News

While women accounted for 51% of all moviegoers back in 2019, of the 100 top-grossing films that year, only 10. 7% were directed by women.

HFPA journalists interviewed Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian film director who passed away in 2019 at the age of 96, several times. In 1973, speaking of his movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon about Francis of Assisi, he said:“I think the problem of dropouts it’s eternal and perennial, in the ‘60s we talked a little more about it, but it’s always been there, and it was at the time of Francis of Assisi in the 12th century.

Beginning in 1952 when the Cecil B.  deMille Award was presented to its namesake visionary director, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has awarded its most prestigious prize 66 times.

One of the biggest stars in silent films that most fans have never heard of was Colleen Moore who, in her heyday, was earning $12,500 a week in the 1920s and ‘30s, (close to $200,000 in today’s money). Unfortunately, most of her films are lost.

The HFPA’s Ting Ting Xu examines Asian film trends through standout films and the authors behind them. Japan is the world’s third-largest box office market after North America and China.

If there is one thing everyone has had to get acquainted with during Covid-19 times, it would have to be reinvention. Parents have had to become their children’s schoolteachers; employees had to convert their dining rooms to workspace and zoom calls have replaced out of town meetings.

Vanessa Kirby has a one-two-punch in Venice. She is the only actress who, in a toned-down year, has two films here.

Tilda Swinton did not just come to the Lido to collect an award – the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement no less – and wear a great mask, she also starred in and introduced The Human Voice, a short film by Pedro Almodóvar, a man she has admired greatly for many years. Wearing a yellow Haider Ackerman blazer and her newly red hair, she paid tribute to the Spanish master:  “My relationship with Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema started with the cinema of William Wyler and George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and then Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was the first time I saw his spirit and I’ve been entirely besotted by his cinema ever since.

When Cecil B. DeMille released his silent movie The Cheat in 1915, his villain was a Japanese ivory merchant called Hishuru Tori played by Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa.

In his new HBO Max series Raised by Wolves, Ridley Scott leaps forward in time to the end of humanity on Earth and shoots off to a faraway planet where humanity is to be restarted. He explores themes that are familiar from his previous work: androids, religion versus science, the fallibility of both human and non-human nature.