Month: June 2019

Run a finger along any of the surfaces in Alistair Banks Griffin’s sophomore feature “The Wolf Hour,” and it will come up slicked with sweat, grime and the residual soot of the city. It is the summer of 1977,  and it’s hotter than hell. June Leigh (Naomi Watts) perches on the window sill of the
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The Palm Springs International ShortFest wrapped Sunday with top prizes going to “The Christmas Gift,” directed by Bogdan Muresanu, for best of the festival, Nara Normande’s “Guaxuma” for best international short and Horatio Baltz’s “King Wah (I Think I Love You)” for best North American short. The festival is the largest shorts-focused event in North
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I recently came down with an acute case of movie-world-itis — call it “franchise fatigue” fatigue. The symptoms are as follows. It’s blockbuster movie season (otherwise known as: any given week of the year), and a handful of sequels, reboots, and tentpole-smash wannabes have all come out and performed badly. The media predictions of weekend
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June 23, 2019 1:15PM PT A well-made but familiar tale of a small-time Chongqing hustler’s choice between money and morals during a kidnapping gone awry. Official statistics imply that violent crime is close to an all-time low across China today, but you would hardly guess as much from the glut of commercial-leaning crime and gangster
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Disney’s summer box office slate continues to dominate over other studios as “Toy Story 4” launches overseas with a solid $120 million and “Aladdin” crosses $800 million in ticket sales. Disney and Pixar’s latest “Toy Story” entry led international box office charts when it debuted in 37 foreign territories. It also dwarfed the competition in
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China’s top film festival showered its highest three honors on the Iranian film “Castle of Dreams,” hours after American President Donald Trump said the U.S. would on Monday impose “major additional sanctions” on Tehran. The drama about family, separation and keeping one’s promises, collected a trio of prizes on Sunday night at the Shanghai International
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Veteran TV director Thomas Schlamme has been re-elected president of the Directors Guild of America for a two-year term. Schlamme was selected by the acclamation of 155 delegates at the DGA’s convention on Saturday at DGA headquarters in Los Angeles. DGA presidents typically serve for two two-year terms, as did Schlamme’s predecessor Paris Barclay. The
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Making a dramatic feature about people who are autistic presents a steep challenge. How do you get an audience to connect with individuals whose defining trait is their inability to connect? “Rain Man,” a popular entertainment that I take utterly seriously, was structured almost entirely around the dramatic conundrum posed by that question. Dustin Hoffman’s
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June 22, 2019 12:18PM PT A wryly engrossing, well-observed story of a man floundering in his forties, given a novel spin by its setting in modern, middle-class Shanghai. “I heard a foreign language. Are they foreigners?” one Chinese waitress asks another when they’re out of earshot of the table of men speaking accented English at
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Danny Boyle’s Beatles-nostalgia film “Yesterday” has secured a theatrical release date in mainland China. The film, which premiered at the Tribeca festival in May, is a musical fairy tale about a world without the Fab Four, and an indie rocker who brings them back. Boyle was previously head of the competition jury at the Shanghai International
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