Month: November 2018

“The Grinch” proved it’s never too early for some holiday cheer as the animated family flick stole the weekend box office with $66 million from 4,141 locations. Illumination and Universal’s adaptation of the Dr. Seuss holiday tale now ranks as the best start for a Christmas film. Benedict Cumberbatch voiced the animated green grouch in “The

This year’s European Film Awards will be dominated by movies that won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, with Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War,” Matteo Garrone’s “Dogman,” Alice Rohrwacher’s “Happy as Lazzaro,” Lukas Dhont’s “Girl” and Ali Abbasi’s “Border” all in the running for best picture. A 1950s-set love story shot in black and white, “Cold

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee visited this year’s Los Cabos Festival where Lee received a lifetime achievement award, his “BlacKkKlansman” closing out the festivities, and Lewis Lee donned her producer hat for an impassioned roundtable on the drama series boom that has been attracting so many independent producers and filmmakers.

November 10, 2018 8:30PM PT Legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who won an Oscar for the music to “The Hateful Eight,” has labeled the film’s director Quentin Tarantino “a cretin.” Morricone savaged Tarantino in an interview published this week in the December edition of the German-language version of Playboy. He criticized Tarantino on two main

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Adding to its burgeoning best picture trophies, “Genesis,” the consecration of Quebec’s Philippe Lesage, won Los Cabos Competition Award Saturday night. “Genesis” scored at a busy Los Cabos Intl. Film Festival, given star gravitas by Spike Lee, Adam Driver and Terry Gilliam and whose hard-driving industry news flow, especially from the

LOS CABOS, Mexico — The 7th Los Cabos Festival, the most industrially-minded of Mexico’s film events, was the first to take place in full-blown digital OTT revolution. Two TV panels, the biggest ever at Los Cabos, packed out by some of the foremost Latino TV and OT show-runners, producers and directors,  debated the huge, multi-faceted

What’s the best antidote to the political division roiling the United States? Try a very proper British nanny best known for coining the phrase “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” At least that’s what “Mary Poppins Returns” director Rob Marshall and star Emily Blunt claimed during a panel discussion at the Producers

Europe’s mainstay fest for cinematography, newly rechristened EnergaCamerimage, launched its 26th edition and a week of 241 film screenings in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz on Saturday with a guest appearance by Roman Polanski. The controversial but seminal director of classics such as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” took the stage to honor a longtime colleague,

“Yomeddine,” a road-trip movie about an Egyptian leper and a young orphan journeying in search of family, won the Reflet d’Or for best feature film at the 24th Geneva Intl. Film Festival Saturday. The character-driven drama, Egyptian-Austrian director A.B. Shawky’s feature debut, premiered in competition in Cannes, and is Egypt’s candidate for the foreign-language Oscar.

In line with its continued bid to release a diversity of strong titles, Cinepolis Distribution has picked up all worldwide distribution rights to horror drama “My Favorite Birthday” (“Mi Cumpleaños Favorito”) by helmer-scribe Agustin ‘Oso’ Tapia (“Club Eutanasia”). Tapia has described “Birthday” as “a story where two genres collide: Film noir with the supernatural.” The

There’s a feeling you get, sort of like a low-grade fever, when a film franchise is starting to run down. It’s had three or four sequels, it’s going through the motions, there’s no more fresh terrain left to plow. That sensation hovers, like a gray cloud, over “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” a movie

Thursday night, when the AFI Fest launched with a starry “On the Basis of Sex” premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the event opened its 32nd annual edition to a much different festival landscape than it had in previous years. That’s because just one week earlier, Film Independent announced that it was pulling

“Green Book” director Peter Farrelly forgives Viggo Mortensen for using the N-word. “Viggo is a great, good-hearted guy who was trying to make a nice point and it came out horribly wrong and he apologized immediately and knew what he had done,” Farrelly told Variety on Friday at the movie’s AFI Fest presented by Audi

His heart may be small, but that doesn’t mean his box office returns will be. “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch” is looking to top the weekend box office in its debut with an estimated $67 million from 4,141 North American locations. Benedict Cumberbatch voices the titular green Whoville denizen in Universal’s new adaptation of Seuss’ 1957

This year’s Los Cabos Festival hosted two iconic directors in Terry Gilliam and Spike Lee, and the actor who most recently ties the two together, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” and “BlacKkKlansman” star, Adam Driver. On Friday evening, overlooking the famous coastal rock formations at the Resort at Pedregal, Driver engaged in a career-spanning

Filming “Crazy Rich Asians” challenged cinematographer Vanja Cernjul with a scale nearly as epic as the holidays of the Singapore billionaire characters the story revolves around. The Croatian-born veteran of action and fantasy films and TV series (“The Deuce,” “Marco Polo”) was faced with dozens of locations to be covered with a score of characters.

The EnergaCamerimage fest’s main lineup, its competition for best cinematographer, covers a vast range of styles, and honors several fresh visual stylists along with many legends in the field. As festival director Marek Zydowicz puts it, this year’s selection “was particularly tough because of the variety of visual means used to enhance the stories being

Mahershala Ali has accepted an apology from “Green Book” actor Viggo Mortensen for using the N-word on at a screening of their film — but noted that it was not appropriate for his co-star to use the slur. Mortensen used the word on Wednesday night at the ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood during a conversation moderated by