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It’s been nearly a decade and a half since Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel performed at the American Film Institute’s tribute to Mike Nichols in Los Angeles. The time in between then has been marked with Garfunkel’s four-year struggle to regain his voice after being diagnosed with vocal cord paresis, followed by a delayed Simon & Garfunkel North American tour that never materialized and Garfunkel’s public denouncement of his former bandmate.

However, their long-standing feud has seemed to reach a healing point. Speaking with The Sun, Garfunkel...

Barbra Streisand’s life and legacy is being captured on the big screen like never before.

Frank Marshall, a fellow Egot winner like Streisand, is set to direct a documentary about the “A Star Is Born” and “Funny Girl” icon. The yet-untitled feature will include never-before-seen videos, audio recordings, and personal keepsakes from Streisand’s archives.

Alex Gibney (“In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon”) is producing, with the film hailing from Sony Music Vision in partnership with Columbia Records, Jigsaw Productions, and The Kennedy/Marshall Company.

The official description reads: “Utilizing this treasure trove of archival materials alongside contemporary verité, the documentary will provide an in depth look of Streisand’s star studded past and her current artistic endeavors.” The film will also “offer an intimate and comprehensive exploration of every facet of the iconic multi-hyphenate who, in a career spanning six decades, has excelled in every area of entertainment.

Altitude Film Distribution has picked up a raft of titles to release in UK-Ireland in the next six months, including Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, which is the opening film of the San Sebastian film festival in September.

Noemie Merlant, Naomi Watts, Jamie Campbell Bower and Will Sharpe star in Emmanuelle, about a woman’s erotic fantasies when she travels to Hong Kong on a business trip.

The Veterans is handling sales with Pathe releasing in France on September 25. Neon has North American rights.

The film is Diwan’s English-language debut and is based on Emmanuelle Arsan’s French novel about...

“Ezra,” the story of a stand-up comic embarking on a road trip with his autistic son, is the kind of movie that Hollywood doesn’t make much anymore. It’s not based on a toy or a comic book; instead it’s a warm-hearted, deeply human story without much in the way of special effects. But the movie, which opened last weekend in the height of summer popcorn season, is exactly what Closer Media, the new film and television company that backed the production, was founded to champion.

“We want to tell stories from all over the world that are meaningful and that can bring people closer together,” says Zhang Xin, noting that Closer’s mission statement is right there in its name. “When a project comes to us, we ask does it move our heart and does it open our eyes?”

It’s a new challenge for Zhang, a...

Salman Rushdie will be the center of a new documentary from Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director behind “Taxi to the Dark Side” snd “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” Tentatively titled “Knife,” the docu is inspired by Rushdie’s memoir “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” which was published in April.

The book is an account of the author’s life and career, and also depicts the 2022 assassination attempt against the Indian-born, British-American novelist and the long recovery that followed. Rushdie was stabbed 15 times in in Chautauqua, N.Y. by a 24-year old New Jersey man with a knife. Rushdie’s neck, eye, and chest were targeted, causing the writer to collapse on stage during a talk he was giving at Chautauqua’s amphitheater stage.

Rushdie, 76, lost vision in one eye and was left incapacitated in one hand after the attempted murder.

Gibney’s “Knife” will explore Rushdie...

"I want to go and follow the music, but you never know what you're going to find along the way." Another new official trailer has debuted for the documentary film titled In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, the latest from Alex Gibney following his docs on The Forever Prisoner, and Boris Becker. This first premiered at the 2023 Toronto & London Film Festivals last fall, and is already streaming on MGM+ in the US (though we missed this when it first dropped). The film follows Paul Simon inside the studio making his new album Seven Psalms while looking back on his six-decade career with countless musical peaks from Sounds of Silence to Graceland. Gibney's In Restless Dreams is supposedly the definitive musical biography of Paul Simon, one of the greatest songwriters (and performers as well) in the history of rock 'n roll. It's yet another one of these music docs...

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The movie lineup has some excellent variety, like the new “Mean Girls” musical movie, Oscar-winner “American Fiction,” the new George Clooney directorial effort “The Boys in the Boat,” “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie,” “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension,” “The Silence of the Lambs,...

Music movies are having a moment — if, indeed, they ever stopped having one. Take the pop-music biopic. There are times, like right now, when it surges in popularity, yet the form has never gone out of style. And music documentaries, a staple of the indie-film world, have only proliferated during the streaming era. This means that they have to compete for visibility, but a ton of them are getting made and (mostly) getting seen. They’ve become a happy epidemic.

A few, like “Amy” or “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?,” are popular and vital enough to have carved out a place in the culture — and, in the case of both those films, to have inspired the creation of a biopic. I have it on good authority that when you’re trying to put together a music documentary, the prospect of it spawning a biopic can be a key selling point.

US filmmaker Alex Gibney says Musk, his documentary about businessman and investor Elon Musk, is “likely to be seen next year”.

The film is currently in production through Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, with Closer Media, AC Independent and Double Agent. Gibney told Screen he “keeps reaching out” to the tech billionaire to be involved in the film, but without success so far.

“It’s likely to be seen next year; I’m working on it now,” said Gibney, speaking to Screen at Cph:dox in Copenhagen where he gave a talk on Tuesday, March 19. “We keep reaching out [to Musk], but I haven...

In a keynote conversation Tuesday at Copenhagen’s leading international documentary festival Cph:dox, Academy Award winning filmmaker and producer Alex Gibney talked honestly about the winding road of making it in the documentary world, the creative process, and the lessons of life, partly learned from singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

The inspirational talk at the baroque Kunsthal Charlottenborg exhibition space, with moderator Thom Powers, Toronto Film Festival programmer, was a prelude to the festival’s screening of Gibney’s two-part doc “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” which debuted on MGM+ March 17.

“What I learned from Paul was that when he wrote ‘The Sound of Silence,’ he sat alone and words came to him; creativity started to flow, and just like Bob Dylan with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ [the song] suddenly fit and he felt like a conduit.”

Gibney said letting free associations take over, having an unguarded curiosity and generosity were some...

In January 2019, Paul Simon awoke from a dream. Some voice in his head had informed him, deep within his Rem cycle, that he was going to work on a project called “Seven Psalms.” The singer-songwriter behind “The Sound of Silence,” “A Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” “Love Me Like a Rock,” and several dozen other songs that have likely been part of the soundtrack of your life, willingly or unwillingly, had effectively been retired for several years. Music-wise, he had nothing on deck except for this lovely little riff he’d...

For documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, what made “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” different from other music docs he has helmed was “being up close and personal for that creative process. I’m a nut for those movies where you see how baseballs are made, how tennis balls are made. This was like how rock and roll is made with Paul Simon. It’s like, wow.” Gibney and Simon discussed the MGM+ documentary series with moderator Stephen Colbert after its New York City premiere at the DGA Theater on March 13.

“In Restless Dreams” tells the story of Paul Simon’s life and career while also documenting the creation of the singer-songwriter’s latest album, “Seven Psalms,” in the midst of sudden hearing loss in one ear. “That’s come back to enough of a degree that I am comfortable singing and playing guitar and playing a few other instruments,...

On the eve of Sundance Film Festival’s kickoff, Nick Shumaker — the New York-based boss of AC Independent, the sales and finance division of Anonymous Content (“Spotlight”) — is feeling celebratory. The banner will celebrate its first birthday with five movies playing in Park City: “Kneecap” (pictured above), “Between the Temples,” “War Game,” “Union” and “Handling the Undead.”

Within a year, AC Independent has become a force in the indie film landscape, handling sales and financing for some major projects, such as Alex Gibney’s “Musk,” “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” as well as the U.K. rights for A24’s “Talk to Me” and the recent Golden Globe-winning animated film “The Boy and the Heron.”

Shumaker, a former agent at UTA, talked to Variety about the company’s international DNA, his hopes for the theatrical market and optimism about the resilience of independent film — as illustrated by...

MGM+ has announced the acquisition of the two-part docuseries “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, debuting on the streamer on March 17 and March 24 at 9 p.m. Edt/Pdt. It focuses on the career of musician Paul Simon.

Per the docuseries’ description, “In Restless Dreams” “juxtaposes Simon’s process of making a new album during the Covid-19 pandemic against archival material tracing Simon’s career and creative journey, including revelatory, previously unseen footage from such historic moments as the recording of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and ‘Graceland,’ Simon & Garfunkel’s unforgettable reunion concert in Central Park, and, 10 years later, Simon’s solo concert there, where he performed before 750,000 people.”

Making appearances in the docuseries are “Saturday Night Live” creator and producer Lorne Michaels, Simon’s wife and singer Edie Brickwell and composer Wynton Marsalis.

Alex Gibney (“The Inventor”) directs and produces, with Jigsaw, Closer Media and Anonymous Content jointly producing.

Updated: Just hours after this article was first posted, MGM+ announced it had acquired Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” and will air as a two-part docuseries on March 17 and March 24, 2024 at 9 p.m. Edt/Pdt.

It’s not too late to pick up a thoughtful gift for the people in your life, and that includes film distributors. While much of Hollywood is shutting down in advance of the holidays, plenty of cinema-loving elves are still toiling away in hopes of seeing their (very deserving) films land underneath the metaphorical tree.

And there are plenty of gifts to share, because even as the distribution landscape continues to shift and shape with startling regularity, some of the year’s most interesting and unique cinematic efforts are still looking for a home. In fact, we’ve got 18 of them wrapped and ready to go.

This holiday season,...

The 2023 Hamptons International Film Festival has unveiled the jury and audience awards for this year’s festival.

The lineup included opening night’s “Nyad” and Alex Gibney’s documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.” Todd Haynes, who received the Achievement in Directing Award, was in attendance for a Spotlight screening of “May December.”

The official Hiff Award for Best Narrative Feature was given to Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s “20,000 Species of Bees,” per the jury’s selection. The feature follows an eight-year-old girl and her grandmother over the course of a summer spent in a village known for beekeeping.

Joanna Arnow’s “The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed” was also recognized in the Best Narrative Feature category with a special mention.

Meanwhile, the Hiff Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to “Fresh Kills,” directed by Jennifer Esposito. The film, which premiered at 2023 Tribeca,...

Updated with latest: The Toronto Film Festival began September 7 in Ontario with opening-night movie The Boy and the Heron, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. It kicked off a lineup for the fest’s 48th edition that included world premieres of GameStop pic Dumb Money, Netflix’s Pain Hustlers, Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, Kristin Scott Thomas’ Scarlett Johansson pic North Star, Chris Pine’s Poolman, Michael Keaton-directed Knox Goes Away, Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshana, Grant Singer’s Reptile, Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, Lee Tamahori’s The Convert and Alex Gibney’s doc In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.

It ended Sunday when Cord Jefferson’s satire American Fiction won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award for best film, usually a steppingstone to a strong awards season to come.

The fest also...

Update: Power was restored to the Camden Opera House as of Sunday morning — and sunshine was restored to coast Maine. Today’s screenings at festival venues are proceeding as per normal; the Sunday lineup of screenings at the opera house, where power had gone out on Saturday, includes Dawn Porter’s The Lady Bird Diaries and The Arc of Oblivion, directed by Ian Cheney. The in-person portion of the festival wraps today; the virtual component runs from Sept. 18-25.

Update: Ciff Executive and Artistic Director Ben Fowlie and Board Chair Caroline von Kuhn sent a message to festivalgoers this afternoon, thanking them for their “patience and support as we navigate the impacts that weather and power outages have had on our programs.” The message noted, “When the power went out at the Camden Opera House this morning at the beloved Points North Pitch, the standing ovation for the Points North...

Talk about ending with a flourish.

Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” a critically acclaimed look at the dramatic life and career of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, will close the 2023 edition of the Hamptons International Festival. “Maestro,” which co-stars Carey Mulligan, will screen on Oct. 12. It is set to be released by Netflix on Dec. 20.

“’Maestro’ is a beautifully crafted, raw and heartfelt film. We look forward to sharing this glimpse into the love story between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein,” said HamptonsFilm Executive Director Anne Chaisson.

The annual celebration of movies also announced its full lineup of programming, which includes additional signature programming including “A Conversation with…” Series with Paul Simon, who will be on hand to talk up a new, sprawling look at his six decades of making cultural-defining hits. Simon, a rock icon who has written everything from “The Sound of Silence” to “Graceland,” is attending...

The first thing to say about Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” is that it’s three-and-a-half hours long. Normally I wouldn’t lead with that daunting fact, especially since the film is mostly marvelous: a documentary that every Paul Simon fan on earth should want to see and experience. But will they?

I raise the issue only because “In Restless Dreams” has come into the Toronto Film Festival without a distributor, and let’s just be honest: The 209-minute running time, when you hear about it, doesn’t exactly sound…user-friendly. Gibney, of course, is one of the renaissance masters of contemporary documentary, a filmmaker of staggering skill and eclecticism. On occasion, he sprinkles in a music doc, which is clearly a labor of love for him. If you’ve never seen “Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown,” it’s sensational. And Gibney...

Paul Simon wanted a documentary. He was a fan of Alex Gibney’s 2015 “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All” and asked the Oscar-winner (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) to consider devoting a documentary to him on the occasion of recording his 15th album, “Seven Psalms”.

The result is “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” which had its world premiere as an all-rights sales title at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has a running time of three and a half hours. However, the capacity audience at the Princess of Wales theater didn’t fidget and gave Simon a rousing standing ovation. On stage, he admitted that he didn’t have the courage to watch the film in the theater, and asked if he got a standing ovation. The crowd jumped up for a second time. “And it’s my birthday,” he joked. (It’s actually October 13.)

Going in,...

At first, the title of Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” seems as if it could be a warning about the director’s approach in this supersized documentary. The film, its title seems to be saying, is about the music of Simon, not the life or the loves or the times of Simon. But it turns out that the music is a gateway to all those other things in this three-and-a-half hour film that covers most of what you’d want to know about the seminal singer-songwriter.

Partly, that’s because Gibney’s jumping off point is Simon’s new album, “Seven Psalms,” an uncommonly personal and soul-searching work for the man who’s been writing songs for seven decades. A half-hour meditation on faith and mortality that came to Simon in a dream and was written during a time when he’d begun to...

In his latest documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” Alex Gibney explores the singer-songwriter’s six-decade career. The Oscar winning director also captures Simon creating his latest album, “Seven Psalms,” which he made while losing hearing in his left ear. Although Gibney is mostly recognized for his rigorously researched investigative exposes, he is also skilled in creating portraits of cultural icons like Simon. In the 209-minute docu Gibney relies on Simon as well as signifigant figures in his life including wife Edie Brickell, Lorne Michaels and Art Garfunkel, who can be heard via archival footage, to tell his story.

In 2019 Gibney premiered his Mikhail Khodorkovsky documentary “Citizen K” at TIFF. “In Restless Dreams” will debut at TIFF on Sept. 10. Gibney is seeking distribution for the film.

Did you have final cut on this docu?

Yes. That was the arrangement we made going into it. I felt good about that.

The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing with a bevy of titles competing both for global distribution and awards prestige. The festival has had its share of lumps in the last month, losing their 28-year-sponsor, Bell Telephone, back in August, as well as being enmeshed in the on-going SAG-AFTRA/WGA duel strike. It is that strike that is the most insurmountable goal for the event, as actors and writers are unable to attend and promote their films, though some have with a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement.

And while the movie landscape is looking different, with movies switching release dates (in the wake of both the strike and Taylor Swift’s Eras tour), this year’s TIFF is showcasing what amazing movies are still being made. Here are 25 of the hottest titles to be excited for at this year’s TIFF.

Courtesy of TIFF

“Dumb Money” (Sony)

Craig Gillespie’s...

Toronto International Film Festival Photo: J. Countess Hollywood may be mostly shut down, but festival season is still chugging along. The Venice International Film Festival, which winds down this week, saw its fair share of pro-union speeches, controversial guests and opinions, and, as always, buzzy premieres ready to hit wider distribution in the coming months.

Toronto International Film FestivalPhoto: J. Countess (Getty Images)

Hollywood may be mostly shut down, but festival season is still chugging along. The Venice International Film Festival, which winds down this week, saw its fair share of pro-union speeches, controversial guests and opinions, and, as always, buzzy premieres ready to hit...

The 2023 Hamptons International Film Festival has officially unveiled its Centerpiece screening and special events lineup.

Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” will be this year’s Centerpiece presentation, screening October 6. Prolific documentarian Gibney previously helmed Theranos doc “The Inventor” and “Restless Dreams” will be making its New York premiere at the East End festival.

Gibney spent three years on “In Restless Dreams” following musician Simon’s creation of new album “Seven Psalms.”

“In early 2021 amid the pandemic, Paul invited me to film him while he was making his most recent album, ‘Seven Psalms.’ Paul was losing his hearing in one ear, and it was a devastating time,” Gibney said in a press statement (via Deadline). “His tribulations in making that album about faith and mortality are the emotional heart of this story. Creating a visual dreamscape to meet Paul’s life as an artist has been painstaking,...

The 19th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, kicking off Sept. 14, will feature a handful of award-contending documentaries fresh off showings at Toronto, Sundance, South by Southwest, Berlin and Tribeca film festivals. The Maine-based film festival will unfold in a hybrid format, with both in-person events over a four-day period concluding Sept. 17, and online screenings available from Sept. 18 to Sept. 25 to audiences across the U.S.

This year’s Ciff highlights include the U.S. premiere of Oscar-winning director, Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music Of Paul Simon,” a portrait docu about the songwriter; Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road,” a documentary about a Black family’s decades-long fight to maintain waterfront land in North Carolina they’ve rightfully owned for generations against corrupt developers; Errol Morris’ “The Pigeon Tunnel,” an inventive interview with spy novelist John le Carré; and Oscar nominee Karim Amer’s “Defiant,...

A documentary about women who accused Louis C.K. of sexual harassment and the consequences those accusations had on their careers is one of 22 documentaries from 12 countries heading to the 2023 Toronto Intl. Film Festival.

The docu titled “Sorry/Not Sorry,” previously intended for Showtime, is one of several films in TIFF’s nonfiction program that focus on women who have been unjustly ignored for their achievements. TIFF Docs opening night film, “Copa 71,” tells the story of the lost legacy of a 1971 international women’s soccer tournament that had record setting crowds in Mexico City but was largely erased from sports history. The film’s producers include Venus and Serena Williams as well as soccer super star Alex Morgan. Lucy Walker, a two-time Oscar nominee, is bringing “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa,” about a single mother working as a dishwasher at a Connecticut Whole Foods, who has another life as a record-breaking mountain climber.

This year, non-fiction titles will be front and center at the Toronto International Film Festival, as many writers and actors will not be on hand due to the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Opening night at the 2023 festival brings a documentary world premiere, Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine’s “Copa 71” (seller: Dogwoof), about an historic international women’s soccer tournament lost to sports history. The filmmakers bring us back to the record-setting crowds assembled in Mexico City in 1971. U.S. soccer star Alice Morgan and athletes Venus and Serena Williams are among the film’s executive producers.

That’s the sort of unexpected story that veteran TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers sought for this year’s documentary program of 22 titles from 12 countries. While it’s always painful to whittle down the selection from 800 feature submissions (the post-pandemic production boom continues), Powers looked at giving a boost to sales titles...