in hand. Timing, ever-elusive, showed its poignant hand: this story about a helpline volunteer ended up leading Buscemi to call one himself, a decision he claimed helped him process the recent death of his wife of 30 years, filmmaker and choreographer Jo Andres.
Continue reading ‘The Listener’ Review: Steve Buscemi’s Latest Directorial Effort With Tessa Thompson Lacks Emotional Depth [Venice] at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘The Listener’ Review: Steve Buscemi’s Latest Directorial Effort With Tessa Thompson Lacks Emotional Depth [Venice] at The Playlist.
- 9/10/2022
- by Rafaela Sales Ross
- The Playlist
If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.
Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is...
Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is...
- 9/10/2022
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Phone Call from a Stranger: Buscemi Conducts a Conduit of Trauma in Striking One-Woman Show
Conjuring everything from Jean Cocteau to T.S. Eliot, Steve Buscemi unites with The Messenger (2009) scribe Alessandro Camon for his first narrative feature in fifteen years, the diametrically opposed The Listener. A one-woman grandstand for Tessa Thompson (also producing), the only actor onscreen guiding multiple phone conversations through miscellaneous vestiges of desperation during a routinely numbing night shift as a helpline volunteer, it’s a hypnotic exercise predicated by moments of suggested violence, trenchant melancholy and often poetic rumination on human resilience despite the odds.
A cast of notables provide the vocal counterparts for Thompson, some immediately recognizable and others not, but Buscemi presents conversational vignettes both soothing and upsetting.…...
Conjuring everything from Jean Cocteau to T.S. Eliot, Steve Buscemi unites with The Messenger (2009) scribe Alessandro Camon for his first narrative feature in fifteen years, the diametrically opposed The Listener. A one-woman grandstand for Tessa Thompson (also producing), the only actor onscreen guiding multiple phone conversations through miscellaneous vestiges of desperation during a routinely numbing night shift as a helpline volunteer, it’s a hypnotic exercise predicated by moments of suggested violence, trenchant melancholy and often poetic rumination on human resilience despite the odds.
A cast of notables provide the vocal counterparts for Thompson, some immediately recognizable and others not, but Buscemi presents conversational vignettes both soothing and upsetting.…...
- 9/9/2022
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
In his acting life, Steve Buscemi has certainly mixed things up, finding time for Bruckheimer/Simpson blockbusters, Pixar animation and even Adam Sandler movies in a bid to avoid typecasting as the definitive New York indie guy. In his directing career, however, he tends to stick to a certain genre: small, intimate, personal films like his excellent 1996 debut Trees Lounge, which told the story of a melancholic underachiever whose life revolves around a seedy dive bar where the crowd of misfit regulars become his bizarre de facto family. Loneliness is a familiar motif in Buscemi’s work, and he excelled himself with that in 2005’s Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck as a young man who’s failed in the big city and now has to move in with his parents.
The Listener, surprisingly only his fifth movie, contains elements of both these titles, starring Tessa Thompson as Beth, a helpline...
The Listener, surprisingly only his fifth movie, contains elements of both these titles, starring Tessa Thompson as Beth, a helpline...
- 9/9/2022
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern devastated the Venice Film Festival with the world premiere of Florian Zeller’s “The Son,” which earned a 10-minute standing ovation. Jackman appeared visibly moved during the film’s reception, as did the audience. Jackman hugged his young co-star Zen McGrath amid the ovation. The film, which centers on a gut-wrenching family tragedy, led to audible gasps from viewers during one dramatic scene. Based on this rapturous reception, Zeller might be back for more Oscar glory with “The Son.”
“The Son” centers on “a family as it falls apart and tries to come back together again,” according to Sony Pictures Classics’ official synopsis. Jackman stars as a father whose 17-year-old son comes to live with him after deciding he can no longer stay with his mother (Dern) years after his parents’ divorce. Jackson’s character, Peter, has a new partner, Vanessa Kirby’s Beth. Peter...
“The Son” centers on “a family as it falls apart and tries to come back together again,” according to Sony Pictures Classics’ official synopsis. Jackman stars as a father whose 17-year-old son comes to live with him after deciding he can no longer stay with his mother (Dern) years after his parents’ divorce. Jackson’s character, Peter, has a new partner, Vanessa Kirby’s Beth. Peter...
- 9/7/2022
- by Marta Balaga and Zack Sharf
- Variety Film + TV
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