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By William Earl According To The variety Sometimes you just need to light a guy on fire. The first scene in “Redux Redux,” in theaters today via Saban Films, features Irene (Michaela McManus), a multiverse traveller, lighting a man tied to a chair on fire and watching him burn. We quickly learn that the man is a killer who murdered Irene’s daughter, and she has devoted her life to traveling to alternate worlds in order to repeatedly get revenge. The indelible flaming image ended up on the film’s original poster, yet it was borne out of a scrappy indie sensibility from writing and directing duo Kevin and Matthew McManus. “We knew we needed to grab the audience,” Matthew McManus says. “Sometimes it feels like it’s a competition between the big screen and the small screen in your ...

By Guy Lodge According To The variety Whether saturating entire frames or dribbling down a rare contrasting design element, there’s red everywhere you look in “The Blood Countess,” as you might well expect. Little of it, however, is the dark congealed claret of blood as we know it. Ulrike Ottinger prefers to paint in the garishly declarative, candied reds of off-brand ketchup, kickass lipstick and iridescent B-movie gore effects — the good, lurid, fake stuff, all the more appropriately artificial for a delirious vampire movie that piles lore upon mythology upon pizza-dream vision, hurtling its story several planets past the true one of its ostensible protagonist, Countess Elizabeth Báthory. Báthory’s legacy can afford such liberties. The life of the Hungarian noblewoman and se...

By Guy Lodge According To The variety The immigrant experience is most often discussed, and most easily understood, as one of an entire person’s movement and relocation: a journey from A to B and perhaps further letters, with concomitant processes of discovery and nostalgia, alienation and adaptation. It’s less simple, however, to articulate the disembodying nature of immigration: the sense of a phantom self left behind, living the life that might have been, and uncannily confronting you when you return. A film of many subtle, tricky marvels, Geneviève Dulude-De Celles‘s slowly bewitching “Nina Roza” comes closer than many to conveying that strange, imprecise separation of the soul — through both lucidly expressed feeling, and artfully built narrative structure. One of the quiet...

By Leo Barraclough According To The variety Finance and sales outfit Global Constellation has boarded international sales on the upcoming live-action family feature “Emil and the Detectives.” The film is a contemporary adaptation of Erich Kästner’s classic 1929 novel, which has been translated into more than 60 languages since its original publication and remains a cornerstone of children’s literature. The film is written by Antonia Scheurlen and directed by David Dietl. Currently in post-production, the film is slated for a theatrical release across German-speaking territories next fall via Warner Bros. Pictures. The story follows young Emil, whose money for his grandmother is stolen during his train trip to Berlin. Determined to get it back, he teams up with a ...