News

1954 was an intense year and a tough summer for the newly married Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. They were living in a suite at the Lexington Hotel in New York, not far from where her famous skirt-blowing scene was filmed in front of the Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theater, for the movie The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder, a three-times Golden Globe winner.

After his stint in the US Armed Forces as a fighter pilot during the last years of WWII where he chalked up more than 50 bombing missions, Robert Altman spent twenty years writing scripts, directing industrials and episodic television, first in Kansas City and then in Hollywood. Success came late in his career – he was 45 when he won the Palme d’Or for M*A*S*H* in 1969, his greatest works still ahead of him.

A few days ago, Golden Globe nominee John Leguizamo called out the casting of Golden Globe winner James Franco as Fidel Castro in Alina of Cuba: la hija rebelde. The film is a portrayal of Alina Fernández Revuelta, the illegitimate daughter of the leftist leader with socialite Natalia Revuelta.

  It’s been a guest list to rival any A-list event: Barack and Michelle Obama, Tyler Perry, the Rev Al Sharpton, Yara Shahidi, Tamron Hall, Tonya-Lewis Lee, and singer Bobby Brown. They’re just some of the luminaries who’ve already appeared over the past weekend at the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival.

Brad Pitt’s Bullet Train may have sped to the top of the domestic box office but the big news was Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick has zoomed past Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s Titanic to become the seventh all-time biggest hit in North America. And with $662 million in domestic ticket sales, the Top Gun sequel looks like it will also dethrone Avengers: Infinity War, which earned $678 million, and become the sixth highest grossing movie of all time in the United States and Canada.

For the fifth consecutive week,  Thor: Love and Thunder leads the Italian Box Office. But this time the drop in overall revenues is of no small concern.

Chinese sci-fi comedy Moon Man, continued its domination of the Chinese box office, revitalizing the theatrical industry. It has already made $297.

Finally, some real shakeup in the charts: a German crime comedy kicked the Minions off the top spot, and a US-made action comedy debuted in third place. Germany’s number one film is Guglhupfgeschwader – to translate this funny dialectic title, one needs to explain: a Guglhupf is a bundt cake, Geschwader means squadron, but the real meaning is found in the story.

According to its new bylaws which mandate staggered election terms for its Board of Directors, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) announced the election of two new directors, Vera Anderson and Earl Gibson III, and the re-election of two directors, Barbara Gasser and Tina Jøhnk Christensen. “At this important time of transition, we welcome the contributions of our newest directors Vera Anderson and Earl Gibson III,” said Helen Hoehne, President of the HFPA.

A League of Their Own will be back as a series on Amazon, starting on August 12. Back in 1992, Geena Davis received one of her four Golden Globe nominations for her work in director Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, co-starring Tom Hanks, Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna.