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Of course, there is a poster of Fellini’s 8 1/2 on a character’s wall. Way to make things obvious, Pedro. I have described this as Almodovar’s 8 1/2, which it very much is, a semi-autobiographical drama in which the director looks back on his youth and career. Antonio Banderas’ Salvador Mallo is an ageing, gay, Spanish auteur with, more or less, the same look as the legendary director. This results in a rather self-indulgent affair, albeit sprinkled with beautiful moments of personal filmmaking....

A longtime, and well-respected, Redditor posted a fascinating tidbit on the Blank Check podcast subreddit. Turns out a trailer for PTA’s upcoming film was secretly shown before a repertory screening of “American Graffiti” on 35mm in London earlier today. “Went to a screening in London of American Graffiti in 35mm. Before the movie they said they had something special to show us. Turns out PTA hand-selected our matinee screening of “American Graffiti” specifically to have the first ever public screening of the Soggy Bottom trailer (that’s not the real title but I won’t spoil it)....

Of course, Tarantino, ever the eclectic, does tend to have a rather unique taste in movies. “Crawl,” directed by Alexander Aja, received positive reviews when it was released this past July. It even managed to become a box-office hit by raking $89 million at the box-office, all this on a dirt-cheap $13 million budget. The film is about a woman having to fend off a relentless attack from a pack of gigantic alligators....

Texas chain Santikos Entertainment had three of its San Antonio-based theaters reopen over the past weekend. The results were overwhelmingly positive as close to 3,000 tickets were sold for a total gross of close to $16,000 over the three-day period. [via THR] The films that were being shown included “Trolls World Tour,” “Bloodshot,” “I Still Believe,” “The Hunt,” and “Bad Boys for Life.” Tickets for general admission were $5. This is a clearcut sign that maybe some folks are ready to go back to theaters and watch movies again....

Eggers’ passion project finally got the green light in October from Focus Features. Earlier this year, the director managed to register “Nosferatu” with the Czech Film Fund. That was already a great sign that the film was moving forward. Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard are being billed as the the leads for “Nosferatu,” which Eggers has been working on since 2015. Eggers regular Jarin Blaschke will be the cinematographer. Prep work is set to begin in early October with Focus Features producing the film....

Mel Gibson being cast as a down-and-out cop in Zahler’s “Dragged Across Concrete” may have had people turn their heads in disgust when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival last August, but the notion of seeing Gibson playing an overt racist is, mind you, a stroke of solid casting. Gibson’s Brett Ridgeman, in fact, turns out to be the best performance the Aussie actor has given us in years, maybe decades....

If we’re led to believe that these are the actual winners, and the SAG hasn’t confirmed or denied the leak’s accuracy, then Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah), and Maria Bakalova (Borat 2) will be the Oscar frontrunners by the time Sunday’s ceremony wraps up. Boseman, Davis and Kaluuya did not, by any stretch of the imagination, give the best performance in their respective categories, but I’ll let you speculate why all three may very well win an acting Oscar at the end of month....

In a Hollywood that has all but shunned artistic freedom for filmmakers this past decade, it must be hard for Mendes to keep his artistic integrity intact, what with the limited opportunities available for directors that have something original to say. Alas, that’s why his upcoming WWI film “1917” should be a cause for celebration. The film will star Mark Strong, Colin Firth, and Benedict Cumberbatch and will have the luxury of being shot by DP extraordinaire Roger Deakins....

The petition reads: “FilmStruck is not just a niche market, it is a massive archive dedicated to keeping art of the past alive, much in the way a museum keeps artists from centuries ago alive. It deserves to live, not only to provide an outlet for film lovers of the past but also to create new fans through the next several generations, and perhaps open some more eyes along the way....

According to a source close to the Cannes committee, the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu-led jury almost awarded “Young Ahmed” the Palme D’or; “the Palme was the Dardennes to lose and then “Parasite” screened” they said. With just three days left in the competition, the screening of eventual Palme winner, Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” complicated things for Inarritu’s jury and eventually led to their awarding the South Korean film the Palme and the Dardennes sharing the Best Director prize....

I’ve come to laughingly shrug King’s over-the-top hatred of the film, especially since Kubrick seems to have had the last laugh in this fight. King’s close to four-decade-long barrage of dismissals of the film seems to revolve around Kubrick betraying his vision. Of course, to say that Kubrick’s movie was a faithful adaptation of King’s novel would be a major lie. What Kubrick did was turn King’s creation over its head, filming what could have been a very dry adaptation into the most Kubrick-ian horror movie imaginable....

Last year, Sundance had the sheer luck of happening just a month before the world shut down due to the COVID-19 virus. It isn’t wrong to state that the next 10 months of the year, audiences and critics had to rely on what premiered at Sundance 2020 to make something out of a movie year that all but shut down theatrically. Films such as “Promising Young Woman,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Minari,” “Time,” “Palm Springs,” “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets,” “The Assistant,” “First Cow,” “Dick Johnson is Dead,” “Time,” “Possessor,” “The Nest” and many more dominated....

Jackson penned a blog post on the official Sundance site about the blueprint for what the future of the festival might hold, describing the next edition as “a single festival expressed locally, globally, in-person, and online.” Jackson’s actions seem to insinuate that there probably won’t be a COVID-19 vaccine available on-time for the mid-January event. Also, travel will be greatly limited, so why not just expand Sundance to many other cities with a digital platform to screen ALL the movies that will be part of the lineup....

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South by Southwest is an annual music, film, and digital festival that takes place in Austin, Texas every March - it that was canceled this past year due to the pandemic just days before it was to set begin. The announcements for 2021 did add tentative “plans for a 2021 physical event” which the festival is currently working on with the City of Austin. Despite the cancellation of the 2020 edition, a bunch of titles have emerged as breakouts on the streaming and film festival circuit, those include “Shiva Baby,” “Shithouse,” “She Dies Tomorrow,” “Topside” and “The Outpost....

In Christian theology, the Harrowing of Hell (“the descent of Christ into Hell” or Hades), is a period of time between Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection. The underworld itself—referred to as Hades—is described as being either at the outer bounds of the ocean or beneath the depths or ends of the earth. I imagine Malick will make the Hades section of the film as surreal, and nightmarish as it sounds....

Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler) Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis), Denis Lavant (Holy Motors), Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Christian Bale (The Fighter), Joaquin Phoenix (Her), Kirsten Dunst ( Melancholia), Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years A Slave), James Franco (Spring Breakers), Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years A Slave), Scarlett Johansson (Under the Skin), Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Lily Gladstone (Certain Women), Viola Davis (Fences), Robert Pattinson (Good Time) Contribute Hire me...

The top two films, both masterworks, are from directors (Roman Polanski and Abdelatif Kechiche) who will likely not see their films released in the United States, at least in the foreseeable future. Why must their art suffer? Well, for one thing, Polanski and Kechiche have both been become “persona non grata” in the States since the #MeToo era began back in 2017. Polanski’s J’Accuse, which despite winning the Grand Jury prize at Venice and being the best film the Polish filmmaker has given us since his 2002 Oscar-winner “The Pianist,” has been completely blacked out by U....

The film is set to open with an astounding $150 million gross this weekend, that makes it Tom Cruise’s first ever box-office opening of over $100 million. It’s about time. The reviews are quite good as well. A 78 on Metacritic is impressive, so is a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes critics are clearly eating up the nostalgia factor with this one. I’m hearing a lot of “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” comments from people....

Perhaps the most exciting feature to be announced as part of the Midnight Madness lineup is the Richard Stanley film “Color Out of Space” starring none other than Nicolas Cage as the star. This is Stanley’s first film since being fired from “The Island of Dr. Moreau” back in 1996. The synopsis: “In director Richard Stanley’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror short story, a meteor falls to earth and lands on the property of a New England family — its increasingly unhinged patriarch played by the one-and-only Nicolas Cage — with insidious, delirious, and psychedelic results....