Movies

Don’t tell Trump, but the Roman Catholic pope is arguably the only world leader with more power than the U.S. President. And yet, despite its importance — and the fact that popes typically serve unto death, rather than four to eight years at a time — the position gets considerably less attention in popular entertainment.

The older he gets (he’s now 23), the more Timothée Chalemet looks like a svelte, neurasthenic-rock-star version of Daniel Day-Lewis. In “The King,” a sprawling but intimate royal-court medieval pageant movie, he plays Hal, the Prince of Wales, who will become Henry V. In the early scenes, when Hal is a dissolute party boy, drinking

New Europe Film Sales has signed territory deals with a host of distributors on Jan Komasa’s “Corpus Christi,” which is a possible contender in the International Feature Film Oscar contest. The Polish film world premiered Monday in Venice Days, an independent section running in parallel with the Venice Film Festival, and makes its North American

Gerard Butler’s “Angel Has Fallen” easily topped the Labor Day holiday weekend with $14.8 million at 3,336 locations in North America, for an 11-day total of nearly $44 million. The Lionsgate-Millennium title, the third entry in the action franchise, stars Butler as a Secret Service Agent trying to clear his name after being framed for

September 2, 2019 10:45AM PT Jack London’s novel is transposed to Naples in Pietro Marcello’s distinctive vision that’s often visually compelling yet intellectually sprawling, weighed down by a devotion to theory. Jack London is one of those writers who lost their place in the pantheon of greats at home but remains a major early 20th-century

Netflix is in final negotiations to sign a distribution deal with Canal Plus Group, France’s leading pay TV group, Variety has confirmed. Although Netflix has contributed to the continued decline of Canal Plus Group’s domestic subscriber base, a partnership with the streaming service could benefit Canal Plus Group, allowing it to distribute Netflix as part

The Venice Film Festival tried to take a concrete step toward promoting gender parity in film by hosting a panel Monday at which a wide range of data on the situation in Europe was provided that could provide a baseline for further action at an industry level. In some of the key findings: – 29%

Cherries aren’t the first fruit that come to mind when watching “No. 7 Cherry Lane.” In an entirely welcome way, veteran Hong Kong auteur Yonfan’s first film in a decade (as well as his first foray into feature animation) can better be described as a bowl of bright, aromatic and very, very ripe bananas. As

Tim Robbins’ documentary “45 Seconds of Laughter,” which premieres Sept. 3 in Venice, follows a group of prisoners in a California facility as they take part in drama workshops led by Robbins’ troupe The Actors’ Gang. In the film, covering 10 sessions over an eight-month period, the inmates reconnect with emotions long buried and form

Bac Films, the Paris-based film group behind the Venice Horizons title “My Days of Glory,” has bolstered its international sales division with a new team topped by Marine Goulois and Andrea Dos Santos. Goulois previously worked at SND, the sales arm of the commercial network M6, and Les Films du Losange, while Dos Santos worked

“Hobbs & Shaw” dropped a gear or two in its second weekend on release in Chinese theaters. The “Fast & Furious” franchise spinoff nevertheless remained in pole position ahead of a largely unchanged chasing pack at the Chinese box office. According to data from distribution and exhibition consultancy Artisan Gateway, “Hobbs” scored $26.3 million on

When a young man with a troubled past arrives in a small-town Polish parish, he pulls off an unlikely feat, convincing the villagers that he’s a visiting priest. But not long after he’s welcomed by the community, he learns of a tragic accident whose repercussions have divided the town. Pursued by a dark secret from

No stranger to the world of prestigious film festivals, Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard drew notice almost from the very beginning of his film career when he won the best actor award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982 for his role in Hans Alfredson’s “Simple-Minded Murderer.” Next stop for the Emmy-nominated star of HBO’s “Chernobyl”

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.