Author: Hollyood rep

“I don’t want to sound like a fanboy,” Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival says sheepishly, “but Shah Rukh Khan is the quintessential power of cinema. There is no cynicism, there is no manipulation. Just this basic faith that you can tell a story through your persona and touch on the very profound building blocks of emotions.” Nazzaro, it is fair to say, is a Khan fanboy. Discussing the Bollywood superstar — winner of Locarno’s 2024 lifetime achievement award, the Pardo alla Carriera Ascona-Locarno Tourism — he compares Khan to the “popular glamor of a hero of…

British icon Jennifer Saunders has joined the star-studded cast for the film adaptation of Enid Blyton‘s beloved children’s book, The Magic Faraway Tree. Hiran Abeysekera (The Life of Pi, The Father and the Assassin) and Pippa Bennett-Warner (Gangs of London, See How They Run, Chloe) will also feature alongside the previously-announced cast of Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nicola Coughlan, and Jessica Gunning. From Neal Street Productions, Elysian Film Group and Ashland Hill Media Finance, The Magic Faraway Tree is currently shooting. Based on the Faraway Tree series of novels for children, the film follows Polly (Foy) and Tim Thompson (Garfield) and their children, Beth,…

India Amarteifio, star of Netflix’s Bridgerton prequel series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, will lead a new coming-of-age romance alongside Maxton Hall‘s Damian Hardung. From Shot of Tea, Into The Deep Blue is the winner of the Nicholl Fellowship, awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It follows Nick (Hardung) and Fiona (Amarteifio), best friends who meet in group therapy and are struggling to piece their lives together after experiencing loss. “When a weekend trip brings their deepening feelings to the surface, they might sooner cut each other off than face them,” a plot synopsis reads. The…

The First Purge director Gerard McMurray is heading to Louisiana for Goons, a new horror feature set amid the eerie backdrop of the state’s cane fields and plantations. Power‘s Michael Rainey Jr. and The Exorcism‘s Chloe Bailey will star in Goon, which is now filming in New Orleans and nearby areas. Tommy Oliver is producing via his Confluential Films, which will make the project under its New Fear Unlocked Productions, a new genre label dedicated to what the company says are “bold, elevated, culturally specific horror films from creators of color.” McMurray co-wrote the script with Hodge K. Johnson. “I…

Ryan Reynolds is infamous for lacing his Deadpool movies with industry jokes. In the 2018 sequel, the irreverent antihero ponders whether his movies will ever be able to pass up the $370.8 million collected by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in North America and become the biggest R-rated film of all time, not adjusted for inflation. While the first Deadpool overtook Passion of the Christ globally ($782 million versus $612 million), it couldn’t claim that same feat stateside. Reynolds finally got to see that wish come true over the Aug. 2-4 weekend, thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine, which…

The international Oscar race has begun. Ireland and Austria have put up their national contenders for the 2025 Academy Awards in the best international feature category. And the two movies could hardly be more different. For its Oscar contender, Austria has selected The Devil’s Bath, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s inspired-by-history feminist horror film. Ireland has, unsurprisingly, gone for the craic, picking Rich Peppiatt’s cheeky doc-comedy Kneecap, about the real-life Belfast rappers of the title. Franz and Fiala, known for their 2014 horror classic Goodnight Mommy and 2019’s The Lodge, explore a dark corner of history with The Devil’s Bath.…

French director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman, Happy New Year, The Beautiful Story) will be honored at this year’s Venice Film Festival with the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award, a prize dedicated to a “personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry.” Lelouch will receive the prize on Monday, Sept. 2 at Venice’s Sala Grande ahead of the out-of-competition screening of his latest feature, of his new feature, Finalement, a musical fantasy starring Kad Merad (Welcome to the Sticks, The Chorus). Elsa Zylberstain, Michel Boujenah, Sandrine Bonnaire, Barbara Pravi, and Françoise Gillard co-star. The film was produced by Les Films 13 in…

An upcoming film from DreamWorks Animation starring actor Mark Hamill has him reminiscing about another movie — from a galaxy far, far away. The focus of a San Diego Comic-Con panel over the weekend, director Chris Sanders‘ The Wild Robot follows the misadventures of a robot known as Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) learning to connect with animals after getting shipwrecked on a remote island. Hamill voices the character of Thorn, a ferocious grizzly bear. He first came to learn of The Wild Robot after reading the New York Times best-selling children’s book by Peter Brown, which captivated young readers…

The 97th Academy Awards have yet to land a host, though it’s not for lack of trying. ABC is said to have made offers to both Jimmy Kimmel and John Mulaney, both of whom passed on the opportunity, as first reported by Puck News. Fortunately for the Academy and its host network, there’s still plenty of time, with the Oscars not slated to air until Sunday, March 2. The first outreach had gone to Kimmel, its late-night host, who’s already emceed the Academy Awards four times, including the last two years. (Ironically, his statement upon accepting the offer in 2023…

It wasn’t until about 10 a.m. PT on Saturday that Disney’s distribution team realized that the near-impossible was within reach: Deadpool & Wolverine was going to cross the $200 million mark in its domestic opening, an unimaginable feat for an R-rated pic. Case in point: the biggest R-rated opening until now was the $133.7 million collected by the first Deadpool in 2016. By Sunday morning, the news was official. The Marvel Studios movie opened to an estimated $205 million, the eighth-biggest debut of all time among any film and by far the biggest launch for an R-rated film, not adjusted…