Movie News

Jon M. Chu, the director for Crazy Rich Asians, is opening up about Adele Lim — the screenwriter who co-wrote the highly successful 2018 film and left the sequel after a pay parity dispute.

In a lengthy statement posted to Twitter, Chu, 39, supported Lim after she turned down a job as co-writer on the sequel after failed negotiations.

“For those of you who are asking, you bet your a— I stand with Adele!” Chu wrote. “I believed in her before we ever shot the movie and believe in her beyond. As many of you can imagine, negotiations are tough and more often

Olivier Assayas isn’t satisfied with the version of his new film, the Cuban spy epic “Wasp Network,” that world-premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week. According to a report from Deadline, the French writer/director is taking the film back into the editing bay, even as it plays the Toronto International Film Festival this week. The new cut will be unveiled at the film’s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival this fall.

“There are a few things that need clarification,” the “Personal Shopper” and “Summer Hours” director told Deadline. “There are a series of fixes I’ll make. I might shorten some parts and lengthen others. The running time won’t change considerably, but it’s about gaining fluidity. I want the film to be understood by those who aren’t aware of the complexities of the local politics. The fixes will be done

“Joker” director and co-writer Todd Phillips wants comic book movie fans to know that there is no chance of Joaquin Phoenix’s villain and Robert Pattinson’s Batman ever crossing over on the big screen. Pattinson’s Variety cover story sparked rumors last week that his upcoming iteration of Batman might meet Phoenix’s Joker at some point since both Warner Bros. releases exist outside of the DC Extended Universe. Phillips bluntly told Variety at TIFF that won’t be the case.

“No, definitely not,” Phillips said when asked if Phoenix and Pattinson would appear in a future film together.

While Phillips shut down the exciting possibility of a Phoenix-Pattinson crossover, the writer-director did say that just because Pattinson’s Batman won’t meet Phoenix’s villain doesn’t mean the new Caped Crusader won’t face off against his infamous foe.

“Oddly, in the states, comic books are our Shakespeare it seems,

The 1997 action movie “Face/Off,” which starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, is getting a reboot.

Paramount has hired “22 Jump Street” screenwriter Oren Uziel to pen the script with Neal Moritz producing. David Permut, who was a producer on the original film, will executive produce. No actors or director has yet boarded the reboot.

John Woo directed the original movie from Mike Werb and Michael Colleary’s script. Travolta and Cage played FBI agent Sean Archer and terrorist Castor Troy, respectively, who each took on the other’s physical appearance via surgery in a complicated story triggered by the assassination of Archer’s son by Troy.

“Face/Off” also starred Joan Allen, Gina Gershon and Alessandro Nivola as Troy’s brother. The film, which carried an $80 million budget, was a solid performer with a $245 million global gross. Woo went on to direct “Mission: Impossible II,” “Windtalkers” and “Paycheck” in the next six years.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand screenwriting duos after the smash hit that was “A Quiet Place,” the 2018 John Krasinski-directed horror film that earned $340 million worldwide. The success of “A Quiet Place” landed Back and Woods a meeting at Lucasfilm, where executives were courting the duo for potential “Indiana Jones” and “Star Wars” movies. In an interview with Movieweb, the writers reveal they turned down Lucasfilm in favor of developing original story ideas. Beck and Woods even called out Lucasfilm’s resistance to new franchises to Lucasfilm’s face.

“We went into Lucasfilm in the wake of ‘A Quiet Place’ and they wanted to talk to us about ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Star Wars,’” said Woods. “And we’re like, ‘We wanna talk to you about what is “Star Wars” before it was “Star Wars?” You guys have a responsibility to start a new franchise.

Filmmakers such as Lars von Trier, David Fincher, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, and Quentin Tarantino often portray the twisted, darker side of humanity with disturbing and cinematically striking results. Clearly influenced by this brand of cinema and the psychological impact it has, director Fred Durst clearly wants to be seen and make movies in this tradition; dark voyeurism that offers intimate entrée to the broken mind.

Continue reading ‘The Fanatic’: An Unhinged John Travolta Can’t Help Fred Durst’s Deep Contempt For Fandom [Review] at The Playlist.

You won’t have to wait until 2021 to see the next chapter of the Jurassic World story, because a new short film is coming to TV in just a few days. Colin Trevorrow, who directed 2015’s Jurassic World and is returning to the director’s chair for the upcoming Jurassic World 3, announced that a live-action Jurassic […]

The post ‘Jurassic World’ Short Film ‘Battle at Big Rock’ Coming to FX This Weekend From Colin Trevorrow appeared first on /Film.

With only an 80-page outline to guide them, there were a lot of blanks to fill when “Endings, Beginnings” director Drake Doremus hired Shailene Woodley to star in the film just two weeks before shooting began. In between casting and shooting, however, Doremus, Woodley, and co-star Sebastian Stan made a two-day road trip up the California coast to the film’s Bir Sur location, swapping life philosophies along the way.

“We ended up driving for five-and-a-half hours and the amount of inside jokes and the vulnerability that came from that drive alone really drove our characters forward,” Woodley said at an “Endings, Beginnings” panel discussion the day after the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere. “The first day of filming, we had to be very vulnerable with one another, intimate with one another … I felt like all of us were riding on the same frequency.”

The film chronicles Woodley

Technology entrepreneur Sean Parker has made a “significant” investment in Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital special effects company.

Parker and Jackson made the announcement jointly. They did not disclose the size of Parker’s investment or the specific role he would play.

“I’ve long admired Peter Jackson’s and Fran Walsh’s work, and the ground-breaking VFX and animation that Weta Digital has created over the last two decades,” Parker said. “The visionary leadership, imagination, and technical expertise of Weta Digital was vital to the creation of Academy Award winning films such as ‘Avatar,’ ‘King Kong,’ and ‘Lord of the Ring.’ I look forward to helping grow Weta Digital and I’m excited to partner with Peter, the leadership of Weta, and its incredibly talented team.”

Jackson said in a statement, “Sean Parker brings an invaluable expertise that will fortify Weta Digital from a technological perspective, while also focusing

Following on the eccentric construction of the first program, where the coherence of a quartet of formally disparate films was established by a shared interest in alternative means of image production, the second slate of Wavelengths shorts traced a much clearer arc, as all six works offered variations on the home movie. Though I found it lesser in quality than the night before, Picard’s curation here was brash and confrontational in a way it rarely is, a charmingly punk gesture to make in primetime on the festival’s first […]

This week on The Collider.com Podcast, we're doing a mailbag episode. We're currently at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, so last week we asked for you, our loyal listeners, to shoot us some questions we could answer on a mailbag episode. Thanks to you (questions are always appreciated!), we talked about biggest Wtf movies, frivolous purchases, least-favorite movie take, and much more. Click on the respective link to find us on iTunes. Also, we've moved to a new channel: Collider Weekly. Collider Weekly will host podcasts only from writers on Collider.com, so please …

When asked about the founding of Formula E, a motorsport circuit that uses only electric cars, its current leader, a former Spanish politician named Alejandro Agag, lights a stogie and tells the unvarnished truth. Advertisers were starting to cool to Formula One for environmental reasons, and Agag admits that business incentivized the development of Formula E more than concern for the air that he’s filling with cigar smoke. The confession reflects the ethos of “And We Go Green,” a documentary about the series’ fourth year that presents itself as a planet-conscious endorsement of clean-energy technology, but is mostly about the brash personalities competing for the championship. It’s the type of engaging-but-shallow sports doc that pops up frequently on streaming services, which seem the finish lines it will ultimately cross.

The phrase “And we go green!” is the “And we’re off!” of a Formula E race, though the

I frequently say that characters don’t need to be likable; they just need to be compelling. Pretty much every single character in Josh & Benny Safdie’s new movie Uncut Gems is someone you wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes with, but they’re not particularly interesting either. It’s a collection of self-destructive, self-indulgent people or outright bullies and they spend most of the movie just yelling at each other. But that’s a good environment for the King of Angry Yelling, Adam Sandler, a man who has yelled at everything from crowds …

At this year’s D23 Expo, we learned that the Marvel-themed land at Disney theme parks around the globe will each be called an Avengers Campus, where guests are “recruited” to help their favorite Marvel superheroes battle the forces of evil. Now there’s a new piece of concept art for the Disneyland Paris version of a […]

The post New Concept Art for Disney’s Avengers Campus and Marvel Hotel appeared first on /Film.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 on the day after Christmas, American speculators were presented with the ultimate gift: An opportunity to sell capitalism to one of the largest untapped markets in the history of time. For Russians, however, the shift away from communism was hesitant and fraught with uncertainty, and some of the country’s proudest institutions began to languish without the state-funded support that had allowed them to thrive behind the Iron Curtain. Business relations between the two superpowers were tantalizing in theory, but difficult to make real, and the ice was slower to thaw than many people on either side might have hoped. Of course, that wasn’t a problem for anyone who knew how to skate.

An amusing sequel of sorts to his 2014 documentary “Red Army,” , and some of the most visionary and/or foolish executives of the American sports arena tried to swoop in and save it.

With each passing day seeming to confirm Apple TV+ is not, in fact, an elaborate prank, the latest streaming service has started rolling out footage of its original series slate. Next up is See, which stars Jason Momoa as Baba Voss, a tribal leader navigating a post-apocalyptic world in which a mysterious illness has left all of humanity blind. When it's revealed that Baba Voss—an incredible name, just Fyi—and his wife Maghra (Hera Hilmar) have birthed twins with the gift of sight, they must protect the children at all costs from a desperate queen (Sylvia Hoeks) …

Universal Pictures has picked up a pair of interesting new projects, as the studio has acquired Meredith Dawson's spec script When Michael Met Carrie... and Other People, as well as the family adventure project Outside the Box from Freaks filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. Paul Feig will produce When Michael Met Carrie, which promises a new take on the romantic comedy, while Mandeville Films duo David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman are attached to produce Outside the Box under their first-look deal at Universal. [caption id="attachment_790811" align="alignright" width="360"] Image via Well Go USA/caption] …

Since his debut feature, Human Comedy in Tokyo, in 2008, Kôji Fukada has steadily become one of the most interesting filmmakers working out of Japan in the last decade plus. Many of his features can be characterised by a protagonist or family unit’s apparent stability being upended by one event, a plot development that illustrates how easily and turbulently lives can spiral out of control. In his sophomore feature, Hospitalité (2010), this was played for laughs. In that film, a family printing business is gradually taken over by a former associate who talks his way into a job, moves into […]

Nameless cooks hustle in the opening montage of Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s brutalist nightmare “The Platform.” Their kitchen is a blend of the delicate and the savage. A violinist plays as blades rip through fish, and the head chef caresses a dangling ham. When finished, they’ve assembled a still-life masterpiece of lobster, papaya and cake on a concrete slab. The feast could feed hundreds, but it never does. As it descends, level by level, down a residential tower, each pair of cellmates have minutes to gobble as much as they can before the food moves on to the next floor. With no distractions except for that day’s meal, the citadel is a test of survival and humanity. Says an intake officer (Antonia San Juan), “We prefer to call it a vertical self-management center.”

He and writers David Desola and Pedro Rivera are curious about how the poor devour each other.

“Joker” has taken the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival by storm, but not everything about the acclaimed comic book film sits well with leading star Joaquin Phoenix. The actor’s interview with The New York Times includes a revelation from “Joker” director and co-writer Todd Phillips that Phoenix dislikes the inclusion of Thomas Wayne in the film’s script. The movie’s explicit connection to the DC Comics mythology was Phoenix’s “greatest misgiving” about “Joker.”

“[Joaquin] never liked saying the name Thomas Wayne,” Phillips said. “It would have been easier for him if the movie was called ‘Arthur’ and had nothing to do with any of that stuff. But in the long run, I think he got it and appreciated it.”

Actor Brett Cullen stars in “Joker” as Thomas Wayne. By writing Thomas Wayne into the script, Phillips and co-screenwriter Scott Silver keep “Joker” tied to