Movies

Brad Pitt’s science-fiction adventure movie “Ad Astra” has quietly vanished from the release schedule, three weeks prior to its previously announced May 24 opening date. Fox had originally dated “Ad Astra” for Jan. 11, 2019, then decided in late 2018 to move it back four months to the Memorial Day weekend on May 24. Disney

May 2, 2019 12:08PM PT Women in Film, Los Angeles, have announced four of the five women who will be honored at the newly renamed gala in June. Formerly named the Crystal + Lucy Awards, the Women in Film Gala will award Amy Poehler, Issa Rae, Elizabeth Debicki and Cathy Schulman for their groundbreaking achievements

May 2, 2019 10:57AM PT “Twilight” is being resurrected. The hit movie franchise, based on Stephenie Meyer’s YA book series, is getting a film-concert tour a la fellow Lionsgate properties “The Hunger Games” and “La La Land.” Lionsgate is launching the “Twilight in Concert” world tour in August in Brazil, followed by stops in Australia

Disney’s “Aladdin” is expected to soar at the domestic box office when it debuts over Memorial Day weekend. The studio’s latest live-action remake should earn $80 million when it opens May 24, according to early tracking. Box office watchers believe ticket sales could near $100 million through Monday, when kids are out of school for

Bentonville Film Festival is marking its fifth anniversary as a space that highlights the work of filmmakers from underrepresented communities. Co-founded by Oscar-winner Geena Davis, the festival isn’t just interested in spotlighting these artists. It wants to get their films out into the wider world. To that end, it guarantees distribution for its top prize-winners courtesy

May 2, 2019 9:00AM PT This biopic about a legendary but little-known jazz pioneer in turn-of-the-century New Orleans leans heavily on stereotypes and clichés. The conundrum that haunts “Bolden,” a murky biopic about turn-of-the-century New Orleans musician Charles “Buddy” Bolden, is right up front in the opening titles, which inform the audience that little is

Jared Leto may not be done with playing the Joker. The Oscar winner says he’s open to revisiting the deranged supervillain he played in “Suicide Squad.” “I would definitely play the Joker again,” Leto says. “It all depends on the script and the circumstances as it always does.” But maybe he already has. Asked if

As it seeks to bolster its production input, the centenary Nordic major SF Studios has acquired a majority stake in thriving Swedish outfit FLX, the company behind the Netflix show “Quicksand” and some of Sweden’s most popular series, including “Solsidan” (pictured), and the popular movie “The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.”

After having been successfully adapted into a pair of live-action movies, “Le Petit Nicolas,” based on the popular series of French children’s books from the ’60s, will be back on the big screen in an hand-drawn animated feature directed by Gilles de Maistre (“Mia and the White Lion”) and Amandine Fredon. “Le Petit Nicolas, une

Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar with “The Silence of the Lambs,” and Olivia Colman, who just picked up the Academy Award for “The Favourite,” will star in Florian Zeller’s movie adaptation of his hit stage play “The Father.” Principal photography begins this month in the U.K. Financing has been arranged by Viewfinder and Embankment,

The war on drugs has never taken more literal form than under the command of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, who rose to power on a pledge to rid the country of dealers and addicts alike — and delivered on his promise in the bloodiest fashion possible, with police summarily executing thousands of people over an

Hot Docs today unveiled the first two documentary projects to receive production support through Hot Docs Partners, its CAN$2.6 million ($1.9 million) cofinancing initiative that was launched a year ago at the annual festival in Toronto. The most recent addition to Hot Docs’ CAN$9 million ($6.7 million) production fund portfolio, Partners matches a select group

Muslim groups in Indonesia are calling for a ban on the film “Memories of My Body,” a drama from the country’s best-known art house director, Garin Nugroho. The groups say that the film is “sexually deviant” and promotes “LGBT values.” The film depicts the story of a young man from a dance troupe that performs

TORONTO — Director Hnin Ei Hlaing’s “Midwives,” which tells the story of two midwives who work side-by-side in a makeshift clinic, has won Hot Docs’ First Look program’s first prize and CAN$30,000 ($22,000) cash, it was announced following the close of the Hot Docs Forum and Hot Docs Deal Maker events Wednesday afternoon. “Midwives” was

“Avengers: Endgame” broke the half-billion-dollar barrier in China on Thursday, becoming the most successful foreign film ever in the country after just over a week in theaters and easily eclipsing the previous titleholder, “The Fate of the Furious.” Released on April 24, “Endgame” is already the sixth-highest-grossing movie in Chinese film history, thanks to a

The suspense is over: Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” will indeed have its world premiere and compete at the Cannes Film Festival, the fest announced Thursday. “Intermezzo” from Abdellatif Kechiche, the Palme d’Or-winning director of “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” has also been added to the competition slate. The star-studded movie has

May 2, 2019 1:04AM PT “The Secret Life of Pets 2” and “Men in Black: International” will both be hitting Chinese theaters soon, though no specific release date for either has been announced yet. The former is due sometime in June, Chinese reports say. Two of China’s major online ticketing platforms list “Men in Black:

Ken Loach’s “Sorry We Missed You” and Jessica Hausner’s “Little Joe” have been selected to play in competition at Cannes. But buyers looking for more British-originated fare can head to the firmly established “Great 8” presentation of titles from the country’s up-and-coming filmmakers. The Great 8 event is backed by the BFI, the British Council,

May 1, 2019 11:59PM PT South East Asian film fund, Purin Pictures has again handed out $170,000 of finance for a fistful of movie projects. The Spring grants include production support for three feature films, production support for a documentary, and post production aid for another documentary. Launched in 2017 and operating an open submissions

May 1, 2019 10:39PM PT An American soldier in Afghanistan copes with his squad’s murderous conduct in Dan Krauss’ drama, based on his documentary of the same name. Atrocities don’t exist in a vacuum, and “The Kill Team” is most valuable — and chillingly effective — as an exposé of the means by which honorable

Throughout his career, Werner Herzog has shared a deep connection with his daring explorer subjects, be it with “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” or “Grizzly Man.” That’s again true with “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin,” the prolific filmmaker’s heartfelt documentary tribute to his celebrated writer friend, who

May 1, 2019 10:24PM PT NFL dance-squad members fight for a fair wage, and the respect that comes with it, in director Yu Gu’s defiant documentary. If you do a job, you should be fairly compensated for it. That’s a straightforward and uncontroversial statement, and yet as proven by “A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader

A contrived and cliché-stuffed thriller such as “The Intruder” often forces me to suppress an urgent desire to shout rude things at the screen. So I must confess that I had a great time watching this very bad movie as a member of a very vocal preview audience that had been given carte blanche to

The band Traffic has probably been getting its heaviest web traffic ever this past week, thanks to the use of a 50-year-old song, “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” that plays briefly but inescapably in the first 10 minutes of the superhero epic. It’s the most prominent of the handful of pop songs that show up during the

While discussing her long career in Hollywood and the #MeToo era, Anjelica Huston showed support for Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Jeffrey Tambor, all men with sexual misconduct allegations brought against them. Huston collaborated with Allen on two of his his films, “Crimes and Misdemeanors” in 1989 and “Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993. Dylan Farrow

Jim’s part-time girlfriend on “The Office” almost wasn’t played by Rashida Jones. In fact, she almost quit acting altogether. During a panel talk on Wednesday for Tribeca Film Festival, the actress, director, writer, and producer said that after working on the set of television show “Boston Public,” there was a writer’s strike going on in

May 1, 2019 4:51PM PT In today’s film news roundup, Sony Pictures Classics announces the release date for “Pain & Glory” and Jonathan Levine enters a first-look deal with Lionsgate. RELEASE DATE Sony Pictures Classics announced it will release Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film “Pain & Glory” in the U.S. on Oct. 4, 2019.

The Syrian civil war may be the largest human crisis of our age, and with no end to it in sight, it’s only right that documentarians are unwilling to let it rest. The last few years have seen Syria-themed docs all but flooding the festival circuit, forming what the more cynical may deem a subgenre

May 1, 2019 3:00PM PT Bill Guttentag directs a paint-by-numbers documentary on the unlikely 1990s superstars. Unless you were of the right age and geographic orientation, Sublime might be an easy band to overlook. A number of their songs haven’t aged particularly well; from a distance they might blend in with the glut of bleached-blond

May 1, 2019 2:41PM PT Frank Grillo, Keith David, Taryn Manning and Mark Boone Junior have joined the ensemble cast of “The Gateway.” They join Shea Whigham, Olivia Munn, Bruce Dern and Zach Avery with Michele Civetta directing. Andrew Levitas is producing under his Metalwork Pictures banner alongside Stephen Israel. The pic follows Parker, a