Month: September 2023

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” has generated $626 million at the domestic box office, overtaking Marvel’s 2012 blockbuster “The Avengers” ($623 million) as the 11th-highest grossing release in history. In order to crack the top 10, “Barbie” will need to outpace 2015’s “Jurassic World” (No. 10 with $653 million), “Titanic” (No. 9 with $674 million), “Avengers: Infinity

Britain’s official post-WWI administration of Palestine lasted from 1920-48 and is probably the UK colonial enterprise least addressed by its fiction filmmakers. But now prolific writer-director Michael Winterbottom (“The Trip,” “A Mighty Heart”) uses that complicated era as a backdrop to the compelling historical romance “Shoshana.” A passion project 15 years in the making and

 “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson’s blistering satire of race and media, captured the Toronto International Film Festival’s people’s choice award, bolstering its Oscars chances. TIFF’s people’s choice award is considered to be among the best predictors of eventual awards success, though the 2023 festival hosted a weaker lineup than most years due to the writers and actors

It’s another close race at the box office. The Warner Bros. thriller “The Nun II” is projected to ever-so-slightly outpace the competition with $14.7 million in its second weekend. But Disney’s murder mystery “A Haunting in Venice” is inching behind with a middling $14.5 million, so it’s possible the order could flip by the time

Horace Ové, director of “Pressure” (1976), the first full-length Black British film, died on Sept. 16. He was 86. Ové’s son Zak posted on Facebook: “Our loving father Horace, took his last breath at 4.30 this morning, while sleeping peacefully. I hope his spirit is free now after many years of suffering with Alzheimer’s. You are

The loftier and more dangerous the goal, the finer the line that separates the Guinness Book of World Records from the Darwin Awards. At a certain point, surviving is the only real difference. Do-or-die marathon swimmer Diana Nyad dreamed of swimming from Cuba to Florida. That’s 110 miles of unpredictable open ocean. Prior to her,

For decades, as I’ve watched Sylvester Stallone on talk shows or caught bits and pieces of promotional interviews with him, my impression, without pondering it much, has been that he’s a dude with a certain charismatic native intelligence. Yet “Sly,” the infectious and fascinating portrait of Stallone and his movies that premiered today at the

Director Richard Linklater expressed his admiration for Greta Gerwig’s record-breaking “Barbie” in a recent interview with NME. He specifically praised the musical numbers in the fantasy comedy, which include “I’m Just Ken,” performed by Ryan Gosling. “I liked the musical numbers,” Linklater said. “I liked the movie a lot. It’s worth seeing a couple times.

Long before Bethenny Frankel began fighting for reality stars’ rights, there was  “Denpa Shonen: A Life in Prizes,” a Japanese reality show that began airing in 1998. The show starred aspiring comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi.  In a room by himself and naked, Nasubi had to fill out contest coupons in order to win what

The unkillable vampire legend gets one of its frequent cinematic resurrections (this Venice Film Festival alone boasted three more: “El Conde” in competition, “En Attendant la Nuit” in Horizons and “The Vourdalak” in Critics’ Week) with Québécois director Ariane Louis-Seize’s sweetly gothy Venice Days winner, a film wittily — if too comprehensively — described by

That perky exclamation point sets the tone for “Coup!,” a story of murder, class struggle, One Percent entitlement and a global pandemic that nonetheless unfolds with all the eager, scrappy energy of an off-Broadway musical, minus most of the songs. The pandemic in question is not the one you’re thinking of — Austin Stark and

Three documentaries have been selected to to participate in the inaugural Diane Weyermann fellowship program, which will kick off Sept. 15 at Maine’s 19th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival. The projects are: “The Last Nomads,” a co-production of Serbia, Montenegro and France, directed and produced by Biljana Tutorov, co-directed by Petar Glomazić, and

Hercule Poirot is back on the case this weekend, with Kenneth Branagh’s “A Haunting in Venice” hoping to best a very quiet box office in its opening. The horror-tinged whodunnit scored $5.5 million from 3,305 theaters on its opening day, a figure that includes $1.2 million in Thursday previews. The film gets a boost from

What happens when an immovable object meets a fatigued force that keeps whacking its head against said object in defeated frustration? That’s the question proposed by ’s debut feature, “Mother, Couch.” Executive produced by and starring the once-boyish, now often forlorn Ewan McGregor, the film follows David, a frumpy middle-aged family man whose mother (Ellen

“The Royal Hotel,” the setting of Kitty Green’s ulcer-inducing thriller, is a sun-baked bar in a rural Australian mining town surrounded by terrain so monotone that Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) can’t keep their eyes open on the way in. The two young women arrive at their barmaid jobs with a