Movies

September 27, 2018 1:49AM PT Slovenian youth run amok in Darko Stante’s dynamic if not always pointed gay-themed debut feature. “Consequences” is a somewhat daring enterprise for Slovenia in that it doesn’t judge its characters for their bi or gay sexuality. Indeed, their simultaneous extreme machismo and party-hearty vibe seem designed to impress younger viewers

Like a crafty Casanova who masks his true intentions while assiduously charming his latest prey, “Mademoiselle de Joncquieres” takes a stealthy and slow-burn approach before fully revealing its true colors as a shrewdly choreographed roundelay of scheming, seduction and revenge in the spirit of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Freely adapted from the same section of Denis

SAN SEBASTIAN — Smart genre, zombies and throwbacks to the ’70s and ‘80s are some of the current trends in genre cinema, according to some specialists in the field. It’s a cyclical dynamic now offering meaningful box office hits such as Corin Hardy’s “The Nun” or Ari Aster’s “Hereditary.” Genre cinema always attracts the attention

SAN SEBASTIAN  — In one of the banner deals at this year’s San Sebastian, Vicente Canales’ Film Factory Ent, the sales agent on “Wild Tales,” “The Clan” and now Argentine Oscar entry “El Angel,” has pounced on world sales rights to “La Llorona,” which stars the female leads of Bustamante’s Berlin awarded debut “Ixcanul.” Deal

SAN SEBASTIAN — Carving out a reputation in Basque cinema as a regarded left-of-field short filmmaker over 20 years moving into features with “Ghost Ship,” essay on fiction and commoditization of pleasure, Koldo Almandoz takes a partial step towards the mainstream in his fiction feature debut, “Oreina” (Deer), which world premiered Tuesday at San Sebastian.

It’s Jean Grey’s turn to get her own X-Men Universe film, and the first trailer for “X-Men: Dark Phoenix” promises to deliver it, with Sophie Turner starring as the supremely powerful mutant. The trailer shows Grey’s progression from a unwitting child who accidentally causes a car accident to a conflicted, tumultuous young woman who seeks

Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke made it clear on Wednesday that big changes are coming to the company’s struggling film business. Less than a week after Dan Fogelman’s “Life Itself” flopped, the executive moved quickly to stabilize her film team and to encourage the faltering division to start developing more commercial fare. As part of

The late 1990s were a goldmine for independent cinema, with financiers and distributors willing to gamble on diverse material in the wake of “Pulp Fiction’s” breakout success earlier that decade. “Smoke Signals,” marketed by Miramax as “the first feature film written, directed, and produced by Native Americans,” was a critical success and crowd favorite from

September 26, 2018 1:36PM PT The Independent Filmmaker Project announced Wednesday that Willem Dafoe and Paul Greengrass will receive an actor and director tribute respectively at the 2018 IFP Gotham Awards. As one of the first awards shows of the season, the IFP Gotham Awards provides early recognition for independent films and their writers, directors, producers and

September 26, 2018 12:55PM PT With “Venom,” which hits theaters next week, Sony is expanding its Spider-Man universe. The upcoming tentpole stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, a journalist who becomes the host of an alien symbiote and unwittingly adopts the terrifying alter-ego Venom. Venom has a long comic-book history with Spider-Man — in fact,

Luis Ortega’s Pedro Almodovar-backed ‘El Angel,’ which premiered at Cannes and screens at this week’s San Sebastian Film Festival, has been selected as Argentina’s submission for consideration for the Academy Award for best foreign language picture. Sold by Vicente Canales’ Film Factory, produced by Argentina’s K & S and and Pedro Almodovar’s El Deseo and

Mindy Kaling isn’t just hopeful that Hollywood is changing in the era of #MeToo and Time’s Up — the “Ocean’s 8” star says she’s already noticing a positive shift toward gender parity. “I’ve seen an enormous amount of change,” Kaling told Variety at the Palisades Village opening gala in Los Angeles, adding, “I’m noticing that

Academy Award-winner Damien Chazelle is coming to Morelia to kick off Mexico’s 16th Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) on Oct. 20 with his latest film, “First Man.” For the first time, the festival will be presenting a medal for artistic excellence to Alfonso Cuaron, whose recent Venice Golden Lion-winner “Roma,” Mexico’s submission to the Oscars

Amazon Studios has acquired the rights to “The Female Persuasion,” an acclaimed best-seller by Meg Wolitzer. The movie will be produced by Lynda Obst (“Contact”), Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, and Per Saari (“Big Little Lies”). Blossom Films, Kidman’s production company, recently signed a first-look deal with Amazon — this film will be a part of

September 26, 2018 12:01PM PT Susan Johnson, noted indie filmmaker and director of the Netflix social media sensation “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” has signed with CAA and Management 360. Based on Jenny Han’s New York Times bestseller of the same name, “To All the Boys” was one of several romantic comedies to

September 26, 2018 10:00AM PT J.K. Simmons, Sienna Miller and Taylor Kitsch have joined Chadwick Boseman’s action-thriller “17 Bridges” for STXfilms. The mini-major announced in July that “Black Panther” star Boseman would produce and star in “17 Bridges.” Brian Kirk, whose credits include “Luther” and “Game of Thrones,” is directing from a script by Adam Mervis

When writer-director David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “Pete’s Dragon”) set out to make his new film “The Old Man & the Gun,” a true-crime story starring Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek, he quickly chose Fort Worth, Texas, as a primary location. Redford plays real-life professional criminal Forrest Tucker, who claimed to have successfully escaped from

Don’t come to “Alpha, The Right to Kill,” the latest rough-hewn slab of social realism from Filipino auteur Brillante Ma Mendoza, in search of revelations, either in form or content. A rumbling, street-pounding drug-war thriller, it’s far from the first film to paint cops and dealers on this beat as equally bent; a Mendoza joint

September 26, 2018 8:41AM PT AMC’s subscription service continues to add customers. The theater chain’s “Moviepass killer” now has 380,000 members, which the exhibitor claims outpaces its internal expectations. AMC has dubbed the program A-List. The servce lets users see up to three movies per week for $19.95 a month. A-List also lets members reserve

Noel Clarke and Jason Maza’s Unstoppable Film and Television is partnering with film funding platform Genera on a £250,000 ($329,000) fund for the worldwide production of shorts. Clarke (“Adulthood”) and Maza’s (“Welcome to the Punch”) work spans film and TV production as well as acting – the pair recently appeared Sky’s buddy cop drama “Bulletproof.”

September 26, 2018 7:00AM PT Smith Global Media has bought worldwide rights to the legal drama “Canal Street,” starring Bryshere Gray (“Empire”) and Mykelti Williamson. The film will open in North America on Jan. 18 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The film screened at the American Black Film Festival. “Canal Street” is directed,

You expect a movie starring Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish to have its share of highly combative verbal fireworks. And given that “Night School” was directed by Malcolm D. Lee, whose last picture, the deliriously raunchy and spirited “Girls Trip,” showcased Haddish as a one-woman comic hurricane (her character was a gale force of pithy

September 26, 2018 3:48AM PT Starline has taken international rights to “The Cellar,” the crime thriller from Russian filmmaker Igor Voloshin (“Bedouin”). The picture is a three-way co-production between Slovakia’s Furia Film, Russia’s Gate Film, and the Czech Republic’s 8Heads Production. It was largely filmed in the Slovak Republic where it will be released this

Paris-based private equity firm Alliance Entreprendre (NATIXIS Groupe) has taken a minority stake in About Premium Content (APC) to allow the company to fast-track its growth. APC’s current drama slate includes Movistar Studios’s Spanish-language drama “Gigantes” (pictured), Vox Pictures’s English-language hit series “Keeping Faith,” Dutch crime thriller “Fenix” and the returning Swedish crime thriller “Alex.”

Global Screen has closed further sales deals for its 3D animated feature film “Marnie’s World,” which is close to selling out worldwide. The movie is written and directed by Oscar winners Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein. In the film, pampered pussycat Marnie is lured into becoming a secret agent. Marnie teams up with a bunch of

September 26, 2018 1:04AM PT The Philippines has selected “Signal Rock” as its contender in the foreign-language section of the upcoming Academy Awards. The film is directed by Chito Rono and stars Christian Bables and Elora Espano. The family drama documents how the population of Biri Island in the 1990s had to climb a high

“Crazy Rich Asians” will open in Japan this week with distributor Warner Japan betting that the film’s muscular box office in the U.S. and elsewhere will carry over to Asia’s second-largest market. But the odds are against a huge win. In mid-September, Warner revealed that it would expand the number of theaters showing the film

Nothing spoils a family gathering quite like politics, and no movie has captured the way such debates can turn ugly quite like Ike Barinholtz’s “The Oath,” an impressively out-there feature debut in which no-win arguments over a divisive new government policy escalate into a full-blown hostage crisis, turning what should have been a mild-mannered Thanksgiving

SAN SEBASTIAN — San Sebastian’s Focus On initiative, now in its fourth year, invites industry professionals from a country, or countries, to expand their networking contacts and participate in industry activities. This year’s featured Focus On region is the Baltics, and the event is hosting representatives from Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. The Baltics boast strong

A borderline impossible game of Taboo could be played if one were tasked with describing Olivier Masset-Depasse’s “Mothers’ Instinct” without using the word “Hitchcockian.” The Belgian director’s luxuriant psychological thriller is so redolent of the Master of Suspense’s style, and so gorgeously robed in Thierry Delettre’s ’60s costuming that at times one expects star Veerle