Month: September 2019

It’s hard to think of another working director who encompasses the range and moods of Olivier Assayas, from beautifully crafted minor-key notes covering major issues like “Non-Fiction,” to films of mysterious, introspective ambiguity like “Personal Shopper,” to the sweeping symphonic feast of “Carlos.” That latter epic will be the most common reference point when people

September 1, 2019 1:42PM PT Kevin Hart was hospitalized Sunday after his vehicle crashed into the hills just south of Calabasas. According to ABC7, the crash occurred around 12:45 a.m. near Mulholland Highway and Cold Canyon Road after Hart’s classic 1970 Plymouth Barracuda swerved off the road and rolled down the embankment. Hart was one

Three years ago, the furor that erupted over Nate Parker — when the rape allegations made against him in 1999 resurfaced, though he had been cleared of the charges in court — set the table for the #MeToo era. In hindsight, that furor directly presaged the reckoning brought on by the Harvey Weinstein scandal. “The

It’s a woefully familiar situation when the dramatic arts try to engage with current events, only to falter because they arrive before audiences are willing to confront the real-deal traumas they seek to explore. “Too soon,” say the critics, as if engaged filmmakers were just a bunch of ambulance-chasing opportunists. But in the case of

Steven Soderbergh’s “The Laundromat” is a fluky contradiction that works. I’m tempted to call it a brain-teaser — not because it’s some sort of clockwork mystery caper that toys with your expectations, but because it’s a true-life journalistic drama about the new world order of offshore financial corruption (which gets shrouded, by design, in the

Universal’s “Hobbs & Shaw” revved past the competition overseas once again, dominating the international box office with $39 million in ticket sales. The “Fast & Furious” spinoff also kept its lead globally, making it the only movie this year to remain victorious at the worldwide box office for four weekends. Blockbusters including “Captain Marvel,” “Avengers:

Looking to make a comeback, director Nate Parker was in contrition mode Sunday at the Venice Film Festival, admitting that he had been “tone deaf” in his past remarks regarding the rape charge he faced as a college student. “The last three years have been such a learning experience for me,” he said at a

There are two kinds of “what if” story. One plunges viewers into an immediate, all-too-imaginable situation, and invites them to consider how they might act and react; the other casts us into realms of uncanny uncertainty, inviting us to consider the world as we don’t quite know it. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Oscar-nominated 2017 short “Madre” was

“The Laundromat” is the story of a terrible joke “that’s being played on all of us,” Meryl Streep, one of the film’s stars, said Sunday. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the Netflix movie takes a blackly comic look at the investigation into the Panama Papers, a trove of documents that were leaked to journalists in 2016

Martin Scorsese made a surprise appearance at Adam Driver’s tribute on Saturday night at the Telluride Film Festival before the screening of “Marriage Story.” Scorsese, who directed Driver in “Silence” opposite Andrew Garfield, was introduced to the stage, where he placed one of the festival’s Silver Medallions around the actor’s neck. “What you see before

Italian and U.S. film industry executives announced Saturday at the Venice Film Festival that this summer’s box office figures in Italy are up by 40% over the past two years as local distributors depart from past practice and release more movies between May and August. This year’s roughly 44% box office rise during that period

London-based sales and production company Taskovski Films has acquired world sales rights to Barbara Paz’s debut documentary, “Babenco — Tell Me When I Die,” which bows in Venice Classics on Sept. 2. Brazilian helmer Héctor Babenco was a commanding presence on the international film scene, directing pics of the caliber of “Kiss of the Spider

The year is 1981, and South Africa’s apartheid government is embroiled in a vicious war along the southern Angolan border. Like all white boys over the age of 16, Nicholas Van der Swart is conscripted for two years of mandatory military service—a brutal period of indoctrination as the white minority government seeks to protect its

Chilean auteur Pablo Larrain likes to tread new ground with each film, but movies with women’s names, and female characters at their center, do seem to have a special appeal for him. After “Jackie,” he’s back in Venice with “Ema,” a portrait of an incendiary lady contending with tragedy in a totally different way than

3B Productions, the French production outfit behind Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Venice opener “The Truth,” is developing the next films of Atiq Rahimi (“The Patience Stone”) and Karim Dridi (“Chouf”). Rahimi, whose latest film “Notre-dame du Nil” will be world premiering at Toronto, is developing with Jean Brehat at 3B Productions and Ron Senkowski (“The Prophet”) the

What will the moviegoing public make of a film called “Lyrebird”? Oblique but apt, that title refers to an ostentatious Australian bird capable of mimicking the calls of countless other species — the relevance of which may not be immediately apparent to those intrigued by the true, post-World War II story of a notorious Dutch

August 31, 2019 7:16PM PT Locally-made family drama, “H is for Happiness” won the top prize at the CinefestOZ festival in Busselton, West Australia, on Saturday. The film is an uplifting tale about a 12-year-old girl who is inspired by an unusual new boy at her school and sets out to mend her broken family.

Audiences have been comparing Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Uncut Gems” to a cocaine rush since it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. I wouldn’t know, but it’s a trip all right: Like a cross between a seat-of-your-pants heist movie and a protracted heart attack, this virtuoso character portrait grabs viewers by the lapels and thrusts