One, You Lock the Target: Magnolia Goes After Headhunters, Point Blank and von Trier's Melancholia
By Cindy Davis | Posted Under Trade News | Comments (3)
Magnolia Pictures is snapping up films at the ongoing Berlin Film Festival, having acquired three thrillers already: from France, Point Blank, Norway’s Headhunters and Denmark’s Melancholia. Point Blank is an adrenaline-powered race that opens with a nurse, Samuel (Gilles Lellouche), saving a criminal’s life in the same hospital where his pregnant wife, Nadia is on bed rest. When a group of the criminal’s henchmen show up to spring the bad guy, they kidnap Nadia to force Samuel’s cooperation in getting the heavily-guarded criminal out of intensive care. With Samuel willing to do anything to save his wife and unborn child, he’s in an impossible situation between the cops and criminals. Magnolia likens writer/director Fred Cavayé’s (The Next Three Days, Anything for Her) latest to Die Hard and Taken.
Morten Tyldum’s (Fallen Angels, Buddy) Headhunters is based on the Norwegian Book Club’s Best Novel of the Year, Jo Nesbø’s tale of a headhunter who also steals art. The film stars Aksel Hennie (A Somewhat Gentle Man) as Roger, a scoundrel living the high life and beyond his means, by virtue of his side occupation. Going after a valuable painting that belongs to a former mercenary, Roger discovers something that puts himself in danger and makes him a hunted man.
Finally, Magnolia has secured the U.S. rights to Lars von Trier’s mysterious science fiction thriller Melancholia, starring Kristen Dunst, Alexander Skarsgård, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård, Brady Corbet and Udo Kier. That’s one hell of a cast. In what von Trier describes as “A beautiful movie about the end of the world,” not much is known other than that Dunst and Gainsbourg play sisters who have different reactions to the impending apocalypse. Someone at Twitch was able to see the first teaser and describes what he saw as “gorgeous.”
Magnolia is expected to release all three films later this year.
(Sources: indiewire, Hollywood Reporter)
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Comments
Posted by: splinter at February 15, 2011 6:34 PM
oh, i love my science fiction. here's hoping that melancholia is as good as it seems.