There’s life after the apocalypse — on TV

Zak Hilditch’s Perth apocalypse movie, These Final Hours, will be adapted for TV by Luc Besson’s Europa Corp.

These Final Hours will be adapted into a TV series.

Zak Hilditch’s Perth apocalypse movie, These Final Hours, will be adapted into a television series by Luc Besson’s Europa Corp. Besson is among the most prolific global producers, with his Taken and Transporter film series both continuing at full tilt.

The announcement from the Toronto International Film Festival follows last week’s news that Josh Lawson’s The Little Death is being adapted by European filmmakers. Hilditch also has found international producers for his next film, Numbskull, according to TheHollywood Reporter. Rob Paris’s Paris Film and Canadian producing partner Zed Filmworks will produce Numbskull although no other details have been released.

Producer William Horberg says: “Zak has written the kind of original script I love, a big fun idea but with an intimate and honest approach to character and emotion. I’m happy to partner up with these guys to bring this fresh story to life.”

These Final Hours earned $470,000 at the Australian box office last year.

Michael Rowe’s film Early Winter has won the Venice film festival’s independently run Venice Days Award.

The expat director previously won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2010 for Leap Year. Early Winter had its world premiere at Venice. It is Rowe’s first English-language feature as he is based in Mexico and has worked on Spanish-language films previously.

Rowe wrote and directed the film drawing on his family and friends’ experiences as nursing home workers in country Victoria. It stars Canadian actor Paul Doucet and Suzanne Clement (Mommy).

Some strong reviews for a batch of new Australian films have emerged from the Toronto and Venice film festivals.

Matt Saville’s A Month of Sundays, starring Anthony LaPaglia as a harried real estate agent, has been warmly embraced by critics, with The Hollywood Reporter describing it as a “warm-hearted character study (which) is carried by a solid lead performance from Anthony LaPaglia”.

Simon Stone’s re-imagining of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, starring Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neill, has been described by The Playlist as a “highly polished” and “deeply involving and emotionally searing”, but anyone who saw it on the festival circuit this winter knew that.

Reviews in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for The Dressmaker, with Kate Winslet and Judy Davis, sit on the fence, both loving and confused by the “appreciably deranged tale of small-town intrigue that finds Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse returning quite literally with a vengeance after a nearly 20-year absence from the director’s chair”.

Reviews for Nicole Kidman’s latest effort, off screen, are more consistent. Reviewers are raving about her West End performance in the stage play Photograph 51 with The Guardian’s Michael Billington commending her “commanding, intelligent performance” and The New York Times’ Ben Brantley saying her portrayal of British chemist Rosalind Franklin is “pretty close to perfection.” See the review from The Times on the opposite page.

The sequel to the young adult hit The Maze Runner, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, opened at the top of the Australian box office at the weekend with a solid $3.6 million, almost identical to the original’s debut. It ended up taking $16m. Straight Outta Compton added another $2.24m for $8m all up, ahead of Adam Sandler’s latest, Pixels, with $2m. Audiences dropped away after that with A Walk in the Woods ranking fourth with $333,000, lifting it to $1.1m and Joel Edgerton’s The Gift adding $312,000 and crossing $2m. Australian film Last Cab to Darwin keeps on driving with another $223,000, bringing its total to $6.6m while Holding the Man earned $105,000 in its third weekend for $872,000.

The Water Diviner has won the key prizes at the Australian Writers Guild’s AWGIE Awards. Screenwriters Andrew Anastasios and Andrew Knight won the top AWGIE as well as the prize for best original feature, the first film to win both since 2012’s The Sapphires. Two films shared the feature film adaptation prize: Brendan Cowell for the adaptation of his stage play Ruben Guthrie and Tommy Murphy for Holding theMan. The all-star Deadline Gallipoli team of Jacquelin Perske, Stuart Beattie, Shaun Grant and Cate Shortland won best original TV miniseries, and Jan Sardi and Mac Gudgeon won best miniseries adaptation for Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. Katherine Thomson won the original telemovie award for House of Hancock.

More international sales agents, distributors, financiers, commissioners and producers have been confirmed as participants in Screen Producers Australia’s coming Screen Forever International Partnership Market.

The event matching Australian producers with international businesses will take place from November 17 to 19 in Melbourne and will now include Material Pictures development executive Paddy Murphy, Pacific Mercantile Bank’s Adrian Ward, Matchbox UCP Productions’ Natalie Chaidez, Dynamic Television’s Holly Hines and Group M’s Josh Black.