News

It's a cruel summer for Italian cinema. One movie made it over a million this week, and there was no major upheaval in the box office rankings.

The weekend’s temperatures were as boiling as forecast, but maybe it was precisely the heat that had audiences yearning for some air-conditioned relief inside a cinema: the German-speaking box office held steady despite strong competition from swimming pools and lakes. On a weekend with basically no new releases – save for one sleeper hit – it was up to the expected blockbusters to fill the theaters.

“We're social creatures. Our mission statement is to promote comics.

David Strathairn recently acted with Frances McDormand in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) with Bradley Cooper and Toni Collette and now with Daisy Edgar-Jones in director Olivia Newman’s Where the Crawdads Sing (2022). Strathairn earned the first of his two Golden Globe nominations for his portrayal of Edward R.

Can an unlikeable heroine make us root for her, and why do we find successful, independent women, unlikeable? These are two of many questions prompted by Céline Devaux’s slyly intelligent comedy: Everybody Loves Jeanne. Jeanne (Blanche Gardin) is that intimidating woman that people love to hate – smart, well put together, heading up her own company – whose goal is to save the ocean.

Summer is here. Time for naps in the shade, cool drinks, a dip in the water and, if we are lucky, a trip to the cinema theater to see a beach movie.

Independent eccentric filmmaker Abel Ferrara, a hard-core New Yorker (born in the Bronx in 1951), is in the land of his ancestors, Southern Italy, a special guest of the 1st edition of the Allora Film Festival in Ostuni, Puglia. The director of Bad Lieutenant (1992), King of New York, Body Snatchers, The Addiction (1995), The Blackout and many documentaries on the most varied subjects (among them the city of Naples and writer/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini) talked to an enthusiastic crowd of young filmmakers and students during the festival.

Think fast: is there any film you had seen that didn’t have a car? Difficult, isn’t it? Cars and movies were born and developed at the same time, from the late 19th century to the early 20th, a moment when movement and speed fascinated new generations and opened opportunities for new horizons. The first moving picture – The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Gare, in 1895 -  showcased a protagonist from the previous century – the locomotive.

Don’t look for a China release for Thor: Love and Thunder, the seventh Marvel Cinematic Universe film in a row to be banned in China. While the Taika Waititi-directed film opened to a worldwide $300+ million, it is unlikely to be passed by the Chinese censors presumably because of LGBTQ references - the Valkyrie character coming out as bisexual and Korg fathering a child with another male.

It’s hard to believe that forever young David Hasselhoff turns 70 today (July 17). But, as we recently discovered when the iconic star of Baywatch and Knight Rider attended the Monte-Carlo TV Festival to promote his new German/English TV series, Ze Network, he’s not slowing down anytime soon.