Following Raw and Titane, Julia Ducournau has set her third feature with Alpha. Though no plot details have been unveiled this far, Golshifteh Farahani (Paterson, About Elly) and Tahar Rahim (A Prophet) will lead the film, Deadline reports. “Alpha is Julia’s most personal, profound work yet, and we are looking forward to a global audience discovering the story with as much excitement as we did,” said Filmnation and Charades, while the producers added, “Alpha is a new page in Julia Ducournau’s corpus that is both very consistent with the previous ones and entirely new in its tone.”
Following All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh is stepping up to a major studio project with a Leonardo da Vinci film set up at Universal Pictures. The film is based on Walter Isaacson‘s 2017 biography, which showed “how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy,” Deadline reports. Haigh will direct and write the film, based on a previous draft by Christopher Hampton.
Romain Gavras (Athena) has assembled quite the cast for his English-language debut Sacrifice, featuring Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Salma Hayek Pinault, and Brendan Fraser, Deadline reports. The film, co-written by Gavras and Will Arbery, is set at a high-end charity gala which is raided by a violent group of radicals on a mystical quest to fulfill a prophecy. Taylor-Joy will play “the passionate antagonist” and Evans will play “the movie star she has tapped to die, along with the two others.” Production will kick off in September, so expect a 2025 premiere.
Emily the Criminal director John Patton Ford has expanded the cast of his revenge thriller Huntington, which A24 has picked up. Deadline reports Ed Harris and Margaret Qualley have joined Glen Powell. The film follows “Becket Redfellow (Powell), the heir to a multibillion-dollar fortune who will stop at nothing to get what he deserves … or what he thinks he deserves.”
Janelle Monáe, Brian Tyree Henry, Missy Elliott, and Halle Bailey have joined Michel Gondry’s untitled coming-of-age musical, which is loosely inspired by the upbringing of Pharrell Williams. They join Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in the Universal-backed project is set in 1977 Virginia Beach. Learn more about the project here.
It’s now been a decade since The Tribe and we’ve been waiting for Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s follow-up ever since. He’s now added a new film to his slate, with the war crime drama Occupation. Based on Peter Pomerantsev’s May 2022 article for The Atlantic entitled “We Can Only Be Enemies,” the film follows a Ukrainian family whose house is shelled at the onset of the war. Unable to reach Kyiv, they return to their village. Taking refuge in their bomb shelter, they have no choice but to cohabitate with the Russian soldiers responsible for the bombardment. Production will begin in Poland this fall. “This is a tremendous project, the kind that wakes you up, punches you in the face and makes you want to fight your life. It reminds us of Son of Saul or Come and See and Myroslav already proved the cinematic power he can bring to this experience with his first film,The Tribe,” said Goodfellas’ Vincent Maraval.
Once and Flora and Son director John Carney is in production on his next feature Power Ballad, starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. The Dublin-set feature is described as an “uplifting music-driven story about a wedding singer, a rock star, and the song that comes between them.”
Tilda Swinton has joined Colin Farrell in a new feature from All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger. Reteaming with Netflix, The Ballad of a Small Player is scripted by Rowan Joffe, based on Lawrence Osborne’s novel following “a high-stakes gambler who decides to lay low in Macau after his past and debts catch up with him. Along the way he encounters a kindred spirit who might just hold the key to his salvation,” Deadline reports. Production begins later this year, around the time Berger will debut his next feature Conclave debuts.
Lastly, the first look at Gia Coppola’s next film has arrived.