News

The family tragicomedy Bố già (Dad, I'm Sorry) has already broken a record by becoming the highest-grossing Vietnamese movie of all time, with grosses of about $20 million; it is also the first Vietnamese film to collect $1 million at the U. S.

Forty-six years after her death, Josephine Baker was inducted into the Panthéon on Tuesday to join France’s heroes. In a moving ceremony attended by iconic figures, she was honored for her life as an artist, resistance fighter and anti-racial activist.

Writing With Fire, Rintu Thomas and Shushmit Ghosh’s feature documentary debut tells the story of Khabar Lahariya, a female-run newspaper in northern India whose journalists are all Dalit, the lowest group in the Hindu caste system. Highly acclaimed, the film has won an audience award and special jury award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and is nominated for best feature honors by the International Documentary Association (IDA).

Namibian producer/director Desiree Kahikopo-Meiffret’s Award-winning film, The White Line, is also her debut. It deals with a painful time in former Southwest Africa’s history when Namibia was ruled by Apartheid.

In Marion Davies’ posthumous memoir, “The Times We Had,” published in 1985 based on her audio recordings, she says, “I couldn’t act, but the idea of silent pictures appealed to me because I couldn’t talk either. Silent pictures were right up my alley, and that’s how I got all the bad notices.

Encanto cast its spell at the domestic box office during the Thanksgiving holidays but the big news was the performance of the so-called specialty films which arrive in the theaters around this time of the year. Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, boasting an A-list cast led by Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, and Salma Hayek, scored the biggest bow for a drama in the last two years.

Alain Delange (Grégoire Colin) is a French airport auditor assigned to make sure the airport of Artsakh Republic conforms to international standards before opening. It had been shot down due to a conflict with its neighboring countries and the hostility between them continues to exist.

Such was her fame that on March 31, 1920, the Los Angeles Times devoted a banner headline across the top of its front page to the nuptials of ‘America’s sweetheart’ Mary Pickford to her paramour Douglas Fairbanks. “Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks are Secretly Married Here,” it proclaimed.

Willem Dafoe spoke to the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press in 1988 about playing Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ directed by Martin Scorsese from the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. “It seems like the most logical thing to do would be to read the source material, but I didn’t, which is interesting, because I didn't want to burden myself with any expectations or be influenced by any images, so you try to free yourself from them as much as possible.

“Don't ask me to start fast and strong! I always start slow and then eventually catch up – all I did in my life is coming from behind and catching up!” That's what So Wa Wai yells in despair to his mother, when she pushes him to start faster in the 200-hundred-meter dash in the Honk Kong film Zero to Hero. Written and directed by Jimmy Wan, the film is based on the true story of Paralympic champion So Wa Wai, who raced for Hong Kong as a sprinter in five special Olympic games between 1996 and 2012.