Movies

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Latam Pictures’ Mineko Mori, one of Mexico’s best-regarded distributors, is making her feature debut as a screenwriter with the upcoming “#Lady Rancho.” The film is produced by Mori and Alex Garcia, founder of Latam Pictures. To aid in the process, Mori enlisted the help of co-writer Molo Alcocer, a promising young

There are few things Hollywood loves more than a good revival. A familiar brand with a built-in fan base? Sold! Even so, bringing back a recognizable property comes with risks. That’s a lesson illustrated last weekend at the box office. It was a tale of two reboots. Illumination and Universal’s “The Grinch,” the third adaptation of

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Ringing its options as one of Canada’s most internationally-minded companies, Yanick Letourneau’s Quebec-based Périphéria has boarded “Viaje al País de los Tarahumaras” and English-language “In Cold Light.” Directed by Federico Cecchetti, “Viaje,” which won the best pitch Talent On The Road Award at Los Cabos Film Festival on Saturday, is set

LOS CABOS, Mexico — In a newly expansive move for a vigorous Mexican movie industry, Machete Producciones founder Edher Campos and producer Gabriela Maire are launching a new production house, Zafiro Cinema. Based out of Mexico City, Zafiro will look to co-produce titles from territories currently underserved by state film funding and industry infrastructure, such

November 12, 2018 1:37AM PT Local comedy “Intimate Strangers” remained on top of the South Korean box office, earning $7.88 million from 1 million admissions between Friday and Sunday. The Lotte Cultureworks release has earned a total of $25.3 million from 3.38 million admissions after two weekends on release. Directed by Lee Jae-kyoo (“The Fatal

It is the first day at a new school for teenaged Mia (Luna Wedler). At lunch break, a girl shyly tries to make friends. But the pouty, pretty Mia, who is just days away from her first period and is perhaps taking this new start as an opportunity to better her social standing, has her

Tom Hardy-starring “Venom” injected some much-needed juice into the Chinese box office, with a blockbuster $102 million first weekend opening. The film crushed other new releases and holdovers alike. Data from Artisan Gateway, which excludes online ticketing fees, shows the superhero film gobbling up 73% of the entire Chinese box office this weekend. Second-placed Japanese

Douglas Rain, who voiced the soft-spoken HAL 9000 robot that went rogue in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” has died. He was 90. The Stratford Festival, which Rain, who was a dedicated Shakespearean actor, co-founded in 1952, said that Rain had died of natural causes in Stratford, Ont. in Canada. The festival said Rain

As the Woolsey fire in Ventura and Los Angeles counties continues to rage, Netflix has canceled the red carpet portion of its AFI Fest screening of “The Ballad of the Buster Scruggs,” the Coen brothers’ latest film. “Our hearts are with the victims and families of the Borderline shooting and of the California wildfires,” a

“The Front Runner,” Jason Reitman’s political docudrama about the disaster that befell Gary Hart’s 1988 campaign for the presidency (a perfect storm of private sin, public voyeurism, and journalistic hubris), is a movie that pulses with the twitchy electronic-nerve-ending hunger of mass media. Reitman, a director of up-front humanity and skill, has figured out a

Reportedly the biggest-budgeted and most widely released Bollywood production ever, “Thugs of Hindostan” is an exuberantly excessive masala of swashbuckling heroics, broader-than-broad comedy, propulsively choreographed action, and raucously caffeinated song-and-dance sequences. Writer-director Vijay Krishna Acharya, a creative force behind the popular “Dhoom” movies, has borrowed freely from Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean,” even to the

“I don’t talk about it a lot…but when I was a young teen, I was in a position where I might become at risk,” Amy Adams said in her acceptance speech while receiving the Giving Tree Award at the Baby2Baby gala Saturday night, held at 3Labs in Culver City. “You never know when an act

Ennio Morricone has denied participating in an interview with Playboy Germany magazine in which he was quoted as saying Quentin Tarantino was a “cretin,” who made nothing but “trash” films. “This is totally false,” the 90 year-old composer said in a statement released Sunday. “I have not given an interview to Playboy Germany and even

Days after the White House press secretary shared doctored footage to justify restricting a journalist’s access, the annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards took on a more charged tenor than usual. “Remember truth? That little thing that’s the foundation of civilization?” Robert De Niro asked wistfully, drawing laughs from the audience who’d gathered at the BRIC

“Venom” carried the global box office this weekend, thanks to its massive $111 million debut in China. That ranks as the second biggest opening ever for a superhero film in that territory, behind just “Avengers: Infinity War.” Its performance in the Middle Kingdom powered “Venom” to $673.5 million worldwide, including $467 million internationally. Though its

“The Grinch” proved it’s never too early for some holiday cheer as the animated family flick stole the weekend box office with $66 million from 4,141 locations. Illumination and Universal’s adaptation of the Dr. Seuss holiday tale now ranks as the best start for a Christmas film. Benedict Cumberbatch voiced the animated green grouch in “The

This year’s European Film Awards will be dominated by movies that won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, with Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War,” Matteo Garrone’s “Dogman,” Alice Rohrwacher’s “Happy as Lazzaro,” Lukas Dhont’s “Girl” and Ali Abbasi’s “Border” all in the running for best picture. A 1950s-set love story shot in black and white, “Cold

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee visited this year’s Los Cabos Festival where Lee received a lifetime achievement award, his “BlacKkKlansman” closing out the festivities, and Lewis Lee donned her producer hat for an impassioned roundtable on the drama series boom that has been attracting so many independent producers and filmmakers.

November 10, 2018 8:30PM PT Legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who won an Oscar for the music to “The Hateful Eight,” has labeled the film’s director Quentin Tarantino “a cretin.” Morricone savaged Tarantino in an interview published this week in the December edition of the German-language version of Playboy. He criticized Tarantino on two main

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Adding to its burgeoning best picture trophies, “Genesis,” the consecration of Quebec’s Philippe Lesage, won Los Cabos Competition Award Saturday night. “Genesis” scored at a busy Los Cabos Intl. Film Festival, given star gravitas by Spike Lee, Adam Driver and Terry Gilliam and whose hard-driving industry news flow, especially from the

LOS CABOS, Mexico — The 7th Los Cabos Festival, the most industrially-minded of Mexico’s film events, was the first to take place in full-blown digital OTT revolution. Two TV panels, the biggest ever at Los Cabos, packed out by some of the foremost Latino TV and OT show-runners, producers and directors,  debated the huge, multi-faceted

What’s the best antidote to the political division roiling the United States? Try a very proper British nanny best known for coining the phrase “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” At least that’s what “Mary Poppins Returns” director Rob Marshall and star Emily Blunt claimed during a panel discussion at the Producers

Europe’s mainstay fest for cinematography, newly rechristened EnergaCamerimage, launched its 26th edition and a week of 241 film screenings in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz on Saturday with a guest appearance by Roman Polanski. The controversial but seminal director of classics such as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” took the stage to honor a longtime colleague,

“Yomeddine,” a road-trip movie about an Egyptian leper and a young orphan journeying in search of family, won the Reflet d’Or for best feature film at the 24th Geneva Intl. Film Festival Saturday. The character-driven drama, Egyptian-Austrian director A.B. Shawky’s feature debut, premiered in competition in Cannes, and is Egypt’s candidate for the foreign-language Oscar.

In line with its continued bid to release a diversity of strong titles, Cinepolis Distribution has picked up all worldwide distribution rights to horror drama “My Favorite Birthday” (“Mi Cumpleaños Favorito”) by helmer-scribe Agustin ‘Oso’ Tapia (“Club Eutanasia”). Tapia has described “Birthday” as “a story where two genres collide: Film noir with the supernatural.” The

There’s a feeling you get, sort of like a low-grade fever, when a film franchise is starting to run down. It’s had three or four sequels, it’s going through the motions, there’s no more fresh terrain left to plow. That sensation hovers, like a gray cloud, over “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” a movie

Thursday night, when the AFI Fest launched with a starry “On the Basis of Sex” premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the event opened its 32nd annual edition to a much different festival landscape than it had in previous years. That’s because just one week earlier, Film Independent announced that it was pulling

“Green Book” director Peter Farrelly forgives Viggo Mortensen for using the N-word. “Viggo is a great, good-hearted guy who was trying to make a nice point and it came out horribly wrong and he apologized immediately and knew what he had done,” Farrelly told Variety on Friday at the movie’s AFI Fest presented by Audi

His heart may be small, but that doesn’t mean his box office returns will be. “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch” is looking to top the weekend box office in its debut with an estimated $67 million from 4,141 North American locations. Benedict Cumberbatch voices the titular green Whoville denizen in Universal’s new adaptation of Seuss’ 1957

This year’s Los Cabos Festival hosted two iconic directors in Terry Gilliam and Spike Lee, and the actor who most recently ties the two together, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” and “BlacKkKlansman” star, Adam Driver. On Friday evening, overlooking the famous coastal rock formations at the Resort at Pedregal, Driver engaged in a career-spanning