News

One thing is for certain: programmers at the Bologna Film Festival are equal opportunity film lovers. Cinema Ritrovato – the official name of this yearly celebration of cinema classics – is nothing if not eclectic.

Exactly 60 years ago, an unusual film opened at the Venice film festival. Smog had been filmed entirely in Los Angeles, a somewhat singular distinction for a time in which production mainly flowed in the opposite direction, with big American studios frequently filming sword-and-sandal epics at the famed Cinecittà studio (productions were so common that they came to be nicknamed “Hollywood on the Tiber).

In 69 years of books and 60 years of movies, seven actors became James Bond, and over two dozen composers created 25 songs to support the opening atmosphere of each one of them – that moment, the dramatically dangerous intro when Bond walks across the screen and shoots at us in the audience. One man, however, has left his signature on all of them – Monty Norman, composer of the "James Bond Theme" that announces how fierce, smart, cool, and indomitable 007 is.

Thor: Love and Thunder thundered globally with $302 million. And also, worldwide, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic: World Dominion, and Minions: The Rise of Gru are nearing $1.

Thor, Elvis, Top Gun. A definitely male-dominated box office week comes to an end.

They may have expected more thunder than they got: Thor 4: Love and Thunder made a weaker box office debut than we are used to seeing from superheroes. The real winners, you may have guessed it, were still the little yellow minions.

A goal of the Chinese government is to export domestic films to the rest of the world and thus increase its influence abroad. At the recent Cannes Film Festival, at the China Film Pavilion, one topic of discussion was the international distribution of Chinese films.

Ryan Gosling will soon be seen in the action thriller The Gray Man (2022) directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, and next year we’ll see him as Ken, opposite Margot Robbie in Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig. Ryan Gosling won a Golden Globe as Best Actor in 2017, after four nominations, for his performance opposite Emma Stone in the musical La La Land written and directed by Damien Chazelle.

Perusing through the television landscape of the summer of 2022, viewers are tuning in to new episodes to some of the mediums most cutting-edge and innovative series. Stranger Things, Hacks, Only Murders in the Building, The Umbrella Academy, Westworld and Peaky Blinders have returned to their streaming homeland while debuting shows such as Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Old Man, Loot, The Black Hamptons and the highly-anticipated House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones, get their chance to hook viewers into binging weekends.

On June 20, 1975, Hollywood released a movie that would not only break records for years to come but, also, for better or worse, change the way the industry would forthwith release and market their product. The movie and its director created what is now widely known as the ‘opening weekend.