Movie News

It’s official: 20th Century and Disney’s Free Guy is a box office hit despite the ongoing pandemic and Hurricane Henri in the Northeast.

The family-friendly action-comedy, starring Ryan Reynolds and directed by Shawn Levy, fell a mere 34 percent in its second weekend to $18.8 million for a 10-day domestic total of $58.8 million. Free Guy, sporting the lowest decline of any film opening north of $10 million in the pandemic era, had no trouble staying at No. 1 thanks to great word of mouth.

Overseas, it was also a hero, earning $17.1 million from 46 markets as it ...

Festival

BFI London Film Festival (Lff) will host the European premiere of Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” for its closing ceremony on Sunday, Oct. 17 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. Coen is scheduled to attend. The festival will also host simultaneous preview screenings of the film at Lff partner venues across the U.K. Previously, the festival has announced that its opening night film will be Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall,” with Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” to screen at its American Express Headline Gala. The 65th BFI Lff will run Oct.

The premiere will take place on September 23.

Michael Steiner’s And Tomorrow We Will Be Dead will be the opening film at the 17th edition of the Zurich Film Festival (Zff), which takes place from September 23 to October 3 2021.

The film will receive its world premiere on September 23 and will be the first screening in the freshly renovated Convention Center.

And Tomorrow We Will Be Dead tells the story of two real-life Swiss individuals taken hostage by the Taliban. Daniela Widmer (Morgane Ferru) and David Och (Sven Schelker) were captured in 2011 while travelling through Pakistan. Widmer and Och will be present at the premiere.

A major new study polled 1300 actors about their experiences.

UK actors from ethnically diverse backgrounds continue to face widespread institutional racism at work, according to a major new survey.

The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University polled 1,300 actors about their experiences between March and April this year.

Among the key findings: 55% of respondents said they have directly experienced racism in the workplace, while 79% felt roles continue to stereotype their ethnicities.

The research flagged up casting as a particular concern. 61% said they felt unable to turn down auditions that stereotype ethnicities, with 64% having experienced racist stereotyping in an audition.

Films include Emerald Fennell’s ‘Promising Young Woman’ and Blerta Basholli’s ‘Hive’.

More films than ever before are eligible for this year’s European Film Awards’ feature film and documentary film selection, with 40 feature films and 15 documentary films, and further feature film titles to be revealed in September.

Titles in the feature film selection include Blerta Basholli’s Sundance hit Hive and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. The latter is eligible despite being listed as a film of US origin. The European Film Academy (Efa) told Screen this was because the film reaches the number of points in

Russia is also set to launch a series of regional rebates to attract international film shoots.

Yash Raj Films’ untitled Bollywood feature Production 70 has become the first project to access Russia’s 40% cash rebate programme for internatonal productions, launched two years ago at the AFM.

According to the Russian Export Center and Ministry of Economic Development, it will receive $650,000 in support, based on the declared budget for production in Russia at the time of submitting the application.

Yash Raj Films, one of India’s largest production studios, is shooting the film in St Petersberg. The spy thriller is directed by

Now that we're a few weeks past the release of "The Suicide Squad," we're getting some more insight from director James Gunn on some hard-to-catch Easter eggs. This one focuses on his tribute to one Dr. Wesley Von Spears.

In the film, the bad guys smoke stogies, as villains tend to do. Unless they're a frazzled newspaper editor, a poker player in a 1930s movie, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, cigars are reserved almost solely for bad guys.

The brand of cigars in "The Suicide Squad" don't actually exist. Much like how Quentin Tarantino invented his own brand of cigarettes (Red...

The post The Suicide Squad Pays Tribute to James Gunn's Late Best Friend Dr. Wesley Von Spears appeared first on /Film.

Orange Studio, the Paris-based film and TV arm of France’s leading telco operator Orange, has poached Charlotte Boucon, Snd’s longtime international sales topper.

Boucon will be head of world sales for Orange Studio starting on Sept. 1 and will report to Kristina Zimmermann, managing director of the French studio.

Under the newly-created role, Boucon will spearhead all of the commercial activities of Orange Studio’s film branch, notably international sales, video, VOD and TV. The department’s staff includes Emilie Serres, the deputy head of sales at Orange Studio. Boucon will also work with David Marquet, a veteran sales executive who ran the department for a number of years.

Boucon joined Snd, the commercial division of the French TV network M6, in 2008 after graduating from the Edhec Business School and headed the group’s international distribution since 2015. While at Snd, Boucon sold a number of hit movies around the world,

HBO Max Emea general manager Sulebakk is overseeing the Emea rollout of HBO Max.

French TV festival and market event Series Mania, which unfolds in the city of Lille in Northern France from August 26 to September, has created two initiatives to focus on women in the audiovisual industry.

They comprise the annual Woman in Series Award honouring a woman whose vision and leadership have made their mark on the audiovisual industry. Christina Sulebakk, general manager of HBO Max Emea, will be the inaugural recipient.

The Copenhagen-based executive was appointed HBO Max Emea in January 2021 and is responsible for existing HBO

Since 2011, the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Talent Lab has nurtured a number of rising filmmakers through an assortment of masterclasses, workshops and individual mentoring sessions: Talents like Ben Sharrock (“Limbo”), Eva Riley (a recent winner BIFA winner for “Perfect 10”) and Rob Savage (“Host”) are alumni of the program. In 2019, however, the program yielded the Talent Lab Connects offshoot, in which a smaller selection of writers, directors and producers are given the chance to develop specific feature film or series projects with a range of industry mentors.

Now in its third year — and its second of the program taking place online — the program will be headed again by renowned U.K. script editor Kate Leys, whose recent credits include Simon Amstell’s “Benjamin,” Bart Layton’s “American Animals” and John Maclean’s “Slow West.”

Six projects have been selected for Talent Lab Connects:

“A Man at the Window”: Yorkshire-born

Two internationally-acclaimed documentaries from the Nordic region – “Flee” and “Gunda” – are among the five films nominated for a Nordic Council Film Prize.

This is the most prestigious film award in the Nordic region, celebrating films with unique artistic visions that actively engage with Nordic culture. It’s the eighteenth year the Nordic Council Film Prize is awarded, and the winner will be announced on Nov. 2 in Copenhagen, taking home a prize of Dkk 300,000 to be shared equally among the screenwriter, director, and producer. Here are the five film nominations:

“Flee,” (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Denmark)

Co-written by Amin (a pseudonym), and produced by leading Danish company Final Cut for Reel (nominated for an Oscar for both “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”), the film has already had a hugely successful festival circuit run. At Sundance, it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary section, while

The festival has conducted over 3,000 tests so far.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has reported zero positive Covid-19 tests on its opening weekend, from over 3,000 tests conducted at the event.

The figures cover the period from Friday August 20 when the festival opened through to the end of Sunday August 22.

The festival also reported that more than 20,000 of the ‘Covid-free’ wristbands all attendees must wear have been distributed, with the figures providing validation so far of this process.

All those wishing to attend the event have to provide a Qr code from an EU Covid-19 certificate. The certificate can be

In between an Adventist Church and a parish church belonging to the Church of Norway in the coastal town of Haugesund lies the Haugesund Public Library which proved the setting for the first major panel discussion at this year’s Haugesund Festival, which turned on Feminism and Religion. In this Christian-dominated environment, the conversation turned in part on a doc-feature, “Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam,” which screens at the festival.

The conversation was organized by the Norwegian Intl. Film Festival-Haugesund in collaboration with The Church Council and The Church of Norway. For context, recent studies report that the majority of Norwegians do not believe in God, but that most non-religious Norwegians – an estimated 70% – are still members of the Church of Norway, though only 2% of them regularly go to church.

Tonje Hardersen, the film festival’s program manager, told Variety that The Church of Norway has been regularly collaborating with

Not even a storming soundtrack of mod classics can save a humdrum scooter-to-Brighton caper, which keeps its eye fatally on the rear-view mirror

Quadrophenia love dies hard. After July’s ill-fated cast reunion To Be Someone, now follows this humdrum standalone from the sentimental end of British cinema’s poverty row, seeking to capitalise on residual fondness for all things mod. The star is a scooter: a nifty runaround with two dozen rear-view mirrors , it’s a worthy steed for Patrick McNamee’s callow latter-day knight John Parker (geddit?) as he retraces his late dad’s tyre tracks from Burnhamland to Brighton. This journey – and the rite-of-passage it represents – encompasses legends of old Jam gigs, 1980s songs picking up where the first mods left off, and cameos from associate producer Patsy Kensit and Eldorado’s Jesse Birdsall.

Those mirrors prove symbolic of an entirely backward-looking enterprise. A prolific writer-director whose Me,

Marion Cotillard, the Oscar-winning French actor whose latest film “Annette” won a prize at Cannes, will receive a Donostia Award at the 69th edition of the San Sebastian Festival during the opening ceremony on Sept. 17.

Cotillard, who won an Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA award for her performance as Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose,” has been working with some of the most revered filmmakers in the U.S. and in Europe. These include Jacques Audiard (“Rust and Bone”), Michael Mann (“Public Enemies”), Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen (“Midnight in Paris”), Steven Soderbergh (“Contagion”), James Gray (“The Immigrant”), the Dardenne brothers, Arnaud Desplechin (“Ismael’s Ghosts”), Guillaume Canet (“Blood Ties”), and most recently Leos Carax, who directed Cotillard in “Annette” alongside Adam Driver.

Cotillard stars as a famous opera singer in the critically acclaimed musical drama “Annette” which world premiered on opening night at Cannes and won best director for Carax.

The actor expressed support for Johansson’s legal action against the studio for releasing Black Widow on Disney+ at the same time as in cinemas

Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney over Black Widow has received support from fellow actor Elizabeth Olsen, who plays Scarlet Witch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Olsen (who is currently starring in Marvel’s WandaVision series on Disney+) said that Johansson was “so tough” and “when I read [about the legal action] I was like, ‘good for you Scarlett’”. She added that “when it comes to actors and their earnings, I mean, that’s just, that’s just all contracts. So it’s either in the contract or it’s not.”

The lucrative prize is now in its 19th year.

The five nominees for this year’s Nordic Council Film Prize have been unveiled at the Haugesund International Film Festival in Norway today (August 24).

The lucrative prize, now in its 19th year, comes with an award of $47,000, which is shared equally between the screenwriter, director and producer. The winner will be unveiled on November 2 in Copenhagen.

The nominees include two films that premiered at the Berlinale: Finland’s Any Day Now from writer-director Hamy Ramezan, selected for the Generation 14plus strand this year; and Viktor Kossakovsky’s Norwegian documentary Gunda, which

It follows criticism over the festival’s decision to honour Johnny Depp.

The San Sebastian Festival and (H)emen, the Basque association of professional women in audiovisual media and the performing arts, are organising a workshop to take place at the festival’s 69th edition (September 17-25), with the aim of exploring issues surrounding gender equality.

A statement from the festival said: “The aim will be to reflect, discuss and endeavour to reach agreements on questions related to gender equality.

“The debate will cover a variety of interrelated aspects, including, among others: the inclusion of professional women in the world of cinema and,

It follows criticism over the festival’s decision to honour Johnny Depp.

The San Sebastian Festival and (H)emen, the Basque association of professional women in audiovisual media and the performing arts, are organising a workshop to take place at the festival’s 69th edition (September 17-25), with the aim of exploring issues surrounding gender equality.

A statement from the festival said: “The aim will be to reflect, discuss and endeavour to reach agreements on questions related to gender equality.

“The debate will cover a variety of interrelated aspects, including, among others: the inclusion of professional women in the world of cinema and,

Thorne was delivering the 46th MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

UK TV has “utterly and totally” failed disabled people, according to MacTaggart lecturer Jack Thorne, as he unveiled an accessibility pressure group designed to improve the situation.

The Virtues and The Accident writer pulled no punches when referring to disability as “the forgotten diversity”, as he became the 46th MacTaggart speaker and first to have had a disability.

“Disability is the issue everyone leaves out of speeches,” he said.

“Gender, race, sexuality all rightly get discussed at length but disability gets relegated out. In conversations about representation, it is confined to the corner,