Movies

Liam Neeson celebrated his 100th film “Marlowe” during a special screening Wednesday night at New York City’s Crosby Street Hotel. “How did I get so lucky? Do you ever get moments like that? Where you think, if I was 15 years of age in a chemistry class or a math lesson in school, and someone

Michelle Yeoh and Colin Farrell are among the nominated stars doubling as presenters at this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards. Other principal actors taking the stage to introduce clips of cast performances from their respective films include Jovan Adepo, Diego Calva and Li Jun Li (“Babylon”); Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (“The Banshees of Inisherin”); Yeoh,

Paul Rudd’s subatomic superhero Ant-Man is taking on his scariest adversary yet: a 500-pound black bear on cocaine. Universal’s gruesome action-comedy “Cocaine Bear” won’t come close to “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” in terms of weekend ticket sales, but the drugged-up animal adventure is expected to start strong at the domestic box office. “Cocaine Bear”

Chris Chesser, the producer known for his work on the sports comedy “Major League,” has died. He was 74. Chesser died suddenly Feb. 2 while at his Los Angeles home, brothers Alan and Steve Chesser announced Tuesday. The cause of death has yet to be confirmed. In 1974, the producer took his first steps into

Ellen Barkin got brutally honest in a recent interview with HuffPo about battling misogyny, sexism and harassment in Hollywood. The actor revealed that during the making of her 1989 neo-noir thriller “Sea of Love,” director Harold Becker allegedly ripped off her merkin during the filming of a nude scene. A merkin is a loin cloth

In what marks a first for Chile’s Storyboard Media, Baremo Films of Mexico has boarded its psychological thriller “Quizas es cierto lo que dicen de nosotras” (“Maybe It’s True What They’re Saying About Us”), which has been shooting in Santiago since Feb. 1 and will wrap later this month.  Written and directed by Sofía Gomez

Steven Spielberg has confessed that the coronavirus pandemic forced him to reckon with age and mortality, acknowledging that his fears are what drove him to make his multi-Oscar-nominated film “The Fabelmans.” “The fear I felt about the pandemic gave me the courage to tell my personal story,” Spielberg said during a press conference at the

Though she’s 26, Kathryn Newton has been playing a teenager for a long time — perhaps because she does it so well: with early roles in “Bad Teacher” and “Paranormal Activity 4,” she proved she can bring depth and dimension to whatever her character is struggling with, be it a dyspeptic teacher or an otherworldly

Liam Neeson revealed in a recent interview with Rolling Stone that James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli contacted him several times in the 1990s to ask if he was interested in taking on the role of 007. The actor was fresh off an Oscar nomination for best actor at the time thanks to “Schindler’s List.” Why

“Lie With Me,” a romance drama headlined by French stars Guillaume de Tonquebec and Victor Belmondo, has lured a raft of theatrical distributors at the Berlinale’s EFM. Represented in international markets by Be For Films and directed by Olivier Peyon, the movie is based on Philippe Besson’s book “Arrête avec tes mensonges.” The autobiographical novel

On stage, drag artist Aphrodite Banks is a femme fatale: Caked in war paint, with a waterfall of braids whipping around her waist, she’s possessed of the white-hot glare and forthright confidence to match her Amazonian height and bearing. Off stage, as Jules, he’s simply femme: that term for gay men who present or express

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the maxim goes. And writing about “Music,” the latest beautiful and strange deep-niche arthouse artifact from uncompromising formalist Angela Schanelec, feels like a similarly doomed proposition. The limitations of language are seldom as apparent as when grappling with the silvery elisions and crisp, cryptic omissions of this

“Music,” Angela Schanelec’s German drama, has been bought by Cinema Guild for NorthAmerican distribution following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Cinema Guild will release the film in theaters following its North American festival premiere later this year. The film tells the story of a a pair of wayward young people who abandon

Disney+ has unveiled the trailer for “Chang Can Dunk” from filmmaker Jingyi Shao, one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch” for 2023. The coming-of-age sports film — which begins streaming March 10 — follows Chang (Bloom Li), an unpopular high schooler who loves basketball and Pokémon. Chang finds himself wagering a bet with the school’s

The Golden Globe Awards are heading back to Sunday night. The film and TV celebration, which officially kicks off awards season, has staked Jan. 7, 2024 for its next telecast. The show pivoted to a Tuesday this year to avoid an NFL game leading up to the NCAA National Championship showdown. In addition to reclaiming

Spanish producers taking part in a Spanish content showcase at the Berlinale Series Market on Monday debated what was jokingly referred to as the “devil’s bargain” offered by major streaming platforms that are propelling Spanish shows around the globe often at the cost of IP ownership.    Álex de la Iglesia of Madrid-based production powerhouse

German production outfit MMC Studios (“Amelie”) is backing romanic drama “Dear Eszter,” from writer/director Alex Balassa. Bastian Griese and Lucas Hamacher will produce the film for MMC Studios in Cologne, alongside Balassa. The film’s co-producers include Peter Seres (“World War Z”) at Hungary’s Punk Films, as well as Ondrej Beranek (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) from

The Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX, has unveiled the full program of its 20th edition, which includes 200 new films, more than half of which are world premieres, sealing CPH:DOX’s reputation as one of the leading events of its kind in Europe. For the first time, all 13 films competing for

Shout! Studios has acquired U.S. and Canada rights to Studiocanal and Working Title’s cross-cultural British romantic comedy “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” with a view to releasing it in late spring, it was revealed at Berlin’s European Film Market on Tuesday. Directed by veteran Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur (“Elizabeth”), “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

Singapore-based film marketing and distribution firm Continental Entertainment Pte. Ltd. (CEPL), which holds global distribution rights for Bangladeshi auteur Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s “Saturday Afternoon,” will release the film in the U.S. and Canada through Reliance Entertainment. The Bengali-and-English-language film takes its cue from the brutal terrorist attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka in

First-time writer-director Malika Musaeva is set to make history at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, where her female-centered coming-of-age drama “The Cage is Looking for a Bird” is the first Chechen-language film ever selected by the venerable German fest. Musaeva’s debut, which world premieres Feb. 22 in the festival’s competitive Encounters section, focuses on

“Back to the Future” stars Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson recently reunited to celebrate the beloved film at Fan Expo Portland, which ran from Feb. 17 to Feb. 19. The stars shared their reunion on Instagram, with Thompson posting several photos and videos from the event. “Wow honestly had the

Elsa Zylberstein, one of the most famous – and bankable — faces of French cinema, known for her Cesar-winning performance in “I’ve Loved You For So Long,” is preparing to emerge as a major film producer. Having recently set up banners in France and the U.S., Zylberstein is actively developing a raft of films and

Prosecutors have dropped a five-year gun enhancement against Alec Baldwin and Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, after the defendants argued that the law did not apply at the time of the shooting on the set “Rust.” Baldwin, the film’s star, and Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer, now face a maximum sentence of only 18 months if convicted of involuntary manslaughter

In “Golda,” Helen Mirren, acting with deft skill and control beneath one of those startling transformative prosthetic makeup jobs, portrays Golda Meir during the three-week cataclysm of the Yom Kippur War, which shook Israel to its bones in the fall of 1973. As the actor stands (or, more often, stoops) before us, we can believe

“Here we go again.” That’s what I thought to myself as it slowly but surely became evident that, once again, the BAFTAs were going to end with every single winner being white. Cue the exasperated sighs. In the wake of the first trending #BAFTAsSoWhite hashtag eight years ago, BAFTA made a pledge to review its

New Zealand-based Black Mandala Films is handling world sales on “Mother Superior,” a gothic horror fairy tale linked to World War II and the Nazi experiments on the purity of the lineage. It is the first feature by Marie Alice Wolfszahn, a director, screenwriter, and multimedia artist, currently residing in her hometown of Vienna, Austria.

Oscar-winning actor Helen Mirren refused to address the controversy around her casting as Israel’s iconic Prime Minister Golda Meir in Guy Nattiv’s biopic during the movie’s press conference at the Berlinale. When asked to comment on the backlash and the issue of authentic casting, Mirren left it to Nattiv and her co-star Lior Ashkenazi (“Footnote”) to stand

Egyptian director Abu Bakr Shawky, whose first feature “Yomeddine” had the rare distinction of making the competition cut for Cannes, has completed his followup, the Saudi-set travel movie “Hajjan” which is expected to soon surface on the festival circuit.  Somewhat similarly to “Yomeddine,” which made a splash in 2018, the hotly anticipated “Hajjan” involves a

Leading Japanese manga artist Matsumoto Leiji, whose space operas became known to fans globally in animated incarnations, died on Feb. 13 in Tokyo at age 85. His representatives announced on Monday that the cause of death was heart failure.   Born Matsumoto Akira in 1938 in Kurume, a city on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu,