Movies

November 26, 2018 7:53PM PT Yuni Hadi, executive director of the Singapore Intl. Film Festival, which runs concurrently with the Singapore Media Festival, unwraps its major themes. How do you read the state of SE Asian cinema, and how has it evolved in the past 12 months? I see a growing confidence in Southeast Asian

In today’s film news roundup, Molly Shannon’s “Wild Nights with Emily” and Motke Dapp’s “Other Versions of You” get distribution, Robert Patrick is up for a role as an FBI agent and “Nutcracker” writer Ashleigh Powell signs with CAA. ACQUISITIONS Greenwich Entertainment has bought “Wild Nights with Emily,’ a dramatic comedy about Emily Dickinson starring

Creative Artists Agency has signed on to represent controversial Chinese filmmaker Wu Hao. Wu’s latest work, “People’s Republic of Desire,” has been selected for consideration in the documentary section of the Academy Awards and goes on commercial release in North America this week. CAA is set as Wu’s exclusive representation. The company will deploy agents

The 28th annual IFP Gotham Awards kicked off award season Monday night in New York City. Rachel Weisz, Willem Dafoe, Paul Greengrass, and Jon Kamen all received 2018 tributes, and Sandra Lee was honored with the “Made in NY” award. The Independent Filmmaker Project’s yearly fete is the first awards show on the road to the

The Writers Guild of America West has launched a campaign to urge its members to report companies when they are paid late and asked to work for free. The guild introduced the WGAW Start Button program on its website, enabling members to inform the guild when writers begin working on a step and when the

The year 2018 is shaping up to be a tragedy of epic proportions for lovers of world cinema. In April, Czech director Milos Forman passed away, and now, in late November, within a matter of days, we have lost avant garde maestro Nicolas Roeg and that great Italian iconoclast Bernardo Bertolucci. Consider: Forman’s “Amadeus,” Roeg’s

November 26, 2018 2:00PM PT The Palm Springs International Film Festival will present director Alfonso Cuarón with the Sonny Bono Visionary Award for his work on “Roma.” The honor will be presented at the festival’s awards gala on Jan. 3 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The festival is in its 30th year and runs

November 26, 2018 1:42PM PT Multi-hyphenate indie star Jennifer Westfeldt has signed with Verve Talent and Literary Agency. The firm —  which counts clients like “Jurassic World” director Colin Trevorrow, up-and-comer Madelyn Deutch and “Hidden Figures” screenwriter Allison Schroeder — has signed Westfeldt as a writer, director, and producer. She’ll remain with Innovative Artists for

November 26, 2018 1:09PM PT Comedian Amy Sedaris has joined the cast of Disney’s live-action “The Lion King” remake, numerous individuals close to the project tell Variety. She will voice an animal brand new to the kingdom that was established in the 1994 animated classic. Under the purview of director Jon Favreau, Sedaris will play an

MADRID — Women fighting back. Three of the six titles in Ventana Sur’s Copia Final this year picture women confronting outrage or tragedy – gender violence (“Do You Like Me?”), the abduction of a new born baby (“Song Without a Name”) or the death of a husband (“Venezia”) – and reacting, in multifarious fashions. “Do

Guido Rud’s Buenos Aires-based FilmSharks Intl., one of the most influential sales agents for Spanish-language cinema worldwide, has released the international trailer for Spaniard producer-director José Luis Cuerda’s upcoming sci-fi dystopian comedy “Some Time Later.” (“Tiempo Después”) “This is Cuerda at his best,” Rud told Variety, “The one that can fly, the one who was

November 26, 2018 9:42AM PT Amazon Studios signed an exclusive first look feature production deal with Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s JuVee Productions, putting the streaming service in business with one of the most acclaimed and honored actresses of her generation. Tennon is an actor and producer, as well as Davis’s husband. Davis has been

Two sequels entered a competitive box office ring this weekend. Both emerged victorious. “Ralph Breaks the Internet” and “Creed II” dominated the domestic box office,  generating a respective $84.5 million and $55 million over the five-day holiday. Those numbers buoyed the stateside market to a record Thanksgiving weekend at multiplexes as ticket sales soared past

Ficunam, the international film festival organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has launched new film lab, Catapulta, in a bid to extend more support to indie films in post. The open call for its First Cut competition runs from Nov. 27 to Jan. 14. The 9th Ficunam unspools Feb. 28 to March 10. Founded

November 26, 2018 5:07AM PT Tributes have begun to pour in for Oscar-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci, who died Monday at the age of 77. “A giant of Italian filmmaking, he will remain forever a leading light in world cinema,” the Cannes Film Festival tweeted. Bertolucci served as jury president at Cannes in 1990 and won an

Greg Kinnear (“Little Miss Sunshine”), Lesley Manville (“Phantom Thread”), Keeley Hawes (“Bodyguard”), Rhys Ifans (“Notting Hill”) and Phyllis Logan (“Downton Abbey”) have joined the cast of “Misbehaviour,” alongside the previously announced Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha Raw and Jessie Buckley. Principal photography began Monday on the dramedy, based on the true story of the 1970 Miss

Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic “The Last Emperor” won nine Oscars and who influenced generations of filmmakers with other groundbreaking works such as “The Conformist” and “Last Tango in Paris,” in which he explored politics and sexuality through personal storytelling and audacious camera work, has died. He was 77. His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said Bertolucci died

November 25, 2018 10:44PM PT Chinese crime thriller, “A Cool Fish” climbed to the top of the China box office in its second week of release. Doing so, it held off the continuing performance of “Venom” and the opening sally of “Ralph Breaks the Internet.” According to weekend data from Asian film and cinema consulting

November 25, 2018 10:06PM PT The Tokyo Filmex festival concluded its 2018 edition by giving its grand prize to Sergey Dvortsevoy’s “Ayka.” This was the first edition of the festival under the control of property to entertainment group, Kinoshita. “Ayka” debuted in competition in Cannes earlier this year. It is a drama about an immigrant

Plenty of people have heard 20th century concert music solely because Stanley Kubrick smuggled it into his movies. The L.A. Philharmonic returned the favor over the weekend, by smuggling the director’s films into the concert hall. “Stanley Kubrick’s Sound Odyssey” took the Phil, along with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, on a musical voyage through

“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” had another magical weekend at the foreign box office, generating $83.7 million for an international haul of $322.6 million. The spinoff sequel has now crossed $439.7 million globally, with $116 million of that total coming from North America. Warner Bros., the studio behind the wizarding world films, anticipated that,

There’s a new favourite at the specialty box office. Fox Searchlight’s “The Favourite” bowed in four venues in New York and Los Angeles, generating a hefty $420,000. That averages out to $105,500 per location, ranking as the best theater average since “La La Land” ($176,221) almost two years ago. “The Favourite” now holds the biggest

Disney’s “Ralph Breaks the Internet” dominated the Thanksgiving box office, generating a massive $84.6 million at 4,017 locations over the five-day holiday period and $56 million for the weekend. Propelled by solid word of mouth, the Disney animated sequel now ranks as the second-best Thanksgiving debut ever, behind another Disney title, “Frozen,” which earned $93.6 million

November 24, 2018 8:17PM PT Bhaskar Hazarika’s “Ravening” (“Aamis”) won the Facebook award for the project with the most buzz at the Film Bazaar Recommends strand at the annual Film Bazaar in Goa, India. The award is calculated on audience votes and number of visits to the film at the Bazaar’s viewing room. The project

Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper are shooting into action near Oxford, England. Video-game company Rebellion, which is moving into film and TV, has bought a large former print works that will be converted into studio space for its highly anticipated Judge Dredd TV series, “Judge Dredd: Mega-City One,” and its Rogue Trooper film, directed by

The 1970s were the heyday of what was still known, with Victorian understatement, as the love scene: those writhing arenas of nude intimacy, which moviegoers experienced with a touch of voyeuristic awe, to the point that the scenes were talked about for years, or even decades. And except for the clashing close encounters in “Last

Anticipation for Disney’s rollout of live action adaptations can sometimes be lukewarm, but that’s clearly not the case with “The Lion King.” The teaser trailer for the upcoming “live action” feature — which is really just photoreal animation — accumulated 224.6 million views globally in its first 24 hours, becoming Disney’s most watched trailer in

Andy Blankenbuehler has signed on to choreograph the upcoming Universal-Working Title film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical “Cats,” Variety has confirmed. Blankenbuehler, who choreographed the recent revival of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s hit musical, is also known as the choreographer for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” He has won three Tonys, for his work on “Hamilton,” “Bandstand,” and

November 24, 2018 9:28AM PT British director Nicolas Roeg, who’s 1970s-era films such as “Don’t Look Now,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Performance” became touchstones for numerous budding filmmakers and cinephiles, died Friday. Directors including Edgar Wright and Duncan Jones, whose father David Bowie starred in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” were

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” and “Creed II” are looking to have some of the most successful Thanksgiving turns of all time, edging the holiday weekend towards a potential new record. Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” sequel should debut to an estimated $84.9 million for the five-day weekend from 4,017 locations, slotting in just behind 2013’s “Frozen,” with